Neoliberal Globalisation, Financial And Economic Crises and Sustainable Development In Africa

– The global financial economic crises of 2007-08 were the most serious of the previous series of similar cataclysmic events that exposed the deficiencies in the global neoliberal capitalism. Perversion of neoliberal literature by dogmatism, fragmented disciplinary myopia, instead of plural approaches hampers understanding of neoliberalism’s multidimensional characteristics, thereby allowing it to wreck serial havoc globally. In this paper, we show how the global North has used neoliberalism to contrive multiple crises that hamper Africa’s sustainable development beyond previous traumas: unequal trade, trans-Atlantic slavery, and colonialism; present neoliberal perspectives, globalisation-hegemonisation; and, show how neoliberalism’s autonomisation, self-referencing, disembedding of finance, its rejection of Keynesian and Marxist principles of hierarchy of (multiple) markets make it asocial, crisis (e.g., unemployment)-prone in Africa and developing countries. The Africa Union presents a platform for Africa to resuscitate Pan-Africanism, joining of the global South’s movement towards socialism as a means of delinking her economy from insidious neoliberal-capitalism, accelerating local job creation, reversing scandalous emigration of her youth to subsidise the global North’s economies.