Structural adjustment: why it wasn't necessary & why it did work

The ultimate measure of the awesome power, and the fundamental violence, of unfettered abstraction is to be found in the millions upon millions of nameless corpses which this most vicious of centuries has left as its memorial(Sayer, 1991:155). Everyone is the most important person in democracy. (IDASA at HYPERLINK http:// www.idasa.org.za on 10 February 1999). This article provides a critical understanding of the broader historical context of structural adjustment. While a lot of contemporary analysis follows the given econometric boundaries of the policy debate many important political processes, which were part of the broader political economy of adjustment, remain unexplored. This exploration is important because the economic programmes have contained concepts that have taken root in a lot of African political debate like ‘freedom’, ‘efficiency’, ‘modernisation’, ‘markets’ and ‘liberalisation’ despite the apparent failure of programmes in socio‐economic terms. By reviewing the issue as one historical chapter in the relationship between poor countries and the managers of international finance, I indicate how oppositional political debate was constrained by pervasive, although ahistorical, ideas of economic necessity and the supposed economic benefits of ‘open’ markets.