‘Most young Africans I meet are not mourning the loss of aid, but they’re questioning why it took so long to reckon with its fragility’
In this wide-ranging conversation, Dr Amber Murrey, a scholar of anti-imperial geographies and co-author of Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies, speaks with Elizabeth (Liz) Grossman Kitoyi, founder of Baobab Consulting and a development practitioner with two decades of experience in Senegal, Malawi, New York, Washington DC, and elsewhere.
In this conversation, they explore the historical dismantling of USAID as a political and narrative project with profound implications for how Africa is positioned within US policy. This political project ultimately led to the dissolution of Liz’s own work with USAID. Drawing on Murrey’s longstanding critiques of the epistemic hierarchies embedded in the development industry, the discussion surfaces the structural dependencies hardwired into donor-driven systems and the contractor ecosystems that delimit the very meaning of ‘reform’. Yet, as Grossman Kitoyi reflects, there are also central spaces of African agency where young people, educators, and innovators are envisioning futures no longer tethered to aid’s fragile architectures. What unfolds is a shared call for narrative sovereignty, radical humility, and forms of development rooted in solidarity.
The International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC) 2025 Global Rights Index was released on 2 June. The report presents a sobering picture of escalating violations of workers’ rights globally. Based on data from 151 countries, the Index reports that 87% of countries violated the right to strike, 80% restricted collective bargaining, and over 70% impeded union registration or denied access to justice. These trends, the report argues, reflect a “coup against democracy”—an ongoing assault on core labour rights driven by repressive governments, emboldened corporations, and a broader authoritarian and conflict-ridden global capitalism.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region once again emerges as the most repressive in the Index (with an overall score of 4.68; a score of 5 indicates no guarantee of rights), with all countries in the region found to have violated fundamental rights to organise and collectively bargain, as well as registration of unions. The right to strike was suppressed in 95% of countries in the region, while over half of MENA states arbitrarily arrested or detained workers (p.28). The list of the ten worst countries for working people is composed mainly of Global South countries, with MENA cases including Egypt, Tunisia, and Türkiye. Over the past few years, my research has focused on the political economy and labour relations of these three countries[i], and below I briefly discuss them with insights drawn from the ITUC report.
However, before turning to these cases, it is important to highlight some potential limitations or problems in the ITUC report. While its findings are grounded in substantial and credible documentation, the non-contextualised regional framing of the Global Rights Index risks reproducing a familiar issue regarding the Middle East: the tendency to isolate MENA as uniquely authoritarian or culturally predisposed to repression. By highlighting MENA as the “worst region” without sufficiently situating its labour regimes within broader historical and structural dynamics, the Index could be seen to implicitly (albeit unintentionally) reinforce exceptionalist interpretations that have long shaped conventional understandings of the region.
When considering the Global South in general, and the MENA region in particular, we must not overlook the dynamics inherent to uneven capitalist development, such as persistent global and regional inequalities, the imperatives of cheap labour in hierarchical global production networks, IFI conditionalities, and the long-term consequences of war, occupation, and imperialist intervention. In countries like Egypt and Tunisia, and historically in Turkey, for example, the role of the IMF and World Bank in shaping labour markets through austerity, privatisation, and deregulation has been central to the weakening of collective rights. The region is also the most unequal in the world by income and wealth, according to the World Inequality Report 2022—a fact that reinforces the political utility of repressing labour as a force of potential redistribution and mobilisation.
While specific political regimes certainly shape labour practices, and domestic political agency is not insignificant, these conditions should not be viewed as ‘anomalies’ within an otherwise democratic capitalism. That countries like the United States and the United Kingdom (major centres of ‘liberal democratic capitalism’) are both rated as systematically violating workers’ rights (with a score of 4, p.21) should caution against any simplistic division between “authoritarian” and “democratic” regimes under capitalism. Rather, what we are witnessing is a global pattern of labour repression under crisis-ridden global capitalism.
The failure of mainstream development policy to deliver on the promise of eradicating global poverty is increasingly difficult to deny (World Bank 2024). As a result, theories of global development are opening to alternative and critical approaches. In this context there has been a renewal of interest in dependency theory as a rich heterodox tradition of political economy (Kvangraven 2021; Chilcote and Salém Vasconcelos 2022; Antunes de Oliveira and Kvangraven 2024). In a recent paper, I turned to one of the foundational scholars of dependency, Walter Rodney (1942-1980), to work through some of the strengths and limits of dependency theory for contemporary studies (Johnson 2023).
“Europe’s new external investment strategy needs to reconnect with historical business models we are going back to white elephants of 1970s – because that’s what partners want“
– G7 official in a speech on Trade and Finance.
“The era of Western dominance has indeed definitely ended“
On 28 January 2024, three members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, announced their withdrawal from ECOWAS. Created in 1974, ECOWAS is a regional economic community serving as a large trading bloc, to enhance the regional integration and economic cooperation of its 15 member countries. The three countries’ decision to leave the trade-bloc so forthrightly, was related to a series of ECOWAS-imposed sanctions on their military governments and the countries’ objection to French influence in the bloc.[2] Long-standing dissatisfaction with the ECOWAS was also an overarching factor; member countries include some of the most resource-rich nations, but on the whole members barely made any progress on socio-economic indicators linked to the ECOWAS promise of prosperity through regional integration.
Political uncertainty in the trade-bloc further deteriorated in mid-February 2024, when the Senegalese President Macky Sall, unilaterally postponed the country’s presidential elections and was later ousted. Faced with such existential challenges, ECOWAS lifted sanctions on Niger and other countries within a month of their imposition. While the potential breakdown of ECOWAS and the general trajectory of some African countries into authoritarianism, may not seem like a radical shift in the continent’s history, the incendiary global context, which compelled ECOWAS to lift sanctions is unprecedented. The neo-colonial drivers of the current crumbling political order in Sudan and the Congo as well as the ongoing genocide in Palestine, indelibly expose the reality that we are entering into an era of naked colonial violence. Backlash to US-centred imperialism is growing. In March 2024, Niger suspended all military relations with the US, citing issues related to US encroachment upon its sovereignty.[3] Embedded in this evolving situation, the episodic and ad-hoc de-linking of Global South countries from Global North countries and their dominance in blocs such as the ECOWAS is representative of a broader shift in Africa’s resistance against political and economic subordination to G7 countries.
Against this background, the Western powers’ new and evolving development strategy in Africa offers important insights into how the G7 countries are failing to register the transformative changes in Africa.[4] In a closed-door speech on investment, trade and finance forum, a G7 official described Europe’s new external investment strategy as one that harkens back to the White elephants of the 1970s. While the speaker was using the term ‘White Elephant’ to signify the EU’s interest in funding hard infrastructure, imbued with a promise of investment and growth for recipient countries, he clearly failed to grasp its meaning. A ‘white elephant’ is an overly expensive infrastructure asset, which fails to generate value for the economy.
Considered in light of the correct definition of the term, the West’s new development strategy does seem to be going towards expensive infrastructure projects, spurred by a reactionary, performative but ultimately imagined competition with China. I make this point through a comparative analysis between the G7s contemporary development strategy vis-à-vis the Chinese development model as it unfolds within the broader demise of US-led imperialism.
In the realm of international development, the ‘white saviour’ trope has long been a subject of critique and controversy. This phenomenon, often rooted in colonialist attitudes, positions Western individuals or entities as benevolent rescuers of non-Western communities, usually without acknowledging or addressing systemic multidimensional inequalities, colonial/racial privilege, and local agency of indigenous communities. The white saviour complex has not only perpetuated harmful stereotypes but has also undermined the efforts and voices of those it claims to help.
As artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a global force to potentially achieve sustainable development goals, we see a new manifestation of the white saviour industrial complex within emerging global AI governance.
7 January 1968 was a day of celebration across the Congolese Copperbelt, marked with marches and festivities in the mining towns, bonuses for mineworkers and medals for those who had labored many years in the industry. All this marked the one-year anniversary of the foundation of Gécamines, the state-owned company that was established when the Congolese government nationalized the operations of Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK).
Early in 1967, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) had decided to nationalize the largest and most powerful colonial company that still operated on its soil, after a dispute about where the headquarters of the company should reside. But deeper concerns stemmed from the fact that a former colonial business still controlled the most important natural treasures of the newly independent Congo. The Congolese had high hopes that the new company would propel economic growth through significant expansion of production. Ultimately, these hopes met with bitter disappointment.
It was not only Congolese people who entertained such hopes, however. What happened in Congo was part of what we term a post-colonial world of copper (1960-1980) in our edited collection Born with a Copper Spoon. The book is a history of the global production of copper, its labour relations, technologies and the international political economy across the 19th and 20th century. The transition, and ultimately, failure of this unique albeit brief episode of postcolonial control is one of the focuses of the book. We assert that the national fragmentation of copper production in the postcolonial world, was in fact deeply intertwined with transnational influences and exchanges. It expressed an agenda that was shared in the Global South: to straighten out the huge economic imbalances with the Global North.
The agreement recently negotiated between the Government of Ethiopia and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) not only imposes austerity on the government, but also risks destroying the country’s model of economic development.
Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous country, has featured tremendous progress in its economic development in the past twenty years. A developmental state driving public investment while imposing tight regulations on the financial sector, a managed exchange rate, and capital controls, achieved a significant decline in hunger and malnutrition, and improvements in literacy and other relevant human development indicators.
Nonetheless, Ethiopia is facing serious macroeconomic challenges including high inflation of close to 30 percent, a current account deficit, foreign exchange shortage, and slowing growth, jointly with domestic conflicts and climate change impacts. This situation has forced the country into negotiations with creditors on its external debt, even though Ethiopia’s external debt stock compared to GDP is less compared to other low-income countries. International financial institutions see government budget deficits as the main culprit in causing inflation and an overvalued real exchange rate that causes trade deficits and balance-of-payments problems while crowding out private investment in the country. End of July 2024, the Government of Ethiopia and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded an agreement on policy action to be taken for a stepwise release of a loan of USD 3.4 billion from the IMF, starting with the immediate release of USD 1 billion, as well as additional grants and loans from the World bank. The agreement is built on the following cornerstones: 1) floating the exchange rate; 2) modernizing the monetary policy framework going from reserve targeting to interest rate targeting; 3) ending monetary financing of the government budget via the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) and exiting financial repression; 4) improving mobilization of domestic government revenues; 5) debt restructuring with external creditors; 6) strengthening the financial position of state-owned enterprises.
The default unit of analysis for many economists when dealing with national economics is the state. Yet, in economics textbooks ‘the state’ is often assumed to be a neutral actor exogenous to economic processes. It is assumed to be the same – in essence – everywhere. This conception is based on a Eurocentric view of the state, which assumes all states are ahistorical Westphalian nation states based on Enlightenment principles. However, states are not neutral, but deeply shaped by historical processes. Analyses of ‘states’ in economics – country analyses, country data, evaluations of so-called ‘macroeconomic fundamentals’ – must be rethought by taking the complexities of the state in Africa into account in their conceptualisations, analyses and policy proposals. In this piece, I unpack how the African state evolved as a colonial project and the implications of it being mischaracterized as neutral state.
A state like no other
The state in Africa has been mischaracterized as a neutral institution devoid of a problematic history which affects its present. In its simplest terms, the state is an institution of governing, i.e., a political organization whose main aim is to establish and maintain security, law and order within its geographic jurisdiction. In economics, the state is discussed and perceived as a one size-fit-all institution, one that is and must be similar in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The African state, in particular, has been presented as if it is similar to other states, especially in Europe and the United States of America to which it must aspire.
Moreover, the African has been evaluated and judged on the basis of other perceived progressive states, especially those on the western hemisphere. That states are the same is both untrue, misleading, and ahistorical. African states are very different from other states as they are products of conquest, colonialism, genocides, epistemicides and slavery. It was created to support these processes and it still dispenses them mainly through violence. Those who colonised African countries did so not only to access markets and raw materials, but to displace epistemologies and decentre the colonized; and in the process they centered the colonising countries as the centre of knowledge production and essence of humanity. This is the origin of the superiority of liberal economics as the dominant way of understanding and doing economics in Africa.
Developing Economics 