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Articles

CUJPIA: Vol. 7 No.2, Dec. 2019

Revisiting the discourse of Globalization, the consensus of Washington, Neo-liberalism and the State in Africa

  • Alabi Usman & Bashiru Salihu
Submitted
June 24, 2020
Published
2019-12-16

Abstract

Neoliberalism as  a  political  economic  ideology drives the world’s global  economy and it‟s responsible for the rise and fall of nations. The global political economy is driven by neoliberal thought and the market has for so long being a medium for distilling the values of a global hegemon that maintains the global political economy and legitimizes its leadership. Washington Consensus is one of the policies that expresses neoliberal economic thought and aims at perpetuating the integration of developing world to the global capitalist grid and also the Soviet States that emerged out of the ashes of the former Soviet Union. But in all, the Washington Consensus has failed and has plunged the countries where it was adopted into deeper crisis, it has not put into consideration country specific peculiarities and has assumed that Latin America‟s problem is peculiar to that of other developing countries.

 

 

 However Neoliberalism did not stop at that, the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideas has led to globalization which is the present reality of the global political economy, the market becomes a universal phenomenon under globalization thus making neoliberal economic arrangement the end of history. The central argument of this paper on globalization is that it was triggered, it was not supposed to be now, the world was not prepared for globalization and that is why we are having the several backlashes occurring now. What exactly does this portends for the African state, the argument of this paper is for the state. Inspite of globalization, the role of the state cannot be overemphasized; the state in Africa is pivotal to the much needed economic leap of Africa. We also argued that neoliberalism distorted the African economic arrangement and led to the neo-patrimonial nature of the African states which makes it incapable of auto centric development. This paper concludes that there is no better period for Africa to develop than in this age of globalization and that regionalism is pivotal to Africa‟s economic advancement

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