Domestic Politics and International Economics in Southern AfricaThe Politics of Economic Power in Southern Africa by Ronald T. LibbyReview by: James CobbeAfrica Today, Vol. 35, No. 2, Class and Politics in Zambia (2nd Qtr., 1988), pp. 69-71Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4186491 .

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Domestic Politics and International Economics in Southern Africa

James Cobbe

Ronald T. Libby, THE POLITICS OF ECONOMIC POWER IN SOUTHERN AFRICA (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987) pp xxiii, 361, $45.00 cloth, $14.50 paper.

Ron Libby set himself a very ambitious task, which he was well-suited for by his experience in the 1970s. He taught at the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, at Chancellor College, University of Malawi, and at the University of Zambia, from which he obtained an unusually wide exposure to the variety of relations with the Republic of South Africa, and implications of those relations for domestic politics, in the region. What he has attempted to do in this book is to set out a different way of looking at the politics of the international economic relationships in the region, but- tressed by discussion of all the cases [with the exception of Angola].

Dr Libby is not happy with the standard, simplistic, functionalist and dependen- cy interpretations given to the economic relations between South Africa and the in- dependent states in the region. He feels, with much justification, that in their stan- dard forms they greatly oversimplify, unnecessarily downgrade the role of domestic political conflicts within states, and miss many of the implications of the two-way nature of all economic interactions. Without so labelling it, what he gives as an alternative is a version of the so-called Public Choice variety of (right wing) Political Economy, in which both state actions and economic interactions are analyzed in terms of their economic costs and benefits to identifiable groups or classes of economic and political actors.

This mode of analysis, reminiscent of old-fashioned economic history, is an at- tractive one because it very frequently permits highly plausible explanations of events without requiring either very much hard data or the use of Marxist concepts. The pro- blems with it are, however, also serious. I will mention three. The first seems to bother economists more than political scientists, namely that it rarely lends itself to rigorous hypothesis testing, instead consisting in the telling of plausible stories with which the cited evidence is consistent. The obvious difficulty is that there are often alternative stories that also would be consistent with the evidence, and only specialists can tell whether important pieces of evidence have been omitted. Several of Libby's case studies, which cover not only South Africa itself but also Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, Zaire and Namibia, are open to criticism on these grounds. Libby's interpretations are plausible on the basis of the evidence he presents, but equally plausible stories with rather different implications could be told by other authors, and have been, using a somewhat different selection of what evidence to cite.

Second, this approach can be criticized as barely more than descriptive. It is useful to realize that, to give one of Libby's examples, reopening Zambia's transport routes to the South and trading relationships with South Africa in 1978 benefited urban wage

James Cobbe is Professor of Economics and Associate Dean of the College of Social Sciences at The Florida State University. Tallahassee, FL 32306.

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earners and restored Kaunda's base of political support to some extent; but it leaves most of the important why questions wholly unanswered. Why has Zambia allowed its politics to be dominated by this group, and why did it so neglect small-holder agriculture; and why were the northern transport routes so inefficient that they could not act as adequate substitutes?

Third, just as dependency arguments can be, and all too often are, used simplistically, so, perhaps even more notoriously, can political economy arguments. There are at least three ways, two analytic and one empirical, in which this can hap- pen. Analytically, argument can be oversimplified so that actors become like the straw figures of "economic man" in old textbooks, motivated apparently solely by considera- tions of economic cost and benefit. Although everyone who has lived and worked in Southern Africa will readily agree that economic motivations are powerful and important, one cannot adequately explain behavior on the basis of them alone. Alternatively, admitting the existence of other motivations, the analysis can become essentially circular, using the economist's device of 'revealed preference": if an actor did something that was economically costly, that reveals that the non-economic consequences were sufficiently valuable to the actor to make the action worthwhile. One then has what amounts to a tautological description rather than an analysis. Em- pirically, the danger is that the mode of analysis is applied without sufficient knowledge of the relevant cleavages, interests, and economic environment of the society in ques- tion. When this occurs, a plausible story may be told that is only plausible given the evidence presented; to an analyst with more detailed knowledge of the issue in ques- tion, the story may be highly implausible.

We now see why what Libby has attempted is so ambitious, and was a risky thing to do. Even with his wide exposure to southern Africa, it was unlikely that he would have sufficient depth of knowledge of all eleven of the countries he tries to analyze to write case-studies that would be free of error and satisfying to specialists in each country. To be blunt, despite obvious long and hard effort, and consultation with many authorities, he does not succeed in all his case-studies. Although he gets the fundamen- tals right in most cases, at least in this reviewer's opinion, all too often he misses more subtle cleavages, oversimplifies, and ends up with stories that seem plausible, but which also strike one as too abbreviated, too simple, and omitting too much. In a way, this was inevitable, and is not too important so long as the cases illustrate the point of the book, are provocative and plausible, and are accurate and well-argued as far as they go. Unfortunately, even on this criterion, Libby is only partly successful.

Probably some of the difficulty here arises from excessive haste to get the book in print after a very long gestation period. Many of the cases do not read very well, use data and argument somewhat loosely, and the whole book is appallingly badly proofread. For a major University Press, the frequency of typographic and syntactical errors is disgraceful; one wonders if the book ever had a copy editor. To give a few examples of loose use of data and argument, it is argued in the section on Zambia (pp. 239-240) that losses by Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines resulted in large balance of payments deficits, a total non-sequitur; on p.286 it is stated that both De Beers and Gold Fields of South Africa are subsidiaries of Anglo American Corpora- tion, which they are not; three zeroes are omitted from several figures on food pro- duction in Mozambique in the footnote on p. 220, giving an absurd and internally in- consistent sketch of its evolution; a footnote on page 66 refers to South African nonag- gression pacts with Angola, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho that are undocumented and, to this reviewer's knowledge, did not exist at the time in question. A more general problem

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with the empirical content of the book is that much of it has, inevitably, been overtaken by events, and that in trying to compress complex events into a few pages, frequently the quantitative and other data quoted come from widely separated years, but the analysis jumps from early '70s numbers to mid '80s numbers without batting an eyelid. Sometimes, where there has been substantial change within, say, the 1970 to 1985 period (e.g. in Lesotho), this produces misleading impressions.

One could, unfortunately, nitpick on factual errors, loose analysis, and omissions at considerable length. This is a pity, but nevertheless the book remains important and worth attention by those interested in southern Africa. It is not successful in its most ambitious terms; its cases do not wholly convince, and it is too marred by inaccuracies, omissions, and loose argument. However, it does succeed in making the case that is its major purpose, namely that the leaders of the various states in southern Africa do have some choices when it comes to economic relationships with South Africa, they do not all act in the same way, choices are influenced by internal domestic political considerations, and the economic relationships do have both costs and benefits at both ends, so that the government of South Africa is also making choices that are influenced by its domestic political concerns. This may seem very obvious, but it is unfortunately true that there is a good deal of writing about Southern Africa that seems to ignore these truisms. If Libbys book reminds people to remember this much, it will have been very worthwhile. On the other hand, I would advise against relying on Libby's cases alone for knowledge and interpretation of recent history in these countries.

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