$6
Tenkir Bonger
ISBN: 0850-2633
CODESRIA 1996
The ‘counter-revolution’ in Development Economics in the 1980s fundamentally altered the way the state ‘thinks’, which is evident in the state’s retrenchment and reconstitution of the state’s relationship to its citizens. The combination of deflationary macroeconomic policies and a residual approach to social policy, broadly, and social provisioning, more specifically, fundamentally altered the post-colonial trajectory of public policy in Africa. Despite the neoliberal ascendance that nurtured the more residual direction of social policy, the contention for an alternative vision of social policy remained and advanced with vigour. Specific contributions range from the deployment of social policy in framing the nation-building project, endogenous mutual support institutions, land and agrarian reform as a social policy instrument, the gender dynamics of social policy, and the mechanism enabling the spread of cash transfer schemes on the continent.
Scholars in the Market Place : The Dilemmas of Neo-Liberal Reform at Makerere University, 1989-2005 (Printed)
Scholars in the Marketplace is a case study of market-based reforms at Uganda’s Makerere University. With the World Bank heralding neoliberal reform at Makerere as the model for the transformation of higher education in Africa, it has implications for the whole continent. At the global level, the Makerere case exemplifies the fate of public universities in a market-oriented and capital friendly era. The Makerere reform began in the 1990s and was based on the premise that higher education is more of a private than a public good. Instead of pitting the public against the private, and the state against the market, this book shifts the terms of the debate toward a third alternative than explores different relations between the two. The book distinguishes between privatisation and commercialisation, two processes that drove the Makerere reform. It argues that whereas privatisation (the entry of privately sponsored students) is compatible with a public university where priorities are publicly set, commercialisation (financial and administrative autonomy for each faculty to design a market-responsive curriculum) inevitably leads to a market determination of priorities in a public university. The book warns against commercialisation of public universities as the subversion of public institutions for private purposes.
The issues that this volume addresses relate to the ways in which, first, Africans negotiated the terms of this modernity during the colonial period and, then, how today they are coming to terms with it in the post-colonial period. The contributors argue both that the African experience of modernity is unique and, at the same time, relevant for social theory more widely. Not only is it important to describe this experience, but also to acknowledge that such a description may provide African Studies with valuable analytical insights into African social reality. In the course of so doing, cases are presented and issues raised covering new forms of labour, changing notions and norms relating to land rights, religious conversion, internal migration, and even emigration. Indeed, one particularly significant, but often underplayed, feature that has characterised both the colonial and post-colonial periods, and which this book deals with extensively, is the variegated linkages and interactions between Africans in the diaspora and within the continent
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