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Grieve Chelwa is currently Associate Professor of Political Economy and Chair of the Social Sciences Department at The Africa Institute. He has previously held academic and administrative positions at the New School, the University of Cape Town and Harvard University where he was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Center for African Studies.

Marion Ouma is a research associate with the South Africa Research Chair Initiative (SARChl) on Social Policy at the University of South Africa, where she also completed her PhD. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Nordic Africa institute, Uppsala, Sweden and has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. 

For issue #133 of The Internationalist, Tanya Singh interviews the Chelwa and Ouma on the themes of their latest book, Can Africans Do Economics?

You can read Part 2 of this interview here.

Tanya Singh: Would you like to discuss the genesis of this book and why it is an important text today?

Grieve Chelwa: So, I edited the book—or, in a sense, I put together the collection of contributors. But the idea itself came from Inkani Press, from the managing editor, Efemia Chela reached out to me and said, "Look, Grieve, I’ve seen some of the things you write, and I wonder if you’d be interested in editing a book—a collection of voices from across Africa that tries to imagine a radically different kind of economy for the continent."

And to me, that was important. A book like this matters because ideas matter. We often underestimate how much ideas shape the economies we live in. For too long in Africa—and across the Global South—the dominant idea, really the only idea, has been neoliberalism: this ideology that upholds capitalism not just as an economic system but as a machine for extraction. Efemia knew I’d been writing about alternatives, so she proposed gathering a new generation of African thinkers who could articulate something different.

That’s how it started. I began reaching out to people—friends, colleagues, writers whose work I respect—and pitched them the idea. Some were on board immediately; others couldn’t commit. Writing a book is hard, and people are busy. In the end, we had five or six essays—I can’t remember the exact number now. But that was the genesis: conversations in 2021 or 2022, drafts coming in, then editing.

The challenge, of course, was accessibility. Most contributors were academics, but we didn’t want this to be an academic book. It had to speak to working-class people, to farmers, to everyday Africans. So we worked on the language, stripped away the jargon, made sure the ideas landed clearly. That took time—honestly, it’s easier to write a book alone than to coordinate multiple voices.

Now, with Trump’s tariffs, aid cuts, and all these shifts in global politics, it’s almost eerie how little the core themes have changed since we first drafted it. The specifics might’ve been tweaked, but the arguments? They’ve held firm. Because here’s the thing: whether it’s Trump or Biden, the UK or Germany, the underlying structures don’t change. The extraction continues. The South stays locked in the same cycle.

That’s why this book isn’t just timely—it’s necessary. Neoliberalism, capitalism, the endless drain of resources from the Global South? These aren’t new problems. They were here two years ago, they’re here now, and unless something radical shifts, they’ll be here tomorrow. This book is part of that fight—to name the system, to imagine something else. And that struggle doesn’t expire.

Marion Ouma: The beginning of this book also stems from the disillusionment we, as African scholars, feel about how Africa is often written about contrasted with what we experience as people who live, work, and engage in policy here. 

When Grieve sent me the initial concept, I immediately recognized its significance, particularly because it aligns with my focus on social policy, policymaking, and policy sovereignty. Having read the other contributions, I believe this book is crucial today because it confronts a persistent contradiction: Africa is resource-rich, yet its people remain disproportionately poor. 

The book challenges the long-perpetuated narrative that Africa’s poverty stems from a lack of ideas or poor leadership. Instead, its central argument—woven throughout the chapters—is that the real issue lies in the enduring neoliberal structure of the global system, which remains deeply colonial. For instance, crippling debt traps, unfair trade practices, and externally imposed economic policies continue to stifle African nations, preventing them from escaping economic subjugation.  

A key theme is sovereignty—how African nations, if freed from systemic subordination, could advance through autonomous policymaking. The book also critiques how Africa has been used as a testing ground for policies, like randomized control trials, which function as economic experiments. This undermines state capacity, leaving governments labelled as "inefficient" while their agency is systematically eroded—a process akin to what some call the 'cannibalization of the state'. 

Can Africans Do Economics? further examines the incomplete project of decolonization, highlighting ongoing plunder through illicit financial flows. Finally, it seeks to reclaim the tradition of socialist Pan-African thought, drawing on the legacies of Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Thomas Sankara. For us as scholars, this book is not just critique—it’s a revival of the intellectual and political spirit needed to reimagine Africa’s future.  

TS: Grieve, given Africa’s early post-independence economic successes—driven by state-led industrialization, domestic savings, and policy sovereignty—why did these models collapse in the face of external shocks and structural adjustment?

GC: The promise of post-independence development models was real—we saw countries driven by industrialization and domestic savings making genuine progress. But these models ultimately collapsed when faced with external shocks and structural adjustment. This failure speaks to a deeper contradiction in our emancipation project. While there were certainly emancipatory aspirations in the immediate post-independence period—the attempts at industrialization, building domestic capacity, asserting economic sovereignty—the commitment wasn't radical enough. We needed to make a much more decisive break, to seriously delink from global capitalism rather than just tinker at its edges.

The path not taken was one of true South-South cooperation - coordinated production across Africa, robust trade between developing nations, collective systems to manage our shared vulnerabilities. Instead, even as we spoke of emancipation, we maintained colonial patterns of production and trade that kept us dependent on Western markets. When crisis hit the global North in the late 1970s—first the oil shocks, then the broader economic downturn—we were completely exposed. Our economies, still structured around raw commodity exports, collapsed when Northern demand dried up. The tragedy was that we hadn't built sufficient industrial capacity or South-South alternatives to cushion the blow.

This vulnerability created the opening for the IMF and World Bank to impose their structural adjustment programs, forcing us to abandon the very policies that had shown promise. In retrospect, our emancipation project failed because it was half-hearted—we challenged global capitalism rhetorically but reproduced its logic in practice. Without a coherent political vision for true delinking, without building alternative economic networks in the Global South, we remained trapped in a system designed to keep us dependent. When the North sneezed, we didn't just catch a cold—we got pneumonia, and the cure they offered was worse than the disease. The lesson is clear: partial emancipation is not emancipation at all.

TS: Marion, your chapter in the book looks at the legacy of neoliberalism and cash transfers in Africa. Would you like to discuss how African governments can balance cash transfers with long-term social policies?

MO: What we’re seeing now with the current cuts in aid and so on—it’s a situation many countries find themselves in due to trade imbalances. When countries depend on natural resources, they go through these cycles of boom and bust where prices are dictated by the global market. Take Zambia, for example, with its reliance on copper. When prices drop, revenue plummets, leaving country in a bind. The way the global economy is structured—with commodity prices often controlled by external forces—puts these nations in a vulnerable position. Then they become dependent on aid, and when that aid gets cut, it creates a mess.

But to your question about cash transfers—in the book, I provide a sort of genealogy of the idea in one of the chapters. Cash transfers have become one of the most prominent tools pushed onto governments in the Global South as the solution to poverty eradication. In some cases, they’re even called a "silver bullet." You’ll find cash transfer programs in almost every country in the Global South now. India, for instance, has them alongside public works programs like MGNREGA, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act.

The problem is, in Africa—and I can’t speak for every context, but generally—these cash transfers are extremely small. In Kenya, for example, a household might get 2,000 shillings, which is about 10 or 20 a month. That’s considered a generous amount in many places. But for a family of four or five, $10 might cover two days of food, and then what? There’s still education, healthcare, and other basic needs. So while cash transfers help to some extent, the amounts are so inadequate that their impact on poverty reduction is minimal. Countries like Kenya, Zambia, and Ghana have had these programs for over twenty years, and poverty levels haven’t shifted much.

Where cash transfers do work is in emergencies—like during COVID, when governments increased payouts to help people who lost jobs, or in humanitarian crises like droughts or earthquakes. In those situations, quick cash injections make sense. But the bigger issue is that cash transfers have been elevated as the main social policy tool, replacing other critical systems like public healthcare, education subsidies, or land reform. International organizations have pushed this agenda, pressuring governments to cut broader subsidies and instead focus on targeted cash programs.

What’s needed is a more comprehensive approach—a full social policy architecture. Social policy shouldn’t just be about handing out cash to keep people barely alive. It should redistribute resources, protect people from market shocks, enhance productivity (like through land reform so women can farm), and support social cohesion. Right now, cash transfers often target only the poorest, which can actually weaken solidarity by excluding others.

Look at countries like Sweden—they have a wide range of social policies working together. But in the Global South, everything’s been narrowed down to cash. And it’s not working. If I were advising governments in Africa or elsewhere, I’d say: Don’t treat social policy like a supermarket where you grab random items. Think of it like building a house—each piece needs to fit together. Health, education, housing, land reform, cash support—they should all connect in a way that doesn’t just prevent starvation but actually lifts people out of poverty, strengthens communities, and transforms the economy. That’s the kind of social policy we need.

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