ABSTRACT
A profound myth developed just at the moment Africa’s rate of economic growth ceased its rapid 2002–2011 increase: ‘Africa Rising’. That myth persists, and as German Central Bank president Jens Weidmann (2017) claimed in mid-2017 at a Berlin G20 conference, without providing any evidence, ‘Africa stands ready to benefit from an open world economy. Its economic outlook is positive’. In reality, after the 2011 peak of the commodity super-cycle and subsequent crash, it was simply illogical to proclaim that Africa was prospering, given so many economies’ dependence upon primary product exports, especially minerals and oil, and given the ongoing global economic turmoil. A brief commodity price recovery in 2016 and the drop in the value of African currencies did not set the stage for renewed competitiveness, business confidence or investment, but instead another round of fiscal crises, extreme current account deficits and sovereign debt defaults. The continuation of the post-1980 downturn in world fixed capital investment (from the 25.5 per cent of gross domestic product to below 23.5 per cent after the 2008 crash) was also reflected in world profit rate stagnation, in spite of hype over China’s ‘Belt and Road’ mega-infrastructure projects. Moreover, with most major mining houses’ value plummeting on the world’s stock exchanges from peak 2015 levels by more than 80 per cent that year, not even a more desperate round of exploitation, the entry of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc (Bond and Garcia, 2015) or the G20’s 2017 ‘Compact with Africa’ could disguise the generalised crisis of accumulation in circuits of the world economy most important to Africa.
