Nigerian scholar-administrator Adebayo Adedeji, who died on Wednesday at 87, was one of Africa’s greatest public servants. He was born in 1930 and grew up in Ijebu-Ode under British colonial rule. This left a fierce anticolonial mark on Adedeji, shaping his later professional exploits.
After completing his education in Nigeria, Adedeji studied economics and public administration at the universities of Leicester, Harvard and London, obtaining a doctorate in economics. He returned to Nigeria in 1958 to take up a post in the Western Region’s ministry of economic planning. In 1963 Adedeji left government service for Nigeria’s University of Ile-Ife. Four years later, at the age of 36, he became a full professor of economics and public administration, transforming the university’s Institute of Administration into a training ground for public servants.
In 1971, aged 40, Adedeji was appointed Nigeria’s minister of economic reconstruction and development by the military regime of Yakubu Gowon. He would oversee the post-war peace-building efforts after Nigeria’s civil war of 1967–70.
Ghanaian political economist SKB Asante described Adedeji as an African Cassandra — a visionary prophet who saw the future clearly but whose truthful prophesies often went unheeded until it was too late
His greatest feats were in regional integration. Adedeji was regarded as the Father of Ecowas, which was the Economic Community of West African States. As a minister he convinced 15 other West African leaders to establish Ecowas. In 1975 he joined the UN to lead its Addis Ababa-based Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). His 16-year tenure is the organisation’s longest: he drove the creation of the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa in 1981 and the Economic Community of Central African States in 1983.
Adedeji used the ECA for the most sustained assault on the structural adjustment programmes implemented from the 1980s by the World Bank and IMF. He argued against the Bretton Woods institutions’ approach of "growth without development" and export-led integration of African states into the world economy on hugely unequal terms. He stressed the need for Africa to use its resources to promote intra-African growth by prioritising agriculture and regional integration.
Ghanaian political economist SKB Asante described Adedeji as an African Cassandra — a visionary prophet who saw the future clearly but whose truthful prophesies often went unheeded until it was too late.
In the end the bank and the IMF reversed the large cuts in education and health spending that had decimated Africa’s socioeconomic sectors in the 1980s and 1990s. Debt relief also became fashionable more than a decade after Adedeji warned about the unsustainability of Africa’s $250bn debt in the 1980s.
After retiring from the ECA in 1991, Adedeji continued his regional integration efforts across Africa. His elevation to the Panel of Eminent Persons of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) in 2003 did not stop him from continuing to criticise the 2001 New Partnership for Africa’s Development as too externally dependent and naively ignoring the past failures of external donors to contribute substantively to African-led development plans.
Adedeji was the lead panellist of the South African APRM country review process between 2005 and 2007. Its report acknowledged the country’s political and economic progress but criticised the slow pace of socioeconomic transformation and growing inequalities, cautioning against the threat of xenophobic attacks in SA.
The Thabo Mbeki government strongly objected to the report’s criticisms, arrogantly dismissing the xenophobic threat as "simply not true". This was a painful moment in Adedeji’s career. He would, however, again prove a Cassandra. In May 2008, 62 foreigners were killed in SA and 100,000 people displaced in attacks on foreigners.
Adedeji consistently called for post-apartheid SA to "deconstruct" its colonially inherited political economy and create an effective and equitable "developmental state". He will take his rightful place in history alongside such figures as Argentina’s Raùl Prebisch and France’s Jean Monnet as the foremost prophet of regional integration on his continent.
• Adebajo is director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg.
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