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Adebayo Adedeji
He told the World Bank and IMF that adjustment would hollow out Africa's economies — and lost the argument.
The rise
Born on 21 December 1930 at Ijebu-Ode, Adedeji studied at London and Harvard and was a professor by 36. After the civil war Gowon made him Federal Commissioner for Economic Development and Reconstruction (1971–1975); in June 1975 the UN sent him to Addis Ababa to run its Economic Commission for Africa.
What they did
In sixteen years at ECA, the longest tenure in its history, he drafted the 1980 Lagos Plan of Action, the OAU's strategy of self-reliance, regional integration and processing at home, and in 1989 the African Alternative Framework to structural adjustment, the continent's rebuttal of World Bank and IMF conditionality. He then founded the think-tank ACDESS and died on 25 April 2018.
The full picture
The Lagos Plan was never implemented: its import-substitution recipe met the 1980s debt crisis and states unable to carry it, and AAF-SAP had no financing of its own. Within a few years most signatory governments had taken adjustment loans; critics held that he shielded their mismanagement behind the word sovereignty.
Why it matters
The free trade area, the regional communities and the language of African integration descend from papers he wrote; his warning that adjustment would destroy productive capacity has aged better than the Bank's reply.
“We must pursue relentlessly the objective of establishing a new national and regional economic order in Africa based on an increasing measure of national and collective self-reliance.”