World Bank Rhetoric Still Sounds a Lot Like Structural Adjustment...A Micro-Case Study from Nigeria

From 1994 to 2024, the Bank's officials consistently advance two core ideas - economic "reforms" must proceed even when they're unpopular, and such "reforms" cannot fail, but can only be failed.

In the Financial Times, the World Bank’s Chief Economist Indermit Gill published an op-ed on October 16 with the emphatic title “Nigeria’s Economic Transformation Must Succeed.” The sub-hed reads, “Failure would set back the cause of reform across sub-Saharan Africa.”

Here is the central argument:

Over the past year or so, the Nigerian government has implemented major, politically difficult reforms. No large-scale reform process is ever perfect, but this one must be allowed to succeed — Africa’s future hinges on its success. An economic turnaround in a country with more people in poverty than almost any other would be a game-changer for market-orientated reforms across the continent.

I am not an economist, but I am fairly familiar with World Bank rhetoric and discursive style. And a few well-worn terms and turns of phrase stand out, recalling Bank initiatives of decades long past. Here are some of those phrases:

• “Politically difficult reforms”: The word “reform” typically connotes something positive, perhaps something happening despite resistance. When the Bank talks about “politically difficult reforms,” the surface-level meaning is that the reforms are good even though people don’t like them. But the idea of such “difficulty” is so widespread that sometimes, to me, it sounds like the Bank is actually saying that the political difficulties themselves somehow signal that the reforms are desirable - that the depth and scale of the resistance has a direct relationship with the supposed wisdom of the reforms. “People don’t like this, therefore it must be good” emerges as the logic. That logic is amenable to the Bank, I think, because it reinforces their aura of technocratic expertise. Their logic also seeks to defang criticism - criticisms are positioned as “political,” leaving economics as a supposedly univocal, expert field. A kind of moralizing narrative emerges: the economists, technocrats, and reformers are depicted as the good guys, while the critics are depicted as either the (supposedly) ignorant masses or the (supposedly) pro-status quo politicians.

• “This one must be allowed to succeed” - the rhetoric here not only conveys a sense of high-stakes urgency but also portrays the reform as a sure-fire recipe for success. Note the use of the passive voice here - the reform is the subject of this clause, while those doing the “allowing” (the politicians and officials) are placed in the background. The clause is also not just grammatically but also semantically passive, suggesting that politicians effectively throw a switch to activate the reform and then should get out of the way; after reform begins, this phrasing suggests, politicians are meant to be cheerleaders rather than active players.

• “Market-orientated reforms” - this of course is the whole direction of the Bank’s thinking and mission.

Substantively, Gill is defending three reforms - floating the naira, cutting fuel subsidies, and maintaining high interest rates - all with the goals of combating inflation and attracting foreign investment. For context, Nigeria’s economy is not doing well at all and has been struggling both before and after the introduction of these reforms in 2023. The links in the first sentence of this paragraph all gesture to relatively mild critiques of the policies in question, and there are even tougher criticisms out there. Clearly the Bank is worried that the critics will gain a wider and wider audience and eventually influence President Bola Tinubu to change course. And indeed, prominent politicians are questioning the reforms and openly disagreeing with the Bank’s prescriptions.

One other striking thing about Gill’s op-ed is how consistent Work Bank rhetoric is across time, particularly these recurring ideas that (a) unpopular reforms are good, actually and (b) reforms can only be failed, and can’t actually fail on the merits.

For one example of this continuity, we can flash back to the Bank’s 1994 self-evaluation of how “structural adjustment” from the 1980s actually fared in Nigeria. Here is a representative passage (from the Foreword, on p. 3):

In short, according to the Bank, people hated structural adjustment even though it worked, and whatever didn’t work can be attributed to either other factors or to “erratic” implementation by politicians. (Note that in so much anthropological literature now and in some political science, “structural adjustment” is now so reviled that it’s practically an epithet, and for good reason - it eviscerated the public sector and left people worse off.) Thirty years later, Gill and the Bank are advancing almost exactly the same arguments and prescriptions - in Gill’s op-ed, we hear that Nigeria must “stay the course,” and that politicians must show “political commitment” and “forge a political consensus in support of these reforms.” Some major details are different from the 1980s and 1990s; there is more talk of cash transfers and the need for a “safety net.” But we are not that far here, rhetorically, from structural adjustment or indeed from Margaret Thatcher’s famous “there is no alternative” line.

Pointing out these rhetorical continuities is crucial because the Bank has supposedly undergone, and is supposedly now undergoing, serious periods of “reform” itself - all, we hear, in line with the goals of reducing poverty and combating climate change. But I see more consistency in the Bank’s approach than change. I agree with what these two analysts write: “Over the last half-century, under this supposed poverty-fighting mission, the bank has rolled out initiatives and built institutions that gave countries only two bad choices: facilitate corporate power, or be disciplined by it.” Gill’s “market-orientated reforms” are, nakedly put, investor-friendly power moves. If ordinary people don’t like that, maybe they’re not so ignorant after all.