[PEN-L] Hamba Kahle Guy Mhone

[Patrick Bond]

There is some awful news to transmit, I'm afraid.   Yesterday just after lunch, while in class at the Wits Grad School Public and Development Management, we got word that the progressive economist Guy Mhone passed away in a Pretoria hospital. In his early 60s, he had been in intensive care for more than a week after an unsuccessful operation, but all of us in the Gordon Building - where Guy was based since the late 1990s - were stunned and profoundly saddened.   I last saw Guy in Addis Ababa ten weeks ago, at a conference of the Ethiopian Economics Association/Codesria/IDEAS. He was, as ever, a stimulating companion, keeping everyone - on his left and right - honest with probing questions and suggestions. The humility and patience that were his trademarks are not in the least valued in the economics profession, so he was never seen as the single leading Southern African - indeed African - economist, which in my view he was, really without peer. No matter his failing health, I know that everyone in Addis that weekend understood that Guy was a giant in the field, and that we would all be wise to emulate his careful balance of radical social-justice instincts and rigorous economic analysis. His role summing up on the final day was breathtaking, because he so effectively brought the conference themes of rural development into sync with his own long-standing inquiries into the disfunctionality of modern African urban capitalism. Above all, what shone through was the common sense in which he pursued linkages between workers and peasants; capitalism and non-capitalist spheres; the capital-intensive 'enclave' and the mass of underutilised labour; inputs and outputs. Guy really took the best of 1950s development economics and merged into it highly sophisticated critiques of bourgeois economic theory established during the 1960s-70s, and policy lessons of neoliberal failures from the 1980s-90s.   Not that I can do justice to his c.v., which was no doubt dauntingly long and varied, but I have some strong recollections of his history. Raised along the border of Malawi and Zambia, his background resisting colonial Central African Federation repression and then Banda-era Malawian brutality gave him enormous reserves of moral strength. Guy would have excelled under these difficult conditions so as to earn entrance to Dartmouth and then scholarships to Syracuse for his economics doctorate. There, Guy learned the finest details of not just the prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy, but the radical critiques of epistemology, method and policy bias which raged across the discipline during his graduate studies. Subsequently, a series of increasingly influential posts in capitals across the region - Lusaka, Harare, Maseru and Pretoria (and probably others I don't know, though I gather he was basically exiled from Malawi) - gave Guy insights into the limits of state power. He periodically taught at universities and gave workshops, but whether in UN circuits - especially the International Labour Organisation - or thinktanks such as the Southern African Political Economic Series or national governments (he rose to become chief director of research at the SA Department of Labour), Guy was thinking and writing against the grain. One of his primary contributions was the deep dissection of markets, so that as Botswana boomed during the 1980s, for example, Guy was issuing the most serious advisories about that country's profound distortions.   It's just impossible to quickly sum up what Guy's temperament, experience and intellectual contributions meant to those of us close to him. Sure, there are many hilarious stories of how Guy, always possessing a quiet, understated dignity, dispatched his intellectual and political opponents.   For me, perhaps the most vivid memory is of a February 1996 struggle between the inconsequential band of left-leaning bureaucrats and consultants close to Jay Naidoo (then minister of reconstruction and development), allied with Guy at Labour, against the arrogant team mainly from the Development Bank of Southern Africa and Finance Ministry that eventually won the fight to implement GEAR. The particular workshop where Guy most convincingly demolished his opponents was graced by an amusing team of German technocrats brought in by a funder who wanted to introduce a 'Think Tools' innovation. One of Naidoo's top lieutenants was under the impression that if linkages were identified in the economy and amongst state agencies, 'alignment' could be readily achieved. The missing link was a computer programme that would establish causal vectors, now provided by the team parachuted in from Frankfurt. The obvious problem, however, was that these chaps were being shoehorned by SA's gang of neoliberal economists into rather monetarist and supply-side paradigms of causality. After some frustrating hours of lefty interventions at the margin, mainly ineffectual, Guy finally got the floor to make a substantial contribution from the Labour Department's perspective. It was a tour de force: questioning premises, introducing an alternative framework, arguing for demand-side strategies, and persisting in making connections between human-scale household consumption/production dynamics and the macroeconomy. Until then, the Germans had pored over their laptops, typing in virtually every little comment, converting ideas into equations, and reducing the left's contributions to the status of minor amendments. But shortly after Guy's long input began, they became flustered. They slowed down their keyboard punching, they glanced around at the neoliberals who were increasingly irritated or bored, one rolled his eyes upward, and then they just stopped. Guy went on with the presentation, and eventually Asghar Adelzadeh (then NIEP later UNDP) pointed out that the magnificent lines of analysis Guy was providing were not being recorded. And the Germans looked so utterly guilty and embarrassed, because everyone in the room knew that Guy's perspective had blown their modeling entirely out of the water. As a footnote, when GEAR was finally published in June, the acknowledgements page contained 17 white male economists (including two from the World Bank and many from the Old Guard), plus Guy. I was long since excluded from the debates - because Naidoo was sent to a kind of Siberia (mandated to privatise Telkom) in March 1996 in the wake of the rand's collapse and subsequent closure of the RDP Office (itself a futile effort to "send the signals to the market") - and hence I couldn't believe my eyes that Guy was implicated in GEAR's inane and incompetent econometrics and reactionary policy project. He chuckled in his characteristic way and said, "Yes, I went to another meeting or two after that workshop in February. It was clear I wasn't wanted so I just dropped out. I guess they wanted my name, though." But that provided him more grounds for mirth, because they spelled it Mahone.   The good news was that hundreds of Wits masters students subsequently learned the critique of neoliberal economic theory from Guy, using GEAR as a case study, not to mention the numerous other structural adjustment flops across Southern Africa, all of which were at his fingertips. All the while, he invoked the limits of neo-classical economics applied to African conditions to undermine some of the central tenets of the discipline, especially labour and capital market theory. Guy's subsequent work included any number of conference papers, published chapters and articles, and a magisterial overview of African economies for Codesria. The latter was underway in mid-2004 just before I left Wits for UKZN, and I dearly hope it is just one of his posthumous works that will receive a wide readership. When I chatted with Guy a few years ago about collecting his finest articles from the region for a book-length reader, in the style that Africa World Press has pioneered for great African scholars, he seemed interested, but was bogged down with too many other responsibilities. In the late 1990s, as Wits P&DM desperately sought a director, for example, Guy was begged by colleagues across the university to take up the job for a few years. He agreed in spite of the bureaucratic drag it imposed on his own work, and I was happy that after a few years he returned to teaching and scholarship. But even then, every week or so, colleagues in Geneva or Addis or New York or Harare beseeched him for inputs into seminars, research projects and cadre development. His comradeship was infinite, and his desire to help younger generations build up the capacity to critique and reconstruct the economics discipline was insatiable.   If indeed there is a single profound legacy from Guy's contributions, I think it's the courage with which he castigated the economies and economists of colonialism and contemporary neocolonialism. His intimate knowledge of ruling-elite ideas and personalities across the region left him with scepticism about reform, and my own great disappointment in thinking about Guy's career these last few hours, is simply that insufficient numbers of energised activists from the global justice movements - especially the African Social Forum - were not sufficiently exposed to his work. Notwithstanding the rigorous and professional way he dressed his ideas, they were and are nothing short of revolutionary. I hope we can collectively bridge that missing link in coming weeks and months, as people across the region and world pour out professional and personal tributes to this lovely man's genius and to his undying spirit. Hamba Kahle Guy.