Beyond No Alternative: IMF Asymmetrical Adjustment and African Resistance in the 1980s

This article examines how the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) asymmetrical approach to structural adjustment in Africa became entrenched during the financial turbulence of the 1980s. Drawing upon unpublished IMF Central Files – including Executive Board minutes, internal correspondence, and preparatory documents – as well as the published proceedings of a 1985 symposium in Nairobi and memoirs of key participants, it argues that African central bank governors mounted sophisticated critiques of the Fund's adjustment programs. By sophisticated, the article means a critique that engaged the Fund's own technical programming framework and challenged its asymmetrical burden-sharing, which required only deficit countries to adjust while surplus nations bore no corresponding obligations. Rather than incorporating these critiques, IMF leadership responded by expanding the Fund's loan programs through the Structural Adjustment Facility (SAF, 1986) and the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF, 1987), facilities that tripled concessional resources while increasing conditionality. These moves represented a selective answer to the governors’ demand for more resources while discarding the Nairobi conference's qualitative challenges to the premises of adjustment. The study shows how alternative viewpoints were systematically sidelined through institutional power dynamics, editorial control, and the foreclosure of dissenting voices, setting the stage for a world with ‘no alternative’ to the IMF's approach to adjustment.