Paper short abstract:

Many African societies are characterised by economic fraud, corruption, debates about moral change, and anti-corruption/fraud campaigns. These dynamics are interrelated parts of the emergence and consolidation of moral economies of neoliberalism. Uganda is used as a case to analyse this phenomenon.

Paper long abstract:

Economic fraud and political corruption at both elite and non-elite levels are widespread and endemic in many African societies that have undergone neoliberal reforms and transformations in the past two decades. Public debates about the moral features and dynamics of contemporary societal and political-economic orders are prevalent. Discourses around moral decline and crisis, as well as moral revival, are intensive; so are the various state-orchestrated anti-corruption and anti-fraud campaigns. In this paper it is argued that these dynamics are interrelated parts of the emergence and consolidation of moral economies of neoliberalism in Africa. It uses the case of fraud in Uganda to analyse the key structures and processes that produce this neoliberal web of moral economies and sheds light on the distinctive features of the latter. It furthermore regards actually existing moralities as both an empirical and political phenomenon. To that end, it explores how aspects of political economy and moral economy are intertwined and interact and thus constitute specific political moral economies in the study case. In a final section, the paper advocates that more scholarship is needed (i) to study the (cultural) political economy of actually existing moral norms, and (ii) to track the political-moral-economic underpinnings of social practices in neoliberal Africa more generally. The study of the changing practices and morals of interacting with others in the economy - i.e. defrauding/harming others - is a fruitful starting point for such a project. Empirical material from Uganda is used to develop and drive the analysis throughout the paper.