In January 2024, Makerere University in Kampala hosted a two-day conference to reflect on 40 years of neoliberalism in Uganda. Writing on the conference, Serunkuma reminds us that, 40 years on, Uganda remains an epicentre of neoliberalism – or what he terms the ‘new colonialism’ in Africa. Consequently, neoliberalism and its many ills must remain at the forefront of scholarly and activist discussion and analysis.
In January of this year, the Uganda’s Neoliberalism at 40 conference took place at Makerere University in Kampala. Put together by comrades Rose Nakayi, Sarah Ssali (both from Makerere University), Jörg Wiegratz (University of Leeds), and my teacher, Guiliano Martiniello (presently at the International University of Rabat in Morocco), the conference attracted a wide variety of papers and comments from scholars and activists from across the world.
The profiles of the presenters and participants were telling enough of the direction of this conference: renowned anti-exploitation, anti-capitalism scholar-activists, and self-described socialist-communists. The keynote that was delivered by Professor Yash Tandon, a socialist who was full of stories of grand encounters and nostalgia – with Milton Obote, Julius Nyerere, and one with Vladmir Putin during his time as a KBG agent in Berlin. Legendary activist Kalundi Serumaga was there; unionist Professor Jean John Barya, and activist Agartha Atuhaire, who delivered the closing comment. That credentialed scholars from Makerere, the UK, and Napoli seamlessly and respectfully mingled with on-ground activists was a sight to behold.
And for the gawkers, activist and former politician, and current UNAIDS boss, Winnie Byanyima, was in the audience, and described herself as old communist-socialist of the Julius Nyerere type. Her son, Anselm Kizza-Besigye delivered a brilliant paper on the ‘ethnoprenuership’ (his term) on oil with Bagungu as the case study. Byanyima challenged her son to try and step out of the scholarly closet and be an activist. I was there. Tasked to read all those brilliant papers and make some comment on all of them. It was an honour.
The papers, crafted from the vantage point of neoliberalism, touched sectors and subjects including the fish industry, civil society organisations, oil, sugar cane growing and trading, labour exportation/externalisation to the Middle East, housing crises, the 2021 election, mental health, and several others. These papers, despite being drafts, were a great deal of learning.
Neoliberalism as Double Jeopardy
In the course of reading these papers, one quickly realises that Uganda is trapped in a double catastrophe. On the one hand, it is capitalism — with all its commodity fetishism and anthropogenic ruins — and on the other, neoliberalism as an ‘imposition’ of a set of policies meant to benefit ‘former’ colonisers.
As we know it, capitalism is dated to have begun in the English countryside in the 1600s. That could mean, exploiting labour and the environment and mild forms of ‘commodity fetishism’ was here before 1980s. (Not that it was all good). But the IMF and World Bank enforcement of structural adjustment programmes — privatisation, financialization and devaluation — did not only come from an ugly place; it added another layer of complication.
Or a series of layers. As Jason Hickel has demonstrated in his recent book, The Divide, these policies came from the diabolic jealousness that the independence of African countries had deprived Euro-America of cheap raw materials. Comparatively, one can actually argue that capitalism in itself would not be the problem for the African continent if the continent were exploiting her resources and getting maximum benefits.
Consider the exploitation of own natural resources in Russia, Iran or Qatar. It could be communism and capitalism combined. Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek recently argued that China and Russia — two of the biggest and most stables economies in the world — have actually combined both: “they work like capitalists, and enjoy like communists.” Of course, they have oligarchs and Sheikhs, but the public is sufficiently provided. Africa’s problem, then, becomes singularly describable as neoliberalism.
Open and Structured Violence
In fact, one of my little disappointments during this conference was that most papers — not all of them — didn’t call neoliberalism exactly what it is: ‘new colonialism.’ That Africa has been dealing with 40 years of raw power and violence from Euro-America disguised as myriad technicalities — and oftentimes, openly as coups. Kalundi Serumaga stressed this point of violence many times.
Consider the technical language of new colonialism – the big debates: Developmentalism; democracy and human rights; conservation and preservation; free trade, and so on. All these have myriad institutions pushing them onto the African continent, yet these are the things through which colonialism reproduces itself. There is nothing more cynical and dangerous on the African continent as Western funded groups and discourses pushing these things. As Palestine has continued to demonstrate in record time, these terms have always been instruments of power.
Seeing Through the Ruins
As the epicentre of neoliberalism — where it is still rabidly promoted — one ought to narrate the forty years of imposition of things, especially privatisation and handing them over to individual businesspersons. This meant removing the government from investing and or running key aspects of a country’s existence, from public education, public transport, cooperatives, the hospitality sector, coffee trade, and telecoms, to banks, industries, ranches, tourism projects, and electricity distribution.
In Uganda, all these ended up in the hands of foreign monopolists. Other were simply left to collapse. Consider that before the 1980s, the government was the entrepreneur, started companies called parastatals, and generated income from exploiting its natural and human resources. These profits would be put to the development of other sectors of the economy including offering subsidies to others such as public health and education. Because of the size of these businesses, with no local businessmen to buy them, but with the IMF and the World Bank holding the Ugandan government at gunpoint, governments were forced to lose their revenue, and also their importance in the lives of their subjects.
If the country was a body, some of its parts have been organ-harvested, some are cancerous, and others are dead. The neo-liberalised state in Africa is a walking zombie. Through these ruins, many things come into context. Consider the collapse of the farmers bank, the Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB), and the deliberate closure of indigenous banks in Uganda. With a banking regime dominated by foreign-owned banks, this is outright violent banking colonialism.
Banking colonialism explains the mental health crises among young adults in Kalerwe market, whose businesses cannot benefit from any loan schemes. It explains the surge in labour/slave exportation to the Middle East (before we even discuss the gendered nature), because there is literary no money in the economy. So are the results of the government collapse of cooperatives (East Mengo, Busoga, Ankole). Because the sugar, coffee, dairy or tea farmers are left to the mercy of thieves from the big cities, it has resulted in a rise in rural poverty, thus rural-urban migration, and thus the pressure on housing in Kampala.
The irony of all this is that while we discussed the scourge of neoliberalism in Uganda, Kampala was hosting something called the Non-Aligned Movement.
A version of this blogpost was originally posted in The Observer.
Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, scholar and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers which was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda. He is also a scholar and researcher who teaches political economy and history, and writes regularly for ROAPE.
