The Eighteenth Brumaire of Yoweri Museveni

July 27, 2021

In this long-read, Liam Taylor explores the politics and class dynamics of Kampala, Uganda. Taylor unpicks the enigma of Yoweri Museveni’s background – a former student militant who was taught by Walter Rodney, and argued for the necessity of revolutionary violence, socialism and radical transformations. Yet he soon became the apostle of neoliberal change, always promising that real change was forthcoming.

By Liam Taylor

During thunderstorms in Kampala the rainwater comes rushing down the hillsides in torrents, through clogged drainage ditches and silty channels, inundating the valleys with sudden floods. The rich make their homes on the hilltops, where the rain runs off their paved compounds. The poor crowd into the wetlands, in one-roomed mizigo rentals sometimes built with small brick walls around the doorway, to hold back the impending tide. In Luganda, an ordinary person is omuntu wa wansi, literally, a “person from down”. It is a metaphor that maps onto the very contours of the city.

The ruptures in Ugandan politics can be seen in the contrast between those valleys and hilltops. January’s tumultuous election was a generational contest and a struggle against dictatorial power. But it was also an eruption of class politics, embodied by the rise of Robert Kyagulanyi, a popstar-turned-politician best known as Bobi Wine. “If parliament will not come to the ghetto,” he said when elected MP in 2017, “then the ghetto will come to parliament.”

For Yoweri Museveni, now in his 36^th year of rule, this upsurge is baffling. His self-proclaimed mission is to haul Uganda out of the sectarian logic of peasant society into the industrial age. In that brave new world, class would replace religion and ethnicity as the axis along which politics was organised. But the distortions of his rule have instead perpetuated old logics and blocked economic transformation, creating alternative forms of urban class politics that he can neither understand nor control. This long-read explores the politics and class dynamics of Museveni’s rule.

The next section explores Museveni’s sociological understanding of politics. Subsequent sections examine how its premises are undermined by the economic realities of neoliberalism and the rise of the “hustling class”. The conclusion considers how Museveni maintains his power in the Uganda he has created.

It’s not like in genesis chapter one

In the 1960s the western region of Nkore was going through a social upheaval. The spread of Christianity and colonial education had reconfigured relations between the high-status, cattle-keeping Bahima and the lowlier Bairu cultivators. Cash-cropping and enclosures were fuelling land conflicts. Politics had fractured along religious and ethnic lines.

The young Museveni was a schoolboy in Nkore at the time. He wrote later of his “revulsion at the sectarian politics in Ankole [which] was a microcosm of the sad story of political sectarianism in the whole of Uganda”. In 1967, when he enrolled at the University of Dar es Salaam, he found the intellectual tools to make sense of his experiences. Campus life was a cauldron of socialist and pan-African politics. Museveni attended a study group taught by Walter Rodney, and argued for the necessity of revolutionary violence in his dissertation on Frantz Fanon.

Museveni’s formative years in Nkore and Dar have shaped his politics ever since. They instilled in him the teleological notion that society progresses in stages from “backwardness” to “modernity”. As a young man in Nkore he had trekked between kraals, encouraging nomadic cattle-keepers to “modernise” and settle down. In Dar he learned a certain version of Marx’s historical materialism, with its dialectic unfolding from feudalism to capitalism to the coming era of communism. But he saw that if history had a direction, it could also be thrown off course. He thought that the petty local divisions in Nkore and the great divisions in African society had opened the door to imperialists and left the peasants poor.

In his speeches, Museveni still reiterates these themes of modernisation and unity. And yet they ring hollow. The long war he waged against the Lord’s Resistance Army has left a legacy of trauma and dispossession in the Acholi region of the north. In the Rwenzori mountains families mourn more than 150 people who were massacred by the army in 2016. There is resentment almost everywhere against the westerners, especially Bahima, who dominate the security apparatus. Division endures.

How can we reconcile Museveni’s political thought with his political practice? The temptation is to reach for psychology: to insist either that he was a imposter from the start, or a young idealist corrupted by the spoils of office. But a better solution to the Museveni enigma lies in political economy. One way to read Uganda’s predicament is as a dialogue between Museveni’s ideas, refracted through militarism, and the international economic order which confronted him.

Museveni was never a liberal. Political competition is dangerous, in his view, because opportunists will sow division for personal gain. After fighting his way to power in 1986, he established a system of “no-party democracy”, in which candidates stood for office without party affiliation. His own National Resistance Movement (NRM) was to be the all-encompassing arena of politics, containing the fractures which had once torn the country apart. Calls for multiparty democracy were missing the point, he told other African leaders in 1990. Democracy was like water, which can exist as liquid, vapour or ice: “Yes, I need water, but let me determine the form which I want to use.”

Museveni, with his Marxist training, believed that political institutions were hostage to the material circumstances of their time. “A society like ours here is still preindustrial,” he said at Makerere University in 1991, “which means that it is still primarily a tribal society, and that its stratification is, therefore, vertical. In an industrialised society, on the other hand, you have horizontal linkages and, therefore, horizontal stratification.” For example, British workers had united around their common class interests, rather than their English, Scottish or Welsh identities. “An industrialised society is really a class society,” Museveni continued. “A multiparty system in an industrialised society is likely to be national, while the propensity of a similar arrangement in a preindustrial society is likely to be sectarian.”

That rather self-serving logic underpinned Museveni’s view that the wrong sort of democracy, too soon, threatens cohesion and thus hinders modernisation. Even after a multiparty system was restored in 2005 – partly as a quid pro quo for the lifting of presidential term limits – the NRM remained the substrate of local politics. The leading opposition force, the Forum for Democratic Change, had itself splintered off from the ruling party. Politicians such as Kizza Besigye, the FDC’s tireless leader, were hounded by the police. They were treated less as rivals than as enemies of the state.

How do Museveni’s disciples think today? Last August, I spoke with David Mafabi, a presidential advisor and NRM ideologue. In 2017 he had convened a meeting to plot the removal of an age limit from the constitution – the last legal obstacle to Museveni ruling for life.

“We are a nation in the process of becoming, an unstable multinational entity,” Mafabi told me, in the same restaurant where that notorious meeting was held. “Democracy, constitutionalism, are not acts of creation. It’s not like in Genesis chapter one: let there be prosperity, stability and everything. No, it cannot be like that.”

NRM activists buzzed around us in canary-yellow shirts. “With the advent of industrialisation, the advent of capitalism, you’ve had individuals who have acted as midwives so to speak of new societies,” Mafabi continued. “And sub-Saharan African countries are generally overall at that point… Leadership in such societies gravitates around the charismatic, visionary leaders, who in themselves express the objective needs of societies at those critical times.” He listed examples. Cromwell. Washington. Napoleon.

A technocrat’s dream

In 1984 the British journalist William Pike went to meet Museveni in the bush. He found a self-confident guerrilla in faded fatigues with a “faraway look in his eyes… the look of a dreamer, a revolutionary”. But Museveni was also the kind of man who would spend an evening debating exchange rate policy. Minutiae obsessed him.

What kind of economic policy could Ugandans expect when, eighteen months later, a victorious Museveni was sworn in as president? Nobody really knew. Many NRM leaders assumed that their Marxist commander would not allow them to own land or businesses, writes Matthew Rukikaire, who had chaired the movement’s external committee during the war. It was only when Museveni himself started buying up cattle ranches that his comrades “breathed a sigh of relief and followed suit”.

Like many post-colonial intellectuals, Museveni had always been a nationalist first, and a Marxist second. “Socialism is not the main issue for Africa,” he told Pike in the bush, “the crucial issue is disengagement from strangulation by foreign interests.” Perceptive rivals poured scorn on Museveni’s radical credentials. As early as 1980, the socialist thinker Dani Wadada Nabudere dismissed Museveni and his comrades as “petty bourgeois anti-Marxist reactionaries”.

In power, Museveni initially resisted IMF-inspired structural adjustment, and even bartered with Cuba. But with inflation running at 191%, and foreign aid funding half of government expenditure, he soon changed course. “In his search for the new Jerusalem, President Museveni went to the precipice, peered over the edge and did not like what he saw,” writes Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile, a liberal economist and the most influential technocrat of the Museveni era. “It was scary. That is why he will never go back.”

The Cold War was over. Free market ideology was at its zenith, pushed aggressively by the West. A new constitution and elections were still several years away. “Uganda was effectively a ‘benign dictatorship’,” write two foreign economists who worked as advisors to the Ugandan government in the 1990s. “The next few years were a technocrat’s dream.”

The government cut spending, crushed inflation and halved the number of public servants in just four years. The shilling was allowed to float freely. Foreign investors were welcomed with generous tax breaks. Between 1992 and 2007 the state sold its stake in 90 public enterprises, in sectors such as telecoms, banking, hotels, power, agro-industry and railways. Museveni still quoted “our friend Mao Tse-Tung” at startled World Bank officials, but his policies had made him a poster child for the Washington Consensus. When debt relief was granted to the Global South in the 1990s, Uganda was the first country to benefit.

And some things did get better. The proportion of Uganda’s population living below the World Bank’s extreme poverty line fell from 58% in 1989 to 36% in 2012. Over the same period, GDP growth averaged 6.9% a year, faster than in Singapore. Museveni lapped up praise – and money – from the Western governments that bankrolled him. The Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby described Tumusiime-Mutebile, the top civil servant in a new economic super-ministry and later central bank governor, as “the greatest contributor to Africa’s struggle against poverty in his generation”.

But reforms premised on the power of the market were simultaneously blind to its failures. The withdrawal of the state from coffee marketing gave farmers a greater share of the export price, but meant they got little support to improve quality or withstand disease. Reduced tariffs on garments led to a flood of cheap imports, swamping domestic industry. The sale of parastatals was opaque and allegedly corrupt. Museveni’s brother Salim Saleh was tangled up in several notorious deals, from the sell-off of a state bank to the privatisation of cargo handling at Entebbe airport (the latter with Sam Kutesa, the president’s in-law, who was investment minister at the time).

There was a deeper problem too. Arthur Lewis, the St Lucian economist, famously observed that poor countries become rich ones through a process of structural transformation, as workers move from subsistence activities into more productive sectors. In east Asia, this kind of industrial revolution was steered by an activist state. But Museveni’s Uganda instead became a test case for neoliberal reform in Africa, with all of its achievements and failures: low inflation, industrial torpor, precarious employment, and the expansion of the informal services sector. There was some initial export diversification and manufacturing growth, especially in areas such as food processing, but by the mid-2000s progress had stalled (some recent experiments with industrial parks notwithstanding). As a share of employment, industry has shrunk. Poverty is rising again.

“The historical mission of the NRM,” Museveni said last year, “is to make the Ugandan jump on the historical bus of machine power and gunpowder power… and, as a consequence, cause the metamorphosis of our society into a middle class, skilled working [class] society and away from the society of peasants, low skill artisans and a miniscule and powerless feudal class.” By that standard, although he did not say it, his government has failed. The people hustle, as best they can: flogging second-hand clothes, baking bricks, hawking herbal supplements, burning charcoal, cultivating wetlands, or toiling in Arab countries as maids and guards. If Ugandans have jumped on any machine in the Museveni era it is the boda-boda, the motorbike taxi, spluttering over hills and round potholes, choking out fumes and frustration. Museveni had once argued that economic transformation would create European-style class politics, which would make true multipartyism possible. But an industrial revolution has not come to pass. And so, by Museveni’s logic, democracy must wait.

The rich eat chicken but it is tasteless

But society is not static. Urban growth, a youth bulge and the informalisation of labour are producing new economic relations and identities. And perhaps the most important of these is the hustler, scraping by in the interstices of the city. In elite eyes, the hustler is an irritant and a threat. Intellectuals sneer about the “lumpen proletariat”. In Luganda, the lingua franca of the Bantu south, the hustler is often caricatured as a muyaaye (plural: bayaaye, adjective: -yaaye): a marijuana-smoker, a trickster, a thug.

Hustles, in many guises, have been around since the era of magendo, the black-market that flourished under Idi Amin. In those days Museveni was in Tanzania, trying to recruit Ugandan exiles into his guerrilla army. “These boys,” he wrote of one batch of idle recruits, “had mostly been working in towns like Nairobi and had a kiyaaye (lumpen proletariat)culture… They would start drinking and moving out of the camps.” He concluded that true peasants, uncorrupted by city life, were a more pliable material to work with.

But under Museveni’s rule the hustling class grew like never before. It was the hustlers – and not an industrial proletariat – that became the lifeblood of urban culture. By the late 1990s, when cheap recording equipment became available in makeshift studios, they were ready to take over the music scene, displacing the rustic kadongo kamu troubadours and imported Congolese soukous. “Eh, I remember in ’96 they called us bayaaye from Kamwokya,” sang one dreadlocked bad boy, mixing English, Luganda and street slang. “They said we stayed in the ghetto, in ramshackle houses, that we are failures / They say me come from a poor family / They don’t know ghetto life is the best.”

That singer was Bobi Wine, the man who now poses the greatest threat to Museveni’s regime. His People Power movement has been characterised, with varying degrees of accuracy, as a youth rebellion, a freedom struggle, or a rejection of Bahima dominance. But it is also, significantly, a class revolt. Bobi Wine – whose family had fallen into the ghetto, and who has long since clambered out – is the great rhapsodist of ghetto life, of its indignities, its promise. “Born hustling,” as he himself has said.

The message is in the music. In “Ghetto”, released before a summit of Commonwealth leaders in Kampala: “Now see in Katwe that on the day the Queen comes, the poor man is cleared away.” In “Kikomando”, named after a cheap snack of beans and chapatti: “Sometimes you sleep hungry, sometimes you eat kikomando / and you think that God forgot about you / the rich are many and drive cars / they eat chicken but it is tasteless.” In “Situka”, the 2016 overture to his political career: “When leaders become misleaders and mentors become tormentors / when freedom of expression becomes a target of suppression / opposition becomes our position.”

These songs were an affirmation of all those who had been kicked down, boxed in, shut out. Young men like Rajabu Bukenya, from the flood-prone ghetto of Bwaise, in northern Kampala. Slight and neatly-bearded, he introduced himself to me by his street name: “Rasta Man e Bwaise Mulya Kimu” (Rasta Man in Bwaise who eats once a day). He dropped out in the third grade of secondary school, unable to afford the fees, and found work as a porter, lugging sand and bricks. These days he runs a small laundry business, and spends his spare time calling radio stations with the ten phones that he carries in his pocket.

“Bobi Wine also came from the ghetto – that’s why the people in the ghetto love him so much,” said Bukenya. “The pain they have, even Bobi Wine passed through that pain… Eating once a day, eating kikomando: in Uganda people don’t have money for food, they just eat chapatti and beans… We have nowhere to go. We have no money to buy land, to build a house. And the land we had in the village? The government took our land in the village.”

Another example: dawn, December last year, in Bobi Wine’s expansive garden, and a cluster of young women who had come to campaign with him. “I’m among those who are the oppressed Ugandans,” said Gloria Mugerwa, draped in a red gown. “The poor can’t access the medical facilities, the poor cannot access the education facilities.” She and her friends had worked as maids in Arab countries where, said Mugerwa, “you are treated as a slave”. In Bobi Wine she saw hope. “He has been through it, and he can help us through this.”

There can be a millenarian tinge to this sentiment: a naïve sense that if only Museveni were gone then Ugandans would “walk with swag”, as the People Power movement’s unofficial anthem goes. Despite his mural of Thomas Sankara and fondness for pan-African iconography, Bobi Wine and his closest associates do not seem especially curious about the dynamics of global capitalism. Yet the radical potential of the movement lies less in the singer himself than in the forces he represents.

Class dynamics have long rumbled beneath opposition politics, from the career of Nasser Sebaggala, a populist mayor of Kampala between 2006 and 2011, to the crowds that thronged behind Besigye. But it has burst to the surface in Bobi Wine’s party, the National Unity Platform, which is an uneasy alliance of young intellectuals, opposition stalwarts, the petit bourgeoisie and the hustling class. In the constituency of Kawempe North the party selected as its candidate Muhammad Ssegirinya, a former restaurant cleaner known as “Mr Updates” for his voluble social media presence. He beat off more established rivals for the party ticket, including a former deputy mayor, who has since accused Ssegirinya of forging his exam certificates – a telling line of attack. Bobi Wine, whose own academic credentials have also been questioned, once told me that Ssegirinya’s selection was evidence of “a system that drops the powerful and elevates the unknown”.

Even the NRM elite can feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. A year ago, I met Mike Mukula, a former health minister who fell from grace after he was accused of stealing money intended for medicines. These days he flies helicopters, drives fast cars and serves as one of Museveni’s vice-chairmen in the NRM.

Mukula laid out the classic Musevenist argument. “You know the British have a class setting, the haves and the have-nots – this is what was lacking in the African continent,” he explained in his Kampala villa, as servants laid out lunch. But something was changing. “Now there is this cluster of a new group, which was not there. I call them the urban lumpen proletariat. If you see most of those people who are on drugs, who are musicians, and so on and so forth – that group… Now they see the Museveni group like us having these houses, the vehicles, being in power for some time.” He sank back in his white leather armchair. These rabble-rousers were a “formation in its infancy”, he sniffed, without structure, organisation or ideology.

And that would also seem to be the view of Museveni himself, who has admonished Bobi Wine for focusing too much on the “lumpen proletariat” and “the bayaaye in Kampala”. Perhaps, in his mind’s eye, the old general thinks back to that cohort of recruits on a Tanzanian training ground. When he looks at Bobi Wine he sees a distracted cadet, with no place in his never-ending revolution.

More dangerous than AIDS and Ebola combined

Museveni should re-read Fanon, who wrote of the “lumpen proletariat” with a mixture of horror and awe. In The Wretched of the Earth, the Martinican intellectual argued that the anti-colonial struggle will find a foothold in cities among those who have “not yet succeeded in finding a bone to gnaw in the colonial system… It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpen proletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the lumpen proletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonised people.”

If this was true of the late colonial metropolis, is it not more so of the twenty-first century city, sculpted by corruption, militarism and neoliberalism? On 18 and 19^thNovember last year, after Bobi Wine was arrested on the campaign trail, Kampala exploded in uproar. Young men lit fires, threw rocks, shook down motorists: this was, in the words of veteran journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo, “an anger bubbling among the ‘lowerdeck’ people, against the ‘upperdeck’ folks in general”. Security forces shot people dead as they protested, sought shelter, sold food, went shopping, walked home. Stray bullets said the police. Collective punishment, more like.

The ghetto had always been caricatured as a place of tough-guy masculinity, from the cartoon violence of the low-budget “Wakaliwood” flicks to Bobi Wine’s self-depiction as a mubanda (gangster), “more dangerous than AIDS and Ebola combined”. But here were men in t-shirts with automatic rifles, playing out the Rambo fantasy for real. The state had become more “ghetto” than the ghetto of the darkest imagination. “When you want to catch a thief, sometimes you behave like a thief,” said Elly Tumwine, the security minister, defending the use of plainclothes gunmen to shoot unarmed civilians last year.

And then the state started stealing people. Hundreds of opposition activists were bundled into unmarked vans, then disappeared. Many of them later showed up in military detention. One man told me that soldiers had electrocuted the soles of his feet and interrogated him about his links to Bobi Wine. “You, the bayaaye, cannot lead this country,” his torturer said to him. When Museveni spoke about the abductions, he said that the army were detaining “terrorists” and “lawbreakers” who were plotting that gravest of crimes – to “scare away investments”.

The blurring of law enforcement and criminality is not new. Under General Kale Kayihura, police chief from 2005 to 2018, stick-wielding thugs would routinely bludgeon protesters while uniformed officers looked on. One of the most notorious outfits was Boda-Boda 2010, a motorbike taxi gang, which terrorised drivers, attacked registration officials, and once set upon a group of schoolchildren who were wearing red, a colour associated with political opposition. In 2019 the association’s leader, said to be close to Kayihura, was sentenced to ten years in jail for illegal possession of firearms (he has since been freed).

But Museveni’s dance with the ghetto is about more than just violence. A few weeks before the November protests I met Andrew Mwenda, an astute and controversial journalist with powerful connections: his older brother, a major general, is in charge of joint security operations in Kampala, and the president’s son describes him as a close friend.

“Museveni has the largest patronage machine of any government I know in Africa,” Mwenda told me. “When there is an uprising here, or demonstrations, the deployment of the police and army is a short-term tactical measure to secure stability, but the medium- to long-term strategy is always to penetrate the groups that are protesting politically and begin demobilising them using bribery. Co-optation. You should see how the system here works! In a very short time, within a month, they will give [their ringleaders] money, put them in party structures. They will find communities where the hotspots are, form co-operatives, put money on the account. They will get hair salon owners, bus drivers, taxi touts, vendors and hawkers, and begin organising them and counter-mobilising politically.”

Perhaps the most striking example of this process is Museveni’s recruitment of musicians. Ragga Dee, a washed-up singer, was the NRM’s candidate for Lord Mayor of Kampala. Buchaman, former “vice-president” of Wine’s Firebase Crew, is now Museveni’s unofficial adviser on “ghetto affairs”. So too is Full Figure, a dancehall star, who once backed Bobi Wine but is now so enamoured with the president that she has named her new-born son after him. Last year I met her in her office, overlooking the welders and mechanics of Katwe. Twice a week, she said, she would visit State House or meet Saleh, the president’s brother. It was the job of musicians to bridge the gap between the government and the ghetto.

That transactional logic is evident even in its repudiation. Before elections, the NRM-state began recruiting boxers in Kampala. Most of them were naturally sympathetic to Wine, an amateur boxer himself, who had his own networks in the sweat-soaked gyms. “We met a certain general during these NRM things,” one boxer told me. “He told us: ‘Bobi Wine is going to make you killed [sic] and he’s not going to support your family and he’s not giving you money. Why don’t you come work for us, and we give you money?’”

The pay on offer was not enough to make the boxers do the NRM’s dirty work. They refused. One former national champion, Isaac “Zebra” Ssenyange, had been mobilising for the party but then fell out with his patrons. Security forces shot him dead in the street.

This is the ultimate rejection of Museveni: to spurn his money. On election day, as Bobi Wine arrived at his polling station to vote, his supporters burst into their favourite chant, which likens the president to “Bosco”, a bumbling character from a mobile phone advert.

Eh Mama! Twagala Bobi si ssente

Eh Mama! Twagala Bobi si Bosiko.

(Eh Mama! We want Bobi not money

Eh Mama! We want Bobi not Bosco.)

Even Museveni is a muyaaye

In 1852 a tousle-haired German journalist called Karl Marx sat down to analyse the politics of contemporary France. Napoleon III, elected president after the uprising of 1848, had recently assumed dictatorial authority. Revolution was sliding towards despotism, just as it had half a century earlier, when Napoleon III’s more famous uncle – the Napoleon everyone knows – had seized power in a coup. The new dictator, scheming and vaguely comical, was a caricature of the old one. History was repeating itself, wrote Marx: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.

Marx called his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, after the date in the French revolutionary calendar when the first Napoleon had staged his coup. It is an intricate study of class antagonisms in a society in flux. And reading it in Kampala, it feels strangely recognisable, despite the gulf that separates modern Uganda from nineteenth-century France. Consider Marx’s discussion of how money greases the wheels of dictatorship:

Money as a gift and money as a loan, it was with prospects such as these that [Napoleon III] hoped to lure the masses. Donations and loans — the financial science of the lumpen proletariat, whether of high degree or low, is restricted to this. Such were the only springs Bonaparte knew how to set in action.

Or read Marx’s description of urban politics, and think of Museveni’s street enforcers like Boda Boda 2010 and its fallen patron, General Kayihura:

On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters [the list goes on] — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.

David Mafabi, Museveni’s adviser, had told me that the president could play the role of Napoleon. The Napoleon he had in mind was the famous one: the military genius, the moderniser, silencing his enemies with a whiff of grapeshot. It is a (historically inaccurate) vision of the great man bestriding history, wrestling with immense forces, even his violence justified by some larger purpose. This is Museveni the ssabalwanyi, the greatest of fighters.

But strip away these delusions and the Museveni project becomes nothing but an endless game of tactical manoeuvre, whispered deals, grubby handshakes. At times, when he is posing with Buchaman or attempting ghetto slang, there is even dark comedy about it. In this regard, Museveni most resembles that other, lesser, Napoleon, the one that Marx christened “the chief of the lumpen proletariat”. Museveni created the ghetto: now he must cajole, co-opt and crush it. “Even Museveni is a muyaaye,” I was once told by a small-time singer in a cramped recording studio in Kampala. “He’s ruling us in a muyaaye style, like fooling us.”

Museveni dreamt of ushering Uganda through the doorways of history, but his politics was premised on an economic transformation which never came. The blame lay partly in his own policies and partly in the international economic order which moulded them. He continues in power through inertia and intrigue, still chasing a vanished future. In his self-righteous violence and petty machinations, he evokes both Napoleons at once: the blood-soaked general and the wily schemer. This time as tragedy. This time as farce.

Liam Taylor is a freelance journalist based in Kampala, Uganda, since 2016. His writing has been published by The Economist, Al Jazeera, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, World Politics Review, the New Internationalist and others.

Featured Photograph: Poster of President Yoweri Museveni. Outside Kisoro in Southwestern Uganda (Adam Jones, 2 July 2012).

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Third World Network-Africa & ROAPE Webinars: Africa, climate change & the pandemic – crises & radical alternatives

ROAPE

July 23, 2021

ROAPE, in partnership with Third World Network-Africa, will hold a series of three webinars starting in August 2021 to explore the connections between Africa, climate change and the pandemic from a political economy perspective. The first webinar is being held on 5 August.

We are currently facing two global crises – one is the immediate threat to lives on a world-wide scale of Covid-19 pandemic (and almost certainly other later pandemic diseases). The second is the larger and potentially more cataclysmic threat of climate change. It has been convincingly argued that pandemics like Covid-19 are triggered by humans coming into more intimate contact with a range of viral infections carried by animals because of migration and cultivation into areas of the globe which up to now were relatively untouched. These movements have been driven by capitalist extractivism, the unbridled search for profits and climate change.

Africa has been severely impacted by both crises in ways which increase the obstacles for transformations that will better lives for its people. African countries have so far been spared the worst health impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic but across the continent the severe weaknesses in public health delivery systems have been further exposed by the pandemic.

The unfolding vaccine apartheid has left Africa with the lowest vaccination rates in the world is not simply another depressing instance of the profit greed of Big Pharma facilitated by imperialist power play. It is also a consequence of weak manufacturing capacity in most African countries, including for pharmaceuticals, due to years of de-industrialisation wrought by neo-liberal economic policies which halted and reversed the industrialisation initiatives of the early post-colonial period.

The contrast with Cuba, a small country which has developed Covid-19 vaccines to complement an enviable public health delivery system, despite suffering from decades of an illegal blockade by the United States, is evidence that development of strategic industrial productive capacities is not only an important part of socio-economic transformation and independence but also critical for the sustainability of public health systems. Africa’s experience of the negative economic impacts of the pandemic, especially in its early days, is additional evidence that industrialisation and a structural shift from raw material commodity export dependence is imperative for equitable transformation in Africa and the long-term welfare of its people.

The climate crisis however makes this a challenging conjuncture for the reinvigoration and expansion of African industrialisation. Even though it bears the least responsibility for climate change, Africa is imperiled as 100 million Africans could be pushed into poverty by 2030 because of climate change.

Financing the costs of green industrialisation and transitioning to low carbon infrastructure is compromised by the dependence of many African countries on the export of fossil fuels alongside the opportunities to benefit from increased demand for diverse minerals and metals and their products because of the transition from fossil fuels to a low carbon future.

Given that industrialisation has been synonymous with intensive use of fossil fuels, how does Africa negotiate the unique combination of its industrial transition amid an energy transition and revolution?

The webinars will be organised under the following themes:

Vaccine Imperialism: Scientific knowledge, capacity and production in Africa
Popular public health in Africa: lessons from history and Cuba
Alternative strategies and politics for the Global South: Climate-change and industrialisation

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Webinar One: Vaccine imperialism: scientific knowledge, capacity and production in Africa

5 August 2021 3-5pm GMT

Speakers:

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps and author of Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19. He has consulted with the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tetteh Hormeku-Ajei is head of programmes at the Third World Network-Africa in Ghana

Marlise Richter is a Senior Researcher from Health Justice Initiative in South Africa

Chair: Farai Chipato ROAPE Editorial Working Group.

Speakers will talk for 20 minutes each.

There will also be a 5-minute activist update from three African countries about what the latest situation is with Covid-19 and vaccinations.

Rob Wallace will talk on what is happening with the virus with a focus on Africa.

Tetteh Hormeku-Ajei will talk about the political economy of and continuing fight against intellectual property rights affecting public health goods.

Marlise Richter will talk about health justice and the pandemic in South Africa.

The meeting will be recorded and several of our new Contributing Editors will take notes so that we can use the material for an issue of the Review.

Register in advance for this meeting:

Click here

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Featured Photograph: Zenile Ngcame of Masiphumelele High School in Cape Town during a protest for action against climate change (Ashraf Hendricks).

A People’s Green New Deal – an interview with Max Ajl

ROAPE

July 21, 2021

In an interview with ROAPE, Max Ajl discusses his new book A People’s Green New Deal and explains that environmental justice and change is a revolutionary project. Ajl argues that the expansion of southern or Third World sovereignty is a critical element of Third World environmentally sustainable development.

Could you introduce yourself to roape.net readers? How did you become involved in questions of climate change and ecological justice and what’s been your scholarly and activist trajectory?

I have been interested in the environmental cause since I was very young, mostly through reading and some climate change journalism. Politically, I have been primarily engaged in anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist work, but have always focused scholarly efforts on agriculture, ecology, agrarian questions, and popular development. I studied at Cornell for my doctoral work, under Philip McMichael, who specializes in historical sociology and agrarian questions. Cornell was and remains one of the best places in the United States to focus on the political aspects of agro-ecological development. For me all these issues are intertwined: we need a good and clean environment for people to have good lives, taking care of the environment starts with taking care of agriculture and food provision, the major human interaction with the surface of the Earth, and finally countries and peoples need first of all to be able to determine their own paths in the world in order to set out to build up their societies.

Your new book A People’s Green New Deal details a radical project, a revolutionary one, for environmental justice and change. You argued for ‘local democratic economies built on appropriate technologies and sovereign industrialisation and local control of renewables.’ Can you talk us through some of the main arguments in your new book?

My book starts by making what I think is the basic point that in order to have a just and revolutionary transformation of the world, we need a holistic understanding of how this world was created and made unjust, particularly as it relates to resource use and environmental issues. Furthermore, we should depart from plans for a just transition which have come from those most oppressed, excluded, and harmed by our current system. The book starts with a criticism of many right-wing and social democratic plans for a great transition, and shows points of convergence between them. I then go on to consider and try to show empirically how to transform certain critical sectors which I know something about, especially agriculture and a bit about infrastructure, construction, and manufacturing. Above all, I want people to see how we can have non-hierarchical – or communist – extremely complex societies, with a high degree of social interdependence, an extremely high level of technology, complex social division of labor and specialization, yet without them being enormously destructive to the environment. Such societies obviously need certain baselines, including local control of renewable technology (where possible), locally-sited industrialization so that people can democratically decide and remediate the damage from industrialization, and technologies which are appropriate to a permanently sustainable modern and non-hierarchical society. That includes in many ways a process of re-skilling to allow for more distributed and decentralized control over technologies. It also includes local control over agriculture, as a mechanism of landscape management, a way to draw-down atmospheric carbon dioxide, a way to protect biodiversity, a way for human communities to generally feed themselves mostly locally, at least within reason, and a way to smoothly integrate humans into nature.

You describe at the start of the book a dizzying array of Green New Deals (GND) and how the idea of the GND has proliferated. Can you describe how this idea has exploded, some of the proposals on offer and also what is deeply problematic at the core of many of these, seemingly radical, initiatives?

The GND entered the household discussion because of the legislation from Senator Edward Markey and Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has been invented as a democratic socialist. This GND essentially tried to bring together issues like employment, housing, and carbon dioxide emissions, and to build a new industrial century for the US, with some attention to social needs and covered with anti-racist rhetoric. It has exploded because of the wide unease with the environmental crisis, but also because capital is attempting to carry out a ‘great transition from above’ and has increasingly publicized the climate crisis for its own purposes. The more social democratic proposals essentially call for a partial or full conversion to renewable energy by 2030 while remaining within the green Keynesian paradigm – the state as a large spender and economic coordinator, the endurance of private property relations. Uniformly, the more visible progressive proposals, like that of Robert Pollin and Noam Chomsky, ignore the Cochabamba demands for climate debt repayments, assert that the North has the permanent right to use more electricity than the South, and disdain any struggle against capitalism. They also sidestep the broader environmental crisis, linked to biodiversity, soil erosion and damage, overuse of nitrogen fertilizers, etc. All of these measures are very much reminiscent of attempts from the 1980s to arrive at North-South development agreements without reckoning with ongoing northern exploitation of the South: that is, they are not even anti-capitalist let alone anti-imperialist.

Max, you write early on that capitalism has an inbuilt ‘inability as a historical system to respect the earth-system and the tenuous, delicate and easily shattered niche it has for many billions of humans’. Though this may be obvious to many readers, including of ROAPE, can you explain why you see capitalism as ‘unreformable’ in terms of any serious environmental transformation?

Capitalism is based on treating use-values as fungible: one thing is as good as another thing provided they exchange on the market. Once we see that this can create an equivalence between, say, sustainably-harvested lumber, or a house made of such lumber, and capital secured from selling phosphate-based fertilizers, or from oil capable of completely changing the composition of the atmosphere, the problems of unlimited fungibility of use-values through market exchange should be clear: such a system is capable of causing almost limitless damage to non-human nature. Because capitalism is based on the massive expansion of value and profit and limitless accumulation, it is naturally unable to respect that earth systems have survivability thresholds. If they are pushed too far, exploited too much, doused with too much poison or if fisheries are extracted from too much, they will simply collapse. Now, I think what is important to keep in mind is not merely that capitalism has run roughshod over the natural world, causing enormous damage, especially on North-South lines of concentrated damage in the South. It’s also worth pointing out that capitalism is now threatening to shift to a different kind of hierarchical regime, a point that Immanuel Wallerstein spent many decades of his life making. Such a system could well preserve nature because it would be based far less on indefinite expansion of exchange value, and would instead, pay people a pittance to preserve nature as a use value, and be based on stable oppression rather than expansive exploitation and endless accumulation.

Interestingly, you state that ‘we’ in the north have a responsibility, ‘specially in preventing our own governments from imposing by violence their political values on other countries’ – this dimension of the fight for anti-capitalist climate change is important. Can you explain what you mean and the nature of this responsibility?

Very often anti-imperialism or the national question are phrased in terms of supporting X bad figure: for example, those who opposed the US war on Iraq became apologists for Saddam Hussein. I want to make the simple point that each nation has to essentially start from minding its own business, and that non-intervention in the affairs of other nations needs to be the starting point for world-wide environmental justice and environmental revolution. Quite simply, the US/EU do not have the right to decide who rules other countries, especially but not only in the Third World. This is a necessary element for an anti-capitalist just transition on a world-wide level, because we need to fight for other countries’ rights to determine their own paths, and assess how our own countries are obstructing the exercise of that. Such an assessment is simple, since the US, EU, and the UK intervene constantly, world-wide. What follows are serious campaigns to put a stop to that intervention, in other words, by demanding respect for international law and the dismantling of northern militaries.

One of the exciting elements of the book is that you challenge seemingly radical figures and projects, including the celebrated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US congresswoman, and the GND she advocates. What specifically are its problems, in contrast with the Democratic Socialists of America, for example?

In particular, that document which she proposed envisions sending public money to private corporations through ‘state-private’ collaborations, sometimes softened with ‘appropriate ownership stakes.’ Now, whatever that it, it is certainly not a socialist program. Another major issue: she calls for the US to be a green-tech leader, and for this to be main mechanism for international action within the GND. In fact, this means replacing climate debt payments and putting in their place a new program for the US to be an industrial powerhouse based on renewables exports. She really does not mention class very much in the document: it refers to phantasms like ‘frontline communities,’ to receive special funding. There is no call for the takeover and dismantling of the oil companies. And finally, there is no mention of demilitarization. So, it’s important to highlight that the plan basically ignores the most central sectors of capitalism and is not even remotely anti-capitalist.

You outline a Southern platform for an ecological revolution – can you describe the nature of such a programme and how it goes beyond climate to protect Mother-Earth?

Capitalism and imperialism deeply damage the environment, and that damage extends well beyond climate – it means cancer plagues, the pollution of aquifers, micro-plastics, a biodiversity crisis. In Tunisia, for example, two of the major disaster zones are Gabès and the area near Monastir, each soaked with chemical residues from textiles and phosphate processing. Cancer rates are astronomical. Tunisia is emblematic of a larger pattern of uneven accumulation which has systematically dumped the most polluting industries in places with the fewest safeguards, particularly in the Third World, in effect making the Third World pay the environmental costs of capitalist industrialization. People need to able to have choices about what kinds of production their societies are engaged in, what the costs of different choices are, and what are the feasible alternatives. In many ways, even in the Third World societies are both over- and under-industrialized: insufficient access to electricity, insufficient existence let alone capacity to manufacture machine tools and mass transport systems; yet burdened with export-industries primarily to the profit of northern capital. So, we need to change that system, based on southern demands, in order to construct a just world system that takes care of ecology.

In what ways do you see existing GNDs as Eurocentric?

Existing GNDs, even progressive ones, tend to share the following traits: one, little to no mention of climate debt, the absolutely essential demand from 2010 from the Third World. Two, a techno-fetishism extending to lab meat and biofuels, two frontiers for renewed primitive accumulation of the South. Three, insufficient interest in agriculture, which is at the core of southern questions of development but must also be far more central, eventually, in northern productive systems. Four, lack of interest in appropriate technology development. Five, total lack of engagement with highly developed theories of environmentally uneven exchange, which show that the South has always paid the environmental price for northern development. Those lenses bring the nature of the actual world-system into focus, and if we do not deploy those lenses, we will produce GNDs that are false remedies to a poorly investigated crisis.

You mention how a supposed ‘internationalism’ actually silences the South, and undermines any real project built on climate justice. Why is the ‘national question’ central to your approach and to ecological transformation? How is this approach a key part of achieving climate justice?

The national question, very simply, means that national liberation is the sine qua non, the antecedent, to further national-popular development efforts. This is very visible in the case of Palestine: how can Palestine expect to develop unless it as a nation has sovereign control over its national productive resources, including land, investment decisions, technology, and so forth? Now, the international system is structured to remove those decisions from southern nations, and to remove control of resources from southern nations. So, the national question reminds us that countries need not just political sovereignty or liberation, but also economic liberation, in order to have just and ecologically sustainable transformation. The national question reminds us that national sovereignty is the necessary political shell, or frame, within which to resolve those questions. And that frame imposes particular obligations to activists and militants in the North: in particular, to seriously come to terms with and contest how our governments violate southern sovereignty and our monopolies drain southern wealth.

Can you speak about your theoretical framework – you use ‘dependency theory’ which positions the focus of global political economy into centre or core nations and the periphery. You write, ‘the West has systematically shifted its dirtiest industrial plants to the semi-periphery… even in the core the dirtiest waste processing is often sited close to Black neighbourhoods’. You also use the term ‘Environmentally Unequal Exchange’ – can you explain these terms and the ways it helps to enrich our understanding of the processes underway and what needs to be done?

Simply, core, semi-periphery and periphery are best understood as relative positions in the world division of labor and accumulation on a world scale. World accumulation is by its nature polarized and continually polarizing. Wealth concentrates in some places: the core. And it is produced, yet flows outwards from, the periphery. Semi-peripheries, such as China, may import value from places like Vietnam yet on the whole they are exporters of wealth and value to the First World. These terms remind us that overall, most wealth and value comes from the working classes, popular classes, of the periphery, and most of the material components that are inputs into value come from the periphery; and finally, the periphery unequally suffers from environmental pollution, including unequal use of or access to world space for CO2. In that way, we can see that the nation, and of course classes within nations, are part of the structuring units of our world system, and even working classes in the core and the periphery may, at least without intercession, have different interests because of different levels of access to world wealth. Those obstacles are superable, but superseding them must start by recognizing them and the problems they impose on planning for world-wide transformation. In particular, the core left has to do a better job on defending demands from the periphery, including ones which seem tough at the moment: climate debt payments, for example. Otherwise the world-system will remain permanently uneven.

On the other hand, environmentally uneven exchange and dependency theory remind us that those suffering the hardest impact of climate change, environmental degradation, and capitalism are in the periphery, not the core. This includes those outside the formal labour market, or indeed who are involved in subsistence based social reproduction, as Lyn Ossome has argued. Such people in fact are central to creating what Archana Prasad calls ‘socially useful nature,’ on the one hand, and on the other, are central to producing human beings who become a labor reservoir. Thus, these sectors of people are absolutely central to the world-wide accumulation of capital. Insofar as such sectors successfully defend the land and territories from unwanted environmental degradation and produce sufficient use-values for their own purposes, and then take part in sovereign popular-ecological development strategies, they will be the fulcrum for a transformation in the world system. So these populations are absolutely central to a just transition on a global basis.

You see national sovereignty as central to the protests of progressive movements across the world. From this, you argue that the right of subjugated nations must be central also to climate justice. Can you talk us through this argument?

This is a question of defending the positive achievements of struggles against war, racism, and colonization. The UN Charter and the anti-colonial national liberation struggles and covenants from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were all crystal-clear that subjugated peoples under occupation and colonization had the right to achieve full political sovereignty, the right to form nation-states fully as equal as other nation-states within the international system. A modern corollary is that nations should have the right to be free of unilateral coercive measures, including sanctions; and perhaps these sanctions or other coercive measures may soon include forms of unilateral ‘environmental’ protectionism or invasion under the aegis of ‘rights to protect’ the environment, as has recently been advocated in for Venezuela. We cannot accept discourses of ‘the environment’ being used as a justification to violate national sovereignty, any more than we can accept discourses of ‘humanitarianism’ or ‘development’ or ‘civilization,’ and because the default ideology in the core states is to accept the ruling class propaganda of the right to intervene, it is necessary to insist on this point, rather than accept the refrain ‘we are all against intervention.’ It is absolutely not the case, including within the metropolitan left.

At the centre of the book is an anti-capitalist eco-socialism which is revolutionary but also pro-Third World sovereignty. This last element is missing from most accounts, including Jonathan Neale’s recent book reviewed by us a few months ago. Why do you see this as key?

The classical arguments for Third World sovereignty went well beyond political or state sovereignty, to questions of natural resource sovereignty. They also saw economic national liberation as flowing organically and extending the achievements of political or legal independence. For example, the Iraqi re-nationalization of its natural resources, for example, flowed organically from its re-acquisition of national sovereignty in 1958. It was a continuous process which lasted some decades, and led the US to set in motion the destruction of Iraq in 1980. Colonialism is in large measure about the denial of Third World states to have the full right to dispense of their natural resources, which certainly includes the capacity to set prices for them through commodity cartels (something that people like Robert Vitalis apparently fail to understand). Furthermore, if you look at investment treaties, they often constrict southern self-determination and sovereignty when it conflicts with the newly written rights of the large monopolies, overwhelmingly based in the North.

So, the question is achievement of, defense of, and expansion of southern or Third World sovereignty as a critical element of Third World environmentally-sustainable development. Indeed, the entire range of arguments for Third World development from the 1970s and 1980s rested on individual and collective self-reliance, and planning for this reached a fairly advanced stage, at least in the Arab region. Clearly, such sovereignty goes well beyond legal ascension to statehood but implies the full exercise of sovereign rights, including the right to make alliances and erect alternative economic, and environmental, architecture.

Unfortunately, there is a common conception that to lift up sovereign is to downplay internal class struggles. But it is the opposite: internal environmental class struggles need sovereign states within which they can advance. Furthermore, many social scientists and planners, from the 1970s, saw that certain northern conceptions of environmentalism were being parlayed into a denial of the south to develop. As the Founex Report, for example, stated: ‘concern for [the] environment must not and need not detract from the commitment of the world community—developing and more industrialized nations alike—to the overriding task of development of the developing regions of the world,’ since development in the periphery would better allow for countries to overcome environmental problems.

What role does the struggle of the oppressed and working classes play in the north in advancing and championing eco-socialism?

To begin, although the oppressed peoples and working classes of the North are unlikely to lead the struggle for eco-socialism – a struggle whose programmatic elements were laid out in 2010 in the Cochabamba People’s Agreements – this does not mean northern working classes can be excluded from strategic plans and horizons. It simply means that we cannot lapse into an economism which looks at those demands in the absence of internationalist horizons, normalizes the blindness to the Third World which is the default ruling class ideology in the West, forgets demands for Land Back from Indigenous movements, and accepts that blindness as simply ‘the normal’ ideological basis for building up better lives in the core.

However, organized labor can be central to a just transition, insofar as the move, for example, to change the nature of first world industrialization goes hand-in-pen with the demands from the periphery: climate debt, prior consultation and informed consent for resource extraction. Take, for example, the heavy presence of electric cars in the Bernie Sanders proposal for a GND. That emerged from trying to get the large amount of organized labor in the auto industry on board. However, there is no reason the target for that industry could not be nationalization, and conversion into producing the vehicles for nation-wide public transport, with a far lower environmental impact. Those are political decisions.

On the other hand, agriculture is a sector which, if done sustainably, in principle involves no extraction from the Third World. There are some small collaborations between ranchers and Indigenous people in the US West around sustainable landscape management, for example. And the move to entirely convert US farming to carbon-dioxide-absorbing agro-ecological production could create a community of interest between the migrant labor force, especially if massive minimum wages and agrarian reform are part of the agenda, family farms, and indeed consumers, who prefer healthy meat and produce from entirely ecological farms. There are opportunities to suture the interests of separated sectors, which are themselves the product of capitalist alienation of production and consumption. However, those sutures need to be carried out through political organizing which keeps the long view in mind.

Finally, what role do you see ‘industrialisation’ playing in the eco-socialist future?

Unfortunately, far too much of the debate around industrialization is trapped in false binaries: between an anti-industrial anti-extractivist or post-extractivist position, for example, and a high-modernist super-industrial position. We should not treat that false debate as innocent. Indeed, one can find precisely the same set of journals and institutions – Historical Materialism, Verso, etc., and behind them German foundations like Rosa Luxemburg which fund and platform the set of intellectuals who crystallized the theory of ‘extractivism’ – simultaneously blasting the Bolivian government for investing rent in infrastructure or just using gas proceeds for popular needs, criticizing that same government for not having immediately implemented an agro-ecological revolution, while also platforming Aaron Bastani to talk about space mining and the Green Revolution, and bizarrely totalling ignoring agro-ecology or the agrarian question as Third World development strategies except when useful to berate Bolivia. Such a ‘debate’ is fundamentally unserious and antagonistic to serious political thought and practice.

It’s actually necessary to clear away this deliberately created confusion in order to have a real discussion. First, what is industrialization? Following Colin Duncan, we can say most essentially, industrialization is the transformation of abiotic, or dead material like lead, copper, oil, gas, iron, into various things humans want and need. It differs in principle from manufacturing or agriculture in that the latter do not produce wastes and can be smoothly integrated into the environment while industry produces poisons – illusions of ‘industrial ecology’ about circular economies to the side. So ideally, we want an eco-socialism that is extremely modern in the sense of socially interdependent with complex divisions of labor, and with an extremely sophisticated and highly technically advanced, yet controlledindustrialization. We want and should treasure industrialization, but industrialization within the limits of what we can remediate, clean up, and control using existing technologies, not ‘prospective’ technologies which justify current environmental degradation. That probably means overall on an absolute basis, a less industrialized but far more evenly industrialized world, assuming we demand roughly equivalent per capita access to public transport, computers, energy, and advanced medical care – some of the sectors which need industry. On the other hand, many things which are made using industrial methods, like textiles, for example, or furniture, can be made using far less industrial methods, using natural materials at a minimum. Think oak cabinets instead of metal ones, or linen and cotton clothing instead of polyester. How much of a change that implies remains to be seen – we will make the path by walking it.

Max Ajl is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. He has written for Monthly Review, Jacobin and Viewpoint. Max is a regular contributor to ROAPE and roape.net.

Thinking about a revolution: research, social media and Africa

ROAPE

July 20, 2021

Writing about his research and politics, ROAPE’s Chanda Mfula discusses the political economy of the media in Africa. Mfula argues that from colonialism to postcolonialism and throughout the post-cold war era, and into the 21^st Century, media in Africa has remained at the service of the propagandistic and capitalistic needs of local and global elites.

By Chanda Mfula

The journey (rephrase to ‘the struggle’) which got me to the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) Editorial Working Group begins with my involvement with the media in Zambia, and my (initial) naïve view of media as channels which were playing an indisputable (and respectable) role in the democratic process in the country, in Africa, and in the world. I loved to simplify this role (and often still do) as ‘informing citizens’ participation and choices in democracy and in democratic processes and activities such as elections, protests, and debates. Fast forward to end of 2019 when I had left behind a career in media, media freedom activism, and political communication and was in the middle of analysing data I had collected for my doctoral research, my view of the media was now that they were less a channel for facilitating democracy and more a site for the struggle for democracy and the rights of the people.

I was feeling radical and thinking about a revolution, a reawakening of some sort, an inspiration to get the working people, the peasants, the grassroots to realise that the media which were sold to them as platforms of empowerment had, in fact, throughout history been used to disempower them. I wanted people to get involved in the struggle for a media system they had been denied by a complex mix of the political nature of economics and the economic nature of politics, among things within the political economy of media.

The media and the politics within which they exist, have long been means of domination of the people by both local and global elites. Between reading and trying to apply Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model to the African media context and reflecting on Graham Murdock and Peter Golding’s very apposite assertion that critical political economy of communication and media strives ‘to engage with basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good’, I came across a call from ROAPE and immediately thought this was probably the ‘home’ I needed for me to develop my fledgling critical ideas.

Today, I have been on the ROAPE Editorial Working Group since January 2020, grateful to the comrades there for allowing me to stay on (or giving me enough ROAPE) despite a very quiet existence understudying them and learning from the diversity and richness of their intellectual insights amid my very busy doctoral research journey. This research journey, gratefully again, has benefitted immensely from my association with ROAPE, especially the critical, emancipatory ideas one engages with through a variety interactions, whether by reading the journals, attending the meetings or debating the various topics through ROAPE forums.

I am more certain than I was at the beginning that ROAPE is the platform to continue developing my political ideas and to inform my contribution to the struggle for a media which serve the people and not the powers that be. If the media is a site for the struggle and I am researching media, then my research, as I have long realised, is not just sheer scholarly curiosity or mere academic inquiry, but a struggle. It is a way to fight for justice and to imbue knowledge and understanding into political action and activism. Through radical emancipatory ideas, ROAPE provides the intellectual resources needed to wage a sophisticated struggle which can outmatch the sophistication and tyranny of capital and political oppression.

But what I have written so far will be just rhetoric, or mere waffle, if I didn’t explain what my research interests are and how they fit within the remit of ROAPE. It takes me back to the beginning and my political awaking to the cruel dichotomy between the ideal and the real role of the media. I am interested in exploring the political economy of the media and communications and this probably suffices as grounds for my association with ROAPE, but I will go further. I take the view that the media in its current forms exist within global and local political and economic structures which constrain them as means for informing citizens’ democratic participation and as forums for democratic debates.

I embrace both the instrumentalist and structuralist views of the media as they exist today. On one hand, the media is an instrument in the hands of political elites and capital, and are manipulated to enable these elites attain, retain, and maintain their political or economic power (and usually both). On the other hand, the media is a product of the ordering influence of capitalist economic structures which prioritise consumption ahead of citizenship and in which profit always wins over democracy (disclaimer: I am aware of the many alternative media forms which are emancipatory and try to resist the lure of capital and power). All this falls within the broader radical and emancipatory concerns of the Left and of ROAPE in so far as they relate to Africa and its positioning in the global context.

Granted, the above concerns are not new and have been a subject of active research across the world including in Africa. What has often been in short supply – and at times completely missing – are researchers who position and reorient such research, particularly in relation to Africa, as a struggle against oppression and as a way to contribute towards change and to give the media some relevance in relation to the issues and concerns of everyday people. Critical media research should carry the aura of a freedom struggle. And this is what I think ROAPE enables me to do.

From colonialism to postcolonialism and throughout the post-cold war era, and into the 21^st Century, media in Africa have remained at the service of the propagandistic and capitalistic needs of local and global elites. Classically, while local political elites have been excluded the truth from being included in the news, preferring to sell propaganda for obvious reasons, the global elites have relentlessly unleashed cultural imperialism by worming their ideology into the local media scene through a supply of ‘free’ content and through satellite channels, all to sustain their domination over the African mind.

When it is time to tell the African story to the world, global media sell the same old story of a diseased, impoverished, or authoritarian African, perpetuating an image which is neither the complete truth nor the way out for Africa’s struggle against enduring oppression. This story is ingrained in the capitalist logic of what sells. In the media production ethos, the mantra is to stick to the familiar and previously successful formulae rather than risk innovation against profits. The story of the backward African continues to sell and there is no way to tell the alternative story since big media will not expose the big lie and risk their profits. In this context, ROAPE provides a platform to start thinking about new ideas and ways to fight against these, mostly classic, tyrannies of capital.

These tyrannies have expanded since the advent of social media in the 21^st Century. They are not different from those which ROAPE has fought against since 1974. Social media have been immaculately dressed and perfectly masked as emancipatory platforms where citizens or, in Dan Gillmor’s words, ‘the former audience’, find active expression as producers of relevant and engaged journalism, having been let down by the political elite’s stranglehold on mainstream journalism and denuding it of its democratic functioning.

People are said to be ‘speaking truth to power’ more now than ever before, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and so forth. When the mask is taken off, however, we begin to see the whole truth about social media. While in many cases these digital platforms allow people to to be heard and to be the journalists informing their own democratic engagements, it is also true that very little, if any, of that discursive activity in the social media public sphere(s) in Zambia, for instance, has impacted public policy or political change. On social media, the status quo is what Nancy Fraser would describe as ‘weak publics’ which ‘denudes “public opinion” of practical force.’

Contrary to the democratic illusions, when people ‘speak truth to power’, powerholders take this truth and use it, not to inform policy to serve the citizens better, but to inform propaganda strategies to dominate the population more effectively and, sometimes, to arrest people and make tougher laws to enfeeble their voices. At a global level, we all know how rich Mark Zuckerberg is, thanks to the content we all produce with our free labour to keep Facebook going. This content informs social media companies about who we, the people producing the content, are and what goods and services we are happy to consume, and how best information about these goods and services can be thrown our way as we scroll down our timelines to check the next status update. Thus, surveillance has become important in serving both the capitalist aims of social media companies and the political needs of powerholders. Once again, with social media companies, as with other media, we are consumers first before we are citizens. Democracy, if it ever happens, is merely a by-product of the capitalist goals of social media. Gladly, these serious concerns find a platform at ROAPE.

Chanda Mfula researches the media and communications with an interest in the interaction between digital, social media, journalism and politics. Mfula was a political and media freedom activist in Zambia before moving to the UK for his research. He is completing his PhD at the University of Sussex.

Featured Photograph: Chanda Mfula with the Zambian politician Dr Guy Scott at an event at the University of Sussex in 2019.

Lieutenants of imperialism: social democracy’s imperialist soul

ROAPE

July 15, 2021

Alfie Hancox writes how the apparently progressive post-war government in the UK which delivered unprecedented social security simultaneously undermined progressive political futures in the Global South – national liberation movements for land and resource sovereignty were thwarted. Hancox reveals Labour’s Aneurin Bevan’s role in deepening British imperialism.

By Alfie Hancox

The working-class vision of socialism during this period may be blurred by the corruption of the ‘welfare state’—Kwame Nkrumah

As the popular national story goes, after the Second World War the British working class, seeking a just reward for their sacrifices, came together to win a fairer society by voting in the Labour government which built the welfare state. At the heart of this reputed ‘Spirit of ‘45’ was the architect of the National Health Service (NHS), Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan (1897–1960). Bevan has pride of place in the romanticised pantheon of the Labour left, and he is widely held to epitomise the party’s ‘socialist soul’. While often memorialised as a class warrior who once called for ‘the complete political extinction of the Tory Party’, behind ‘the myth of the miner prophet’ there lies a much more complex and contradictory picture of Bevan the statesman.

Britain’s post-war welfare settlement emerged against the backdrop of negotiated decolonisation – which was by no means a peaceful or straightforward process – and class compromise within the bounds of the capitalist nation-state was mediated by an enduring relationship with Empire. For Bevan, socialism was above all a ‘l anguage of priorities’, and a critical overview of his parliamentary career reveals that colonised peoples in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were often a subordinate element in his considerations, despite his long-standing friendship with Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru.

It is also often forgotten that the welfare state was serviced by a migrant workforce extracted from Britain’s colonial ‘dependencies’, who were greeted upon arrival with racial-exclusionary impulses which were at times reinforced by Bevan himself. Similar ‘nativist’ tendencies remained present in the recent social democratic revival, demonstrating the need for an interrogation of the traditional Labour movement’s entanglement with imperialism.

The welfare state as neocolonial compact

Social welfare reforms delivered by the state have a contradictory class character. On the one hand, they constitute immediate gains for workers, but at the same time they assist in the reproduction of a value-creating labour force and represent concessions which may boost the legitimacy of capitalism. Welfare measures thus play a mediatory function in the push and pull of class struggle, the surge forward and the reactive containment. Interwar Britain was not wholly immunised from the social convulsions that shook continental Europe, and one wartime Conservative Member of Parliament warned in a famous speech: ‘If you do not give the people social reform, they are going to give you social revolution.’

The reforming Labour government of 1945–51 adopted a carrot and stick approach to class compromise, as the expansion of social housing and public education, and advent of free healthcare, was accompanied with a consolidation of workplace discipline. Bevan claimed to have received his political training in Marxism, but his true faith was in parliamentary democracy, and he believed that national industrial management laid the foundations for the construction of socialism ‘from above’. As a member of Clement Attlee’s Ministerial Emergencies Committee, the erstwhile trade union militant helped defeat a strike wave in the newly nationalised industries (a response to efficiency drives), using the Supply and Transport Organisation which two decades earlier helped beat back the General Strike of 1926.

While welfare concessions reflect the domestic class balance of forces, this is only one part of the story. As the British New Left historian John Saville identified in 1957, ‘the flexibility and manoeuvrability of the ruling class’ in charting a new social consensus had ‘been derived from the possession of the world’s largest Empire.’ It was this situation which enabled the Labour government to square the circle of maintaining (relative) class peace at home, without eliminating capitalist exploitation. The Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah, in his seminal 1965 study Neo-Colonialism, explained how the governing elite in Europe and North America found a means to deal with social demands at home after the war:

A deliberate attempt was made to divert colonial earnings from the wealthy class and use them instead generally to finance the ‘Welfare State’ … this was the method consciously adopted even by those working-class leaders who had before the war regarded the colonial peoples as their natural allies against their capitalist enemies at home.

Immediately following the war, Britain was facing a currency balances crisis that called Labour’s social plans into question. Bevan was not explicit about where the money for Attlee’s ‘New Jerusalem’ would come from, but his colleague Evelyn John Strachey, a former Marxist and Labour’s Minister of Food, was more forthright. During a parliamentary debate on a Colonial Development bill in 1948, the year of the NHS’s founding, Strachey concluded that ‘by hook or by crook, the development of primary production of all sorts, in the Colonial areas, Colonial territories and dependent areas in the Commonwealth … is, it is hardly too much to say, a life and death matter for the economy of this country.’

The Attlee government essentially pursued a policy of issuing ‘IOUs’ to the colonies in return for the dollars earned from key exports such as rubber and tin from Malaya and cocoa from Ghana. Britain’s post-war reconstruction employed ‘a more systematic exploitation of colonies than at any previous time in imperial history’ – with the active support of the labour bureaucracy.[1] The trade union leader, Ernest Bevin, declared: ‘I am not prepared to sacrifice the British empire [because] it would mean that the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.’ As the Trinidadian Marxist George Padmore put it, these labour lieutenants of imperialism wanted to turn the British working class into collective ‘shareholders of the Empire.’

British socialism’s civilising mission

Writing in the socialist newspaper Morning Star, the trade unionist and historian Graham Stevenson has attempted to defend the legacy of the welfare state, and detach it from Attlee’s imperialist adventures in Korea, Malaya and Iran, by arguing that ‘foreign policy was not in Nye Bevan’s remit’. It is well known, however, that Bevan had wanted the Colonial Office, and he was an influential voice in international affairs as the charismatic leader of the ‘soft left’ Tribune faction.

Though Bevan’s rejection of the pre-war colonial status quo did put him at variance with the Labour right, he nevertheless stressed he was ‘against any proposal for complete self-government’ until the colonised countries had endured sufficient tutelage under British parliamentary democracy. He believed in the civilising mission of the ‘Socialist Commonwealth’, and in 1948 declared that with the advent of the National Health Service Britain had achieved ‘the moral leadership of the world’. This paternalistic mindset, which smacked of the ‘white man’s burden’, was typical of the ethical socialist tradition in Labour, and distanced Bevan from the approach of the Comintern-affiliated League Against Imperialism and the Manchester Pan-African Congress, which both rejected the ‘Enlightened’ colonial doctrine of trusteeship.

Bevan never challenged the unequal economic relationship with the ‘dependencies’ which characterised Britain’s free trade imperialism, or what he preferred to call ‘the legitimate claims of world commerce’. The superior British capacity for ethicizing self-interest was shared by Bevan’s wife and fellow MP Jennie Lee, who said at Labour’s annual conference in 1956, without a hint of irony: ‘We have to work for the day when there will be a higher standard of living here, a higher standard of living in the colonies, and when as free and friendly nations they will want us to be their bankers.’

It was in his attitudes to the Middle East that Bevan’s more overtly imperialist leanings came to the fore. While opposing the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, Bevan nonetheless expressed his outrage when President Gamel Abdel Nasser, who he racistly dubbed ‘Ali Baba’, nationalised the Suez Canal used to transport ‘our oil’. In justifying the Zionist colonial project that violently displaced 700,000 Palestinians, Bevan also argued in the Cabinet that ‘it was not necessarily true that we must avoid estranging Arab states. A friendly Jewish state would be a safer military base than any we should find in any Arab state’. He thought that Europeanised Jewish settlers could shake up the ‘semi-medieval institutions’ of the Arab world and prepare the grounds for socialist democracy, betraying a racialised view of civilisational development.

Bevan’s wavering stance on colonial liberation didn’t make him an outlier on the Labour left. For example, it was the former treasurer of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, Anthony Greenwood, who as Labour’s Colonial Secretary oversaw the ousting of British Guinea (Guyana)’s socialist Premier Cheddi Jagan. The Communist Party theoretician Rajani Palme Dutt identified this tried and test pattern of western social democracy, whereby ostensibly left-wing spokespersons are ‘given positions in the imperialist machine such as would not only gag them from expressing anti-imperialist sentiments but compel them to undertake the official duty of defending imperialist policies’.

Ultimately, the government that delivered unprecedented social security at home simultaneously thwarted progressive political futures in the Global South – national liberation movements for land and resource sovereignty, and regionalist aspirations like those fleetingly concretised in Nkrumah’s Union of African States. Labour’s inglorious colonial record came up one time when Bevan was lecturing the Conservatives on their imperial policy. When he mentioned the imprisonment of Nkrumah, Tory members opposite reminded him that the Attlee government he served in as Health Minister was responsible! Bevan brushed this off, replying: ‘Well, we shoved him in gaol. If honourable members will restrain their hilarity for a moment, I said that this is part of the classic story of these struggles.’ This glib response omitted the killing of unarmed protestors in Ghana, which took place months before the arrest of Nkrumah. The West African Students’ Union, of which Dr. Nkrumah was a former member, noted that US imperialism often appeared a lesser threat to colonial independence than ‘British Socialism’.[2]

An additional pillar of Attlee’s foreign policy was the backing of Western Europe’s remilitarisation under the US Marshall Plan, enabling the British Communist Party to declare that Labour’s welfare state was really a ‘warfare state’.[3] Before WWII, Bevan had alienated the Labour leadership by calling for a United Front with communists against the fascist threat in Europe. However, his sympathies had changed with the onset of the Cold War, as anti-colonial movements supported by the Soviet Union destabilised the hegemony of the western imperial powers; and the Bevanites became enmeshed in an ideological struggle pitting Occidental social democracy against Marxism-Leninism. Bevan’s 1951 ‘rebellion’ against Labour’s militarism was not a protest against the genocidal proportions of the Korean War – he had in fact fully supported the Anglo-American invasion of the Peninsula – but because bloated defence spending was now cutting into his health service.

Empire and the National Health

The welfare state also carried the imprint of Empire domestically. While healthcare is a basic social necessity, historically the state provisioning of medical services has been framed in terms of labour productivity and, from the late-nineteenth century, imperialist ideologies of racial hygiene. The Liberal economist William Beveridge’s 1942 blueprint for the welfare settlement recommended that ‘good stock should be allowed to breed while bad stock would be ameliorated through state intervention’, and similar eugenics-influenced sentiments permeated the Labour movement through the Fabian Society.[4]

The nationalisation policies in 1945–51 were not in any meaningful sense socialist, being administered from above by the capitalist state. While Bevan described the National Health Service as ‘pure socialism’, it was compromised from the start by the continued existence of independent contractors and retention of private practice. Nevertheless, the post-war reforms were a step forward in terms of collective social security, and they boosted loyalty to the nation-state that administered them: welfare came ‘wrapped in the Union Jack’. The language of socialism was co-opted and degraded by what Tom Nairn termed Labour’s ‘nationalization of class’, and lost in the process of the patriotic social compact were the Marxist values of working class self-empowerment.

Notions of national belonging and entitlement in Britain became increasingly racialised after the war, and as Satnam Virdee reminds us, the apogee of British social democracy ‘was also the golden age of white supremacy [and] legal racist discrimination’.[5] When migrant workers from the non-white ‘New Commonwealth’ were induced to bolster Britain’s public services and stagnating industries, they were met with a racist ‘colour bar’ in employment and housing, often reinforced by the white-dominated trade unions. In 1948, a year that saw violent attacks on Black residents in Liverpool, Bevan wrote that if ‘colonial subjects come here on their own responsibility’ they ‘cannot complain if it is not all plain sailing’.[6]

An informal caste system was built into the NHS itself, with workers of colour restricted to the lowest-paid employment grades, regardless of their level of training. A Brixton-based Black feminist group described how the health service was like a colony in the way it was run: ‘in the head of the black nurse from the Caribbean is the echo of slavery; in the head of the Asian nurse is the servitude to Sahib and Memsahib.’[7] Britain was simultaneously draining skilled medical labour from developing countries, the effects of which were described in Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The hyper-exploited labour of Black and Brown women was unacknowledged by Bevan, who ascribed the NHS’s success to ‘the vitality and genius of the British people’. [8]

Healthcare was quickly propelled to the centre of popular anti-immigrant discourses, and only a year after the NHS’s inception Bevan succumbed to nativist pressures by assuring voters that he’d ‘arranged for immigration officers to turn back aliens who were coming to this country to secure benefits off the Health Service’. The image of non-British ‘foreigners’ exploiting the NHS was a trope later deployed to great effect by Conservative MP Enoch Powell in his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

Bevan’s capitulation reflected a failure to offer a principled counter to anti-immigration rhetoric. His celebrated essay ‘In Place of Fear: A Free Health Service’ was riven by a tension between the defence of ‘the collective principle’ in terms of socialist universalism, and a cost-benefit approach that stressed immigrants’ contributions to ‘national revenues’, and the expenses that would be incurred by passport checks at hospitals. When Bevan rebuked the Trades Union Congress’s call for immigration restrictions after the 1958 racist riot in Notting Hill, this was not on grounds of proletarian internationalism, but the potential damage it would do to the image of the Commonwealth as ‘the greatest constitutional experiment in the history of nations’.

The legacy of Empire persists in the health service today, as demonstrated by the revival of medical racism in the Coronavirus context. The NHS is also still dependent on the labour of precarious migrant workers, now extracted from developing countries such as the Philippines and Nigeria. The present struggle to defend healthcare services in Britain thus needs to be coupled with a historical awareness of the inherent dangers of seeking social reform within the confines of the imperialist nation-state. We should look beyond the elitist parliamentary socialism of Bevan, to the alternative politics of metropolitan anti-colonialists like Dutt and Padmore who sought not a class settlement within the parameters of capitalist competition, but the levelling of wages and conditions across national and racial boundaries. The experiences of the 1970s–1980s further demonstrated that rank-and-file struggles in the health sector, often instigated by low-paid Black ancillary workers, can galvanise the labour movement in a profoundly progressive manner.[9] We can draw on these lessons, and reconnect with more radical, worker and patient-driven visions of socialist healthcare which target the social roots of ill-health intrinsic to capitalist exploitation.

Alfie Hancox writes on Marxism and anti-imperialism. He is currently researching the British Black Power movement and works as an editor at Ebb Magazine.

Featured Photograph: Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan in 1954.

References

[1] John Callaghan, The Labour Party and Foreign Policy: A History (Routledge, 2007), p. 164.

[2] Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900–1960 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1998), p. 133.

[3] R. P. Dutt, J. R. Campbell & Harry Pollitt, Welfare State or Warfare State? An Appeal to Every Sincere Labour Man and Woman(London: CPGB, 1950).

[4] Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (Agenda Publishing, 2018), ch. 4.

[5] Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 98–9.

[6] Shirley Joshi & Bob Carter, ‘The Role of Labour in the Creation of a Racist Britain’, Race & Class 25, 3 (1984), p. 60.

[7] Brixton Black Women’s Group, ‘Black Women and Nursing: A Job Like Any Other’, Race Today 6, 8 (1974), p. 226.

[8] Christopher Kyriakides & Satnam Virdee, ‘Migrant Labour, Racism and the British National Health Service’, Ethnicity & Health 8, 4 (2003), p. 287.

[9]Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie & Suzanne Scafe, Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (Verso, 2018), pp. 45–50.

Liberia’s Political Economy of Belonging: an interview with Robtel Neajai Pailey

ROAPE

July 13, 2021

In this interview with Robtel Neajai Pailey, ROAPE asks her about her new book Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia. She argues that Liberia today must address historical and contemporary inequalities that have fueled armed conflict and currently underpin claims against dual citizenship.

ROAPE: Can you please tell us a few things about your work and background?

Robtel Neajai Pailey: I have taken a rather circuitous route to academia. With over 15 years of combined personal and professional experiences in Africa, Europe and North America, I’ve worked across a broad range of fields while supporting governments, media institutions, multilateral, regional, non-governmental and community-based organisations. For example, in my mid-twenties, I served as special assistant for communications to Liberia’s (and Africa’s) first democratically elected female president followed ten years later by a stint in the executive office of the African Development Bank Group as an Ibrahim Leadership Fellow. I am currently Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I research race, citizenship, ‘South-South’ migration and development cooperation. Much of my life’s work sits at the intersection of scholarship, policy and practice, and is propelled by a deep commitment to social justice and radical storytelling.

Liberia is the right country to speak about the issues of identity and citizenship. Can you give us a brief outline of the history of Liberia – its establishment as a place of what you call “black diasporic solidarity and self-rule” in the middle of the 19^th century – to its current situation?

I would encourage people to read my book for a nuanced and textured analysis because I don’t think I could do a critical précis of Liberia’s history justice. What I will say briefly is that Liberia’s original premise of black diasporic solidarity and self-rule, though bold and revolutionary, was poorly operationalised. The assumption that haphazardly territorialising black people from disparate locations, sensibilities and worldviews, without actively and systematically reconciling those differences, would somehow yield a cohesive national identity appears almost as ill-advised as the arbitrary carving up of Africa by European colonisers or the decision by post-independence African leaders to maintain colonial borders.

When black settlers began arriving in what would later be known as Liberia, they inhabited the Atlantic coast initially before pushing further inland to establish political dominion over a larger swathe of territory. Yet, while settlers battled British and French colonial encroachment before and after establishing Africa’s first black republic in 1847, they barred from citizenship most of the 16 ethno-linguistic groups who already occupied the coast and hinterland. So, obvious frictions emerged, including indigenous wars of resistance against settlers, in addition to collaborative encounters, such as when some indigenous groups helped settlers stave off bouts with malaria.

Century-long exclusionary citizenship lasted until a Unification and Integration Policy reconfigured the settler-indigene divide somewhat in 1946. Precipitated by political upheavals from the early 1970s related to the politics of exclusion and inequality, a coup in 1980 toppled settler domination, which eventually culminated in a 14-year protracted armed conflict that led to the election in 2005 of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Your new book deals with issues of citizenship and belonging in Liberia. You use the term “political economy of belonging” to look at some of these themes. Can you take us through the key arguments and issues in your book?

I actually coin the term political economy of belonging to illustrate how citizenship manifests in post-war polities like Liberia, but also more generally in countries that have not experienced crisis or rupture. In all contexts citizenship remains multi-layered and intensely socio-economic in nature. For example, I demonstrate throughout my book—incorporating over 200 interviews I conducted with Liberians in the capital cities of Liberia (Monrovia), Sierra Leone (Freetown), Ghana (Accra), the United Kingdom (London) and United States (Washington, DC)—that Liberians conceptualise and practise citizenship differently based on their life-worlds and social locations, and that these interpretations influence whether and how they engage in development. So, I understand the political economy of belonging to be a transactional system in which socio-economic transformation depends on the provision of privileges/protections (what we might deem ‘rights’) in exchange for the fulfilment of duties/obligations (what we might deem ‘responsibilities’).

My book is the first to evaluate domestic and diasporic constructions and practices of Liberian citizenship across space and time and their myriad implications for development. I do this by using a contested dual citizenship bill, introduced in Liberia in 2008 but never passed, as an entry point to ask broader questions about how citizenship is differentiated by class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc, and whether dual citizenship actually reproduces inequalities.

One of my major arguments is that while mid 19^th to mid-20^th century Liberian citizenship was ‘passive’ and constructed from ‘above’ by a hegemonic state, mid-20^th century Liberian citizenship onwards has been ‘active’ and reconstructed from ‘below’ by citizens themselves through protest. This has largely been brokered by historical and contemporary factors such as conflict, migration and post-war recovery, and each of these thematic processes is the subject of empirical chapters in the book. Scholars before me have documented how citizenship is viscerally contested in African countries that experienced the greatest colonial-era migration; although Liberia was never formally colonised by Europe, it did experience heightened levels of colonial-era migration, particularly of free and formerly enslaved blacks fleeing racial injustice and economic servitude in the United States and Caribbean as well as Congo River basin recaptives who were diverted to West Africa while on slave ships headed across the Atlantic. I argue further that the 21^st century gridlock on dual citizenship is emblematic of Liberia’s enduring struggles over citizenship (Liberia is currently one of only seven countries in Africa that prohibits dual citizenship, including Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Tanzania).

You had first-hand experience of working with the government of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and you critique clearly in the book what you call her “neoliberal economic model of development and over-reliance on returnee experts”. What was the impact of these orientations on the questions and issues you confront in your book?

In some respects, Liberia succumbed to a one-size-fits-all approach to post-war recovery during President Sirleaf’s administration, in which International Monetary Fund and World Bank dictates to deregulate, privatise and liberalise reigned supreme. Sirleaf’s high-level returnee recruits, some of whom held the citizenships of their Euro-American countries of settlement, were rewarded handsomely for implementing neoliberal policies. This created salary tiers based on nationality, a common practice amongst multilateral and international organisations which pay so-called ‘expatriate’ staff inflated tax-exempt salaries while compensating so-called ‘local’ staff at much lower rates. Conspicuous income inequalities between domestic and diasporic Liberians further revealed the possible pitfalls of enacting dual citizenship, thus causing a backlash against the 2008 proposed bill. I argue throughout my book that Sirleaf’s administration signaled a transformation of the 19^th century settler-indigene divide into a 21^st century homelander-returnee divide, pitting those who may never have left Liberia before/during/after armed conflict against those who returned in the post-war era.

Finally, can you outline some of the contemporary policy implications of your book, mainly how you write that questions of “legal citizenship should be based on empirical analysis” rather than on the “whims” of political actors?

Alongside senatorial by-elections, Liberia conducted a national referendum in December 2020 in which dual citizenship featured prominently as one of eight propositions under consideration. Despite attempts by current head of state George Oppong Weah to convince Liberians to vote ‘Yes’ on all measures, none of the propositions garnered the required two-thirds majority vote. In most cases, invalid referendum ballots outnumbered valid ballots. The ruling regime was quick to blame the electorate’s ‘ignorance’ but I argue that the failed referendum (and the regime’s significant by-election losses) symbolised Liberians’ disillusionment with President Weah’s abysmal leadership to date.

Having said this, however, only five of Liberia’s 15 sub-political divisions definitively rejected the dual citizenship proposition, indicating to me that contrary to Afrobarometer data of 2012 and 2018, in which two-thirds of those surveyed rebuffed dual citizenship, Liberia may actually be inching closer and closer to forgoing its outlier status and enacting dual citizenship. I argue in the conclusions of my book that before Liberia legislates dual citizenship, however, it must address historical and contemporary inequalities that fueled armed conflict and currently underpin claims against dual citizenship. Anything short of this will derail policymaking on dual citizenship.

Visit here for more information about Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and to download the Introduction free of charge. To order copies of the book here with a 20% discount, enter the promo code PAILEY20 at checkout.

Robtel Neajai Pailey is a Liberian scholar-activist and Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Featured Photograph courtesy of Kate Lloyd.

Famine and Ethiopia: colonial legacies and global power structures

ROAPE

July 8, 2021

Reflecting on events in Ethiopia, Fisseha Fantahun Tefera argues that to understand famines we must go beyond a narrow, localized and simplistic understanding to look at how global structures foster conflicts that lead to famines. Tefera explains that colonial legacies and contemporary global power shape famine response operations, both by the states themselves and by the international aid industry.

By Fisseha Fantahun Tefera

The past two consecutive years Nobel peace prizes went to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia and the World Food Programme for settling a peace deal with neighbouring Eritrea and for fighting global hunger respectively. Now the two Nobel peace prize winners are confronted with a humanitarian crisis in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, that could potentially be the worst man-made famine in recent history. As the political crisis unfolds and the humanitarian disaster ensues, with a risk of imminent famine, history shows us that we have failed to learn the most important lessons about famines.

Failure to establish accountability

Famine casualties and mass starvation crimes going unprosecuted is a common thing. In fact, they have almost never been brought to trial anywhere, and even then, they assume a marginal space. This is usually attributed to a lack of explicit provisions in legal frameworks coupled with the complexity of factors causing famine. As many point fingers at the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments for what is happening currently in Tigray, there are lessons we can learn from Ethiopia’s own experiences in dealing with famines. Following the 1974 Wollo famine in northern Ethiopia during the Imperial period, a commission was set up to investigate the case. Even though the Emperor was deposed by the Dergue the same year, the commission was able to finalize its investigation that identified responsible governors, ministers, prime ministers, and other officials for the famine both individually and as a collective. These officials were later on, together with others, executed by the Dergue regime before they were brought to justice.

A decade later, the widely televised catastrophic 1984-85 famine killed close to one million people. Beyond claims that the Dergue regime is responsible for the famine, no one has yet been held accountable. The Special Prosecutor Office, set up after the 1991 transition, despite initial plans to investigate the famine, never brought any famine related case to court. With no significant political resistance from the totally collapsed former regime and with sufficient legal provisions available, this was a rare opportunity unused by the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front/Ethiopia Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (TPLF/EPRDF) led government. One explanation for this could be the relative ease of prosecuting the direct forms of violence like the Red Terror and war crimes, whereas, an investigation into the famine would raise unwanted attention (and culpability) to the role of other actors like TPLF, the US, and the UK that have used the famine and the aid operations for their own political, military and ideological interests. Both attempts at investigating crimes of mass starvation fall short of delivering justice to those who died and suffered due to man-made catastrophes.

Complexities

Contrary to the simplistic, localized, and unethical framing and representation, famines are complex events and part of the local-regional-global political dynamics and structure. Even though droughts, socio-economic conditions, policy failures, armed conflicts etc create the conditions for famines, catastrophes of famines are actualized when there is a failure in response. As armed conflicts have become the leading vectors of famines especially since the 20^th century, the local-regional-global political dynamics of these conflicts become an integral part of the causes, responses, and consequences of the famines.

The ongoing political crisis in Ethiopia that turned into an all-out open armed conflict between the federal government and Tigray’s TPLF since November last year is only a part of a broader political process that has been evolving during the past decade in particular and more broadly since the assumption of state power by the TPLF/EPRDF three decades ago. The conflict is also an integral part of the sub-regional Horn of Africa politics as countries advance their own interests including border conflicts, hydro politics, and more broadly with regard to the region’s strategic geopolitical position. The political crisis, the consequent humanitarian crisis and the imminent danger of famine need to be understood in light of these long durée of political processes in the country and the region, the various actors, and their complex constellation rather than a simplistic localized narrative.

Beyond the national level, historical and contemporary global political dynamics and structures shape the complex processes that result in famine casualties; both the conditions leading to famines and also the famine response. This is not unique to Ethiopia. Critically studying famines throughout Africa tells us a more revealing story. As armed conflicts become the leading factors that set the condition of famines, the much overseen yet still detrimental legacy of colonialism, among other things, in intra- and inter-state armed conflicts, is unavoidable. In addition, the various armed conflicts across the continent are shaped by the postcolonial global power structure that kept the continent in a subordinate position throughout the Cold War period, the War on Terrorism, the various development programmes etc. As well as shaping armed conflicts that create the conditions for famines, colonial legacies and contemporary global power structures have shaped famine response operations, both by the states themselves and by the international aid industry. The infamous World Bank and IMF led structural adjustment programmes of the post-Cold War period are worth mentioning here. Agricultural liberalization under these programmes led to the selling of strategic grain reserves that left many African states (for example Malawi in the early 2000s) incapacitated to respond to famine situations.

The international aid industry plays a key role in famine response, the failure of which usually leads to catastrophic consequences. We have seen how the global power structure plays into this process in many cases, a very good example being the Ethiopia 1984-85 famine of which two aspects are particularly relevant here. The first is how the Cold War period shaped the civil war in Ethiopia between a USSR-friendly central government and rebel groups supported by Western countries attempting to topple the central government. While this armed conflict created the conditions for famine, the famine response operation is even more crucial. For instance, the then US-friendly Sudanese government received more food aid than Ethiopia to an extent that it affected the agriculture sector of the country. In Ethiopia, despite media coverage and public outrage, ‘donor countries made efforts to restrict aid to unambiguously humanitarian needs and, insofar as possible, to keep it out of the hands of the central government’. More directly, as now declassified documents have also shown, the policies of the US and UK governments were ‘…to use food shipments to starving Ethiopians as cover to ship arms and supplies to rebels…’ and to ‘…make life harder for the Ethiopian regime…’ in their bid to overthrow the socialist Dergue regime.

Much more recently, we have also seen how the US war on terrorism in Somalia and the EU’s role contributed to the 2011 famine as aid was cut and withheld from agencies operating in Al-Shabab controlled southern Somalia. Given the strategic geopolitical location of Ethiopia and the Horn region broadly, great powers rivalry, which has seen increased competition recently, is an integral part of armed conflicts. Global powers(particularly US-China) military competition in the region coupled with Middle East countries (like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE) competition to intervene in various political processes in the region were highly visible recently. The hydro politics tension between Ethiopia-Sudan-Egypt over a dam project in Ethiopia is also another piece of the puzzle in the political instability we have seen in the region recently. The push for accountability for famines must go beyond a narrow, localized and simplistic understanding to look at how other actors and global structures foster and respond to conflicts that lead to famines.

Ethics

Reminiscent to the 1980s, pictures of emasculated, wounded, and dead bodies are once again circulating. In the social media age when it is easy and convenient to access and distribute images and stories of humanitarian catastrophes, ethical concerns become paramount. Among others, aid agencies, media outlets, political groups, and activists, including in the diaspora, rely on and use stories and images of those suffering and dying to mobilize resources and support. Yet as we have seen from the past, those who suffer are portrayed unethically, a representation that becomes fixed, and helps to construct and reinforce stereotypes. The 1984-85 famine of Ethiopia and the subsequent Band Aid that ushered in ‘celebrity humanitarianism’ are classic examples of the un/ethics of images, stories and representations of victims of famines in Africa. Through these processes, already existing stereotypes that are fundamentally ‘simplistic, reductionist, colonial and even racist’, are reinforced and reproduced. That in turn also lends to the simplistic and localized framing and definition of accountability and responsibility to famine casualties.

Ethical concerns are not only discursive, they translate to practical consequences. As elsewhere in Africa, the Ethiopian political crisis has attracted international ‘experts.’ Some of these international experts and journalists continue to be the subject of social media controversy. Their continued analysis and reporting of the political crisis have been used by different actors as an ‘expertise’, ‘unbiased’, ‘neutral’ validation of their side, and invalidation of the other. Unfortunately, the existing global order also affords these ‘experts’, particularly those from the West the position of being heard by and to influence international organizations, Western countries, and the media. This often amounts to ‘experts’ actually shaping and influencing the politics of a country they are not a part of and the consequences of which they are immune from. In Ethiopia, for example, it is particularly alarming given the highly sensitive and complex ethnic identity politics (where at least advocates of the three politically dominant ethnic groups are currently accusing each other of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’). Western ‘experts’ analysis, reporting, and social media engagement, is frequently oblivious to the nuances and complexities of these factors.

Over time, we have seen a growing understanding of famines as man-made political, criminal acts that are legally prosecutable. The UN resolution 2417 of 2018 ‘condemning the starving of civilians as a method of warfare’ is one major milestone. This growing understanding carries with it the challenging task of identifying responsibility and establishing accountability. Given the complexity of the political crisis, with multiple actors from local to global level, it might take time before we know the full extent of responsibility of actors for the current catastrophe happening in Ethiopia. Another very important lesson we can learn from past famines and related political violence in Ethiopia is the need to be aware of and the real, practical dangers of unethical representation, analysis, and reporting. Sadly, it is not only in terms of legal accountability that we need to learn from the past. While we have museums, monuments, associations, and other forms of memorialization for victims of spectacular forms of political violence like wars and the Red Terror period, the victims of the 1984-85 famine and other historical famines are left ‘forgotten’.

Fisseha Fantahun Tefera is a PhD candidate in Peace and Development at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. He is currently working within the research project ‘Famines as Mass Atrocities: Reconsidering Violence, Memory and Justice in Relation to Hunger’. His research interests include politics of development, transitional justice, and memory politics in Africa through a critical, Africanist approach. He has a background in Development Studies (MSc) from Lund University and in Political Science and International Relations (BA) from Addis Ababa University.

Featured Photograph: Bob Geldof as the white saviour during the Ethiopian famine in 1984-5.

Kwame Nkrumah and imperialist finance in Africa today

ROAPE

July 6, 2021

More than half a century after Kwame Nkrumah first articulated his magisterial critique of neocolonialism, Scott Timcke argues his critique remains just as relevant in the analysis of present-day developments of capitalism in Africa.

By Scott Timcke

The present convergence of finance and wireless technology has generated considerable enthusiasm in development circles about the promise of connectivity and FinTech to improve quality of life and create wealth on the African continent. The prototypical example that proponents point to is M-Pesa, a service run in Kenya by Safaricom. Launched in 2007, M-Pesa is a form of mobile banking which uses cellphone accounts as a financial service, permitting transfers and credit extension facilities. Initially funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), the service was commercialized through a joint venture by Vodafone and Safaricom. By 2018 there were 30 million customers and 6 billion yearly transactions. By most assessments, the service is a success. This blogpost revisits that conclusion by asking how these kinds of FinTech technologies, in their current configuration, perpetuate neocolonial relations. Replacing direct military rule, neocolonial relations can be understood as the coordinated exploitation of developing countries by advanced capitalist ones through their clout in international political economy. If such a claim at first appears like a stretch because it appears conspiratorial, it is worth recalling how European imperial and colonial practices were naturalized and normalized for most of modernity.

While ‘the methods of neo-colonialists are subtle and varied’ let us begin with the obvious. Desires to ‘bring Africa online’ in the 2000s had to confront stark realities born from both (i) the legacies of colonial infrastructure planned primarily to support resource extraction or settler communities, and (ii) the IMF imposed structural adjustment policies that slashed state maintenance budgets and social, economic, and political infrastructure. So, when digital neo-modernization advocates maintained that without access to the internet people in the Global South would face a digital divide which would exacerbate poverty that stemmed from the already asymmetrical relations in the global system, they overlooked the very history that gave rise to those inequalities and deficiencies in the first place. But this rhetoric of digital inclusion tended to overlook the historical materialist method at the heart of discussions about digital inequalities. Indeed the ‘connectivity paradigm’ currently promoted by the World Economic Forum and Facebook focuses on building infrastructure to create markets and customers, which will bridge the digital divide. However, this conceptualization ignores the insights of the scholarship around uneven and combined development or the research on the spatial fix required by capitalism to stall social problems in metropoles. In other words, for all the discussion about connectivity when digital neo-modernizers deny the connections of history; they deny how some polities are rich because others are poor.

Take the case of rising household over-indebtedness mediated by micro-lending platforms like M-Pesa. Sociological studies of the working-class in Kenya, like that by Kevin Donovan and Emma Park, demonstrate how these digitally mediated financial markets create debt traps for this class. In effect their earnings are used to pay off debts and more loans are taken against future earnings to service existing debts. This digitally mediated indebtedness of the working class is facilitated by the combination of the increase in the volume of rents extracted in the modern financial economy as well as, crucially, analysis of user generated data to assess their creditworthiness. In short, social reproduction is articulated through the logic of this financial system in turn causing severe maldistribution. Through this employment of FinTech ‘poverty is understood as a new frontier for profit-making and accumulation.’ These are the kinds of processes that Dan Kotliar and Abeba Birhane have in mind when they write about data orientalism and the algorithmic colonization of Africa respectively.

While the excellent critical literature on FinTech in Africa is growing, too often this work is lost in the analytical (and political) noise of neo-modernization. As the connectivity paradigm illustrates, this ideology has a naïve comprehension of technology as a social form. By contrast, when approached from a critical perspective, FinTech is not confined to reconfiguring or extending new services. Rather it involves creating new markets, introducing new machinery to reduce labor costs and more generally aiding inter-sector competition. But most importantly, FinTech is concerned with enclosing and capturing the value in existing informal lending practices the African working class has already built themselves. For example, South African informal saving networks are estimated to hold US$3 billion. To put it another way, the purpose of FinTech is to readjust the balance of power between capital and labor. This means that the central issue is not about the outcomes this technology produces, nor is it even a matter of access. The fundamental question is about how control rights of this technology reside with a minority of shareholders and how their interests are adjacent to the interests of their firms’ customers. And through indebtedness, FinTech is effectively creating a ‘digital-creditor-debtor-divide’ in Africa.

There is considerable value in revisiting Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism to understand the neocolonial components of algorithmic capitalism (informational or cybernetic capitalism). Published in 1965 and written in the wake of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 1960s Wind of Change speech in the Parliament of South Africa in which the Conservative British government signaled that is would no longer actively oppose independence movements, neocolonialism as Nkrumah described it, was a technique of indirect rule kept in place through a combination of economic arrangements and treaties, innovations in communication technology, and with the assistance of local sympathetic agents. In short, Nkrumah argued that European politicians like Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle offered disingenuous statements about the formal end of colonial rule, in part because newer mechanisms of colonial exploitation were possible to implement.

As a quick illustration of the durability of neocolonialism as a form of imperial rule, consider how, sixty years after formal political independence, the CFA franc has kept former French colonies under the influence of France monetary policy and structuring the economic relationship between France and these former colonies. Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla’s recently published Africa’s Last Colonial Currency concretely shows how 162 million people in 15 states have France mediate their monetary policy. When paired with the frequent military interventions that still take place, as Nkrumah accounted for, African populations continue to be subjects of scientific and financial experimentation by global powers.

Even reviewing Nkrumah’s sequence of chapters gives an early indication of the larger argumentation and stakes of his thesis. “Exercised through economic or monetary means” and “by a consortium of financial interests” imperialist finance and its currencies enable capitalists to establish corporations dedicated to extracting raw materials from concessions. By pressing labor—whose wages are artificially depressed through monopoly in economic sectors and the monopsony of labor (a market situation in which there is only one buyer) like in many African extractive economies—the profits of which are repatriated to metropoles through monetary zones and foreign banks. Indeed, at the time the book even caught the eye of the CIA in November of 1965. Nkrumah’s government would not last even four more months. It was deposed in February 1966 by a military coup. While it is difficult to adequately discuss Ghanaian politics in the 1960s in this venue (and more generally we must resist mono-causal explanations) it is nevertheless telling that Nkrumah’s removal set in motion a ‘diplomatic realignment’ that benefited the West.

Indeed, it is this kind of protracted material struggle between oppressor and oppressed that gave rise to the neocolonial critique. In the 1989 edition of The Black Jacobins, CLR James included an appendix ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’ in which he writes that about the intellectual encounter between the West Indians like Marcus Garvey and George Padmore and Africans like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. Calling this “one of the strangest stories in any period of history”, James described how encounters between sets of migrants in European cities led to the formation of groups like the International African Service Bureau, as Theo Williams has previously discussed on roape.net. Being in metropoles these Pan-Africanists had front row seats to witness the transition from ‘the old colonial system’ that had stood since the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference to ‘neocolonialism’ that emerged after World War Two. Through their ‘criticism of the weapon’—to employ a line from Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right—the Pan-Africans made their theory ‘a material force.’

While there are several tendencies in African studies, neocolonialism and neo-modernization represent two divergent conceptualizations of actions occurring on the continent. Despite protestations otherwise, neo-modernization is institutionally, philanthropically, and academically entrenched. It provides the initial frame of reference for design of empirical studies. And it is precisely “because they have already established a near monopoly of what is written on the subject” to enroll some of Walter Rodney’s remarks, that space is made for the neocolonial critique. This critique can, for example, show how local intermediaries facilitate neocolonial rule. Walter Rodney called these local agents’ allegiance to, or cynical cooperation with neocolonial powers, part of the ‘elementary conditions’ of neocolonial rule. For example, as it applies to algorithmic capitalism, the Kenyan government owns 35% of Safaricom. This means that the state gains revenues from the indebtedness of its citizens and the commodification of their data that Donovan and Park describe. But here arises a contradiction, because these revenues may be offset by costs spent to address the social consequences of indebtedness like homeless and mental illness. Indeed, depending upon their mandate, parts of the Kenyan bureaucracy are likely working at cross purposes from one another. This adds conflicting interests to any intra-governmental discussions on how (or if) to regulate lending apps like M-Pesa.

To recap, aside from the skews and parameters that arise from internal properties, it is true that there is nothing intrinsically exploitative about digital technology. That said, due to the global supremacy of the private property regime, the meaning and operation of these digital infrastructures is overdetermined by capitalist values. Accordingly, using neocolonialism in studies of digital sociology can help us focus less on the mechanisms of this or that platform, and more on how platforms are part of the basic forms of a society that shape social relations. In this vein, neocolonialism provides a different methodology—a counter-narrative that foregrounds the experience of the oppressed—that comes to vastly different conclusions to the neo-modernization perpetuated in the elite ‘fintech-philanthropy-development complex’.

This complex promotes platforms to advance economic liberalization and skirting existing regulations believing that such policy courses can nominally improve material conditions for Africans. However, in practice due to platform mediated financialization setting up conditions of perpetual insolvency, the lived-experience of the African working class is delimited by the interests of metropolitan capital, an arrangement that is reminiscent of the same kinds of subordination that Nkrumah described in the latter half of the 20^th century. Much like in the 20^th century this most recent iteration of neocolonialism will have long reverberations.

Scott Timcke is a comparative historical sociologist who studies race, class, and technology in modernity. He is a research associate with the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change and a fellow at the University of Leeds’ Centre for African Studies where he studies the overlap between, algorithmic capitalism, FinTech and neocolonialism. His second book, Algorithms and The End of Politics (Bristol University Press) was released in February 2021.

Featured Photograph: British prime minister Harold Wilson talking to president Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana in the garden of Marlborough House, London (Adam Sonin, ‘Heritage: Kwame Nkrumah, the visionary who took Ghana to independence’ 14 October 2020).

The New Intellectuals of Empire

ROAPE

July 1, 2021

In a powerful polemic against the new intellectuals of empire, Yusuf Serunkuma addresses an African audience. Serunkuma warns his audience of a new breed of missionary-scholars who speak to the visible wrongs in our midst, but they hardly ever offer any context, longue durée, causation, and abstraction, to the point that they have even conscripted disciples from among us. This new breed, he argues, is more tactical, more sophisticated, but as dangerous as their colonial predecessors.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

It has become increasingly common for scholars, activists and politicians who see Africa from African vantage points to be outraged by neo-orientalist portrayals of Africa by activist-scholars and media from the west. By ‘African vantage points’, I mean that they tend to explain and offer context to the well-publicised crimes of Africa’s leaders as opposed to calling them out and campaigning for sanctions and intervention from the benevolent west. I mean, whilst they would be critical of Muammar Gaddafi or Robert Mugabe, they are unwilling to support coalitions of the so-called ’vanguards of justice and human rights’ to flush these bad leaders out, even if flushing them out comes by way of sanctions. These scholars and activists are my main audience in this essay – because I claim to be one of them.

It is my contention that we need to be kinder to the West’s celebrity-missionary intellectuals and media. They commit no crime when they ’misrepresent’ the continent. In fact, misrepresentation as a term does not even apply to them as, indeed, they are not mispresenting anything but simply doing their job – which is mainly writing for and informing their home audiences on how to see Africa, which remains an abundant wild reserve for game and exploitation. It would be liberating for the African activist and scholar to beware that over 95 per cent of academics, mainstream media outlets such as the BBC and CNN, and the myriad commentors including bloggers, columnists, and overly sanctimonious tweeps on Africa from the West will — oftentimes involuntarily, instinctively or by association — follow the foreign policy positions of their countries.

So, Michela Wrong, Nic Cheeseman, Robert Guest and many others remain intellectuals of empire. But with a sophistication; they are not crude like their predecessors (such as the colonial anthropologists and explorers who were, among other things, openly racist and abusive). This new breed of missionary-scholar speaks to the visible wrongs and actual abuses by African leaders, but they hardly ever offer any context, longue durée, causation, and abstraction. They treated their subjects as exotic and geographically contained with neither global-local connections, nor power games with the new colonial powers etcetera. Indeed, these outright half-analyses have been used quite successfully to even conscript disciples from amongst us. You will constantly hear African university graduates chanting tired buzz words about democracy, free market economies, the need to attract foreign investments, praising IMF and World Bank data, and congratulating themself after more aid is released. They’ll then focus on small and obsolete campaigns such as decolonisation, demand reparations to appear cool and sophisticated. All this is the work of the new breed of the intellectuals of empire, which is more tactical, more sophisticated, but as dangerous as their predecessors.

Reflecting on Wrong’s recent book, Do Not Disturb, Jörg Wiegratz and Leo Zeilig have reminded us about the timeless trope of monsters in Western media and academia in reference to African ‘autocratic‘ presidents. It is worth stressing that presidents that are labelled ’monsters’ are not necessarily innocent individuals; they are and have actually committed crimes to fit the label. But while their badness ought not to be denied, it has to be understood as a timeless fact of all politicians: their monstrosity ought to be understood as a function of power – so the truism that ‘power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely’ – and this is not limited to Africa.

In truth though, those characterised as monsters across formerly colonised places have been men [and women] unwilling to allow modern imperial plunder disguised as free trade and often packaged in the slick language of human rights. Please note that monsters do not begin as monsters in both their political character, and the ways in which the world sees and writes about them. Frequently, they simply undergo a key turn, which often happens at that sobering moment of encounter with the imperial capitalist machine. Slovenian theorist, Slavoj Zizek has described this moment, as a ‘key dilemma’ for any president seeking to champion the lives of the wretched of the earth under a corrosive capitalist modernity.

Ugandan president Idi Amin started out as a darling of the West. But he became a monster as soon as he chose to get the natives out of the backwaters of the economy, which actually meant taking the economy away from the Indian-Asians, the ‘deputies of colonialists’ as historian Lwanga-Lunyiigo called them.[1] After Amin radically pulled the rag from under their feet — as Kenya and Tanzania had done using their legal systems — Uganda’s former colonisers who had actually shipped Indians into the region and deliberately privileged them over the natives, were the first to demonise Amin labelling him an autocrat, a monster. Once politically ‘bad’, Amin also became bad in the scholarship and media coverage. Most famously, he became a ’white pumpkin’ in popular media circles.

Queen Elizabeth II bestowed a knighthood on President Mugabe, which was clearly a subtle bribe to get him to ignore land reforms, a burning issue at independence in 1980. For 20 years, Mugabe remained a darling of the West, never antagonising white farmers and instead, becoming ensnared in endless negotiations with them and the UK government to find a less radical or less painful way to allow them to keep their colonial loot. Even when the British government gave Mugabe money to buy land for redistribution, the white landowners refused to sell. Caving into pressure in the late 1990s from inside his own party and from former combatants, Mugabe then took a hard stance on land. Shamelessly, Zimbabwe’s former colonisers took back their bribe, and the media and academia competed in badmouthing Mugabe. On the heels of UK government sanctions, were tons of monsterizing scholarship and media coverage.

In nearby South Africa, the gift for his political-economic naivety was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nelson Mandela which was working wonders. Mandela admitted in his memoir, Long Walk to Freedom, that he had blatantly defied the ANC’s resolutions in his ignorant and childlike pursuit of political independence. In effect, he left South Africa’s entire economy in the hands of white South Africans. As Zizek puts it, if Mandela had really won, he would never have become a darling of the West — and of the world. Similarly, before Kagame started taking a hard stance towards the West, he had been their darling for years. He is now their monster.

Ever wondered why with all Museveni’s crimes, he is yet to become a monster? Well, Museveni is in Somalia, Central African Republic, South Sudan, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo – doing mercenary work for the western democracy merchandising imperialists. He is providing the calm under which foreign mining companies enjoy Congolese resources, and also providing the environment under which European pirates enjoy Somalia’s marine resources. Thus, despite his well-documented crimes on Ugandans, he is yet to make the label, a monster.

The point I am making here is that a huge percentage of scholarship and media in the West reflects the foreign policies of their states. This is true not just in the so-called “formerly colonised” places, but it is also true of Europe’s and America’s relations across the world where their exploitative tentacles are being resisted. Mainstream scholarship, and media, which is largely ‘a bunch of frauds’ as Noam Chomsky puts it, will often find the ‘ethical imperative’ to blast leaderships in Russia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, China, and even helpless Palestine — as long as their multinationals face stiff opposition attempting to monopolise the economies of these countries.

The crime of the leaderships of these countries is trying to extract maximum benefit from their mineral resources — especially oil, gold, lithium and platinum — and fighting for their land. As these leaders are derided by EU and American politicians, western scholars and journalists endlessly chant their badness. These same scholars and media also sweat blood and tears to ensure that the crimes of empire are not exposed. Ali Mazrui told us as much in 1997 when the BBC censored him for reporting factually about Muammar Gaddafi. More recently, The Conversation killed a well-researched piece by Matthew Alford on how ’western media rationalises and amplifies state-sanctioned violence and wars as millions die.’

Please note that these fellows in the Western-based media and academia hate being associated with their countries’ foreign policies. They will vehemently deny this accusation. They strut themselves around as independent objective academics and analysts building their craft purely on fieldwork and theory. This is rightly undeniable but to a degree. There are two glaring handicaps with their claim: first, you’ll never hear them speak out against the crimes of their own countries the way they do about those of other countries or their leaders. You do not see them calling out Israel’s colonisation of Palestine. You do not see them joining Black Lives Matter, nor see them call out the wars in Yemen, Iraq, and the entire Middle East that were started on absolute deception. And this isn’t a case of disciplinary focus or areas studies. That would be a clumsy excuse. A true activist-scholar has to start by calling out the crimes of own countries. Sadly, you have heard them downplay the double standards of structural adjustment, or simply remain silent. They are happy to harp on about democracy and human rights as if there is no connection between livelihood and governance. It is as if they do not see the continued ruins of structural adjustment as local African populations remain disempowered and emasculated – and the double standards with which Europe and North America still enforce the Washington Consensus onto Africa as they themselves do the exact opposite at home.

Second, and this is an important point I intend to make: working or simply following the foreign policy positions of their countries cannot be seen as a crime on the part of these activist-scholars and media. They really have no choice. Even those most aware of their positionality in this game – by far the fewest – end up with very limited choices. To appropriate David Scott, they did not choose to do this job, they were simply conscripted. They did not choose to work for their countries as earlier intellectuals of empire did. To survive as scholars, they have to stay true to the mission of the master who not only introduced them to these parts of the world, but who also enables their intellectual and financial power to undertake scholarship in these parts of the world.

That the majority are unaware of or simply deny their conscription to the imperial machine is how it is meant to be. This is because the conscription is more discreet and takes many subtle forms including their training, funding, legitimation by their schools, historical connections, etc. This is an existential dilemma. Just one telling example, there are exponentially more scholars from the UK than from France or Germany working in the former British colonies, in the same way that there are more scholars from France than from the UK in the former French colonies. And although this form of conscription runs deep, it remains not just largely invisible but unconsciously suppressed. Should it be strange that there are almost zero scholars from the colonies doing fieldwork in Europe and North America. To this day, it is still viewed as almost comical that an African university started a centre for the study of the Americas.[2]

The bigger point I wish to make is this: scholarship is closely linked to the economy—and to politics. Until Africans develop their economies to fund their own scholarship, these men and women from the west will continue to say whatever they want – and there will always be good evidence to back up any arguments they choose to make, which actually makes their scholarship appear sound and objective. But as Foucault has told us, to focus on a particular argument or focus on a particular subject is often a political position and not an intellectual one. It is not intellectual persuasion or a case of overwhelming evidence. It is power and politics.

My intention is not to make the conscription of Western media and scholars at the service of their countries’ foreign policies a crime (though perhaps if they acknowledged this fact, they would be humbler and less sanctimonious). It is to remind African intellectuals and activists that there is a need to spend more time fighting at home to better their politics and economies. This, in turn, will give them the intellectual and political power to also push our side of the story – which will also be, as Nigerian historian Yusufu Bala Usman would put it, a political position.

Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, scholar and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers and it was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda.

Featured Photograph: Eric Dutton (right), Palmer Kerrison, and Governor Robert Coryndon at Government House in Nairobi, 1924. Dutton was an academic geographer and a major force behind early urban-planning programs in East and Central Africa and author of four books. Permanently disabled by war wounds, he was also permanently infatuated with the moral rightness of British imperial culture (Garth Myers, 1998).

Notes

[1] Since they were neither settlers nor natives at independence, the only category left in this push and pull for belonging and identity was deputies to the colonialists. Quite inexplicably, the Indian-Asians stayed on in the East African colonies even after the end of colonialism. Had they become natives or settlers?

[2] In 2018 South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand started the African Centre for the Study of the United States (ACSUS).

Sudan: prisons, jockeys and contraband cars

ROAPE

June 30, 2021

Magdi el Gizouli argues that the new prison complexes in Sudan’s major towns are part of the legal scaffolding of the privatisation and austerity assault which continues to punish insolvency with imprisonment. Gizouli sees the massive rates of imprisonment as manifestations of social conflict, the hunger, the hustling, the jockeying, the wheeling and dealing of Sudan today.

By Magdi el Gizouli

Sudan’s Minister of Interior, Izz al-Din al-Sheikh, inaugurated on 17 June a new prison in Soba, a sprawling suburb south of the capital Khartoum. The new prison has the capacity of hosting 3600 inmates and is designed to accommodate minors of both sexes. The new prison complex is the third in recent years. Two similar prisons were opened in Gedaref and the White Nile in 2020. A police officer boasted that the new prisons would even allow wives to enjoy an intimate hour with their inmate husbands. As a side note the officer declared that the new prisons are equipped with ‘massive workshops’. Sudan’s prison population is estimated at around 36 000 inmates, including the former president Omar al-Bashir and many senior members of his defunct political party, the National Congress Party (NCP).

Excluding the newly built prisons, Sudan’s inmates are crammed into some 125 establishments with an occupancy level of 255%. The country’ prison population has been increasing steadily over the past three decades, from some 7000 inmates in 1990 to around 20000 in 2011 at the time of the breakaway of South Sudan. Like most available statistics in the country, the accuracy of these figures is not guaranteed but the trend is clear. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 the Sudanese authorities decided to release all prisoners held in relation to public prosecution offences, mostly people incarcerated for burglary, robbery, drugs crimes and prominently bounced cheques. Over 4000 inmates were released from one prison in March 2020. The inmates left behind mutinied, and one was shot dead by the police in the chaos. Copycat mutinies followed in the Port Sudan and Nyala prisons.

The Sudanese penal code introduced in 1991 as part of the legal scaffolding of the privatisation and austerity assault of former president Bashir’s government, punishes insolvency with a fine or a maximum of 5 years imprisonment. Repeated offenders could be jailed for up to 7 years. The practice of the courts often meant that default on loans resulted in a situation of perpetual imprisonment, in the parlance of court verdicts ‘imprisonment until payment’. Sudan’s minister of justice in 2016 said there were around 4000 debtors behind bars in al-Huda prison alone, a major prison complex north of Omdurman. At the time the percentage of non-performing loans from gross loans in Sudanese banks was estimated at 5.2% after an all-time high of 26% in 2007. Imprisonment for insolvency was already a feature of Sudan’s debt ridden mid-1980s in the twilight years of Jaafar Nimayri’s rule when an article of Sudan’s civil procedures code was used to justify the pretrial detention of debtors.

Non-performing bank loans are however only a fraction of the debt crisis that lands people behind bars in Sudan. Cheques function as promissory notes in cycles of trade to the detriment of new market entrants, often those trying to escape the crushing regime of agricultural labour through attempts at enterprise after liquidation of meagre assets, a stretch of farmland or a few animals. These start-up retailers, novices in a cut-throat market economy, acquire merchandise from wholesalers on debt and at often stunning interest rates but are unable to survive in a perpetually stagflating market. The peculiar situation often arises in which the naïve novice is forced to sell the merchandise at a ‘fraction’ of the price – meaning far below market price – to remain out of jail, at times to the same cheque-weaponised dealer or associates.

Eventually a market in debts emerged involving the transaction of defaulted cheques between a new class of traders, known as ‘jockeys’. A jockey buys debts in the form of draft cheques at a lower price than their nominal value from their cash-keen holders and uses the drafts to buy tradeable commodities, greater debts or ideally urban land or real estate in cycles of speculation. The neatest example is probably the car market. Cars acquired through bank loans with the security of real estate or draft cheques are sold at a ‘fraction’ of the price in return for hard cash and resold for draft cheques with a high profit. The jockey is the risk-ready middleman. Sudan’s auditor general estimated the volume of circulating debts in the form of bounced cheques in 2019 to be some 44.7 billion (approximately US$100m) Sudanese pounds including some 3.6 billion (US$8m) Sudanese pounds in draft cheques submitted to the tax authorities.

The power of jockeys should not be underestimated. Back in 2010 trade in ‘fractions’ and debts became a security crisis in al-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. In May 2010 the open market in fractions imploded and the local government was faced with some 3700 angered claimants who had traded actual cash and real property for toxic debts. Protests ensued and the police resorted to gunfire. Four people were killed, and fifty others injured in the process. The clean-up proved a political nightmare for the central government. Two prominent jockeys were allies of the long-time governor of North Darfur Osman Mohamed Yusif Kibir and were elected to the regional parliament on the ruling party’s ticket. The crisis cost the governor his position. He was fired from the job in 2014 in a major reshuffle but remained too influential to ignore and was eventually parked in the presidential palace as a deputy to Bashir in September 2018, a few months before the collapse of the regime.

The market in debts did not disappear with the demise of Bashir’s regime in 2019 and fused into the market in cash forcing the authorities to effectively surrender. In May 2020 the Bank of Sudan suspended an article of a memo issued back in 1997 instructing banks to shut-down the accounts of clients who dishonour three cheque payments or more in a period of six months.

Jockeys and dealers of sorts were instrumental in inflating the ballooning market in smuggled cars through toxic debts from around 2015. Thousands upon thousands of used cars were smuggled through Sudan’s turbulent western frontier, mostly from post-Gaddafi Libya and Chad bypassing the country’s porous customs regime and fuelling a bonanza of speculative debts trading. The initial signal was a government decision that offered Sudanese expatriates returning from war-torn Libya customs advantages in the import of cars. The famed loose cars acquired the name ‘Boko Haram’ in reference to their origin outside the bounds of law and order. In February 2021, the authorities estimated the number of Boko Haram cars in Khartoum alone to be some 300 000 vehicles.

The government’s interventions oscillated between attempts to capture some of the value of the cars through post-hoc customs arrangements and licensing with perpetually shifting deadlines and hollow threats of confiscation at gun-point. The latest immediate confiscation order in this salvo of official edicts was issued by the governor of North Kordofan on 14 April 2021 after another deadline had passed on 1 March. Similar orders were issued back in 2017 by Sudan’s former vice president, Hassabo Mohamed Abd al-Rahman. At the time he told the regional parliament in North Darfur that the government had decided to confiscate all Boko Haram cars without compensation with immediate effect.

World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) experts, international NGO cadres, ambassadors of great powers and government officials prefer to perceive Sudan’s chronic economic malaise through statistical summaries that are supposed to reflect economic performance: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, current account balance, external debts, foreign direct investments, purchasing parity, poverty lines, poverty head counts and so on and so forth.

These and other notions constitute a powerful vocabulary of economy, finance and social management on a global scale but shed eloquence and utility when juxtaposed against the conundrums facing a Darfurian farmer who trades his meagre crop at a ‘fraction’ of its value to a jockey in al-Fasher to address a health crisis in the family. The language of international finance is not particularly illuminating when attempting to comprehend the fate of the thousands of insolvent petty traders and inept drug dealers in Sudan’s prisons. Its syntax does not accommodate the moral economy that underwrites the ties and relationships which flow with savings in the form of ‘Boko Haram’ cars through international borders.

Prisons, contraband markets and isolated customs checkpoints might not appear at first glance to be the most suitable places to understand an economy. The social contradictions and conflicts that play out in these locations are easily lumped together under the designation ‘corruption’ as some sort of pathological feature external to the workings of the ‘real’ economy.

The contention is which realities count? IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) findings from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other partners show that an estimated 7.3 million people in Sudan (around 16% of the population) are going hungry and are forced to sell limited livelihood assets as a result, a goat may be or the odd piece of furniture. Of these 1.8 million are already in the clutches of malnutrition and are dying excessively as a consequence. These figures are expected to increase to 9.7 million people (21% of the population analysed) in the lean season (June to September), the period between planting and harvesting when work is hard to come by and incomes drop.

The new prison complexes in Sudan’s major towns are a securitised response to the manifestations of the social conflict, the hunger, the hustling, the jockeying, the wheeling and dealing, that offers no avenue to address them.

Magdi el Gizouli is a scholar and a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. He writes on Sudanese affairs here and regularly contributes to roape.net.

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