Real and imagined facts in Rwandan history

October 14, 2021

Jos van Oijen writes that Michela Wrong in her new book moves around real and imagined facts and witnesses, revives a double genocide theory based on inflated casualty numbers, re-labels victims, discredits bona fide genocide experts and promotes layman’s opinions as irrefutable evidence, while revising the history of the genocide against the Tutsi. Van Oijen makes an appeal for properly corroborated and verified research.

By Jos van Oijen

My critique of Michela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb in September was by and large a technical discussion to explain how the book allocates undue credibility to fringe theories and recycled myths by neglecting better evidence from forensic investigations, judicial inquiries and academic research. Without this flaw, which affects about two-fifths of Do Not Disturb, it could have been a useful book of 250 pages. Instead, it’s a problematic one that mixes facts and fabrications.

Several commenters – university professors among them – nevertheless manage to politicize my review, using an “us” versus “them” dichotomy. According to their binary logic, the “us” category is reserved for fierce critics of the Rwandan government, like Michela Wrong. In contrast, others who don’t fall in line and highlight major flaws in her work are labeled pro-government and filed under “them”.

Judging by the emails addressed to the editors of the ROAPE website, “us” means good and “them” means bad. Let’s keep in mind, however, that unless fabricated or manipulated, facts have no side. They are what they are, whether they confirm a popular theory or expose it as a hoax. That’s reality, not politics.

In this follow-up post I provide additional examples of myths, recycled in the book, to illustrate my observation that the intuitive method employed by the author is prone to error. Fact checking the information obtained from informants and other informal sources is an essential component of investigative journalism. How else are we to know if a story is based in reality or on a fiction? Intuition isn’t a useful tool to determine this. Feelings and impressions are not facts, they can’t substitute critical thinking.

However, my central argument – that the book would have benefited from applying professional principles and guidelines – does not exclusively concern one author or a single book. Hidden behind the errors there can be myths created decades ago. Their appeals to emotion or to a suggested logic have convinced other authors before Michela Wrong, sufficiently to evade scrutiny for years.

The Hourigan Affair

The manner in which hundreds of scholars and journalists have discussed the story of International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) investigator Michael Hourigan, perpetuates an international conspiracy theory, which, we will see, is not even remotely plausible. The case revolves around a memorandum written by Hourigan in 1997. It was intended for ICTR chief prosecutor Louise Arbour to inform her about intelligence collected from alleged whistle blowers in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

Do Not Disturb summarizes the Hourigan Affair as follows: “… when ICTR investigators Jim Lyons and Michael Hourigan, a former FBI staffer and an Australian lawyer, respectively, were approached in 1997 by three former RPF fighters claiming direct knowledge of [Paul] Kagame’s responsibility [for assassinating President Habyarimana], they excitedly called Louise Arbour to say they had compiled a dossier outlining grounds for prosecution.”

Arbour invited Hourigan to her office in The Hague to provide her with the details. A couple of weeks later a meeting was arranged where Hourigan delivered his memo conveying the essence of the witness statements. Unexpectedly, the story goes, Arbour reacted with hostility. She dismissed the information and ended the investigation. “Shocked investigators,” Wrong writes, meaning Lyons, “speculated that Kigali’s various Western “friends” – most likely, the US government – had applied pressure. What prompted her about-turn remains unclear.”

Wrong’s source for the cover-up is a brief interview with Lyons in the controversial BBC documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story. It’s risky to rely on a TV program, however, as they’re rarely adequate sources and should be treated with caution. This one omits the fact that Lyons’ contribution was almost entirely hearsay. When Hourigan met Arbour in The Hague, Lyons was in New York as his one-year contract had expired. He has never met the informants and didn’t discuss the incident with Arbour to get her side of the story.

The “outside pressure” element was debunked in 2010 by Hourigan when he was interviewed about the incident at a conference in Brussels. About his meeting with Arbour in The Hague he said: “I presented her there a memorandum … about informants’ information. She read that, but thereafter it was completely different.” If Arbour’s attitude changed after she finished reading the memo, any clues to the cause of her “about-turn” must be in the text. The section of the memo relevant for this discussion is reproduced below, in Fig. 1.

The many journalists and scholars who have cited the memo tend to highlight statements in the text that appear to confirm a consensus view of fifteen years ago: that Kagame was responsible and that a missile was fired from Masaka hill. The other information has been largely ignored, especially in the academic literature. This is odd because it exposes the affair as a hoax.

Luc Reydams has dedicated an entire journal article to the Hourigan Affair in 2018, titled Politics or Pragmatism. It quotes large portions of an affidavit Hourigan submitted in 2007, but the memo – which was attached to it – and what it claims (that FAR [government] soldiers were responsible and that Camp Kanombe, where the Presidential Guard was stationed, served as mission control), are ignored.

French professor André Guichaoua, who is widely regarded as a leading expert on Rwanda, has published the memo on his website as an annex to his book From War to Genocide. However, the places where it mentions Camp Kanombe are covered with black bars (see Fig, 1). Why his readers aren’t supposed to take note of that information remains unclear. Guichaoua didn’t respond to questions.

**Figure 1: The original text is quoted on the left; Guichaoua’s Annexe 49 is on the right**

We can imagine Louise Arbour’s astonishment when she read the memo. If the suggestion that the assassination was a joint venture of the RPF and FAR was farfetched, there were more glaring errors: Gasogi Hill as a shooting location, for instance. Even in 1997 it was understood that the missiles were fired from the left side of the plane. Gasogi was on its right. Not helping matters was Hourigan telling Arbour that, like Jim Lyons, he had neither met the witnesses, nor verified their information.

The team member who handled the informants was Amadou Deme. This is a notable aspect because in his 2014 memoir Deme describes his close friendships with genocidaires like Georges Rutaganda and Aloys Ntabakuze that go back to the pre-genocide era. This raises questions about the integrity of the investigations he had been involved in. In the memoir, Deme still refers to his genocidal buddies as “falsely accused heroes”.

Unsettling as this knowledge may be, it doesn’t seem to bother Filip Reyntjens, another leading expert according to some. In his 2020 Working Paper on the Habyarimana assassination, Reyntjens still evokes the obsolete information of Hourigan and Deme as credible evidence to support his own conclusions.

When I contacted Louise Arbour about this case, she explained that she didn’t know Hourigan very well when he contacted her. She wasn’t encouraged by what she learned when she inquired about him. “I felt at that time that our capacity to investigate thoroughly that event was seriously compromised: our resources (human and otherwise) were not adequate to the task and our operating from Kigali made it even more problematic.”

Arbour wasn’t surprised at the negative reactions to her decision to shelve the case: “The lens of a journalist, or that of a historian, is obviously not the same as those of a prosecutor, constrained by rules of legal relevance, admissibility of evidence and a very high standard of proof, all necessary to engage personal criminal responsibility. I did not think at the time that we could meet those standards in that case.”

An analysis of the relevant jurisprudence by ICTR defense lawyers Peter Robinson and Golriz Ghahraman supports Arbour’s decision. Itconcluded, “… the inconclusive determination of whether the attack constituted perfidy or treachery, or instead a permissible ruse of war, makes it more prudent not to bring such a prosecution, and to leave the debate to scholars and historians.”

Whether it is wise to leave it up to scholars and historians in this polarised academic field is contestable as well. The tendency to resist new information that threatens one’s belief, is a major factor on both sides of the debate. The examples in this and my previous blogpost demonstrate that influential scholars may have great difficulty adjusting to evidence which emerges after they’ve already formed their opinions and published their analyses.

Michela Wrong, primed by a man on TV and unaware of the factual and historical facets of her information, displays the same dismissive attitude towards research that invalidates the stories she believes to be true and has staked her reputation on.

Re-labeling genocide victims

The next example is one that I mentioned briefly in my previous blogpost. But due to its nature – the recycling of a hate radio message from May and June 1994 – it merits a more detailed description. The flaw in Wrong’s method is quite similar to the one in the first example. She apparently found the story in a fringe report, didn’t verify it, and took it as credible evidence to support her argument.

On 25 April 1994, fishermen from the village of Kasensero in Uganda noticed the remains of Rwandan genocide victims floating in the Kagera river, close to where it flowed into Lake Victoria. Over the next few weeks, tens of thousands of bodies would follow. In the first weeks of May they were reported from Butare in southwestern Rwanda, 900 kilometers upstream from Kasensero, all the way to Musoma, 250 kilometers across the lake in Tanzania.

A clean-up operation retrieved 11,000 bodies from along the shore, but the total number of victims in the lake was estimated to be in the range of 25,000 to 50,000. Because the operation was sponsored by Western aid organizations, international journalists flocked to Uganda to report the story. Most victims were women and children, they wrote, murdered in the most horrific manners. Here was tangible evidence of systematic killing on such a massive scale that the regular deflections and excuses of the Hutu Power government in Rwanda no longer sufficed.

This PR problem was resolved quickly by mirroring foreign news reports on the Rwandan radio stations with the difference that the perpetrator-victim roles were reversed. The alternative version broadcast by the hate radio towards the end of May and throughout June blamed the RPF for the catastrophe and re-labeled the genocide victims in Lake Victoria as innocent Hutus killed in RPF territory.

This version was kept in circulation after the genocide was over, first by the ousted regime and army leaders, followed by a motley crew of genocide deniers and lawyers of genocide suspects. The latter group finally managed to push it into the mainstream media by persuading journalists it was one of the examples of long suppressed evidence of RPF atrocities.

The persuasive element in the story was the fact that after the RPF had captured the town of Rusumo on 30 April 1994, a large stretch of the Akagera river was under their control, although most of it was in a game reserve. Wrong’s colleague Judi Rever rehashed the story in her book In Praise of Blood: “Near the end of April, the most southern prefecture of Kibungo was securely held by the RPF. The refugees escaping to Tanzania were therefore not Tutsis, but Hutus being chased and killed by the RPF. The corpses dumped in the Kagera from late April onward were Hutus.”

This explanation sounds reasonable until one takes a look at the map (see Fig. 2 below). The Akagera isn’t the only major river in Rwanda. Upstream from Rusumo lie the Nyabarongo and the Akanyaru. These rivers meander through regions where in April 1994 most Tutsis were concentrated before their combined currents discharge into the Akagera.

The troops movements as depicted in Alison Des Forges’ Leave None to Tell the Story and other sources suggest that on 1 May 1994, around 90% of the riverbanks along the main rivers in inhabited areas were in government territory. A few reports incriminate RPF troops suggesting they’re accountable for at least some of the victims. However, the genocide in the rest of the country did not abate after the RPF took Rusumo, which implies that the vast majority of bodies reaching Lake Victoria towards the end of May and early June would still have been genocide victims. For a general idea of the situation, I’ve combined the data in Fig. 2.

**Figure 2: Map of rivers in the region.**

The version in Do Not Disturb is slightly different from the Radio Rwanda/RTLM/Judi Rever version. Wrong writes: “Reporters would later recall, with retrospective unease, how eerily quiet the first areas captured by the RPF had always seemed. When bodies with their hands tied kandoya-style behind their backs surfaced in Lake Victoria, brought by the Kagera and Nyabarongo Rivers, many observers wondered how fresh genocide victims could be washing down from areas the RPF had long cleared of interahamwe.”

The “fresh genocide victims” element caught my attention. The distances by river between Rwanda and Lake Victoria seemed too great for a dead body to arrive in Lake Victoria and still look‘fresh’, given the tropical conditions. The stretch from Butare and Gikongoro to Kasensero is more than 900 kilometres. From Rusumo it’s still 525 kms. But I always try to check such extraordinary claims, just to be sure. In this case I received help from an engineer at Delft University of Technology and two other specialized scientists. The exercise led me to conclude that if fresh bodies indeed surfaced in Lake Victoria, they would have been thrown in locally, not in Rwanda.

So where did Michela Wrong get those ideas? The only reports I could find which mention fresh bodies in the water are from the post-genocide period and they do not refer to Lake Victoria. The scale is incomparable as well. In July 1994 a UNHCR spokesperson told journalists: “We are seeing between 10 and 20 bodies a day floating down the river past Ngara [in Tanzania, opposite Rusumo], “some of them are very, very fresh bodies, so the killing continues.”

Did Wrong mix up the reports? There is a more likely explanation. When I was reviewing publications authored by Paul Rusesabagina a couple of weeks ago, I came across a version of the ‘lake bodies story’ that’s almost identical to Wrong’s. In his report ‘Compendium of RPF crimes‘ from 2006, the details and opinion are all the same, which suggests that the mistake originates with him. Wrong could have read it, paraphrased it in her book, and forgot to credit it to Rusesabagina.

Moral choice

In Do Not Disturb, Michela Wrong moves around real and imagined facts and witnesses, revives a double genocide theory based on inflated casualty numbers, re-labels victims, discredits bona fide genocide experts and promotes layman’s opinions as irrefutable evidence, while she casually revises the history of the genocide against the Tutsi as if she’s redecorating her living room. This can’t all be explained in detail without turning this blog into another book. Most omissions and distortions have layers of facts, or a history attached to them, as demonstrated by the examples above. Unfortunately, people generally remember false facts and alternative histories better because they’re simple and catchy compared to the refutations that are often more complex and require some effort to understand.

Other reviewers have highlighted how Wrong portrays her informants as Prince Charmings, and their former comrades as scary monsters. She even defends an informant who is in prison for embezzling a few hundred thousand pounds from a charity. Proximity matters. So does cognitive dissonance. Two of these Prince Charmings who play a prominent role in the book, fell out with each other as well, one now accusing the other of genocide. And the dissidents who claim to be witnesses of the plane attack have refuted each other’s testimonies before the investigative judges. Such bubble-bursting details are rationalised in passing and remain largely obfuscated in the book.

Journalists and scholars who write about Rwanda and the genocide are from a wide spectrum of disciplines and backgrounds: historians, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, forensic scientists, political scientists, law professors, human rights activists, linguists, economists, medical doctors, engineers, and so forth. Besides these we have of course the genocide survivors and other eyewitnesses, priests, attorneys, diplomats, aid workers all contributing to the literature. The advantage of this diversity is that together they produce a multifaceted perspective providing opportunities for reaching a comprehensive analysis of the genocide, its history and aftermath, and to learn from it.

But it also causes friction, misunderstandings and personal resentments that, while they endure, hinder rather than advance our understanding. Everything will stand or fall on the quality of the data and the ability to identify independently established facts from opinions. Theories and judgments should follow the evidence, not the other way around. If a claim is made that according to science, the laws of nature, or the logistics involved is simply not possible, it must be discarded, and the theories should be adjusted accordingly. Unfortunately, not everyone is prepared to do that.

Let me conclude this blogpost by reminding the reader that my critique of Do Not Disturb has addressed methodological flaws that affect about two-fifths of the book. The other 250 pages are largely accurate and worth reading. As long as the author checks her facts and makes clear distinctions between personal feelings, beliefs, assumptions, opinions, facts, and evidence, there’s no crime in letting people have their say, even if what they say is sometimes offensive.

Jos van Oijen is an independent researcher from The Netherlands who publishes on genocide-related issues in various online and print media. His first blogpost on Michela Wrong’s book Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad on roape.net can be read here.

Featured Photograph: The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania.

Bringing global capitalism back into the picture – social protection programmes in Africa

ROAPE

October 12, 2021

Anna Wolkenhauer writes that there is a much to be criticised about recent social protection programmes in Africa. Though these programmes will not end global capitalism she urges scholar-activists to recognise that they may provide a momentum for posing unresolved social questions at national and global levels. Wolkenhauer argues that these programmes are creating a window of opportunity that can be seized by a radical coalition for developing anti-capitalist alternatives.

By Anna Wolkenhauer

The recent wave of social protection programmes, that have swept across African countries since the turn of the millennium, has generated mixed reactions. On the one side, especially cash transfers are seen as effective and revolutionary ways of eradicating some deeply entrenched impoverishment, and the larger social protection agenda raises hopes to be potentially transformative. On the other, social protection has been criticised for remaining stuck within in the confines of the neoliberal paradigm. Critics point to the decoupling of social policies from issues of production, the anti-democratic policymaking by donors that promote social protection, and their narrowing of the policy choices of African governments through the imposition of hegemonic ideas, as well as the ideological nature of the global justice discourse within which they are embedded. Instead of buying into such programmes, it has been suggested, the left should work towards a more radical imagination that can underpin a popular counter-hegemonic project of real decommodification. So, the search for progressive, holistic forms of social policy in the African context remains an unfinished project.

In this blogpost, I side with the critical voices but call for some strategic and pragmatic opportunism. My simple argument is that, yes, there is a lot to be criticised about the recent social protection policies, and no, they are probably not going to end global neoliberal capitalism. But we should nonetheless acknowledge that they are creating a window of opportunity that can be seized by a scholar-activist coalition for developing more radical imaginations. Building on what is there, more transformative visions for welfare and development can be brought (back) into the picture, and scholars should play their part in re-politicising that debate. This, I argue, requires the contextualisation of present welfare states within global financialised capitalism, the excavation of historical visions, and the formation of coalitions with those on whose behalf social protection policies are made – and who have for too long been excluded from political negotiations. After briefly introducing the current state of social protection, I will look at each of these three imperatives in turn.

According to the African Union, social protection is meant to “ensure minimum standards of well-being among people in dire situations to live a life with dignity, and to enhance human capabilities”, and “includes responses by the state and society to protect citizens from risks, vulnerabilities and deprivations”. During the COVID-19 pandemic, existing schemes like cash or food transfers provided an important basis for several governments to scale up support to people affected by lockdowns. Nonetheless, the long-term sustainability of African social policies remains as uncertain after the pandemic as it had been before, being threatened by a limited resource base, economic extraversion, lack of diversification, and capital flight. The expansion and institutionalisation of social protection is hence an ongoing project. The current campaign within the UN for a global fund for social protection aims at building a transnational redistribution mechanism that is based on social rights instead of charity.

While buffering some effects of the ongoing health and economic crises, and while contributing to a certain level of decommodification, social protection cannot substitute for “development proper.” If development has been reduced to complementing private sector-led market integration with poverty reduction, a long-term equitable sharing of wealth will not materialise. Yet, the fact that social rights have been brought back onto the global development agenda, coupled with the growing attention paid to research and evidence, as well as the partial strengthening of states in the course of rolling out social policy, creates an opportunity for re-connecting social policy with longer-term structural transformation. But for collectively building an alternative vision of social change, scholarship will have to stop reproducing the mainstream policy consensus. I am making three suggestions.

Bring global capitalism back into the picture. In his recent critique of congratulatory social protection scholarship, Alf Gunvald Nilsen argues that the underlying power structures leading to inequality and precarity are too often overlooked. As “cash transfers are unlikely to have a transformative impact on the power of capital in production”, he calls for instead addressing exactly those “asymmetries of class power” to achieve “greater equality and freedom”. I endorse his proposition. Thinking too long about the nitty-gritty of targeting procedures and effectiveness measurements, researchers are at risk of losing sight of the bigger picture: the growing concentration of wealth that is captured by a small elite. Understanding what the neoliberal turn means, necessitates a look at class relations. It is not characterised only by a retreat of the state – even though this has been a core pillar of austerity since the 1990s. But more importantly, the neoliberal era rests on a set of global institutions that protect global capital from democratic interference and facilitate its unhindered movement around the world. The consequences are seen in diverse places: foreign investors who crowd out local owners, attacks on labour regulation, precarious working conditions and the privatisation of social services. The task of critical scholarship must be to understand these structural causes of social problems, and move the focus away from the individual level, where social protection all too often looks. This is pertinent for illuminating where real change would have to start.
Rehabilitate historical solutions to social questions. In the search for more transformative visions for equality and freedom, scholars should tap into the wealth of historical experiences of state-led development. The dominant accounts of incapable and inefficient post-independence African states that worsened the economic crises on the continent need a serious counterbalance. The common-sense assumption that states are likely to fail continues to legitimise replacing them with technology, the market, and/or self-responsible business people (kick-started with the help of social protection). Welfare provided by many post-independence governments was not without problems but based on much more holistic approaches to long-term economic inclusion. At the very least, the plans of the time reflect much more ambitious visions of social transformation, political and economic independence, and inclusive nation building. Taking a longue durée perspective can thus be fruitful to bring out the “social policy effects” of other forms of state intervention than social protection in the stricter sense. Supporting agricultural cooperatives, implementing land reform, collectivising ownership of businesses and the means of production should not be dismissed as experiments of the past but scrutinised for lessons for the future.
Form coalitions with the intended “beneficiaries” of social protection. In developing more transformative visions for social justice, engaged scholarship can give voice to those people for whom social protection is supposed to work but who are many times not part of the political process. Recent social policies have often not been introduced in response to popular political demands but in a top-down manner; thought out by politicians, technocrats and “experts” at the centre. Where only a relatively small number of people work in formal employment, unionisation levels are low, and as unions concentrate on social insurance policies, the self-representation of recipients of social assistance is largely absent. However, new policies like cash transfers have generated a new interest in speaking to “the poor.” They are frequently interviewed and surveyed in order to find out how social protection is influencing their lives and how it could be improved. Capitalising on the political interest in study results, research that goes beyond asking predefined questions about predefined programmes could bring new ideas into the discussion. One facet of neoliberalism is the narrowing of the range of thinkable solutions. To escape these confines is a precondition for formulating alternative futures, and would benefit from a powerful coalition of reflexive scholarship and imaginative communities.

Jimi Adesina criticises that even “civil society” has been in part manufactured by the donor community in order to lobby for their social protection agenda. The African Platform for Social Protection, for instance, that has continental headquarters in Nairobi and connects 27 national-level equivalents, was set up in 2008 – supported by international donors. Its expressed aim is to “support the development of effective national social protection policies and programmes and thereby contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and the goals of the African Union Social Policy Framework”. So, one could argue – as Adesina does – that they were created from above and have bought into the mainstream narrative about cash transfers, poverty reduction, and the MDGs. More mainstream than revolutionary, maybe. However, this should not be a reason to miss out on tapping into these evolving structures and to look more closely where connections with the “grassroots” already exist or could be formed. Rather than dismissing them as manufactured, we should work with them, in order to re-connect to those for whom the present order is not enough. By way of an example, the Southern African Social Protection Experts Network has brought policymakers, scholars, and civil society together, including activists, who represent marginalised and otherwise silenced groups. Creating such fora for interaction and avenues for people to exercise their voice, must be a crucial step along the way towards more equality and freedom. If this is enabled by structures that were initially donor-funded, I would call it a pragmatic starting point rather than a non-transformative compromise.

In sum, scholars and activists should dare the balancing act between becoming more practically useful, while radicalising their critique of the status quo. Present social protection policies might not be the solution for ending exploitative global capitalism, but they are providing a momentum for (re-)posing unresolved social questions – at national and global levels. This momentum should be seized. But to have more real-life significance, research must escape the neoliberal mindset, by scrutinising the underlying structures that reproduce inequality, by dusting off historical imaginations, and by forming coalitions with all those activists out there. To envision alternative futures can be one important impetus to moving social protection discourse and practice forward.

Anna Wolkenhauer is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bremen, Germany. She wrote her PhD thesis on state formation and social policy in Zambia and has been involved with social protection advocacy in the SADC region since 2014.

Featured Photograph: Market in Ghana (Eric Nana Gyetuah, 14 November 2017).

Extracting Profits – imperialism, climate change and resistance in Africa

ROAPE

October 7, 2021

In an extract from the preface of the African edition of her book, Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism and the New Scramble for Africa, ROAPE’s Lee Wengraf writes about the failure of the system we live under to resolve the crises it produces, and the centrality of resistance to build an alternative to capitalism in Africa and worldwide.

By Lee Wengraf

2018 seems like a lifetime ago. When Extracting Profit came out that year, the Covid-19 pandemic was two years away. Since then, the world has been plunged into a devastating crisis, with 4.5 million lives lost globally, including close to 200,000 reported deaths on the African continent. The depths of loss and destruction have been immense, both in human and social terms. The overall theme of the book, however, remains the same: the failure of the system we live under to resolve the crises it produces, and the centrality of resistance to build an alternative to capitalism in Africa and worldwide. A number of trends have become more pronounced in the context of a pandemic in the neoliberal era. African economies heavily reliant on oil and other commodities were thrown into recession as the world economy ground to a halt; the inequality of access to healthcare, jobs and services has only accelerated under a system of global vaccine apartheid; and, finally, the fall-out has produced a new round of indebtedness among African nations to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as well as G20 nations including China who holds the largest percent of bilateral African debt. Some older debt payments have been rescheduled but only a tiny portion have been forgiven. The economic pain is sure to reverberate well into the future as African governments turn to budget cuts when loans come due.

Within the span of the pandemic to date, the economic volatility experienced by oil producing countries has seesawed at lightning speed. By mid-2020, global oil prices had fallen into negative territory when a significant drop in demand led to a glut in supply. The gross domestic product (GDP) of many oil-producing nations in Africa crashed to levels not seen in years. Countries such as Nigeria imposed brutal cuts and retrenchments on workers. According to the IMF, the country’s GDP shrunk in 2020 by 1.8%, with predictions of a 2.5% growth in 2021. Since that time, oil has “re-bounded”: as of August, 2021, the price of Brent crude had climbed back to $65 per barrel. Yet the IMF does not expect most African countries to return to pre-pandemic per capita income levels until 2025.

African economies are unevenly integrated into the global system, meaning that the centers of capital accumulation primarily lie elsewhere. The deeply unequal global distribution of Covid vaccines mirrors this unevenness: the lack of access to vaccines across the Global South has been nothing short of criminal. By late summer 2021, when countries in the Global North began rolling out plans for booster shots, only about 24 million people in Africa, just 1.7% of the population, were fully vaccinated. Activists are now re-visiting the lessons of successful struggles for full access to generic HIV drugs such as South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), demanding an end to Covid vaccine patents and free healthcare for all.

The pandemic has erupted at a moment of climate emergency. The inextricable connection between fossil fuels and environment-destroying extraction has been well-established for decades but the crisis has unfolded since 2018 at a breath-taking pace. Sites of extraction have devastated communities across the continent, from gas flaring and oil spills to ground-water and soil contamination. In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a stunning warning that the globe is approaching permanent, irreparable harm, and that a major structural intervention is the only hope to avoid disaster. The evidence for these conditions has never been in short supply in Africa, as elsewhere: the Amazon Basin, now a net emitter of carbon dioxide; unprecedented levels of hazardous weather conditions, from flooding to fires; and the frightening rise in global temperatures.

The scale of the crisis has become so massive that capital and the ruling class are now compelled to grapple with the problem. Fossil fuel producers and political leaders have set targets for reduced emissions. But to date, globally, the proposed “solutions” are limited to the same market-based framework of carbon off-sets: machinations which provide a way to maintain fossil fuel production under the guise of “net zero.” Shell, for example, plans on growing its gas business by 20% over the next five years despite its declared emissions targets. That fossil fuel industries are even contemplating emissions curbs is a testament to the power of the global climate movement who have long demanded a just transition to truly sustainable resources. Yet activists have rightly denounced the non-solutions on offer as greenwashing distortions by the oil industry.

A new race for these so-called green investments is escalating, fueling competition between oil and gas companies aiming to diversify their portfolios. In early 2021, corporations such as BP and Total spent unprecedented amounts to lease offshore wind projects. The same dynamic is unfolding with other products such as water and solar-based energy supplies. Unsurprisingly, oil and gas companies are not exiting the world stage quietly. The scale of their investment in a polluting industry is just too large. The world’s largest banks have provided $3.8tn to fossil fuel companies since the signing of the Paris agreement in 2015. In a highly competitive “green” future, these corporations are relying on their climate-destroying businesses to fund the inevitable and costly “transition” to a more sustainable, albeit market-based, one. And much as the prices of primary commodities like oil are subject to the boom and bust cycles of the unplanned and unregulated market under capitalism, today there’s a glut in renewable technologies. The over-supply in the renewables industry will inevitably face the same contradictions as fossil fuels: the same cycles of declining profitability, collapse, and job loss.

African nations are among the least prepared for a shift to renewables because of the scale of the investment required and fossil fuel-producing states in Africa are heavily reliant on those exports for revenue; nations such as Angola, Nigeria and South Sudan rely on oil for almost 100% of their foreign exchange earnings. Yet according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the African continent represents the most dire need with regards to access to electricity: they project that by 2030, up to 650 million people – 80% of the global total – will not have access.

The contradictions of sustaining fossil fuel-based economies in an evolving climate crisis have compelled an array of what environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey has called “techno-fixes”: so-called “clean” geoengineering technologies representing innovation and industrial growth in some African nations. Yet a strategy that seeks “value adds” in environment-destroying industries places economic growth on a collision course with any possibility of a sustainable transition. As activists and critics of extraction-based economies have long pointed out, “green” strategies cannot be merely layered upon destructive industries; the underlying basis of the economy must be undone in its entirety, and quickly.

In May 2021, the IEA made a stunning announcement: in their report Net Zero by 2050, they declared that to realize this goal, all fossil fuel projects must cease by 2021. For the energy body to issue such a warning underscored the accelerated reckoning confronting the oil and gas industry. But for the Global South in particular, as Namibian activist Ina-Maria Shikongo has pointed out, the framework of “net zero” grants a cover to corporate practices to pollute still further. The dynamics of colonial and post-colonial state-building in Africa tended to produce nations with a weak regulatory environment, reinforced with structural adjustment conditionalities imposing privatization and liberalization. At a moment when fossil fuel production is under fire, high profile extraction projects in Africa are making headway, seemingly beyond the glare of regulatory scrutiny. Harmful exploratory drilling is currently underway in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Okavango spanning Namibia and Botswana, threatening to displace the San indigenous people and the area’s extensive wildlife. The French oil giant Total along with the Chinese state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation are building the controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline through regions of Tanzania and Uganda rich in biodiversity.

As Shikongo suggests, the growing pressures towards tighter corporate emissions standards beg the question of whether their “carbon footprints” will be exported to Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. In many ways, this is not a new development: studies have shown that the continent has long been a dumping ground for pollution from the Global North. As oil prices experience a new boom and consumption surges relative to a decade ago – the pandemic-driven price volatility notwithstanding – pressures to hold onto fossil fuel investments will continue, intensified by the cost of transitioning to sustainable technologies that will run into the trillions of dollars. The political leaders of poor nations like Namibia – currently without any onshore oil extraction – will be compelled to navigate the tension between their own environmental commitments and the revenue-generating opportunities drilling offers.

The “new scramble for Africa” of the twenty-first century has been a rush for fossil fuels: oil, minerals and natural gas. With an accelerating turn to sustainable energy sources, the global race for raw materials used in clean energy is on, many of which are plentiful on the African continent such as lithium, copper and cobalt for electric vehicles. But just as the drive for raw materials has been an engine for imperialism in Africa in both the colonial and post-colonial eras, the dynamics of the current global turn to renewables echo those historical relations: extraction and export with minimal industrial development. Oil majors’ massive investments in the manufacturing and marketing of green technologies predominantly takes place in the Global North and China. Construction in Africa of urgently needed alternative energy plants such as wind and solar farms are a minuscule portion of global development. The need for a world based on renewables is urgent. But as long as these energy sources are tied to the oil industry, and the market in general, the limitations and contradictions of meeting human need in a capitalist society will prevail.

China currently dominates clean energy manufacturing and technological development, and controls access to large shares of the world’s “green minerals.” China’s long-term strategic orientation on primary commodity extraction and infrastructure development in Africa, for one, shores up their competitive edge in a sustainabls- dominated landscape. These conditions further sharpen the rivalry between China and the United States; the dynamics of a competitive global system under capitalism promises that a “green” imperialism and a struggle over control of those resources will emerge.

When Extracting Profit was written, the Obama presidency in the US had recently concluded, a period marked by a widened military footprint through the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) and an escalation of drone warfare. Yet in 2018, the US declared a shift in global imperial strategy from “counter-terror” to a focus on “peer competitors,” chiefly China but also Russia and other powers. For Africa, the US foreign policy establishment recognizes that China’s investments are a long-term, strategic priority, one that it has been pursuing on a range of fronts and from which it will not easily retreat.

As the Daraja edition of the book was going to press, the 20-year US war in Afghanistan was brought to an ignominious end with the return of the Taliban to power. With US credibility weakened, how the geopolitics of the inter-imperial rivalry between it and China will unfold, and the implications for Africa, is unclear. On the one hand, if the center of gravity of these tensions shifts more decisively to the Pacific, the strategic importance of Africa’s proximity to the Middle East – and US concerns with “stability” on the continent in general – may also shift. On the other hand, US support for “war-making” in Africa has taken on a dynamic of its own, where states and the African Union now have an apparatus to pursue their own security agendas including safeguarding energy resources. As Samar Al-Bulushi has pointed out, “While each of the governments in question are formally allies of the US, their actions are not reducible to US directives.” More broadly, intensifying inter-imperial rivalries – compounded with the drive for sustainable resources and the instability of the climate emergency – promise to reverberate globally. The world’s major powers undoubtedly will still aim to project power and minimize instability threatening investment potential in Africa through alliances with local ruling classes nurtured in the name of “partnership.”

In 2021, oil and gas corporations suffered a series of stinging losses in decades-long legal challenges brought by residents of oil producing communities. Most recently, a Nigerian court settled a 30-year-old claim against Shell for a spill that took place during the 1967-70 Biafran war, ordering damages of over $111 million. All of these legal victories are the culmination of grassroots organizing sustained and grown over a long period of time.

The current fight to stop drilling in the Okavango in Namibia has birthed a coalition of indigenous and environmental justice organizations across southern Africa, determined to halt potentially irreversible harm. Across the continent, activists are demanding a carbon-free future for all, Global North and South alike. They have also been forced to take on the state violence of governments relying on repression to manage the crisis of poverty exacerbated by the pandemic lockdown. The Nigerian police deployed their Covid task force to confront the massive #EndSARS revolts against police brutality. Social movement forces such as the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi have reported on heightened violence of the police under lockdown conditions including the murder and detention of those who resist. Struggles against policing and militarization resonate far beyond their borders, against a backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement.

Since the book’s original publication, the scale of the climate emergency has accelerated a consciousness of our shared future. The solutions on offer from the ruling classes worldwide are proving utterly bankrupt in both the immediate and the long-term, growing an awareness that a sustainable transition must be driven by social need and not profit. Beneath the empty promises for a cleaner environment and the pandemic’s end, the contradictions of the twin crises have exposed how deeply wedded corporations are to accumulation at all costs. They will not voluntarily break from a system that has served the capitalist class so well. It will require resistance and organization on a previously unseen scale. Linked struggles across borders – from pipelines to public health demands – are gathering strength, at a moment when they are desperately needed. The urgency of an alternative to extraction and the climate nightmare, inequality, imperialism and the war on terror was the original impetus for writing this book. That reality is no less true today.

The new African edition of Lee Wengraf’s book Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism and the New Scramble for Africa published by Daraja Press is available here

Lee Wengraf is an activist based in New York City, contributing editor to the Review of African Political Economy and author of Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the New Scramble for Africa (Daraja Press, 2021). Follow her on twitter here.

Featured Photograph: The photo shows an oil spill from an abandoned Shell Petroleum Development Company in Olobiri, Niger Delta (Ed Kashi, 2004). The image is taken from the cover of Wengraf’s book.

The Hate Paradigm – How Africa was demonised in the West

ROAPE

October 5, 2021

Reviewing a new book, the Congolese historian, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, asks how Africa was demonisation by non-Africans, and Westerners in particular, to generate the hatred and discrimination against Black Africans and their descendants until today? Nzongola-Ntalaja writes that Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media by Milton Allimadi provides excellent answers to this question, with powerful examples of institutionalised racism from major Western media.

By Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

In his award-winning and highly acclaimed book, The Invention of Africa (1988), Congolese philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe provides a compelling analysis of how the idea of Africa was initially conceived by non-Africans as “a paradigm of difference.” By this he means the way Europeans looked at Africans as “the other”. Even today, after students of human origins have conclusively shown that fully modern homo sapiens, the ancestors of all humanity, evolved entirely in Africa before spreading to other parts of the world, racists in the West and other parts of the world continue to believe in the inferiority of Black Africans and their descendants.

According to the American historian Christopher Ehret, the peoples of Africa “participated integrally in the great transformations of world history from the first rise of agricultural ways of life, to the various inventions of metalworking, to the growth and spread of global networks of commerce”. Ehret also shows how the Afrasian civilization, which originated in the Horn of Africa, expanded into the Ethiopian Highlands, and had a great impact on the Red Sea Hills and in Egypt. Contacts with the outside world before the Atlantic era were also established through the trans-Saharan trade involving the great West African empires and the historic scholarly centre of Timbuktu, on the one hand, and through the trading city-states along the Indian Ocean coast, on the other.

Given this implication of Africa into the world system on largely equal terms, how did its demonization by non-Africans, and Westerners in particular, originate to become a major factor in the hatred and discrimination against Black Africans and their descendants until today? In Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media, Milton Allimadi provides excellent answers to this question, with mind-boggling examples of institutionalized racism from The New York Times and other major Western media. The book is divided into four parts, each examining a key aspect of the demonization of Africa, namely, (1) How the primitive image of Africa was created and universally disseminated; (2) How the great African military victories against European imperialists have been trivialized; (3) The covering of Africa by racist correspondents and editors of Western media; and (4) How Africa is relegated to the backwaters in these mass-consumption publications.

Allimadi is correct in tying the primitive image of the African by Westerners to “the expansion of the European capitalist economy on a global scale” (p. 4). To rationalize slave labour and the looting of Africa, the Africans themselves had to be dehumanized. For those who reaped benefits from slave labour like Thomas Jefferson, and the states and industrialists for whom the so-called explorers served as intelligence gatherers for Africa’s abundant natural resources, needed to dehumanize enslaved Africans and the inhabitants of the lands to be looted, respectively. Owned or sponsored by capitalist entrepreneurs, Western media treated Africa as a case of isolation and difference. With their very humanity denied, Black Africans were portrayed as “barbarians,” “primitives,” “tribal people,” “uncivilized,” and “peoples without history.”

One of the most idiotic acts of the European intelligence gatherers was their claim of “discovering” rivers, lakes, and mountains, which they then baptized with the names of their kings, queens, or other illustrious persons, when these natural sites already had local names. For example, Samuel Baker renamed the lake known as Luta N’zige, one of the sources of the River Nile on the border of Uganda and the Congo, “Lake Albert,” in honour of the husband of Queen Victoria, the British monarch. Unfortunately, the rulers of postcolonial Africa have kept most of these European-given names, including Victoria Falls, Lake Victoria, and Lake Edward.

Another interesting example of European arrogance and its limits is shown in chapter 4 of Manufacturing Hate, in which Allimadi recounts the conversation between Baker and Comoro, an elder and an organic intellectual of the Lotuko people of South Sudan. In this encounter between Baker, an allegedly superior human, and an African “savage,” it was the latter and not Baker who won virtually all the arguments. Of the two, it was the African who grounded his discourse in material reality instead of superstition.

Likewise, Allimadi shows how the European myth of African docility is contradicted by armed resistance to the colonial conquest by great African warriors such as Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi of Sudan, Samori Ture of what is today Guinea, and Empress Taytu Betul and Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia. The victories at Khartoum and Adwa are discussed at length in Part II of the book. The author is obviously happy to celebrate the victories of African armies over better equipped European imperialists, but also to “dispel the myth of imperial invincibility and the canard that Africans welcomed European domination” (p. 42).

While acknowledging the charisma and popularity of the Mahdi, Allimadi does not place the Mahdist movement in Sudan within the overall Sufi resistance to European colonialism in the 19^th century, which includes Samori Ture and other jihadists like Al-Hajj Umar Tall of the Tukulor Empire. As a Nubian Sufi leader of the Samaniyya order, Muhmmad Ahmad defeated the Egyptians in 1883 and was declared the Mahdi. His next challenge, and a very big one, was his ten-month siege of British and Egyptian forces in Khartoum, Sudan, who were commanded by the highly decorated General Charles George Gordon, nicknamed “Chinese Gordon” for his exploits in China. The Mahdists defeated his army and killed him on 26 January, 1885. Mahdi died unexpectedly five months later, but his Dervish state survived for 13 years under his successor, Abdullah ibn Muhammad al-Khalifa, until the defeat of the Mahdists at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 by General Horatio Herbert Kitchener.

The other glorious victory over imperialism was the one engineered by Empress Taytu and Emperor Menelik II at the Battle of Adwa, where an Italian army of 17,000 troops was annihilated in a single day, between 6:00 a.m. and noon on 1 March,1896. With the Ethiopians using European weapons of the same quality as those of the Italians, this encounter demonstrated that given the same arsenal, Africans could, with appropriate strategy and devotion to the task at hand, defeat European armies. Adwa is widely celebrated across Africa and in the African diaspora worldwide as “Africa’s victory.”

On the other hand, falsifying reality in the name of “the manifest destiny” of the white man, The New York Times, as cited by Allimadi, depicted the attempted Italian conquest as a noble task designed to impose “civilization and Christianity over barbarians and savages, over unbelief, over habits of ferocity, over brutal ignorance of every human law, religious, social, and civil” (p. 47). As Allimadi points out, Christianity was established as Ethiopia’s state religion in 330 CE. Ironically, the newspaper clearly indicated in the same article the real Italian objectives, which were mainly economic, and the main reason why the Times was behind colonial conquests in Africa.

Italy’s defeat in Ethiopia was greatly felt as humiliation, not only for being denied access to Ethiopia’s economic and strategic assets, but also for a white country to be defeated by a black one. Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist dictator, could not rest until he could avenge the humiliation of 1896. With large armies in its neighbouring colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somalia, Mussolini had no great difficulty invading Ethiopia on 3 October 1935, with 30,000 troops, 1,000 trucks, and large supplies of mustard gas. Once again, The New York Times on 6 May, 1936, applauded Mussolini’s show of force with fifty planes flying over Addis Ababa, the Ethiopia’s capital, forcing Emperor Haile Selassie to leave the capital and go into exile. The Italians committed heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity, with their reckless use of mustard gas and the imposition of a veritable reign of terror all over the country.

Allimadi’s discussion of the retaliation against Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia between 1935 and 1941 is incomplete, since he devotes only one paragraph of chapter 8 to this important fight for the recovery of the sovereignty of a state that had been in existence since Biblical times. It is true that the mobilization of African American and Afro-Caribbean volunteers for military action in Ethiopia did present enormous logistical challenges, but some of these men did make it to the Motherland to fight Italians, as shown in Joseph E. Harris’s book African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936-1941. The father of the late Howard University professor Abiyi Ford was one of them.

The author credits the defeat of Mussolini’s army in 1941 to “British forces in Africa … fighting with Ethiopian guerrillas” (p. 54). But this is not the whole story. The Allies had entrusted this task to the British because of the latter’s colonial presence in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, British Somaliland, Kenya, and Uganda. Thus, except for officers, the “British forces” in question were mostly Africans from these colonies and those from Nigeria and Southern Rhodesia, plus troops from India. A very important addition to the Abyssinian Campaign of 1941 was a large contingent from the Belgian Congo, solicited by the British from the Governor General of the colony, with the obvious agreement of the useless Belgian government in exile in London, financed to the tune of £40 million from its rich colony.

On 29 February 2012, I received an email from Lensa Idossa, an Ethiopian student at Columbia University, asking me to explain why there is a place in his town of Dembi Dollo in Western Ethiopia called “The Congo Cemetery.” I replied that hundreds of Congolese soldiers from the Force Publique (FP), the colonial army, had died to free Ethiopia from Italian Fascism. Three major victories were won by the Congolese as follows: 11 March 1941, at Asosa; 23 March at Gambela; and 3 July at Saïo, which is now known as Dembi Dollo. Here, nine Italian generals, one colonel, 370 officers, 2,574 Italian non-commissioned officers and soldiers, and 1,533 Eritrean non-commissioned officers and soldiers surrendered to the FP. Thus, if the Battle of Gondar under British command in November 1941 was the ultimate defeat of Italy in Ethiopia, its capitulation to the Belgian Congo at Saïo had been a blow from which it could not recover fully. More than 500 Congolese lost their lives during the “Abyssinian Campaign,” including 245 soldiers (of which 42 were killed on the battlefield and 195 due to gun wounds or disease) and 274 porters.

For two years after my email exchange with Idossa, a fire inside me urged me to visit the battlefields where Congolese soldiers fought in 1941. I finally found my way to Western Ethiopia with a three-day visit to Gambela in early August 2014, including a full-day trip to Dembi Dollo, site of the FP’s greatest victory and the “Congo Cemetery,” on 3 August, and a two-day trip to Asosa from 6-8 August. These visits were all very disappointing. Except for the Ethiopian citizens who were kind enough to show me around, there were no plaques for the battlefields and the cemetery in Dembi Dollo. Some of the graves were still visible but the whole area was simply bush and likely to disappear if the Ethiopian and Congolese governments fail to honour this burial ground.

If Allimadi is correct about the trivializing of Africa’s military victories by Western media, African governments must also be blamed for neglecting to mark the sites where they took place for historical memory and to honour the soldiers who died there.

Part Three of the book focuses on biased reporting on Africa by Western media, with examples from The New York Times, Time magazine and other publications, most of which were for long-time supporters of the apartheid system of white supremacy in South Africa. Freedom fighters like the Kenyans of the Land and Freedom Party, who were derogatorily referred to as “Mau Mau,” their counterparts in the fight against settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa, and South West Africa (now Namibia), as well as those fighting against Portuguese Fascism and ultra-colonialism were invariably called “terrorists.” The crimes committed by the white minority regimes in settler states and the Portuguese in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique were far greater in savagery than anything carried out by freedom fighters. Allimadi relates information from hearings by UK courts with documented evidence of “barbaric forms of torture by the British colonial authorities” during the “Emergency” in Kenya between 1952 and 1956.

In the case of the Congo, it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that “Mobutu handed Lumumba over to Tshombe” (p. 76) because the assassination of Patrice Lumumba was a joint undertaking by the United States and Belgium, and Moise Tshombe was a Belgian puppet whose Katanga province was under the full control of Belgian civil servants and military officers. Moreover, Tshombe did not “preside” over Lumumba’s demise (p.114), as this was the work of a Belgian execution squad.

The strongest point Allimadi makes with Congo’s example is the double standard in the Western media’s valuing of white lives compared to those of Blacks. Following the Belgian paratrooper drop in Stanleyville (Kisangani today) from US military transport planes on 24 November 1964, Time magazine and other major Western media had no shame focusing their attention on one American medical doctor and the other 70 whites killed, and simply mentioning that over a thousand Congolese were also killed in a tragic drama involving the Belgian paratroopers, racist white mercenaries, and Lumumba’s followers then in control of the city. For these media, the life of one white person was obviously more important than that of a multitude of Blacks.

In Part IV, Allimadi looks at how Africa is relegated to the backwaters from a Eurocentric perspective, which continues to perpetuate the Black inferiority complex, the identification of Africans with “tribesmen,” and the Western media’s cavalier approach to Africa. First, Allimadi takes Alan Cowell to task for his patronizing and racist article in The New York Times Magazine of 5 April, 1992, in which he argued that the Congolese have failed to manage the state inherited from Belgium, on account of Cowell’s failure to seriously examine the underlying causes of state fragility in the Congo, including the Belgians’ own responsibility for state decay. Then, he rightly dismisses Paul Johnson’s plea on the 18 April, 1993, issue of the same magazine for the recolonization of Africa. Allimadi’s response to him, which applies to Cowell and all other adherents of Eurocentrism, is worth quoting. He writes that Johnson “conveniently ignored the reality of the colonial agenda—to exploit Africa’s resources and cheap labor, to continue enforcing trading patterns that benefit industrialized countries at Africa’s expense, and not to prepare Africans to … run their own affairs” (p. 93).

The third major writer that Allimadi takes to task is the notorious Afropessimist Robert D. Kaplan, whose doomsday scenario of Africa’s plunge into endless poverty and disaster is outlined in his article in The Atlantic Monthly of March 1994. Closely related to this relegation of Africa to the backwaters is the pseudo-scientific division of the people of Africa into different “tribes” or creating “noble Africans” versus “true Negroes” as Alex Shoumatoff does in his provocative and racist article on Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda in The New Yorker of 20 June 1992.

Despite their short length, chapters XIV and XV, on “Africa and the Black Inferiority Complex” and “Africans Are Not ‘Tribesmen’,” respectively, are extremely useful in consciousness raising for Africans and their descendants in the African diaspora worldwide. Allimadi does a great job in going back to the classics like The Black Jacobins of C.L.R. James (1938) and Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon (1952), which ought to remain required reading for combatting the inferiority complex and negative stereotypes likely to lead to self-hatred and rejection of the Black heritage and the 1960’s empowerment motto that “Black is Beautiful.”

As for “tribe” and the “tribal,” these are notions invented during the transatlantic slave trace and codified by anthropology as the colonial science par excellence to divide and conquer the peoples of Africa. Today, the use of these terms in connection with African ethnic groups comprising millions of souls in virtually all occupational categories of the modern world and some of which outnumber many European countries in population is nothing but ridiculous.

Overall, this is an outstanding work of scholarship, and one that should be read by undergraduates and students enrolled in studies of journalism and communications generally, as well as by the general public. It is very timely, given the increasing migrations of peoples of colour to Europe and North America, which is being exploited by right-wing extremism. The latter is once again raising its ugly face against black and brown peoples in a struggle to reinforce white supremacy and privilege.

Since this book is about the Western world, it is imperative to note that in this age of globalization, the demonization of people with black skins is not limited to whites in Europe and the Americas. African merchants and students in China complain about xenophobia, racism, and outright discrimination in doing business, housing, and the job market. But one area of the world for which a study of the kind that Allimadi has produced is urgently needed is the Arab world, which comprises North Africa and Sudan. The Darfur conflict over the last 20 years pitting Sudanese of Arab culture against those of African culture has involved crimes of genocide, as brown and black Arabs have been killing and raping non-Arab Blacks, whom they call abd or “slaves,” to confiscate their lands and ethnically cleanse them from areas they have lived in for centuries. Likewise, Black African migrants in Libya seeking an imagined Eldorado on the other side of the Mediterranean and Black Libyan supporters of the late head of state Muammar Qaddafi have been tortured, raped, killed, or reduced to commodities for human trafficking since the NATO invention of 2011, mostly for their skin colour.

The millennium-old Arab/Muslim slave trade has a lot to do with the complicated relations between Arab and Black Africans. Since the incorporation of North Africa into the Dar al-Islam in the 7th century CE, the region of the continent below the Sahara Desert became the Dar al-Kufr, the abode of the unbelief, or the Dar al-Harb, the realm of war, where captives could be found for enslavement. For both Arabs and the Amazigh or “Berbers,” the bilad as-Sudan, or the “land of the blacks,” became “a paradigm of difference,” as it was for Europeans. Generally, North Africans are reluctant to identify themselves with Africa. What does the future hold in store for African-Arab relations?

Milton Allimadi’s book Manufacturing Hate: How Africa was Demonized in Western Media can be purchased directly from the publisher here.

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, a Professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill is the author of numerous books including Patrice Lumumba (2014) and The Congo From Leopold To Kabila: A People’s History (2002) which won the 2004 Best Book Award of the African Politics Conference Group (APCG). Read the roape.net interview with Nzongola-Ntalaja conducted by ROAPE’s Ben Radley here.

A version of this review was posted on Black Star News (New York) on 13 September 2021.

Global Lenin

ROAPE

September 30, 2021

Adam Mayer celebrates a new volume on the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Lenin150 (Samizdat) has a sheer diversity that takes one’s breath away. Authors young and old, queer and old-style Marxist-Leninist, women and men write about Lenin’s work, history and legacy in an anthology that also includes many African and Black voices. Mayer argues that this rich collection proves that Leninism is alive and well.

By Adam Mayer

Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn, the main editor of this magnificent edited volume of socialist theory, history and literary art (especially poetry), as well as a collection of Lenin visuals presented via art photography and a number of other mediums, has created a celebratory tome to mark the 150^th birthday of Lenin. The picture presented in the volume is one of the Leninists’ Lenin (with partial exceptions), but he and his co-editors certainly did not aim at conveying a composite historical account that would include every possible voice from Russian Orthodox priests’ through neoliberal pundits’ and new right fascists’, to the Vatican’s or the Taliban’s conception of Lenin and his historical role. Rather, the work comes together as a well composed symphony with magnificently presented, interwoven themes: with lots of humor, nuance, drama and self-awareness, but also (to use the editor’s favourite term), lots of real, unadulterated, pure joy.

In some cases, themes disappear and re-appear, as when one of our subculture’s favourite taboos, the fact that ‘state socialism’ as an economic system was designed by Yevgeni Preobrazhensky as late as 1926 is mentioned in one of the multiple Introductions (p.6) and then again on p. 229 – but how delightful, how relevant, how deep this discussion on this much forgotten topic here is! Matthew T. Huber’s chapter, for example, goes into the highly controversial topic of the concept’s provenance. Preobrazhensky was initially allied to Trotsky within the Left Opposition and Stalin, after ‘eliminating’ the entire Left Opposition in the 1930s, including Preobrazhensky, unleashed the most ruthless industrialization by dispossessing the peasantry – all in the name of ‘state socialism’.

Such themes, rich and sometimes surprising as in possible connections between Aleister Crowley and Lenin (in Oxana Timofeeva’s intriuguing chapter, ‘What Lenin Teaches Us About Witchcraft’), appear and re-appear in visual rhythms not so much as in a kaleidoscope than as in fireworks – of the most spectacular kind. (And yes, Joffre includes a People’s Republic of China scholar on Lenin, Wang Hui, as well as a Western Marxist theologian (!) who works in China).

Joffre’s Lenin is a decolonial Lenin first and foremost. He is called a “non-White man” (p. xviii) and this is as well, given Lenin’s Tatar features and Russian, Jewish, German/Swedish and also Kalmyk ancestry, as well as sturdy peasant build – but more importantly, his stunning and steadfast opposition to chauvinism and Great Russian (or any other European) ethnic pride, condescension, and “leading role” in the multi-ethnic state he led.

Lenin shines here, throughout the edited volume, as the architect of the Affirmative Action/Positive Discrimination Empire, of the early USSR. This revolutionary state has such a bad reputation among the billionaires of today that one of them, a Russian oligarch (Vitaly Malkin) wrote, published and is sponsoring the free distribution of a work that links this emancipatory, multicultural social construction of the early 1920s to today’s BLM, and to Black Power – even the class enemy notices that Lenin’s legacy is at the core of the liberation of the Black woman and the Black man, as well as Asian, Russian, European and American woman and man (as oppressors and oppressed, of course, are both deformed by the same oppression).

This brings me to Joffre’s background, which is in theatre for peace, and the theatre of the oppressed, in post-conflict and conflict zones: Joffre is someone extremely and pointedly human. Only partly incidentally, my own region (post-‘state socialist’ East-Central Europe) is really the only place that is not represented in this magnificent collection of diverse authors – Hungary, once a country of a 1919 Soviet and of Georg Lukács, is not famous for its Leninists in the last decades. Joffre’s connections are as strong among theorists as within the world of theatre and he presents us with a Swiss female actress playing Lenin (Ursina Lardi) in an interview that enlightens and thrills.

The sheer diversity of the collection takes one’s breath away. Authors young and old, queer and old-style Marxist-Leninist, women and men submitted texts for this anthology, in English, German (translated by Joffre and also by Patrick Anderson), French (translated by Patrick Anderson), Russian (translated by G. Mamedov) and most importantly, Spanish and Portuguese (translated by the Spanish native speaker Joffre). The richness of Latin-American analysis and theory here, could be enough to fill a volume in itself. Indeed, for the average Anglophone speaker, who would be likely to learn about new Marxist ideas from Latin-America chiefly from Naomi Klein’s books (the author of this review includes himself in this category), this collection is a revelation on those riches: Bórquez, Cordero, Boron, del Roio’s interventions are stellar.

Another ‘decolonial’ group of Leninists whose works appear in this reader are ex-Soviet Central Asians: contemporary and late authors from Kyrgyzstan (Mamedov, Bokonbaev), Tajikistan (Suyarkulova). The visuals (edited by Johann Salazar) are photos of Lenin statues, bas-reliefs, mosaics, and frescos that stand (decaying) in the Republic of Kyrgyzstan, as well as images that aficionados of Soviet Bus Stops (also known as Facebook’s Brutalism Appreciation Society, British Brutalism Appreciation Society, etc.) will recognize.

The experiences of Central Asians and Russians are not silenced here – any academic from a global periphery or semi-periphery will understand how important this is. There is (to the utmost satisfaction of the author of this review) even an East German thinker, the son of GDR diplomats, Michael Brie, whose extremely subtle take on how Lenin should inform today’s Left, was not excluded by the authors. Indian voices, Vijay Prashad’s and also a contribution by a South Asian thinker from South Africa, Vashna Jagarnath’s, are also represented. In addition, Lenin’s oeuvre is problematized, criticized, and even (in comradely debate) attacked here (Kevin B. Anderson).

For a review in ROAPE, it is particularly exciting to note that African and Black voices are crucial for the editors. Joffre starts off the compilation with quotes by George Floyd and Langston Hughes (p. xii), commends the USSR for caring, celebrating and even paying royalties for young Congolese poets’ “public self-expression” (pp. 6-8). This is in the spirit of a critical solidarity with Lenin (p. xviii) and the attitude characterized by the quote “to grudgingly defend certain aspects of the 70+ year legacy of the USSR and other Communist experiments (p. ix).” African authors in the collection are: Vashna Jagarnath (pp. 51-60), Michael Neocosmos (pp. 201-212), and Maloadi Wa Sekake (pp. 213-224).

Jagarnath’s essay draws from Issa Shivji’s analysis of NGOization (“Within this context, NGOs are neither a third sector, nor independent of the state”) and stresses the specifically proletarian nature of both the 1905 Revolution in Russia (with its quintessentially proletarian weapon: the mass strike), and that of Lenin’s fight, with relevance today for South Africa and the continent. Three and a half thousand South Africans own as much as the bottom 32 million in the country (p. 53), making South Africa the most unequal country in the world – with 30% in the reserve army of labour. Marikana has 50 communal water taps for 60,000 families: a scandal.

Jagarnath refutes the importance of the technical shrinking of the proletariat in South Africa and elsewhere, by reminding us that Russia in 1917 had less than 20% of the populace classified as workers (and as we know even this is a liberal figure). Even though a minority, the employed, organized worker is an anchor for the compound, and will actively shape the consciousness of the people that she or he helps or lives with. In the West, where the sharing of food in kinship groups or the neighborhood is not seen any more, this is not expected – but in less individualistic, more communal, more humanistic formations, it is widespread still.

Michael Neocosmos of South Africa, a CODESRIA researcher, discusses the problem of the bureaucracy for Lenin after the Revolution. He points out how Lenin wanted to educate the unions, whereas Trotsky wanted to control them (p. 205). He also hails Chinese efforts, including Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in destroying bourgeois culture, and recommends following these examples in Africa (p. 209). Molaodi Wa Sekake, also of South Africa, quotes Ostrovsky on the liberation of humankind, opposes constructing a hagiography even for Lenin, posits that ANC and FRELIMO are today busy turning Lenin into a Trojan horse for neoliberalism in South Africa and Angola (p. 215), where the ANC also uses Lenin to pacify the masses (p. 214), whilst the academy is guilty of promoting pseudo-revolutionary speak (p. 218) – points we find difficult to disagree with! Lenin and the colonial question, Lenin as anti-imperialist (the constructor of the very theory of anti-imperialism) is also discussed (p. 220) in this chapter. There are, he warns, still, racist Leninists.

Whether Lenin was principally a political actor, a political actor-cum-theorist, or a theorist, depends on the authors’ vantage point and analysis. Lukács and his construction/deconstruction/analysis of Lenin’s thought figures strongly here, but other authors of this compendium deny that the idea of the vanguard party would have been central to Lenin’s thought (this is in the opinion of Renault, p. 193, who also calls Lenin “a calculator”), emphasizing his prudence instead of his take on the vanguard party (which he considers entirely tactical!) Others, especially thinkers from Africa, Asia and South America, see Lenin principally as the author of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism – theory that arguably, may well be seen on par with Marx’s very own contribution to theory, worldwide.

An exception within this collection that presents a decolonial Lenin, is Slavoj Zizek in his chapter. Zizek did not consider this a minor assignment and he offers us here an extremely elegant, well thought-out, as well as scandalously un-decolonial, picture of Lenin. His historical points, even the most controversial that Stalin won against the Left Opposition by offering normalcy after ten years of war and mayhem: this is an argument that one finds difficult to contest. However, Zizek also claims here that “Communism is a European event, if there ever was one.” He brings neo-traditonalist Southern examples of rolling back Euro-centric epistemicide but claims this has nothing to do with Marxism (p. 292). He alleges that “capitalism functions much better when its excesses are regulated by some ancient tradition,” an assertion that is easy to make but more difficult to defend, and one that is easily contradicted by an even cursory analysis of today’s Nigerian political economy (very few would assert that Nigerian capitalism “functions well,” beyond producing profits for a small elite class). But more importantly even, Zizek forgets completely about the entire history of Marxist-Leninist states (from Mali through Guinea Conakry and Congo Republic, from Burkina Faso to Sudan, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and Madagascar, not to mention the role that Communism played in and around the ANC during the fight against apartheid) and also about African Marxist theory.

From Cabral through Fanon to Rodney, we may here make mention of African radicals, Marxists and (occasionally) Leninists, Eduardo Mondlane, Stephanie Urdang, Bernard Magubane, Ndeh Ntumazah, A. M. Babu, Thandika Mkandawire, Issa Shivji, Ernest Wamba Dia Wamba, Dani Wadada Nabudere, Ruth First, Ifeoma Okoye, Bade Onimode, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Amina Mama, Baruch Hirson, Govan Mbeki, Yusufu Bala Usman, Claude Ake, Biodun Jeyifo, Akin Adesokan, Biko Agozino, Ali Mazrui, Mahmood Mamdani, Baba Aye, and Usman Tar, as well as the recently deceased giant of decolonial Marxism and Leninism in Africa, Samir Amin. The African People’s Republics, and fighters such as Thomas Sankara, matter for Africa and for the World. Zizek once said that the worst part of Adorno and Horkheimer was that in all their works, one finds no reference to even the very existence of the GDR – and we can only salute Zizek for this incredibly pertinent point. What we see here though, is similar – Zizek is implicitly denying the validity of Africa’s Leninist moment, Marxist history, and the relevance of Communism for Africa (and Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas) by his historical European exceptionalism. This is no small matter. Communism is a global event, if ever there was one.

But Zizek does not define this anthology. The wealth of dialectical analysis here is staggering, and the tone set by Prashad and the South Africans (as well as Joffre’s unequivocal stance on the ongoing Kulturkampf, as it concerns Black people).

It is important to note that none of the contributors to this magnificent, multifaceted gem of a volume, see reason to embrace Lenin’s now increasingly problematic ‘line’ on the question of individual human rights (which of course he had labelled a ‘bourgeois distraction’), or his silence (or worse) on women’s issues as ‘political questions’. This also in turn proves that Leninism is alive and well, as a reflexive universe.

The volume celebrates the genuine political and theoretical achievements of Vladimir Ilyich, the revolutionary vozhd (leader) of the international proletariat, a class that he unwaveringly represented through his praxis, and even, through his political victory. Winning may be the hallmark of truth only for Nazis – but the pull of oblivion and losing, the political death wish, is also real. This volume is an antidote against such a seductive Thanatos in Africa and elsewhere.

Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn (editor), Patrick Anderson (language editor), Johann Salazar (photography): Lenin150 (Samizdat), Daraja Press, 2nd Edition, revised and expanded 2021.

Adam Mayer is the author of Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria published by Pluto Press. Adam teaches International Relations at the Széchenyi István University Győr in Hungary and is a regular contributor to ROAPE.

Featured Photograph: Portrait of Lenin with a book of Pushkin (Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin).

The securitisation of capitalist rule in Africa

ROAPE

September 28, 2021

More CCTV, More Security Forces, and More Classified Budgets: The Securitisation of Capitalist Rule in Africa

Given the recent exposures of crucial weaknesses in their security systems and encouraged by multinational corporations some African governments are turning to surveillance technologies and foreign military support to garrison their economic hubs against violent disturbances.

By Scott Timcke, Jörg Wiegratz, and Chris Paterson

In March 2021, the international press was flush with coverage of Ahl al-Sunnah wa al Jamma’ah (ASWJ) after members of the group had undertaken a limited offensive in northern Mozambique. Coded as Islamist militants, about 200 rebels had captured the town of Palma, an economic hub for Total’s gas operations in the Afungi Peninsula, the site of Africa’s second largest gas reserve. Shortly thereafter, Total evacuated its complex, abandoned equipment and suspended plans to develop a US$20bn gas liquefaction plant. According to some estimates, 3,100 people have been killed and 820,000 displaced. Notwithstanding SADC’s mixed record of regional intervention, subsequently there were calls for their involvement, even suggestions of committing military assets using the familiar rhetoric of ‘responsibility to protect’. In late June SADC approved a standby force, if needed. Still, the regional politics is fraught as SADC’s involvement could erode the legitimacy of the state more than that of the rebels 2000km away. Seemingly, the preference is for targeted military assistance from the US and EU. Indeed in December the previous year, EU parliamentarian Michael Gahler warned “the United States is trying to involve Mozambique in its anti-IS coalition.”

While there is debate whether ASWJ have a relationship with the Islamic State, the US Department of State has nevertheless labeled the group as ISIS-Mozambique. Such a framing is indicative of how counter-insurgency epistemologies perpetuate the conflicts in which they are applied. While it is not impossible that ASWJ may draw inspiration from conflicts abroad in the North Africa or Middle East, there are nevertheless many local drivers of the conflict, with resentment at economic marginalization of rural populations being a significant factor, especially in the wake of Cyclone Kenneth in 2019 and COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020. A counter-insurgency approach will do little to address the foundational grievances of economic exclusion, poverty, and inequality; but it does reiterate that securitization of capital is an imperative.

Without more attention to these local factors, much of the South African and international media analysis “falls short of levels of precision” needed to account for the various layers of inequalities and resource conflicts that certainly predate Total’s e nclave extractivism, but which Total’s arrival amplified. These key factors underscore the findings by Michael Watts, Ike Okonta, Dimieari Von Kemedi and their many collaborators in their decades long study of the political ecology of oil in the Niger delta and the rebellions spawned by the presence of multinational companies facilitated by governments which at best were fairly distant to ordinary people, but more typically pursued interests that were hostile to local populations. So instead of the partial frame of counter-terrorism advanced by SADC and the US government, well contextualised media reporting might improve the public understanding of the situation in Mozambique through framing it as, amongst others, the long-standing economic neglect of rural citizenry by central governments compounded by capitalist penetration of the extreme periphery. Among other factors, this penetration causes impoverishment through the destruction of livelihoods, like fishing communities in the Cabo Delgado province tapped for forced resettlement to make way for Total’s construction. But this sort of broader line of enquiry/explanation is complicated and harder to investigate because for example reporters visiting Mozambique’s north require the cooperation and protection of a media-hostile state and of local power brokers, including foreign armies. Altogether the reality of these working conditions narrows the prospect for holistic reporting, especially for journalists stationed in the region who have to have repeated encounters with state officials for other reporting.

One subtext in the subsequent regional and international press reports expressed astonishment at how Islamic fundamentalists had besieged the supposedly well-guarded oil complex, a symbol of capitalist ambition and power. Composed of global capital driving foreign direct investment and the local Mozambique political class, this complex’s anticipated operations in the Afungi Peninsula was positioned as a potent expression of the Africa Rising narrative. The project was not supposed to be attacked, let alone be abandoned due to a relatively minor rural rebellion so in effect the event exposed how the various weaknesses in the Mozambican state meant it was ill-equipped to secure capital on this occasion. Quickly questions were being asked. How and why had security forces failed to contain the attack? What kind of local group wished to eject businesses that could bring prosperity to their region? What is their plan, their agenda? Capital seldom experiences ambushes and defeats on this scale by opponents like these, in such dramatic fashion in front of the cameras, in this corner of Africa or in fact anywhere else on the globe. The question is now what kind of actions do states like Mozambique and others that face similar opponents take to secure a favorable business climate and preemptively contain threats against capital, or at least ensure they do not attract headlines and media attention that jeopardize share prices and major business plans.

While having important differences and proximate explanations, there are two other recent events that also speak to the evolving relationship between capital, the state, and securitization. The first, in June 2021 was an assassination attempt on General Wamala, a core member of Uganda’s National Resistance Movement government. The attack occurred outside his home, in a residential area of Kampala, by assassins on motorbikes. Wamala’s daughter and driver were killed. The events were captured on CCTV and shared by the state with the general public. Uganda has in the past few years witnessed a string of highly controversial and publicly debated high profile murders that included representatives of the state, parliament, and the Muslim community among the killed. Similarly, in July 2021 images of the storming of commercial centres and looting of shopping centres in South Africa invoked the need for greater institutional security, despite prominent warnings of an emerging South African security state. Again, there are unique contextual factors, but both cited events in Uganda and South Africa, were embarrassing, temporary defeats of already highly guarded, securitised socio-political orders. Accordingly, might the state and capital insist upon more CCTV, more security forces, and more classified budgets to deliver on the promise of security in insecure times?

Already there are signs of an escalation in securitization. In Uganda, the government spent US$126 million to purchase a 3,200 camera CCTV system from Huawei for Kampala. Nominally, this system is in response to a violent crime wave, the system forms part of Huawei’s Safe City initiative, which has been rolled out in more than 200 cities worldwide. Following cities like London which pioneered the introduction of mass CCTV systems in mid-1990s after the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing, this initiative has seen Chinese cities become some of the most-surveilled urban areas in the world (there are 2.6 million cameras in a city like Chongqing, Sichuan providing 168 cameras per 1,000 people). While citizens have a right to safety – and there are moral panics generated by a surveillance culture especially in the West when Chinese companies are involved – arguably the deeper reason for this procurement is the securitization of capital and of capitalist class rule. After the latest attack on the minister, President Museveni announced plans to put a tracking system in every vehicle; in this case with the help of a Russian company. While politicians and activists have pushed back on these plans, these latest developments are consistent with the evolving character of neoliberal capitalism in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa.

There is a larger context to the coarticulation of massive wealth accumulation borne from capitalism and the militarised political economy which helps secure it. Uganda was regarded as emblematic of the dividends from adopting the neoliberal reform package. These reforms produced a restructuring in the late 1980s onwards as the National Resistance Movement came to power following the civil war. Beginning as a rebel movement formed to oppose authoritarian governments, the NRM and Yoweri Museveni’s government has been in power for more than 35 years. Through becoming the kind of polity they replaced, the NRM is intensifying surveillance practices to preserve aspects of ‘no-party democracy’ including controlling consent and dissent. The result is arguably a form of transactional citizenship for sections of society. Provided citizens do not aid political opponents, they will be kept safe. This exchange is offered in context of highly neoliberalised society where, as Achille Mbembe writes, the “privatization of public violence, the appropriation of means of livelihood, and the imaginations of the self” characterise everyday life.

As earlier neoliberal reforms set in motion changes in the order of Uganda, so it is probable that neoliberal securitization in the 2020s in tandem with discourses of national development will further shift what political actions are regarded as acceptable/unacceptable and whose views are subsequently coded against the axes of good/bad, legitimate/illegitimate, and right/wrong. If that is the case then the new surveillance system will prompt a revisiting of the classic question of “who is to be protected, by whom, against what and whom, and at what price?”, as Mbembe writes.

Returning to Mozambique’s north, the coincidence of the state’s embrace of enclave extractivism and retrenchment from governance in the north, has come at a high cost to residents already pressured by decades of underdevelopment and some of the most devastating climate change impacts on the planet. Humanitarian development aid to parts of Cabo Delgado has been stopped by the provincial government due to insurgent activity. Indeed, Joseph Hanlon, whose newsletter suggests deliberation in the displacement of local populations by insurgents, mercenaries, and the government, with each having something to gain. But this mediation would take place in a climate where some African states are keen to embrace foreign military intervention and more hi-tech militarised surveillance systems in accordance with modernist developmental models. While the details of each case matter considerably, there are some general conclusions to be drawn. First, making security enclaves will reshape the political space regardless of whether they are in urban or rural areas. Second, any restructuring is a conflict-ridden process with political outcomes rarely known beforehand. While these matters can still be contested, in the interim demilitarisation does not seem to be on the agenda because the institutionalisation of patterns around militarised ‘solutions’ and escalating foreign militarization with state and private variants providing further evidence of a colonial present consistent with the long history of violent capitalist accumulation on the continent.

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 was released in February 2021.

Jörg Wiegratz is a Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, and Senior Research Associate, Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg. His recent books include Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (co-edited with Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco). He is a regular contributor to roape.net and a member of the Editorial Working Group.

Chris Paterson is Professor of Global Communication at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on revealing the unseen processes which create international news, and on analysing communicative processes which disadvantage the Global South. His co-edited book Africa’s Media Image in the 21st Century: From the “Heart of Darkness” to “Africa Rising“ was the first book in over twenty years to examine the international media’s coverage of sub-Saharan Africa.

Featured Photograph: CCTV monitor room at police HQ in Kampala, Uganda (17 April, 2017).

Sankara’s elusive socialism

ROAPE

September 23, 2021

Jean-Claude Kongo and Leo Zeilig look at Thomas Sankara’s reforms in Burkina Faso in the 1980s. Sankara understood that Africa had to find its own path to development, and this would require redistribution of wealth and severing the ties with imperialism. Yet ultimately Sankara’s project of transformation proved too weak.

By Jean-Claude Kongo and Leo Zeilig

Thomas Sankara’s project of transformation was dramatically uneven. With his comrades, Sankara attempted to push through radical reforms. With his personal incorruptibility and deep commitment to transforming Burkina Faso’s diabolical underdevelopment, he remained an intransigent figure of opposition to the emergence of neoliberalism, privatisation and the marginalisation of Africa. Sankara understood that Africa had to find its own path towards development. This development had to include not only opposition to the corrupt local elite, by wide-ranging redistribution of income and wealth – but also freedom from imperialism, by severing the lines of economic and political slavery with the North. In all of these ways, he was right and remains worthy of our celebration and study.

Yet the strategy and politics for pursuing the transformation Sankara sought were deeply flawed. This is not a matter of simple ideological disagreement. By using and creating institutions and organisations from above to implement his project for Burkina Faso, he failed. Sankara’s tools for transformation proved too weak.

If this conclusion seems cynical or indicative of acquiescence, it is neither of these. If the need for such transformation remains vital on the continent, then we need fraternally and critically to assess how previous radical projects have failed. Sankara’s years provide us with vital lessons from which to judge and assess the project of emancipation and on how to make subsequent projects more resilient.

Sankara was greater than the totality of the speeches and declarations he made at international forums, great as these were. He fought against a world economy that was set up to crush initiatives such as his, even in dreadfully poor, economically marginal countries such as Burkina Faso. The enemies of the regime were national and international. Even such a top-down project posed too great a threat to many important interests.

A key action, indicative of the top-down nature of the project, was the setting up of the CNR (Conseil National de la Révolution – National Council for the Revolution), charged with directing and coordinating transformation from the top of the military command structure.

Some of the top-down initiatives were successful and incredibly audacious, and thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of them. In primary healthcare the regime scored some of its greatest successes. To give just a few examples, infant mortality fell from 200 in every thousand births in 1982, to less than 150 in 1984; local pharmacies were built in approximately 5,800 of the 7,500 villages. Even more impressive was the programme of mass vaccination: between 1983 and 1985, 2 million children were vaccinated against a range of illnesses. In addition, tens of thousands – including many poor peasant farmers, men and women – were for the first time given access to education and literacy. School fees were reduced, and thousands of classrooms and school premises were built. All of these were real achievements – even if progress was uneven and hard to sustain. Yet the regime’s own decision to sack striking teachers in 1984 had a devastating impact on the lives of thousands.

Despite these achievements, the government was still locked into a deeply unequal relationship with the world economy, and the recession that rocked the continent stung and provoked Burkina Faso’s radical government. The country was dependent on gold and cotton, with cotton comprising half of all export revenue. Although cotton production increased from 60,000 tonnes a year in 1980 to 170,000 tonnes in 1987, the actual income levels, despite this increase, barely rose. The price of cotton continued the inexorable fall it had suffered since 1960 – and Sankara was powerless to affect this.

Prices of cash crops, as Sankara knew, significantly contributed to the country’s overall instability (and underdevelopment). Valiant though they were, attempts to diversify the economy into production and manufactured goods were important, but remained largely symbolic. Food instability – another target of reform by the CNR – deepened in the 1980s, so in 1984 and 1985 the government was forced to import food, triggering a dramatic trade deficit. Foreign investment – the holy cow of contemporary African finance ministers – remained pitifully low under the CNR, so the deficit was filled by long-term borrowing that by 1987 had doubled the country’s debt burden. Economic and financial independence remained a dream.

The regime’s relationship with the World Bank was fraught. The original aim of the government was to extend Burkina Faso’s potential, to make the maximum use of the country’s resources. Gold mines were opened; there was an attempt to build a railway line in 1985 – undertaken by the regime itself after the World Bank and other donors refused funding – to connect manganese fields in the north-east to the rest of the country; local businesses were subsidised; and a poll tax on local farmers was lifted.

The project was not so much anti-capitalist as national capitalist development, and the World Bank was not always opposed to many of the measures: the Bank found in 1989 that economic growth in Burkina Faso between 1982 and 1987 had been ‘satisfactory’. The report noted that agriculture had performed particularly well, with an annual increase in added value of 7.1%. The reasons for this were linked to several reforms pushed through by the government, including improved land utilisation in the south and south-west, and impressive use of technology in cotton production.

At a time when structural adjustment was being implemented across the continent as a condition for accepting IMF or World Bank loans, Burkina Faso managed to avoid external adjustment. The reason was that Sankara had been able to impose his own form of ‘restructuring’: he ensured that there was considerable control over budgetary expenditure, with a reduction in public-sector employment accompanied by attempts to generate private capital investments in manufacturing, in line with imposed ‘reform’ packages elsewhere on the continent at the time.

The genuine and committed efforts at agricultural reform included ‘austerity’ measures designed to reduce the state deficit, and as a result the income levels of state employees, teachers and civil servants suffered, and levies were raised on workers to fund development projects. Nevertheless, these efforts – attempting to make up for underdevelopment because of the country’s incorporation into the global economy less than a hundred years before – were understandable; what other tools were available to achieve such development and to alleviate the region’s terrible poverty and suffering?

Sankara was nothing if not an enigma. He argued for a radical plan of national self-development, condemning in powerful terms the behaviour of ex-colonial powers, financial institutions and global capitalism, yet he also in a sense made a compromise with these bodies while attempting to build up and diversify the economy. This terrible and dangerous dance – weaving between competing and hostile interests – meant that national capitalist interests overrode all others; the regime was left at the end of 1987 without any powerful domestic allies. Sankara was almost without comrades on the left. Left-wing supporters and opponents were condemned and imprisoned, and the unions were often silenced. The trade unionist Halidou Ouédraogo was unequivocal in his verdict, and it was harsh: “We do not understand how foreign socialists can have a positive verdict on Sankara, without having heard the opinion of the trade unions.”

Socialist Labour (Nigeria) hosted a public meeting about the life, struggle and legacy of Thomas Sankara (29 May, 2021).

Yet – and it is important, indeed vital, to qualify this verdict – the appearance and behaviour of the government were impressive. Ministers were no longer overlords and gods, living in the dizzying heights of luxury, extravagance and conspicuous consumption. They received the average worker’s wage, while basic healthcare and education were delivered to the poor. In this atmosphere of national austerity, which was implemented from above and actually included the highest office-holders in the executive, there was a genuine commitment in practice to the national endeavour.

Imperialism was routinely denounced, even directly to France’s then president François Mitterrand during a regular state visit, and the grande bourgeoisie in their turn often came in for denunciation. Unlike anywhere else on the continent, these statements, while frequently limited to the level of rhetoric, were sincerely meant and not accompanied by acts of hypocrisy.

But if Sankara’s project was a valiant attempt at radical reforms, he was unable to turn international market trends in his country’s favour. He forced through what could be seen as economic restructuring and even launched a systematic attack on trade unions. Some studies have concluded that the position of corporations was actually strengthened after 1983, and wages in the public sector fell and food prices increased. Sankara’s project was a self-conscious effort at capitalist modernisation and development, and its characterisation as socialism is confusing and unhelpful.

Ideological clarity

Sankara and his comrades, including supporters in the PAI (Parti Africain de l’Indépendance – African Independence Party), argued that they stood as socialists in the traditions of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Yet, all of them were equally infected by a notion of socialism from above, as state edict and control. They claimed this style of politics for socialism, but in reality it was an attempt at national democratic development.

Despite Sankara’s speeches being full of references to the people, depicting them as ‘leading’ the Burkinabé revolution, the actual agency of these popular masses was tightly constrained. In some respects, the statement of their leading role in the revolution was a declaration of an abstract ‘future’ intent. Babou Paulin Bamouni, one of Sankara’s leading advisors, was clear that the middle class had led the revolution, but that at some later, ill-defined stage, the path would be cleared for the peasantry and working class instead to benefit and take the lead.

The French activist and writer Lila Chouli was scathing about Sankara’s political shortcomings. As we have seen, Sankara’s social reforms were from above, rather than nurturing the self-emancipation of the working and popular masses: indeed, his reforms worked against popular empowerment. The result of this approach, Chouli tells us, was to lead to the regime into conflict with sections of the working class and its organisations. In January 1985 a trade-union front was set up in protest against and to counter the decline in democratic and trade-union freedoms. Although this front remained active throughout the so-called revolutionary period, trade unions and independent organisations were to be considerably undermined as a result of repression of union activity. This included the dismissal of civil servants, and the arrest and torture of activists.

By 1986, less than three years after taking power, the CNR’s authoritarian approach had alienated sections of the Burkinabé population, leaving Sankara and his allies isolated from those in whose name they were acting. This also led to divisions and opposition from some elements within the government.

As Chouli has argued in 2012

the government banned trade unions and the free press as these were seen as obstacles to the CNR’s reforms. Additionally, as an admirer of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution, Sankara set up Cuban-style Comités de Défense de la Révolution (Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, CDRs). In principle, all Burkinabé were members of the CDRs and critics and opponents were branded ‘enemies of the people’. The actions of the trade unions were considered subversive and could be punished with ‘military sanctions’.

The ruling CNR found itself unable to conduct a meaningful dialogue with other groups and the elusive ‘people’ about its objectives and how to achieve them. Chouli explains:

In the name of wanting to provide socialism for the mass of poor people, they did it without them. Sankara recognised this in his self-critical speech of 2 October 1987. But he and his allies did not have time to restore the severed lines between the authorities and the mass independent organisations of the poor and the working class.

The end of Burkina Faso’s brave – if not socialist – revolution

Sankara’s project was state-led development oriented towards benefiting the poor, as part of a perceived transition to socialism – a socialism that however remained almost completely absent from his official speeches and declarations. Carried out by a military hierarchy and an even smaller political cadre around Sankara, the project was inherently elitist. This is not a criticism, but a description.

What forces were there in Burkina Faso to lead such a struggle against this top-down project? The story of Sankara is one of absences – absence of other social forces, of radical left organisations, of a social base that could have sustained his project. The presence of an ideological and organisational centre for the radical left, in Burkina Faso and the region, could instead have ensured an enduring project of development of the people as part of a radicalising movement – powered by the popular classes – across West Africa and the continent. This could have developed as a practical and realistic alternative.

The militant uprising that finally swept Sankara’s murderer (and former comrade) Blaise Compaoré from power in 2014 came about after an extraordinary period of protest from 2011 among agricultural workers, miners and urban trade unionists, and mutinies in the armed forces. Still, maintaining the momentum of popular protest beyond the sacking of the Assemblée Nationale and Compaoré’s forced and hurried resignation in 2014 has proved difficult. In this sense, Sankara’s predicament – political isolation and the absence of alternative radical forces – remains unchanged today.

Almost a hundred years ago, many of these questions were being posed in practice, in the struggle for democratic transformation and socialism in Russia. That experience spoke of linking democratic and socialist transformation within a single process that had to be international. The international development of socialist politics in the early 20^th century sought to build the capacity for such linking, which would ensure that movements within the nation state could survive – could literally grow over and transcend the barriers of the national state.

Underpinning these ideas was the understanding that national autonomy was a reactionary, impossible pipe dream, and economic evolution – a process that today we describe as globalisation – had broken the fragile edifice of the nation state. The era of permanent and global social transformation as a practical and realistic project of radical development remains the essential path for socialists today.

Although the working class was present in Upper Volta in the early 1980s, sometimes in a dramatic way, it lacked its own consistent organisation and strategy. The national bourgeoisie remained feeble, impotent in the face of crisis and congenitally incapable of resolving Burkina Faso’s dependency and underdevelopment. It was as a result of this real impasse and blockage that Sankara and the CNR were able to emerge. By 1987, the isolation of the ruling military group around Sankara was almost total – trade unions and civil society were increasingly moving against them. Sankara, true to form, refused the option of breaking the regime’s isolation (and principles) by incorporating a wider circle of openly establishment parties. But the crisis and isolation were real.

Sankara’s comrade Compaoré had no such compunction and did not want to see his power overthrown along with Sankara. Knowing that he would fail to persuade his comrade through discussion, Compaoré turned to the violent and bloody murder of Sankara and his loyalists on 15 October 1987. This murder marked the end of the incredibly brave, though mislabelled, Burkinabé socialist revolution.

Jean-Claude Kongo is a teacher and journalist in Burkina Faso. As a student in the 1980s, Kongo was also an active supporter of the Burkinabé revolution. Leo Zeilig is editor of roape.net. Kongo and Zeilig are co-editors of Voices of Liberation: Thomas Sankara (HSRC Press, 2017).

Ethnonationalism, imperialism and the working class in Ethiopia

ROAPE

September 21, 2021

Since November last year, Ethiopia has been fighting a devastating civil war with the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front. Hibist Kassa argues that the scale of misinformation on the war, lack of context and attempts to impose false narratives is deeply troubling and pervasive. Kassa calls for a nuanced and historically grounded approach to properly analyse the course of events.

By Hibist Kassa

Since 4 November last year Ethiopia has been caught in a devastating civil war with the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) which has been marked by escalating genocidal attacks on ethnic minorities in Ethiopia. The scale of misinformation and disinformation on the war, brazen lack of context, shameless and downright dangerous attempts to not only impose false narratives, but also impose a narrow human rights agenda skewed to ignore abuses by Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) and its allies is deeply troubling and pervasive.

At the moment, a dangerously simplistic and false narrative labelling the federal government as having an agenda for centralisation, as opposed to the TPLF which is pushing for federalism, is being spread in mainstream media outlets and through scholarly networks. This is drawing on a further over-simplification of the history of empire building and contestation, and the nature of cultural and language identities and their relationship to class stratification.

This year marked the 125^th anniversary of the Battle of Adwa in 1896, a historic defeat of a European imperialist power by Africans, with the unification of divided peoples. Lords, serfs and slaves, women and men, mobilised an army of about 100,000 to defeat Italian troops in a matter of hours. The aftermath of the victory also laid the basis for further empire consolidation and forging of the modern state, a contested historical process that has been foregrounded in the current conflict. A nuanced and historically grounded approach is needed to analyse the ways the centre-periphery tensions shaped autonomy in Tigray, recognise the wide spectrum of debates within the TPLF and how elites have deployed this in the current conflict (I examine this in some detail in the Agrarian South Bulletin here).

While the need to get the analysis right on the crisis is important to inform interventions, we also need to understand the nature of the accumulation strategies of elites, the contradictions in these strategies and where this leaves the working class and the advancement of a progressive alternative from below.

What are the competing narratives?

At the moment, mediation is being proposed as was recently advocated in a statement by African intellectuals, that eerily followed the line of the United States and TPLF on the crisis. A robust response by the Global Ethiopian Scholars Initiative and Jon Abbink have highlighted the problematic nature of the statement, and the need for an understanding of what is really at stake in the volatile Horn of Africa region, where a realignment of geopolitical relations between Eritrea-Ethiopia-Somalia, with South Sudanese solidarity, is potentially decentring US domination in the region, and sealing the decline of TPLF. Understanding the tricky and complicated context of the changes underway, demands also for careful attention to what is left out of the dominant narrative of the crisis.

For instance, it was shocking to hear pro-TPLF commentator, Martin Plaut, and now visiting researcher at Kings College Department of War Studies, declared boldly on 5 February this year, that even though a massacre in Mai-Kadra in Western Tigray was terrible, ‘I don’t care who carried them out’ (see 30:00-31:21). This was a genocide of about 1000 men, the elderly and children who were identified as ethnic Amhara by TPLF youth groups. As the men were being slaughtered, women overheard them say they would come for them next. Zelalem Tessema, Co-Chair Ethiopian Association in the UK, who was on the same panel as Plaut said that this was the ‘Srebrenica massacre’ of Ethiopia. Accountability which was so important for Plaut when examining Amhara militias, Ethiopian federal troops and Eritrea’s involvement, was suspended in the case where TPLF militia and its youth members, who later escaped to join refugees on the Sudanese border. The TPLF has continued to commit atrocities in its vicious expansion into Afar and Amhara regions displacing up to 4 million people.

Meanwhile, a coherent campaign sympathetic to TPLF by the US, EU and UN, including the IMF and World Bank, have focused on aspects of the Tigray crisis pressuring the Ethiopian Federal government to revert to mediations with the TPLF. Even when a unilateral ceasefire was declared by the government, the TPLF has continued to encroach upon other provinces in Amhara and Afar provinces, temporarily occupying Lalibela, and slaughtering civilians, destroying historic Churches in Gondar, there was still no universal condemnation of the TPLF except for the instance where the USAID Director in Ethiopia cited widespread TPLF looting of aid goods.

There has also been complete disinterest in the killings of ethnic minorities elsewhere which have been linked to the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), openly allied to TPLF. In principle, violations by any state and non-state actor in Tigray and other parts of Ethiopia should be investigated, victims provided care and culprits held to account. But the geopolitical power struggle that is ongoing has no interest in this kind of accountability agenda. Instead, human rights violations, whether they be genocide, widespread rape, recruitment of children as combatants and violations against Eritrean refugees, have been ignored when TPLF forces have been identified culprits. Talk of accountability and human rights is just a game in a bigger geopolitical battlefield.

Getting the facts right is key!

To make sense of what is an intensely complex crisis, it is important to focus on the following key facts:

On 4 November, after the Federal Government of Ethiopia had transferred US$281 million to the Tigray provincial government, a ‘lightning strike’ so described by TPLFs’ spokesperson, was unleashed on federal troops who were undertaking joint operations with the Tigray provincial forces. Unarmed soldiers and generals were slaughtered in their pyjamas and their bodies left to rot, while other troops were taken as prisoners. Soldiers with specialised training were later summarily executed, ran over with trucks, and women soldiers were raped. When the news of this shocking attack trickled in, it horrified the general public and ended all attempts to mediate tensions between the Federal government and the TPLF.
Prior to the above attack, tensions had been building between the Federal government based in Addis Ababa and the TPLF. The loss of TPLFs almost three-decade dominance of power in the federal government had aggrieved the committee members. To recall, TPLF itself was a political party, with its own hierarchies and membership drawing from various constituencies within Tigray province.
Normalisation of relations with Eritrea was an extremely significant change introduced by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in 2018. This significant change in foreign policy of Ethiopia was made possible under the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition with new leadership under Abiy Ahmed as a member of Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO). It was a decisive break from TPLF foreign policy which had treated the Eritrean government as a lethal enemy. The latter which has acted as a bulwark against the expansion of the United States’ AFRICOM in the Horn of Africa, and retained some semblance of sovereignty over its national policy space. These former allies who waged war against the Derg (the military regime that ruled Ethiopia and Eritrea from 1974 to 1987), soon turned into foes over the TPLFs ethnonationalist agenda entrenched in the Ethiopian federalist system, redrawing provinces and the entire governance system on the basis of ethnicity. Each province formed standing armies of their own and entrenched the right to secede in the constitution.
Tigray province is in the northern most part of Ethiopia and shares a border with Eritrea, over which war was waged from 1998-2000, when Abiy was then on the frontline as a solider. A peace treaty was only signed in 2018 once the OPDO under Abiy was in power after a wave of popular protests against TPLF. According to Iqbal Jhazbay (former South Africa ambassador to Eritrea) since the Peace Treaty was signed, this provided Eritrea, ‘a previously isolated regime which has stubbornly resisted being turned into a pawn by foreign powers’ a bridge with which to expand its foreign policy influence in the volatile Horn of Africa. Asmara has resisted a regime change agenda, a challenge now facing Ethiopia, under the new Progress Party (PP) under Abiy, which has now had to resist pressure from foreign powers to dictate its relations with Eritrea.
The successful completion of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has been resisted not only by Egypt and Sudan, but also with backing from the US and Israel. Although GERD was conceptualised and initiated by former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, its successful implementation did not have full backing of his heirs in the TPLF. The Metal and Engineering Corporation, a mega-parastatal, which was charged with manufacturing parts of GERD, manufactured them below expected standards. This delayed the project and has been suspected as an act of subversion instead of incompetence on the part of the parastatal. The combination of Egypt and Sudan, and the realignment of interests with internal actors, like the TPLF (and now OLF), has created another deadly alliance that threatens stability in the Horn of Africa.
Ethiopia is on the brink of national self-sufficiency in wheat production within two years. The Abiy government has also been setting up bread factories to ensure affordability for the urban poor and working people (especially in a time when food prices continue to skyrocket). In addition to the GERD and its potential to provide renewable energy resource to the Horn of Africa and beyond, these developments should be seen as efforts to strengthen productive capacity in the region and hopefully also address energy poverty that falls on the back of women. It is also a case that the infrastructure investments and Industrial Parks especially in the garments industry, have had keen interest from global brands, but also significantly drawn upon domestic resource mobilisation. All these are signs that concrete gains are being made in the country.
Nonetheless, in spite of the Ethiopian governments commitment to liberalisation, this has not enamoured the regime to donors and the Bretton Wood Institutions. Sanctions have been imposed on government officials to travel to the US. Conditionalities for loans are being attached to ensure mediation with TPLF. The interest of the IMF, primarily influenced by the US, in this conflict is noteworthy.
Bretton Woods Institutions, especially the IMF, have been attaching conditionalities to assistance obliging the government to make concessions to the TPLF. This hard-line towards the PP government is puzzling given that it has declared the country open for business, liberalising one of Africa’s last heavily regulated economies and allowing competition with State-Owed Enterprises, electricity and the telecommunications. The Abiy government has also been a very consistent partner in the War on Terror, especially as it relates to operations against Al-Shabab in Somalia.
This indicates that there are higher stakes in Ethiopia’s forging of alliances with Eritrea and Somalia and the broader goal to stabilise the Horn of Africa in a manner that has not centred Washington and its ‘War on Terror’. Lawrence Freeman, on a panel on Ethiopia Television, “Addis Dialogue”, argues that a global political oligarchic faction that maintains neo-colonial control of African countries in particular, sees any actor operating outside US control as threatening their dominance and needing to be dealt with as a threat. Deacon Yoseph Tafari, Chairman of the Ethiopian American Civic Council, concurs and emphasises that the US had initially misread the Abiy government in the beginning of its tenure, and had to confront the reality of its more autonomous approach to foreign policy and its persistence with state led developmental initiatives such as the GERD. It is this aspect that has informed a regime change agenda.
The TPLF which was the dominant force in the previous coalition government had been able to control the security and governance arms of the state and considerable investments in SOEs. It is an open secret that the TPLF had amassed offshore accounts of US$30 billion. At its height, foreign aid reached US$3.5 billion a year. Two to three billion dollars were lost annually through under and over invoicing of imports. Parastatals had become effective vehicles for accumulation of wealth by the top tier of the regime, with varied forms of patrimonial relations with less powerful actors within the party machinery. Proximity to power had its benefits, but none compared with the accumulation of wealth and deepening inequality that was apparent over the last three decades.

Q & A between Munyaradzi Gwisai and Hibist Kassa which reflects on the state of the working class in Ethiopia today.

MG: The emergent Ethiopian working class was a key player in the 1974 revolution that eventually ousted Emperor Haile Selassie. The wave of strikes helped inspire the popular protests of students, peasants and the junior soldiers. The later eventually wrested power led by the [Marixst Leninist] Derg, provoking a nearly two-decade period of Civil War and instability.

What happened to the Ethiopian working class in this period, in the struggles that ensued… Was class militancy and organisation crushed by repression and war?

HK: As the parastatal, Metal and Engineering Corporation (MetEC) case highlights, trade unions have struggled, and continued to struggle to organise in Ethiopia. IndustriALL Federation has been making important interventions especially in industrial parks. Important analytical work has been done on the super exploitation of women workers has drawn attention to how the accumulation strategy of the state that relies on cheap wage labour and the creation of an enabling environment for foreign direct investment, demands the repression of organised labour.

In response to high turnover of the workforce and a wave of wildcat strikes, there have been some moderate reforms to create a means for workers to raise concerns through the Labour Department inspectors and the provision of district offices. In spite of this, trade unions still need to be able to organise workers on the shopfloor. Resistance to this persist.

Moreover, the tension between the focus on large scale foreign direct investments as a means of enabling industrialisation places this strategy in tension with the dynamic and diversified economic activities by smallholder producers in agriculture, cottage industries and the retail sector. Ethiopia has a history of cooperative associations traced to the Derg regime, but these were demobilised by the TPLF dominated EPRDF regime.

MG: Ethiopia is amongst the top five performing economies in Africa in the last decade with annual growth rates of over 10%. A new, younger and expanded working class must therefore have emerged. If the working class retreated in this period leaving the petite bourgeoisie in charge, was there not a significant growth and re-emergence of the working class in the period after 1995? Quantitatively and qualitatively especially after 2000?

What is the degree of organisation, class consciousness, and militancy of this new expanded class? How does it compare to the leading role played by other working classes in the region recently, in Sudan, Egypt, Kenya for example and does it provide a counter to the petite bourgeoisie and their ethnicity – region based politics and mobilization?

HK: A new, younger and expanded working class has emerged, and its face is that of women migrants. The new subjects arising out of the industrialisation process is that of women workers, who are being superexploited as part of the country’s development strategy. Rural-urban migration, and now with covid-19, urban-rural migration, has become significant.

I think if we are to consider the primarily informal character of the labouring classes or working people (as Issa Shivji says) we needs to use different approaches to analyse the forms of resistance to capital and the state, and the ways in which people are building autonomy from below through their livelihoods and even survival strategies. This expanded approach to resistance and understanding of class helps us better draw the connections between the urban poor and dispossessed masses, and rural communities who in carrying the burden of social reproduction even as a gendered cheap wage labour strategy is imposed from above become a basis for drawing organic linkages with ‘wage workers’ in the formal sector. I think this is an opportunity to think in an interlinked manner and develop a more holistic understanding of what organising interventions can be made by trade unions working in alliance with women’s groups, farmers associations, artisanal miners and casual workers.

Elite wealth accumulation and the gendered working class

It is crucial to also reflect on the nature of corruption facilitated via illicit financial flows and how this has fed into the wealth accumulation strategies of elites in the TPLF dominated ethnic coalition government prior to its removal in 2018. A prime example of this is the mega parastatal, Metal and Engineering Corporation (MetEC).

With about seventy SOEs, seven military hardware manufacturing entities, about 12,500 employees, MetEC is a significant force in the Ethiopian economy. Under the TPLF, it successfully disbanded trade union organising on the shopfloor. In 2014, labour unions confronted the then CEO Knife Dangew and they were dismissed for being focused on rights bargaining and of being wedded to the legacy of the previous ‘Marxist Leninist’ military dictatorship. Instead, the trade union federation was expected to focus on the objective of attaining middle income status. In 2018, a parliamentary review revealed extensive graft, with overpricing of domestic and international procurement of up to US$2 billion, in some cases 400% higher than market prices. He was arrested in November 2018, and charged over the procurement of two shipping vessels, two hotels and a plastics factory.

The description below by Tim Hall of an industrial park, in Hawassa, now in the newly established Sidama province, gives us a glimpse of the pre-Covid situation:

Over 17,000 young women from predominately rural areas and a variety of ethnicities have, from 2017, migrated to work at the Hawassa Industrial Park (HIP), employing around 120,000 mainly women workers at potential full capacity. They face long shifts, low salaries given living costs between 800 to 2000 BIRR a month (US$27–68) and new challenges in an unfamiliar urban context, which are exacerbated by their status and dislocation from familial networks.

The brief description Hall offers above is that of women who form self-help groups on the basis of ethnicity and religion.

While there is a case for understanding ethnicity (or kinship as Archie Mafeje argues) in terms of how it can be an organising element in the labour process, the rigid and impervious colonial conceptions of ethnicity institutionalised by the TPLF cannot be underestimated. As relevant as this is to understand the reproduction of inequalities, in the Ethiopia case, it is also important to weigh how these have been entrenched as an organising principle of society.

The ability to render some groups as vulnerable as in the case of the non-Sidamo women migrant workers in Hawaasa or the migrant farmworkers massacred in Mai-Kadra also needs to be treated with caution. TPLF as a dominant force in the EPRDF coalition had almost three decades with an effective machinery to entrench this in the everyday forms of social, political and economic spheres of society, from ethnic development banks to redrawing provincial borders as in Raya to subsume areas where Amhara ethnic minorities can be disenfranchised.

Beyond this, there is also a dangerous oversimplification of vast periods of history and the association of repressed classes with specific language and cultural groups has fed a dangerous and divisive propaganda. This labels certain language groups as exploiters and oppressors and others victims of dispossession and oppression without a grounded understanding of complex and fluid categories, alongside complex economic and historical processes. These claims have also justified horrific violence by the OLF against the Amharic speaking people such as the disembowelment of pregnant women, the slicing off of the breasts of women and rape.

Progressive scholars, the working class and Ethiopia

Progressive scholars have to build bridges to engage with the intelligentsia in Ethiopia who have persevered through military dictatorship under the Derg in the 1970s and 1980s, and through 27 years of TPLF-dominated rule. Ethiopian scholars have been speaking out, as in this speech in 1994 by Mammo Muhcie in London that is an eerily precise analysis of TPLF as it is today.

In the midst of this conflict, Ethiopian scholars have been repeatedly trying to get their voices heard by the Ethiopian government and the international community. The statement widely shared by African intellectuals (including on roape.net) that presumed Ethiopian scholars cannot speak for themselves therefore came across as deeply condescending. If there is genuine interest in supporting Ethiopian scholars to get their perspectives and analysis on the crisis, and build bridges for meaningful interventions, the first step has to be through a serious and deliberate process of engagement.

There is also a need to pay attention to the accumulation strategies of elites and the manner they fit (or do not fit) within imperialism. Within this, an expanded understanding of a gendered working class is needed, recognising the strategically important role of women’s labour as a source of cheap wage labour. In addition, it is still important to not lose sight of how a liberal government like the PP, in pursuing its own ambitions to assert sovereignty over foreign policy and natural resources, has fallen from grace and is facing the age-old colonial/imperialist strategy of ‘divide and rule’ tactics both at the national level and regional levels through the TPLF, OLF and external actors such as Sudan and Egypt.

This also gives us insight into the accumulation strategy of the EPRDF, which still operates under a constitution and governance system setup by the TPLF dominated government. This draws out a broader lesson to the challenges arising out of an ambitious developmentalist elite in Africa. Although, the TPLF has been subjected to accountability processes after their removal from control of the federal government, there is still a broader lesson here for development in Africa, and this demands further interrogation.

Some on the left have admired the capacity of the ruling class in Ethiopia to pursue developmentalist ambitions with industrial parks as a strategy, for instance. But the limits of this strategy also need to be highlighted, as this also has relied on cheap wage labour and migrant women workers who have been rigidly constrained from organising in trade unions. Wildcat strikes and high turnover of labour has meant this is not a stable accumulation strategy, even on their own terms. It begs a broader question, what is the nature of a viable developmental strategy?

In addition, the pressures arising out of a gendered understanding of working class dynamics lays a basis to consider what developmental alternatives can be fought for. Such an alternative also demands a rupture from the existing imperialist architecture of power to assert control over resources which destabilises the global financial and geopolitical arrangements that the emerging Eritrea-Ethiopia-Somalia relations pose. Failure to recognise this is akin to enabling the catastrophic outcome of interventions in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the reason why there has been a robust and vociferous rejection of any possible intervention by the likes of Global Ethiopian Scholars Initiative and Jon Abbink.

Progressives have a responsibility to centre an understanding of imperialism and the national question, as Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros pull together in Reclaiming the Nation, to navigate this terrain and build bridges with the radical intelligentsia and popular formations in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa who want to construct a transformative agenda themselves. A first step has to be rejecting the ethnonationalist, genocidal agenda of TPLF, OLF and their allies.

Hibist Kassa is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for African Alternatives in Cape Town, South Africa. She is also a Research Associate at the Centre for African Studies and Chair in Land and Democracy in South Africa.

Advancing working class struggle

ROAPE

September 15, 2021

ROAPE’s Ruth First prize winner, Lawrence Ntuli, writes about his journey into activism and research. Ntuli’s political activism and research combine to a single objective – helping to advance the struggles of the working class in South Africa. His research into precarious workers who fought through the union and those who engaged in struggle without being led by trade unions was the 2020 winner of the prize.

By Lawrence Ntuli

I was born and grew up in the working class township called Tsakane, located in the far east of Johannesburg, South Africa. Immediately after finishing from high school, in 1996, I became a student of politics and economics at Wits University, Johannesburg. I joined student struggles at university and ultimately I became a member of the South African Student Congress and later I joined a socialist student organisation. I became an activist during a period in which the university was introducing a swingeing neoliberal restructuring plan, called Wits 2001.

In that period, the restructuring plan formed part of a broader programme to transform Wits into a neo-liberal university, orientated towards profit-making and partnership with big business. As a result of this restructuring, tuition fees became unaffordable and many students from poor and working-class backgrounds were kicked out. Similarly, ‘unprofitable’ courses were closed, and some academic posts were frozen resulting in more than 50 academic job losses. Coupled with this, the university outsourced or privatized services it considered as ‘non-core’ and as a result close to 613 workers were retrenched.

However, some of these retrenched workers (250 workers) were re-employed by new private companies which were awarded contracts by the university. As we expected, these workers lost all benefits, wages were halved, and they were not allowed to join a trade union. In other words, the conditions and wages of these workers rapidly worsened compared to when they were previously employed directly by the university.

Yet the effects of university restructuring created favourable conditions for students to build a united front together with the workers. Thus, workers and students formed what was called the Wits University Crisis Committee which ultimately led several protests at the university against restructuring and high tuition fees. I was part of this Committee and helped organise and coordinate the protests.

It was during this time that I began to campaign against precarisation of work, in addition to campaigning for affordable and accessible education. Unfortunately, our struggle was not strong enough to defeat either restructuring or prevent precarisation of work. We only managed to delay the implementation of outsourcing, but in the end we lost the battle – outsourcing went ahead.

Subsequently, together with other student activists, we decided to continue supporting workers who entered precarious employment because of outsourcing. In addition to supporting a demand for the reversal of outsourcing, we also supported their struggle for better conditions and wages including the right to join and form a trade union. With this in mind, we supported several general meetings and protests organised by precarious workers. This experience without doubt stirred my interest in the struggles of precarious workers – in this sense my activism and research are entirely linked.

After I left the university, I continued to support worker struggles. Hence, I became active in the now defunct Anti-Privatization Forum (APF). The APF was a social movement which was made up of 21 Community based organisations fighting against the effects of neo-liberalism, for example, outsourcing and privatisations. In the APF, I assumed the role of labour coordinator. This role allowed me to work with various types of precarious workers. The vast majority of these workers were either unorganised or lacking trade union representation, those who were unionized were rarely serviced by their trade unions. In other words, trade unions did not address their grievances, or respond to their demands. As a result, we gave them various types of support including writing and printing leaflets for them. Most importantly, we organised community organisations affiliated to the APF to support their struggles. For example, when they were involved in a strike, we built support and solidarity for the strike.

Around 2007, I was employed as a Publication Officer at the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU). NEHAWU is a trade union in South Africa with a membership of 235,000, it is the largest public sector union in the country. It organizes state, health, education, and welfare workers. I worked for only nine months with Nehawu. Afterwards, I was employed as a director (of research and program monitoring) by the local government department – Gauteng Provincial Government.

Even though, I was employed by the government, I remained in touch with workers struggles and I supported several protests. This continuous association with workers motivated me to pursue a doctoral degree on the union response to precarisation of work, focusing on South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) and the union’s resistance to privatisation in the period between 1999-2003. At the same time, my interest in workers struggles made me to leave government employment and join SAMWU as a national research officer.

SAMWU is the largest trade union in the local government sector and affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Union (COSATU). It was one of the trade unions which fought strongly against privatization in the 1990s and 2000s, but it lost this fight. Both privatisation and outsourcing in the local government sector continued unabated. Increasingly outsourcing took different forms in different municipalities and even within a single municipality. For workers, privatisation threatens trade union representation, collective bargaining, job security, pay, benefits, occupational safety, and health protection.

With the previous experience of working with precarious workers, in SAMWU I work in the field of precarisation of work, write and put together articles and booklets, and organised workshops, etc. The rationale was to aid various union campaigns against precarisation of work.

So, in one way or the other, my work in the field of precarisation of work led me to conduct research on the subject, with the title The strategies and tactics of fighting against precarisation of work: a comparative study of precarious workers’ struggles in two South African municipalities. In fact, this research was focused on ascertaining the tactics or strategies which can assist precarious workers to win in their struggles. The conclusion was that precarious workers prefers to fight via the trade unions, not through other, alternative forms of organisations such as cooperatives or NGOs, as other writers have argued elsewhere. When precarious workers fight back independently, it is because trade unions have refused to represent them and not because they seek to build alternative forms of organisations. The workers who were studied were convinced that only a trade union could win both better pay and conditions.

As an activist, I am thrilled to be chosen by ROAPE as the winner of the Ruth First Prize. Most importantly, it is an honour to be associated with a journal which is known for supporting radical transformation. At the same time, I am also delighted to win a prize inspired by the work of Ruth First, a Marxist whose life was committed to the struggle against class and racial oppression. The Ruth First Prize without doubt will boast my confidence to continue research that is focused on advancing working-class struggle.

Lawrence Ntuli is employed as a researcher by the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) and is currently completing doctoral studies. He is an activist and his areas of research includes precarious work, trade unions and local government. Ntuli is writing a history of SAMWU with the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit at Rhodes University.

Featured Photograph: Striking municipal workers in Boksburg, South Africa in July 2009 (Heather Elke – 27 July 2009).

Big Pharma and vaccine apartheid

ROAPE

September 14, 2021

In this report on the TWN-Africa and ROAPE webinar on vaccine imperialism held last month, Cassandra Azumah writes that the unfolding vaccine apartheid which has left Africa with the lowest vaccination rates in the world is another depressing example of the profit and greed of Big Pharma facilitated by imperialist power.

By Cassandra Azumah

The webinar on ‘Vaccine Imperialism: Scientific Knowledge, Capacity and Production in Africa’ which took place on 5 August 5, 2021, was organized by the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) in partnership with the Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa). It explored the connections and interplay of Africa’s weak public health systems, the profit and greed of Big Pharma enabled by the governments of the industrialized Global North, and the Covid-19 pandemic from a political economy perspective. This report summarizes the main discussions held during the conference, including an overview of each of the main points discussed. The webinar was the first in a three-part series of webinars scheduled by the two organizations under the theme Africa, Climate Change and the Pandemic: interrelated crises and radical alternatives.

The format of the event involved keynote presentations from three speakers, a five-minute activist update on the COVID-19 situation from two African countries, and an interactive discussion with participants. Chaired by Farai Chipato, a Trebek Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa and ROAPE editor, the session included presentations from Rob Wallace, an evolutionary epidemiologist and public health geography expert at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps; Tetteh Hormeku, Head of Programmes at Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa) and Marlise Richter, a senior researcher at the Health Justice Initiative in South Africa.

The current state of the pandemic – Rob Wallace

Rob Wallace began the session by providing a global perspective on the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic. He presented data showing that though the total number of vaccinations are increasing, the percentage of people fully vaccinated is concentrated in the West. We are currently experiencing a third wave of the pandemic, which is being driven by the delta variant. Though the cases in Africa are relatively lower than in other parts of the world, it is still a marked increase from the first and second waves which were less severe. This is not the trajectory that was predicted for COVID-19 on the continent in the early days of the pandemic. Marius Gilbert et al had speculated that Africa would be vulnerable to the virus due to a lower public health capacity and underlying co-morbidities that might increase the spread and damage of the virus. However, the incidence of the virus has played out in a different way, Africa’s cases are not as high as that of other continents. The possible reasons that have been given for this are: demographics (a younger population), open housing (which allows greater ventilation), and an ongoing circulation of other types of coronaviruses which have induced a natural, partial immunity in the population.

Wallace also commented on herd immunity, stating that it is not a panacea for defeating the virus. He referenced a paper by Lewis Buss et al on COVID-19 herd immunity in the Brazilian Amazon which found that although 76% of the population had been infected with the virus by October 2020, they had not achieved herd immunity (which is usually estimated at 70-75%), and proliferation of the virus was ongoing. He pointed out that the key lesson from this study is that there is no magical threshold for herd immunity; it may be different for different populations or there may be no threshold at all.

Likewise, he contended that defeating COVID-19 has little to do with vaccination as a silver bullet, but much to do with governance and the wellbeing of the population being at the crux of any public health decisions a government would take. A multi-pronged approach should be taken to defeat the virus, one that includes vaccinations, wearing of masks, social distancing, and testing and tracing. He argued however, that in the neoliberal regimes of the industrialised North, dealing with COVID-19 is organized around profit.

This was not the case in the early days of the outbreak. Initially, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US were in favour of having open medicine and making sure any pharmaceutical products produced to fight the virus were free to all. To this end, WHO developed the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP). However, the lobbying of Big Pharma and the likes of Bill Gates worked to centre the COVID-19 response around the model of intellectual property rights. This has had a considerable impact on the evolution of the virus, allowing it enough room to evolve such that pharmaceutical companies can make profits by selling booster shots of the vaccine. According to Wallace, this speaks to the “sociopathic nature” of the neoliberal regimes in the Global North who are willing to put the profits of Big Pharma over the lives of people. He opined that we need to act in solidarity to create a system in which disparities between the Global South and Global North are removed.

Health justice and the pandemic in South Africa – Marlise Richter

Marlise Richter’s presentation shed light on the work of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the lessons that can be learnt from their struggles for access to medicines (in particular ARVs). She pointed out that the TRIPS agreement (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights – TRIPS – is a legal agreement between member states of the World Trade Organisation) had a big impact on how the HIV/AIDS epidemic was addressed, resulting in a limited number of ARVs reaching the Global South.

The HIV epidemic was particularly acute in South Africa, the number of people living with the virus ballooned from 160,000 in 1992 to over 4.2 million people by 2000. At this time, ARV’s had been developed but were unaffordable in Africa, costing up to US$10,000 a year in 1998.

The TAC used multiple strategies such as skilled legal advocacy, high quality research, social mobilization, demonstrations, and public education to fight the pharmaceutical industry and their abuse of intellectual property rights protections. It joined the case brought by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PMA) against the South African government for allowing parallel importation of drugs in order to bring down prices of medicines. Its intervention contributed to pressuring the PMA to withdraw its claims in 2001. In addition, it applied pressure at the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban in 2000 by staging a march to highlight the danger of President Mbeki’s AIDS denialism and demanded access to ARVs in Africa.

From 1999 onwards, the TAC also campaigned for a national prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. This case was won at the high court and precipitated a national ARV roll-out plan in April 2004. Finally, in 2002, TAC and the AIDS Law Project filed a complaint with the Competition Commission against GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Boehringer Ingelheim arguing that they violated the competition law by abusing their dominance in the market and charging excessive prices for ARVs. This forced the companies to reach a settlement in 2003 leading to a drastic cut in ARV prices. By employing these tactics, the TAC and other activists were able to transform both the national and global conversation on drug pricing, eventually leading to South Africa having the largest HIV treatment program globally and pharmaceutical companies reducing the prices of ARVs.

Following the success of the campaigns to provide access to ARVs in Africa, activists in the Global South fought for the Doha Declaration. The Doha Declaration waived some of the provisions in TRIPS in order to prevent public health crises and promote access to medicines for all. However, Richter commented that not many of these flexibilities have been used. She posits that this is due to immense political pressure from the West. The US in particular has singled out governments that seek to use the TRIPS flexibilities and placed them on the US Special 301 Watch List.

Returning to the present, Richter presented data that showed that on 3 August, there have been just under 200 million confirmed cases and over 4.2 million deaths of COVID-19. 28.6% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of the vaccine with 14.8% fully vaccinated. But to give a sense of the disparity in vaccine administration across the world, she indicated that 4.21 billion doses have been administered globally with 38.67 million administered daily, but in low-income countries only 1.1% of people have received at least one dose. Narrowing it down to Africa, only 1.58% of the population has been fully vaccinated. This variance in administered vaccines is also present across the continent. In July 2021, Morocco had 28.9% of its population fully vaccinated, Botswana and South Africa had 5.3% and 5% of their populations fully vaccinated, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo had 0%. These incongruities are also evident when we assess the number of vaccines promised against vaccines delivered, with South Africa receiving only 26% of the vaccines promised. Continuing at the current pace, it would take South Africa two years and three months just to vaccinate 67% of its population.

Richter quoted the WHO Director-General saying, “The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure – and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.” Following from this, she believes that it makes ethical sense and public health sense for vaccines to be distributed equitably amongst the world’s population. In a bid to fight for vaccine equity, South Africa and India co-sponsored the TRIPS waiver in October 2020. If successful, this waiver will bring about flexibilities in the TRIPS agreement which would have an immense impact on the manufactured supplies of vaccines and other medical goods. For the waiver to be passed, a consensus amongst all member states of the WTO needs to be reached. While the waiver is supported by over 100 countries (predominantly in the Global South), it has been blocked most notably by the EU, Australia, Norway and Japan, countries which have enough vaccines to vaccinate their population many times over. Putting this into perspective, in January 2021 the EU had 3.5 vaccines per person and Canada had 9.6 vaccines per person, as compared to 0.2 vaccines per person in the African Union. By blocking this waiver, the industrialised North is further entrenching the extreme inequalities currently faced by the Global South.

Richter concluded her presentation by speaking on a recent development in South Africa, where Pfizer-BioNtech has recently signed a ‘fill and finish’ contract with the Biovac Institute. She claimed that while this is a first step in developing manufacturing capacity, it is not enough to achieve vaccine independence because it does not include the sharing of Pfizer-BioNtech’s technology or know-how. In addition, the ‘fill and finish’ approach does not address issues of security of supply, nor does it allow local manufacturers the freedom to make their own pricing decisions. She believes that if we start from the premise that health is a human right, as the TAC does, we will regard health equity and especially vaccine equity as essential in the struggle against the pandemic.

The political economy of the continuing fight against intellectual property rights negatively affecting public health goods in Africa – Tetteh Hormeku

Tetteh Hormeku’s presentation was centred around the challenges that African countries have confronted in the process of trying to develop their own pharmaceutical capacity. These challenges go beyond the struggles for the TRIPS waiver and include the impact of some of the choices governments have made. He focused on two interrelated points that frame the predicament of African countries in relation to the current vaccine situation:

1) The vaccine process is dominated by pharmaceutical Multinational Corporations (MNCs) based in the advanced industrial countries and supported by their governments. The controversy around the TRIPS waiver is a clear example of the extent to which advanced countries and their MNCs would like to hold on to their place in the international order.

2) On the non-existent domestic pharmaceutical capacity in African countries, Tetteh explained that he uses the phrase “domestic pharmaceutical capacity” because:

It does not include a subsidiary of an MNC signing a production agreement with a local African company.
The word ‘domestic’ combines both the local character of production and the fact that it is embedded within the nation, its challenges, people, drives and imperatives.
It does not refer to nations alone, but also to regional and continental initiatives.
It captures pharmaceutical capacity beyond the production of vaccines.

Tetteh provided the following case-study to show how these two points are interrelated. 24 February marked the first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines to Ghana, and there was an optimism that it would be the beginning of a steady supply of vaccines to the country – six months later, less than 2% of the population has been vaccinated. Around the time Ghana received this first shipment, it was in talks with the Cuban government for support on the transfer of technology to improve its pharmaceutical capacity.

This date in February also marked the anniversary of the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. Six months before the coup Nkrumah’s government had established a state pharmaceutical enterprise. After the coup, the military government tried to hand it over to Abbott Laboratories, an American pharmaceutical company, under such outrageous terms that the resulting backlash from the populace led to the abandonment of this plan.

The creation of a state-owned pharmaceutical enterprise in Ghana and in other African countries in the post-independence era was a reaction to colonial policies which deliberately curtailed the production of knowledge and science across the continent. The aim of developing a pharmaceutical industry domestically was to intervene on three levels:

Creating an industry with the technical know-how and the machinery to be able to participate in the production of pharmaceutical products.

Creating an industry which is linked to the process of developing and building knowledge and being at the frontiers of knowledge. This involved creating linkages with universities and scholars.

Making use of traditional sources of medical knowledge. The state pharmaceutical enterprise was in operation until the 1980s when due to the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) it was privatized and unable to compete in the free market.

Tetteh pointed out that two lessons can be taken from this anecdote:

The government strongly intervened to ensure pharmaceutical production was linked to public procurement and public policy. The market for the product was guaranteed (army, public hospitals etc.).
The government intervened to ensure that certain medical products could not be imported into the country. These interventions were crucial in creating the legal and scientific conditions within which the state-owned enterprise thrived until the SAP period.

A key success of the state pharmaceutical enterprise was that it was able to bargain with Big Pharma on its own terms. At the time, Big Pharma needed to negotiate with the state pharmaceutical enterprise to produce their products locally since they had no access to the Ghanaian market. Although Ghana’s intellectual property rights regime replicated and mimicked some of the standards in the Global North, it was an indication of the amount of space countries in the Global South had to develop their own legislation with respect to intellectual property for public health. However, this option is no longer available to these countries. According to Tetteh, TRIPS inaugurated the monopoly that Big Pharma has over technical know-how for medical products. It has also enabled bio-piracy which allows Big Pharma to appropriate African traditional knowledge and patent it for themselves. In the 1990s, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) tried to create an African model law to enable a fight against bio-piracy but was unsuccessful.

Tetteh noted that the current situation highlights the importance of getting the TRIPS waiver, as it is a starting point for building domestic pharmaceutical capacity. The waiver goes beyond just patents and encompasses a host of other intellectual property rights such as copyrights, and industrial design. It covers all the important bases for making medicines in a modern context. Looking back to the Doha Declaration, very few countries were able to make real changes to their laws in order to make use of the flexibilities. This was due in part to the entrenchment of TRIPS in other agreements such as AGOA (the African Growth and Opportunity Act) and the EPAs (Economic Partnership Agreements). However, importantly, there was no real commitment by African leaders to making these changes.

Tetteh argued that African leaders are not making the strategic choices that would eventually lead them to developing independent pharmaceutical industries. Suggesting that South-South cooperation is an avenue to address the current issues the continent faces, he argued that instead of using all their funds to buy vaccines, African countries could have allocated some funds to support phase three of Cuba’s vaccine trials. By doing this, they would have been able to negotiate for a consistent relationship in terms of knowledge exchange and the transfer of technology.

Updates on COVID-19 in Senegal and Kenya

Cheikh Tidiane Dieye provided an update on the COVID-19 situation in Senegal. The country recorded its first case of the virus in March 2020. Since then, the government has put in place measures such as curfews, travel restrictions and the banning of public gatherings to contain the spread of the disease. The Senegalese government did not enforce a lockdown because the country has a large informal sector which would have been negatively impacted by a lockdown.

Senegal is currently experiencing its third wave – driven by the delta variant. The total number of cases has increased significantly over the last year, moving from 9,805 cases and 195 deaths in July 2020 to 63,560 cases with 1,365 deaths as of July 2021. This increase in cases has taken a toll on the country as it does not have the healthcare infrastructure to deal with the virus caseload. The vaccination campaign was launched in February this year, with about 1.2 million doses received, 1.8% of the population fully vaccinated and 3% receiving their first dose.

He stated that Senegal is currently facing two issues:

Lack of access to the vaccines. This is because the country does not have the means to purchase enough vaccines for its population and is currently relying on donations from COVAX. This has resulted in protracted waiting times for the vaccine. These waiting times can cause complications for vaccine administration, since there are people who have received the first dose but must wait for longer than the recommended time of eight weeks to receive their second dose.
A significant part of the population is reluctant to receive vaccines and sensitization campaigns are proving ineffective.

He remarked on one key development in Senegal – the creation of a vaccine manufacturing plant funded by the World Bank, the US, and a few European countries. The plant is expected to produce 300 million doses a year, first of COVID-19 vaccines and then other types of vaccines against endemic diseases. This project will be implemented by the Institut Pasteur de Dakar which already produces yellow fever vaccines.

ROAPE’s Njuki Githethwa provided an update on the COVID-19 situation in Kenya. He mentioned that the delta variant has caused a surge in cases and deaths. There have been currently over 200,000 cases since the pandemic began with the total number of deaths at 4,000 at the end of July. He pointed out that this third wave is affecting the lower classes which were spared in the initial stages of the pandemic. Kenya has received 1.8 million doses of the vaccine, with about 1.7% of Kenyans vaccinated. He noted that if vaccinations continue at this pace, it will take over two years for Kenyans to be fully vaccinated.

According to Njuki, the disbursement of vaccines from the West is being portrayed as a symbol of charity, solidarity, and sympathy. This portrayal is underlain by the West positioning themselves as saints while vilifying other countries like India and China. He also mentioned that there is a class dynamic at play in Kenya regarding the distribution of vaccines. People in affluent areas have ease of access whereas the less privileged wait in long queues to get vaccinated. As a result, most of the population, including frontline workers, are yet to be vaccinated. Schools in the country reopened at the end of July, and only about 60% of teachers have been vaccinated. Njuki touched on the fact that there is an optimism that more vaccines are coming, however the government is not doing enough to sensitise the population. There is still a lot of misinformation and superstition surrounding the vaccines.

Moving beyond the state?

The discussion was further enriched by contributions from the participants. Gyekye Tanoh, for example, noted that in the past the presence of state pharmaceutical enterprises around the continent constituted an active and embodied interest. This influenced the way transnational pharmaceutical companies were able to negotiate, severely limiting their power. However, such a thing is not present today on the continent. In fact, a study from the McKinsey Institute pointed to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has the highest markups in Africa, meaning that while the continent is not the biggest market, it is the most profitable region in the world. Currently, the interests of Big Pharma dominate, he asked, how do we begin to shift this? Is it time to look beyond the state as a leading agent for change? What can progressives do in this situation?

In response to Gyekye’s question, Tetteh argued that he does not believe that it is time to look beyond the government. In the case of the pharmaceutical industry, the market is created by production and government procurement of pharmaceutical products. Real change cannot be realised without the involvement of the government and well thought out policies. But there is still a role for progressives. Activists need to mobilise and organize around broad paradigmatic changes and clear concrete policy choices that can be implemented in the immediate, medium, and long term.

Wallace added that the objectives of activists in the Global North should be to support the efforts of those in the Global South. This is especially important because COVID-19 is not the only virus that can cause real damage. We need to make structural changes that ensure the Global South is not at the mercy of the Global North whose economic model has contributed to the current situation.

Farai Chipato ended the session by thanking the speakers and participants for their contributions to the fruitful and important discussion. Chipato urged participants to join ROAPE and TWN-Africa for their two upcoming webinars: ‘Popular public health in Africa: lessons from history and Cuba’ and ‘Alternative strategies and politics for the Global South: climate-change and industrialisation.’

Cassandra Azumah works at the South Centre and has a MA in Political Science and Political Economy from the London School of Economics.

Featured Photograph: Children wearing masks to protect themselves against COVID-19 (Aobakwe Absa Basupi, 27 February 2021).

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