The World Bank and Covid-19: the private investment broker of the Global South

January 21, 2021

Despite cosmetic rebranding, the World Bank continues its decades-long work of pushing power into the hands of private capital. Sean Taylor explains how the Covid-19 response is being used to further the Bank’s role of acting as a private investment broker in the Global South.

By Sean Taylor

For decades, it has been documented that World Bank operations have advanced capitalist restructuring in the Global South, and that it is institutionally wedded to the language and ideology of neoliberalism: deregulation, privatisation, marketisation, and commercialisation. This institutional fixation with neoliberal ideology remains almost unchanged in the face of rapidly changing global economic and political circumstances.

The 2010s were set against the backdrop of the 2007/8 financial crisis, which posed a severe threat to neoliberalism. This decade also saw the coming-of-age of alternative economic models, in the form of the ‘developmental state,’ or ‘retro-liberalism,’ offered by the likes of China and Brazil. This has furthered the ideological challenge to neoliberalism. Yet, the Bank – rather than updating its economic doctrine for the 21st century – spent the 2010s transferring power into the hands of private capital, as it has always done. For example, its Maximising Finance for Development (MFD) scheme, one of its flagship policies of the decade, is presented as an innovative new way of financing sustainable development in the Global South. Though presented as part of the Bank’s rebranding as a ‘solutions Bank,’ ostensibly void of ideology, in practice it operates according to the same neoliberal logic long promoted by the institution.

This tunnel vision is guiding the Bank’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the potential for global economic transformation. That this commitment to neoliberal orthodoxy should remain steadfast, in the face of such challenges, suggests that the Bank enters the 2020s doing the same fundamental job it has done since the 1980s: transferring power to private capital.

The World Bank and Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism has not, of course, been the sole preserve of the World Bank. Since the 1970s the global economy has undertaken a process of capitalist restructuring, in which the fundamental tenets of a capitalist economy have been expanded: free markets, private property, exchange relations across society, and power shifts in favour of capital over labour (I understand neoliberalism to be essentially a project of capitalist restructuring, and that it should be understood in this context). This has been an almost universal phenomenon, yet the Bank has been crucial in advancing this programme in the Global South.

Since the late 1970s the Global South has become dependent on capital in the form of loans, contingent on neoliberal reforms such as tax cuts, lower regulations, lower financial costs, and privatisation of public services. Societies in the Global South have been profoundly reorganised as a result. I appreciate that this is not new territory for readers of roape.net, and it should be noted that much of ROAPE’s coverage of the continent in the 1980s examined in detail the consequences for African societies and economies of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programmes (see the archive for back issues of the review). There has been no lack of critique of this neoliberal model, but dependence on Western capital, and lack of credible alternative economic models (since 1989 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall) has meant near ideological hegemony in international development. Without challenge, it is of little surprise that the Bank continued to vigorously promote neoliberal reforms in the developing world.

The landscape has, however, changed rapidly since 2008. Alternative economic models are being offered in countries such as China and Brazil. Neoliberal logic assumes the state, its regulatory powers, and ownership of industries, are impediments to free market efficiency. By contrast actors such as China and Brazil see the state as an imperative actor for directing capital towards appropriate projects. The ‘developmental state’, as this model is often known, is an active participant in development, not a bureaucratic frustration whose frontiers are to be rolled back. This model is sometimes also referred to as ‘retro-liberalism,’ for its similarities with Western models of the 1950s. As well as offering a viable alternatives to neoliberalism, more Southern actors – China, Brazil, India, Venezuela and South Africa, for example – are acting as development lenders and investors, reducing dependency on Western capital, and thus the associated contingencies.

This threat to neoliberalism’s ideological and geostrategic dominance rapidly accelerated following the global financial crash of 2007/8 – largely blamed on deregulation of global finance. The countries which had most embraced neoliberalism in the decades prior – such as the UK, where this blogpost is being written – entered a recession followed by a decade of austerity. By contrast, developing countries offering alternative, ‘retro-liberal’ models came out of the crash in a position of relative strength, having maintained high, if decelerated, growth rates.

Together this posed an existential crisis for neoliberalism. The model’s failures had been exposed in the West where it wreaked economic havoc and was subsequently rebuked from all sides; both right-wing and left-wing politicians attacked what was commonly labelled neoliberal globalisation. In some parts of the Global South alternative models were providing high growth rates and appeared to offer a preferable route for smaller developing countries. The capital dependency upon which the West had relied on in order to strong-arm neoliberal reforms on to the Global South was being weakened.

Sham reforms

In terms of the game, it would have made sense at this point for the World Bank to have adapted to remain relevant. Even the IMF appeared to recognise its limitations, in admitting that elements of the neoliberal project “have not delivered as expected.” Yet, the Bank’s adaptations to this new world in which neoliberalism was losing the ideational battle have been merely cosmetic thus far.

As early as 2012 there was talk of a “new strategic identity,” growing into a “solutions bank.” Arguably, one implication of becoming a ‘solutions bank’ is an admission that the Bank was previously not focused on perfecting solutions, but ideology. Was the Bank tacitly suggesting it would be repositioning itself at a further distance from neoliberalism?

If so, the Bank’s rhetoric did not match its actions. The flagship announcement of the 2010s, the MFD scheme, ultimately follows the same logic as its previous work in the Global South. MFD is described by the Bank as an opportunity to bridge the US$2.6 trillion per year gap between development aid and what is necessary to end global poverty. The Bank sees developing countries as a US$12 trillion ‘market opportunity,’ into which it seeks to attract private capital investment using subsidies and guarantees, and legal, policy, and regulatory changes. This sets up securitisation markets in the financial sector, and proliferates the use of Public-Private Partnerships (PPP).

In practice, this equates to the deregulation of domestic finance sectors, in order to incorporate global financial institutions and shadow banking institutions in the economy. Foreign investment is enticed through further deregulation of labour, land, environmental, and social laws. In other words, a wholesale reconfiguration of the economy in order to access private debt.

For example, in Indonesia where the MFD scheme is being used for geothermal exploration, the Bank seeks to use US$150m from the government, US$175m in concessional climate finance, and US$325m in Bank loans to unlock US$4bn in private capital investment to put towards geothermal exploration. The Bank itself provides “advice on how to structure the facility to align with the needs of the private sector.” Rather than Bank or state-led investment adapting to the needs of Indonesia’s energy sector, the Bank explicitly states that Indonesia must make adaptations to the needs of private sector investors. There are plenty of similar instances in Kenya and Nepal where MFD is underway, and the Bank states that “MFD is about prioritizing private sector solutions and optimizing the use of scarce public resources.”

Development is reduced, then, to being dependent on neoliberal reforms which expand the private sector and weaken the power of the state over its domestic economy. This is ‘development’ as a power-grab by global finance. The Bank’s reinvention of itself amounts to little more than becoming a private investment broker in developing economies.

Covid and the Bank

Today the world faces a fresh challenge to the neoliberal model, with the Covid-19 pandemic graphically illuminating its deficiencies. In particular, the reduction in state-planning capacity left countries ill-equipped for the logistical challenges the pandemic posed, with the so-called efficiencies of the market found wanting.

This has been particularly exposed in the distinction between the failure of the neoliberal West’s test, trace and isolate systems – which were often contracted out to the private sector – compared to those of Asian countries. Just-in-time supply chains and large supranational free trade areas and political bodies begin to look outdated in a world where borders are being closed and the nation-state confirmed as a real political and sovereign entity.

Public-private-partnerships have been a hallmark of neoliberalism, often supplying public services. These have been long-criticised, but the collapse in demand for some of these services during periods of lockdown has left some states with huge bills being paid to private companies just so they can maintain profit margins. The World Bank’s failure to produce data on exactly how much is being spent only serves to make it look like a shady racketeering scheme. Profit margins remain too sacred to be touched, whilst states will no doubt be forced to make cuts to public services in order to pay for them.

At the same time as the virus have ripped through communities and societies demand has increased for healthcare. In much of the developing world, public healthcare systems are underfunded and of poor quality, and much provision is private – again this is the legacy of structural adjustment programmes and reforms from the 1980s. The role of global finance, and its need for returns on investment, in funding private healthcare means that profit is often put before a universal quality of care. The result is grotesque health inequalities. Rather than a ‘great leveller,’ the pandemic shows that the greater role of private companies and global finance in healthcare systems results in higher death rates among those in a worse socioeconomic position.

Despite these fundamental flaws, inherent to the neoliberal model, the Bank has refused to change course. Of the World Bank’s initial US$14bn disbursement to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, US$8bn (57%) was channelled through the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the Bank, representing an increase on its historic average of 17%. Of the IFC funding, 68% went to financial institutions rather than ‘real sector’ businesses, such as agribusiness, healthcare, and tourism; 50% of funding to these sectors went to companies that are, or are owned by, international conglomerates. Therefore, the Bank’s Covid response was primarily an exercise in rescuing global finance.

Funding allocated by the IFC to the ‘real sector’ continues to support this notion. To take one example, the IFC and the International Development Association (another arm of the WB) are raising US$4m in blended concessional finance (private investment) to support a project by Ciel Healthcare, Uganda’s largest private healthcare provider. Given the health inequalities inherent to the financialisation of health systems, this is not an optimum project for protecting Ugandans, which would be to improve universal public healthcare systems, rather than brokering private investment.

This is part of a wider trend in the developing world. Spending on public health briefly increased when the pandemic first surged, but the focus quickly returned to private provision, with the IFC announcing a US$4bn Public Health Platform with the explicit purpose of “support[ing] the private sector’s ability and capacity to deliver healthcare products and services.”

Taking other examples, an emergency Bank loan to Ecuador in May, the Bank demonstrates a commitment to the wider principles of neoliberal economics to stimulate economic growth. The loan was conditional on removing certain sectoral minimum wages and increasing exemptions for taxes on financial transactions. A loan to Nigeria’s energy sector in June last year was completed with the explicit purpose of de-risking investment for the private sector. In these instances, the Bank is acting to hand power to private capital, effectively making the success of Ecuador and Nigeria’s domestic economies dependent on the rampant desire for profits motivating global financial institutions.

These are not isolated examples. The Bank declared in one blogpost last year that its Covid-19 response is part of their “integrated approach to help mobilize private sector financing.” It goes on to discuss the central role PPPs will play in their future economic plans, despite the way they have locked in profits for private investors.

This is the future offered by the Bank. It continues to advocate for neoliberal reforms in the Global South even as this model faces, what would appear to be, an existential challenge. There remains the possibility in the long run that the Bank could fade into irrelevance as other international players, primarily China, reshape the global economy. But what is certain is that the Bank has entered the Covid-19 world with the same mission as it had in the 1980s: advance capitalist restructuring and push power into the hands of private capital.

Sean Taylor is a politics graduate from the University of Leeds, with particular interests in radical political thought and political economy.

Featured Photograph: A member of the Boston Direct Action Project dressed as vampires to impersonate public relations associates of the World Bank, Washington DC (Justin McIntosh, April 2005).

Reflections on aid and regime change in Africa: a response to Cheeseman

ROAPE

January 19, 2021

In a response to Nic Cheeseman’s call for strengthening patron-client relations between western donors and African governments, Jimi O. Adesina, Andrew M. Fischer and Nimi Hoffmann argue his approach is ahistorical, counterproductive, and morally indefensible. They explain that Cheeseman ignores the destructive, anti-democratic role of western-backed regime change and policy conditionality across the Global South.

By Jimi O. Adesina, Andrew M. Fischer and Nimi Hoffmann

In a blogpost, published on 22 December 2020, that he describes as the most important thing he wrote in 2020, Nic Cheeseman penned a strong criticism of what he calls the ‘model of authoritarian development’ in Africa. This phrase refers specifically to Ethiopia and Rwanda, the only two countries that fit the model, which is otherwise not generalisable to the rest of the continent. His argument, in a nutshell, is that donors have been increasingly enamoured with these two countries because they are seen as producing results. Yet the recent conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia shows that this argument needs to be questioned and discarded. He calls for supporting democracy in Africa, which he claims performs better in the long run than authoritarian regimes, especially in light of the conflicts and repression that inevitably emerge under authoritarianism. His argument could also be read as an implicit call for regime change, stoking donors to intensify political conditionalities on these countries before things get even worse.

Cheeseman’s argument rests on a number of misleading empirical assertions which have important implications for the conclusions that he draws. In clarifying these, our point is not to defend authoritarianism. Instead, we hope to inject a measure of interpretative caution and to guard against opportunistically using crises to fan the disciplinary zeal of donors, particularly in a context of increasingly militarised aid regimes that have been associated with disastrous ventures into regime change.

We make two points. First, his story of aid dynamics in Ethiopia is not supported by the data he cites, which instead reflect the rise of economic ‘reform’ programmes pushed by the World Bank and IMF. The country’s current economic difficulties also need to be placed in the context of the systemic financial crisis currently slamming the continent, in which both authoritarian and (nominally) democratic regimes are faring poorly.

Second, we reflect on Cheeseman’s vision of aid as a lever of regime change. Within already stringent economic adjustment programmes, his call for intensifying political conditionalities amounts to a Good Governance Agenda 2.0. It ignores the legacy of the structural adjustment programmes in subverting deliberative governance on the continent during the 1980s and 1990s.

Misleading aid narratives distract from rebranded structural adjustment

On the first point, Cheeseman establishes his argument early on by stating ‘that international donors have become increasingly willing to fund authoritarian regimes in Africa on the basis that they deliver on development’. In support of this assertion, he cites a table from the World Bank that shows net Official Development Assistance (ODA) received by Ethiopia surging to USD 4.93 billion in 2018, up from just over USD 4 billion in 2016 and 2017, and from a plateau oscillating around USD 3.5 billion from 2008 to 2015.

These aggregated data are misleading because ODA received by Ethiopia from western bilateral donors in fact fell in 2018 (and probably continued falling in 2019 and 2020). The World Bank data that he cites are actually from the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) statistics, which refer to all official donors (but not including countries such as China). If we restrict donor assistance to DAC countries – which is relevant given that Cheeseman only refers to the US, the UK and the EU in his piece – disbursed ODA to Ethiopia fell from USD 2.26 billion in 2017 to USD 2.06 billion in 2018 (see the red line in the figure below).

Figure: ODA to Ethiopia (millions USD), 2000-2019

OECD.stat, last accessed 30 December 2020.

There was a brief moderate increase in DAC country ODA starting in 2015 and peaking in 2017. Cheeseman might have been referring to this. However, contrary to his argument, it was likely that the reason for this increase in aid was primarily humanitarian, responding to the refugee influx from South Sudan that began in 2015 and to the severe drought and famine risk in 2016-17. It was also probably related to attempts to induce incipient political reform following the major protests in Oromia in 2014, which Cheeseman would presumably condone given that conventional measures of democracy and freedom improved in 2018. Indeed, it is notable that committed ODA from DAC donor countries fell even more sharply than disbursed aid in 2018, from USD 2.49 billion in 2017 to USD 2.07 billion, reflecting the context in which these countries were negotiating hard with the Ethiopian government at the time.

Instead, the sharp increase in ODA in 2018 came entirely from the International Development Association (IDA) of the World Bank Group, which increased its mixture of grants and loans to the country from USD 1.1 billion in 2017 to USD 2.1 billion in 2018. This subsequently fell to USD 1.8 billion in 2019 (the dashed green line in the figure).

Such ODA has been explicitly tied to the World Bank’s long-standing goal of liberalising, privatising and deregulating the Ethiopian economy, thereby ‘reforming’ (or disassembling) many of the attributes that have allowed the Ethiopian state to act in a developmentalist manner. These attributes include state-owned enterprises, state control over the financial sector, and relatively closed capital accounts, in strong distinction to most other countries in Africa (including Rwanda).

For instance, in October 2018 it approved USD 1.2 billion from the IDA in support of ‘a range of economic reforms designed to revitalize the economy by expanding the role of the private sector… to gradually open up the economy and introduce competition to and liberalize sectors that have been dominated by key state-owned enterprises (SOEs)’. The support aimed to promote public-private partnerships in key state-owned sectors such as telecoms, power and trade logistics as key mechanisms to restructure these sectors, as well as broader deregulation and financial liberalisation. It is also notable that the World Bank prefaced this justification by emphasising the political reforms that had already been embarked upon, and the promotion of ‘citizen engagement social accountability’ in Ethiopia.

In other words, contra the idea that western donors have been increasing their support for an authoritarian development model, they have been gradually withdrawing aid since 2017. The World Bank pulled up the slack in 2018, and in December 2019 both the World Bank and IMF promised more funding in support of ongoing economic reforms. The economic liberalisation has in turn undermined political liberalisation and has been a key source of political destabilization.

The bargaining hand of these donors has been reinforced by the economic difficulties faced by the Ethiopian economy – in particular, a hard tightening of external foreign-exchange constraints. Balance of payments statistics reveal that the government had effectively stopped external borrowing after 2015, a policy that it was advised to adopt in its Article IV consultations with the IMF in 2016 and 2017 as its external debt distress levels were rising. As a result, the government became excessively reliant on donor grant money as a principal source of foreign financing. Yet the country continued to run deep trade deficits, in large part because its development strategies, as elsewhere in Africa, have been very import and foreign-exchange intensive (e.g. think of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, requiring more than USD 4.6 billion to build, the bulk in foreign exchange). Significant capital flight appears to have taken place as well; for example, errors and omissions reported on the balance of payments were -USD 2.14 billion in 2018. In order to keep the ship afloat, the central bank burnt through over USD 1 billion of its reserves in 2018 alone.

This severe tightening of foreign-exchange constraints needs to be understood as a critical structural factor in causing the development strategy to stall. Along with non-economic factors, this in turn put considerable strain on the government’s ability to stabilise political factions through the deployment of scarce resources, of which foreign exchange remains among the most important, especially in the current setting. Again, the point is not to apologise for authoritarianism, but rather to emphasise that the current situation is rooted deeper within a conjuncture of systemic crises that go far beyond any particular form of political administration.

Indeed, Cheeseman commits a similar oversight in ignoring the previous systemic crisis that the present is in many ways repeating. Later in his piece, he asserts: ‘The vast majority of African states were authoritarian in the 1970s and 1980s, and almost all had poor economic growth.’ This is an ahistorical misrepresentation of the profound global crisis that crippled Africa from the late 1970s for about two decades and which was the source of the poor growth he mentions. Then, as now, economic crisis was triggered throughout the continent by the severe tightening of external constraints, which neoliberal structural adjustment programmes exacerbated in a pro-cyclical manner despite being justified in the name of growth. The combination crippled developmentalist strategies across the continent regardless of political variations and despite the fact that many countries were performing quite well before the onset of the crisis. Such historical contextualisation is crucial for a correct assessment of the present.

In this respect, there is a danger of putting the cart before the horse. Most countries that descend into deep protracted crises (economic or political) generally stop being nominally democratic, and yet this result becomes attributed as a cause, as if authoritarianism results in crisis or poor performance. Cheeseman cherry-picks two papers (one a working paper) on democracy and development performance in Africa (which like all cross-country regressions, are highly sensitive to model specification and open to interpretation). However, drawing any causality from such studies is problematic given that states tended to become more authoritarian after the global economic crisis and subsequent structural adjustments of the late 1970s and 1980s, not the other way around. For instance, 16 countries were under military rule in 1972, compared with 21 countries in 1989 during the height of adjustment. Faced with crippled capacity under the weight of severe austerity and dwindling legitimacy as living standards collapsed, many states responded to mass protests against the harsh conditionalities of adjustment with increasing force. As such, economic crisis and adjustment plausibly contributed to the rise of political instability and increasingly authoritarian regimes. Other factors include the Cold War destabilisation, which western countries fuelled and profited from. In other words, the political malaise across Africa at the time was driven by as much by external as internal factors.

Aid as a lever of regime change

This leads us to our second point concerning Cheeseman’s vision of aid as a lever of regime change. Cheeseman is at pains to emphasise that rigged elections and repression of opponents have contributed to the recent emergence of conflict in the Tigray region. While these are important features, Ethiopian intellectuals have also emphasised that conflicts in contemporary Ethiopia have taken place against a history of imperial state formation, slavery and debates about the ‘national question’, or what has sometimes been called ‘internal colonialism’. These conflicts are shaped by the system of ethnic federalism, in which ethnically defined states control their own revenues, social provisioning and security forces. They have been affected by foreign agricultural land grabs, which interact with older histories of semi-feudal land dispossession. Most recently, there have been concerns that regional tensions over the Renaissance Dam and agricultural land may help draw neighbouring countries into the conflict.

In the face of this highly complex and rapidly changing context, no one person can identify the optimal response. It plausibly requires regular collective deliberation by people who are deeply embedded in the context. In particular, the brief political liberalisation of 2018 was followed by a sharp uptick of political violence on all sides, rooted in fundamental tensions between different visions of statehood. Such situations cannot be solved simply by ‘adding democracy and stirring’; they require deliberative governance.

Yet, Cheeseman’s piece seeks a reimposition of the very political conditionalities that were a primary factor in subverting deliberative governance on the continent during the first wave of structural adjustment and its attendant Good Governance agendas. Such conditionalities work by constraining the open contestation of ideas and the process of informed consensus-building. They undermine the sovereignty of key institutions of the polity and the economy. And by doing so they degrade the historical meaning of development as a project of reclaiming social and economic sovereignty after colonialism.

Indeed, as Thandika Mkandawire has argued, the previous wave of political conditionalities and democratisation reduced democracies to formal structures of elections and, by wedding and subordinating them to the orthodox economic policy frameworks established under structural adjustment, led to what he called ‘choiceless democracies’. Such ‘disempowered new democracies’ are incapable of responding to the substantive macroeconomic demands of voters and thereby undermining substantive democracy, deliberative governance and policy sovereignty.

In particular, the idea of a democratic developmental state is meaningless in the absence of policy sovereignty. The institutional monocropping and monotasking of the type that Mkandawire wrote about does not merely prevent key institutions, such as central banks, from using broader policy instruments to support the developmental project. It also involves the deliberate creation of unaccountable policy vehicles, such as Monetary Policy Committees (MPCs), which operate outside of democratic oversight, but have considerable hold on the levers of economic policy. MPCs are in turn wedded to neoliberal monetarism. The message to such disempowered new democracies is that ‘you can elect any leader of your choice as long as s/he does not tamper with the economic policy that we choose for you.’ Or as Mkandawire wrote in 1994, ‘two or three IMF experts sitting in a country’s reserve bank have more to say than the national association of economists about the direction of national policy.’

In such contexts, the prospect of a democratic developmental state is severely diminished. Ensuring significant improvements in people’s wellbeing is important for the legitimacy of democracies. Yet the subversion of policy sovereignty significantly constrains the ability of new democracies to do so, setting them up for a crisis of legitimacy.

If democracy is to be meaningful it should involve the active engagement of citizens in a system of deliberative governance. Civil society organisations, in this context, are meaningful when they are autonomous institutions of social groupings that actively engage in boisterous debate and public policymaking in articulating the interest of their members. Yet, donor clientelism in Africa has wrought civil society and advocacy organisations that are manufactured and funded by, and accountable to, donors, not the citizens. This is a substantive subversion of democracy as a system of deliberative governance.

In this respect, we can call the kind of intrusive donor clientelism that Cheeseman is recommending Good Governance 2.0. His advocacy for strengthening patron-client relations between western donors and African governments, and his urging that donors use crises as a way of forcing regime change and policy conditionalities, is ahistorical, counterproductive and morally indefensible. In particular, it does not take into account the destructive, anti-democratic role of western-backed regime change and policy conditionality across the Global South during the era of flag independence. Even recently, these donor countries have disastrous human rights records when pushing for regime change in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Their support for military dictatorships, such as in Egypt, has been a central pillar of foreign policy for decades. And several of these donor countries worked hard to uphold apartheid in South Africa. They have no moral high ground to push for regime change, and little record to ensure that they could do so without causing more harm than good.

Moreover, external actors attempting to enforce their narrow view of democratisation in contexts of deeply polarised and competing visions of statehood, and in the midst of economic instability reinforced by already burdensome economic conditionalities, austerity and reforms, could well be a recipe for disaster. As a collective of intellectuals from across the Horn has emphasised, the people of Ethiopia in particular and the Horn in general must be at the forefront of developing a lasting peace. This would likely require a developmental commitment to supporting state capacity and deliberative governance, not undermining it through external interference and conditionalities.

This blogpost was originally posted by CODESRIA Bulletin Online, and has been reposted by The Elephant, Developing Economics blog and other websites.

Jimi Adesina is professor and holder of the South African Research Chair in Social Policy at the College of Graduate Studies, University of South Africa, South Africa. Andrew Fischer is associate professor in Social Policy and Development at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands. Nimi Hoffmann is lecturer at the Centre for International Education at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom.

Featured Photograph: Senegalese women cast their votes in the presidential elections in 2019 (Nic Bothma, 24 February 2019).

Patrice Lumumba: Revolution, freedom, and the Congo today

ROAPE

January 17, 2021

In a powerful defence of the legacy and politics of Patrice Lumumba, murdered 60 years ago today, Charles Gimba Magha-A-Ngimba asks what his death mean for Africa and the Congo? Lumumba’s name has become a passport to power, but the question remains how do we revert to his real legacy?

By Charles Gimba Magha-A-Ngimba

“We must move forward, striking out tirelessly against imperialism. From all over the world we have to learn lessons which events afford. Lumumba’s murder should be a lesson for all of us” — Che Guevara, 1964.

On 17 January 1961, the African leader and first head of government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Patrice Lumumba, was brutally murdered. Yet Lumumba’s legacy endures and continues to resonate among all peoples in Africa and the world.

Lumumba led the DRC to independence on June 30, 1960. The African leader wanted the decolonisation of his country but even more, he wanted to totally eradicate European colonialist power present in Africa, and to remove plunders from the continent and the Congo. As a gifted party organiser, Lumumba’s ambitious aspirations for independence were inspired by pro-independence groups across Africa and notions of African unity emanating from Ghana which has achieved independence in 1957.

Lumumba’s resolute position on independence made him an enemy for Europe and the United States, who, according to several analysts, played a role in his death. The murder of Lumumba was the most significant assassination of the 20^th century due to the global context in which it took place, and its impact on Congolese politics. War, disorder and plunder have plagued the DRC’s people since, despite the Congo being one of the world most mineral-rich countries.

Lumumba died fighting for the Congo’s unity and autonomy, in the context of the country’s colonial past and its rooted mechanisms. Against the backdrop of such a violent history in the DRC, in the 1950s groups emerged with a pro-independence determination for a free and sovereign Congo. One of these groups was the Congolese National Movement (MNC), in which Lumumba became the best-known face and from 1958 its leader.

In 1958, inspired by the independence movement of Africa after attending the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana, Lumumba was determined to fight for the decolonisation of the DRC, despite the limited possibilities of social action due to the Belgian colonial system – an empire of silence, as it was known. Lumumba was in favour of creating an independent and secular state, whose unitary political structures would help to overcome tribal differences and feed into the creation of national sentiment.

After protests and a rising wave of decolonisation over several years, a round-table conference was called in Brussels in January 1960. At this conference, the Congolese strongly rejected the guidelines drawn up by Belgium, and under the leadership of Lumumba and the MNC they insisted on the immediate transition to independence and elections. Elections were called for May of that year and Lumumba was elected the first Prime Minister, while Joseph Kasa-Vubu was appointed as the first President of the newly independent state. The country became officially independent on 30 June 1960, later changing its name to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

However, independence immediately triggered major difficulties. Lumumba was unable to prevent widespread disturbances, mainly in the provinces of Katanga and South Kasai, where both states, in mineral rich areas of the Congo, seceded with the support of the Belgian government. The Katanga region was (and still is) the heart of the country’s mining wealth, where large-scale industrial mining had started in the early 20th century, mainly through the system of colonial companies, closely aligned with the Belgian state.

Huge profits were stolen from the Congolese people filling the pockets of the colonial industrial and political elite; something that after independence, the former colonial power was not willing to sacrifice. It was inevitable that the construction of a legacy based on brutal colonial exploitation and political authoritarianism would not vanish overnight. After July 1960, the uprisings and breakaway of Katanga grew in strength with the mutiny of military forces supported by the US and Belgium.

As a strategic ally to Belgium, the US maintained a close interest in DRC’s affairs, given their interest in uranium, mined in the Congo. Lumumba’s determination to use Congo’s natural resources for the benefit of the people, meant he was immediately perceived as a threat to Western interests, which led them to use all possible strategies to remove him. After the separatist revolts in Katanga supported, Lumumba demanded before the UN the rights of sovereignty and inviolability of its territory and called for the immediate expulsion of Belgian troops. However, the UN ignored the request and Lumumba sought the support of the Soviet Union, which for many was a defining point in the Congo crisis.

After his murder on 17 January 1961 Lumumba’s body – together with two comrades murdered with him, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo – was dissolved in acid in an attempt to erase his legacy, his thoughts and the importance of his struggles for the liberation of African peoples. Without any physical burial, a gold-capped tooth is all that remains of Lumumba. It was wrenched from his skull after he was executed and taken to Belgium as a human trophy. After 60 years, the tooth is finally heading home. A Belgian judge has ordered it to be sent back to Lumumba’s family in the DRC, where it can be laid to rest.

In Lumumba’s famous letter to his wife, written two months prior to his murder, he wrote:

The day will come when history will speak. It will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations. It will be the history which will be taught in the countries which have won freedom from colonisation and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and in both the north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity.

Dead, living, free, or in prison on the orders of the colonialists, it is not I who counts. It is the Congo, it is our people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage where we are regarded from the outside…

Would the people of Africa be drowning in the Mediterranean in search of a better life in Europe if Lumumba’s vision and leadership had been fulfilled? Today, people in Africa and the Congo are still angry about Lumumba’s murder. Nevertheless, how long shall we continue discussing his death, while the circumstances of our lives remain unchanged? For Africans, Lumumba remains alive as an idea, even if these thoughts are not implemented into a party programme or a political strategy today.

Neither Africa nor the Congo has written the history that Lumumba forecast. Lumumba fought for the Congo’s independence and a united Africa, freed from imperialism and external control. Yet his greatest legacy to his fellow Congolese and Africans remains the ideal of national (and continental) unity, particularly in the DRC where it is still an important weapon in the defence of Congolese territory from Balkanisation supported by foreign powers and international businesses.

Lumumba was also an African revolutionary leader whose Pan-Africanist vision of a united continent gained him many enemies from the outside world. Together with Kwame Nkrumah, Lumumba sought a continent where the wealth of resources would benefit not only the Congo but also African people as a whole.

In his famous independence speech, as the newly elected Prime Minister he stood up and denounced the humiliation and brutality of colonialism. He remained through the crisis in 1960 determined to defend Congo’s independence, territorial integrity, and a programme of reforms that Congolese leaders have completely failed to achieve since his murder. Perhaps it is the current generation’s responsibility to remember Lumumba’s legacy in order to be able to return to his real vision. The cycle of repression, poverty and corruption in the Congolese state illustrates the failure of leadership, and the legacy of exploitation and foreign involvement in Africa and the Congo that continues unabated today.

In the DRC, evoking Lumumba’s name and ideology for political means has become a political strategy to earn people’s trust and their ballots. More than 95% of Congolese politicians label themselves as Lumumbist or Lumumba’s disciples. Yet, the proliferation of Lumumbist political parties is nothing other than a trick which consists of using his name in order to access political office. Lumumba’s name grants political citizenship which has been used to quench personal ambitions and fulfil an imperialist agenda.

We are still forced to ask ourselves what does Lumumba’s death means for African and Congolese people? What are the lessons to be drawn from it? And what are we doing to perpetuate Lumumba’s vision? Today in the Congo, Lumumba’s name has become a passport to power, but the question remains how do we revert to Lumumba’s real legacy?

Charles Gimba Magha-A-Ngimba has a PhD in International Studies and Social Sciences from Coventry University. Gimba teaches at the University of Kikwit in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and is a Research Fellow at the School of Business and Law at Aston University, England.

Featured Photograph: Ituri Province, DRC, a man wears a jacket with the image of Patrice Lumumba (13 September 2015).

Patrice Lumumba and the unfinished business of liberation

ROAPE

January 15, 2021

On 17 January 1961 Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first leader, was murdered. In this celebration of his life and work, the Congolese scholar and activist, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, writes about the All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) that Lumumba attended in 1958, and the years of his leadership of the nationalist movement before his murder. Nzongola-Ntalaja argues that liberation has yet to take place in much of postcolonial Africa which is the failure to follow a revolutionary path.

By Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

When the First All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) took place under the leadership of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah between December 5 and 13, 1958, I was a teenager in the Belgian Congo. I was a student in the first year of a Presbyterian-Methodist secondary school, which eventually expelled me in April 1960, two months before our independence, for my anticolonial activism. These American missionaries had somehow forgotten that they had played a role in our political awakening, not only in provoking our anger by echoing the racist colonial propaganda that Africans could not govern themselves, but also by furnishing our student center with a powerful radio from which we could get news from international broadcasters such as the Voice of America and the BBC plus all the major newspapers published in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville), including those of the principal Congolese political parties.

The Political Rise of Patrice Lumumba

Patrice Lumumba, who was just emerging as a nationalist leader following his election as president of a new and multiethnic political party, the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) or Congolese National Movement in October 1958, spoke to his first Pan-African audience on December 11 at the Accra Conference. He and two other MNC colleagues made the trip to Accra thanks to financial support from the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East and Central Africa (PAFMECA) obtained on their behalf by A.R. Mohamed Babu of Zanzibar (Tanzania) and Tom Mboya of Kenya.[1]

The Accra conference took place at a very propitious moment in Lumumba’s life. Having left his 12-year civil service career as a postal employee and a leader in African elite organizations fighting to gain better entitlements and privileges in the colony, he was then employed as the publicity director of the second largest brewery in Kinshasa, but was contemplating working fulltime as a leader in the national struggle for independence. Nearly two weeks in Accra interacting with progressive heads of state and leaders of radical liberation movements involved in armed struggle helped solidify his volte-face or total rupture with the assimilationist positions of middle-class African évolués.[2] As Frantz Fanon has described them, these gentlemen had “a wish to identify permanently with the bourgeois representatives from the metropolis.”[3]

The rupture with Lumumba’s earlier ideas was evident in his speech to the Accra conference. He no longer perceived colonialism as a harbinger of Western civilization in Africa. It was, on the contrary, a system of exploitation and injustice. Colonial invaders like Henry Morton Stanley – the Welsh-American adventurer – and their successors were no longer heroes to be admired, but racists with an idiotic superiority complex. As for the objective of the political struggle undertaken by the Congolese people, it was no longer a fight for racial equality in a Belgo-Congolese community, but for their total liberation from colonialism and the attainment of full independence.

Thanks to Accra, the notions of freedom and development that Lumumba had been wrestling with since July 1956 became very clear in December 1958. Independence did not mean the embourgeoisement of the so-called educated Africans: the assimilated of French or Portuguese colonies, the “black Englishmen” of the newly independent Ghana, Nigeria and other British colonies, or the Congolese évolués. It meant freedom or liberation for all from economic exploitation, political repression and cultural oppression or racism in all its forms. This independence was not to be granted on a silver platter like Charles De Gaulle did in 1960, in repudiation of his own French Community of 1958. Africans were to rise up to seize independence on their own initiative. While the ultimate aim was and still is the establishment of the United States of Africa, the most immediate task then was the implementation of a national project of democracy and development through self-determination politically, self-reliance economically, and pan-African solidarity throughout the continent and including the African diaspora worldwide.

This is the message with which Lumumba returned to Kinshasa, and one he delivered to the people at a public rally on the AAPC on Sunday, December 28, 1958. On January 4, 1959 – the following Sunday – after the refusal by the Belgian mayor of Kinshasa to authorize a rally called by the Alliance of Bakongo (ABAKO) of Joseph Kasavubu, who was frightened of losing the leadership of the independence struggle to Lumumba’s MNC, an urban rebellion shook the city for four days. A week later, on January 13, both the Belgian king and his government made two separate declarations announcing that they were ready to start discussions on the independence of the Congo. Thanks to the AAPC, January 4, 1959 is commemorated in the Congo today as Independence Martyrs Day, and Lumumba, whose own martyrdom occurred two years later, on January 17, 1961, is our country’s national hero. His effective tenure as prime minister lasted for two months and a half, from June 30 to September 14, 1960, and he was assassinated in the Katanga province, which had declared its independence with Belgian support on July 11, 1960.

The assassination of Patrice Lumumba

The strategic importance of the Congo to the Western powers was such that unlike other martyrs of the liberation struggle who were assassinated directly by their respective colonial powers, the demise of Patrice Lumumba, had to involve the leader of these powers, the United States of America. In the Congo case, what was at stake in 1960 concerned more than the interests of the former colonial power. Lumumba became a victim of a counterrevolution involving the whole African subcontinent from Katanga to the Cape of Good Hope. Mining companies and white settlers in this region were reluctant to cede their political power and economic privileges to the forces of pan-Africanism and African nationalism. For as long as they could, they retained power with the support of Western powers, most of whom were convinced that Europeans and their descendants were better protectors of Western economic and strategic interests than Africans.

Geographically and economically, the Katanga area of the Copperbelt has long been an integral part of the Southern African economic complex, a relatively interdependent region of world capitalism with a highly developed industrial structure in South Africa and an abundance of mineral resources in all major countries. South African capital had been invested in nearly all countries of the region through corporations such as the British South African Company (BSAC), Tanganyika Concessions Ltd. (Tanks or TCL), Anglo-American, Consolidated Gold Fields and De Beers. The development of mining and related industries in Katanga attracted white South Africans and Rhodesians to the Belgian Congo. With these hardcore racists as their reference groups, Belgian settlers sought to create a colonial settler system comparable to the apartheid and other white minority systems of Southern Africa.

The prospects of independence under a radical nationalist government led by Lumumba brought a rapprochement between the corporate leaders, led by the top management of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), the largest corporation in the colony and a subsidiary of the Belgian corporate giant, the Société Générale de Belgique (SGB). With the support of the Belgian government and its NATO allies, plus lobbying efforts of right-wing circles in Western countries, particularly the United States and Britain, mining companies and white settlers felt that their time to seize power had come.

Since Brussels was not willing to set up a government of white settlers on the models of South Africa and Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe), the solution was to set up a fake government with black politicians, but one actually run by Belgian civil servants and military officers. The first Belgian shadow government was known as the Belgian Technical Mission in Katanga (Mistebel), which administered the province from July 22 to August 26, 1960. It was led by Count Harold d’Aspremont Lynden, a nephew of Count Gobert d’Aspremont Lynden, the grand marshal of the royal court or chief of staff of the Belgian King Baudouin I. As minister of African Affairs after leaving Katanga, the younger d’Aspremont Lynden became the supervisor of his successor, Dr. René Clemens, professor of sociology at the University of Liège, who served as head of the Katanga Advisory Office, the second Belgian shadow government in Katanga. Katanga under Moise Tshombe and Godefroid Munongo was nothing but a caricature of a state (un État d’opérette).[4]

As it is widely known today, Lumumba was assassinated on orders from US president Dwight Eisenhower and the Belgian government, acting mostly through Minister of African Affairs Harold d’Aspremont Lynden and his “advisory” team in Katanga. Both the Americans and the Belgians abandoned their earlier assassination plots, the CIA plan to have cobra venom injected in Lumumba’s food or toothpaste, and the Belgian’s Barracuda Plan of hiring a European crocodile hunter to shoot Lumumba. The two countries decided to go along with a more practical idea from Lawrence Devlin, then CIA station chief in the Congo, who thought that collaborating with the moderate Congolese leaders who were against Lumumba and associating them to the crime would yield the desired result quickly. With the approval of the US National Security Council, the CIA mounted a Project Wizard by which Congo president Joseph Kasavubu, military chief Joseph Mobutu, security police chief Victor Nendaka and others took unknown quantities of US dollars to sacrifice the life of their former comrade in the fight for independence.

Other participants in the abduction and the murder of Lumumba, either directly or indirectly include the Tshombe government; the United Nations, whose Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld had “given de facto protection to the Katanga secession;”[5] and MI6, the British foreign intelligence service. Baroness Daphne Park, who served as the MI6 officer in Kinshasa between 1959 and 1961, admitted to a fellow House of Lords peer that she had “organized” the British role in the assassination of Lumumba.[6]

Lumumba was captured on December 1 at Lodi, on the left bank of the Sankuru River, and denied UN protection by the Ghanaian contingent under British military officers at Mweka the next morning. Whatever reasons President Nkrumah had for maintaining senior British military officers in top command positions in the Ghanaian army for more than three years after independence, it was a mistake to assume that these officers would be politically neutral in a crisis like the one in the Congo. Major General Henry Alexander, the Chief of Defence Staff of the Ghanaian army was among the top commanders within the UN force whose anti-Lumumba views were well-known, and he did not get along with the Ghanaian ambassador in the Congo. Nkrumah did dismiss all the British officers in September 1961, but the damage was already done.

After Mweka, Lumumba was taken to Ilebo (then Port Francqui) and flown to Kinshasa where, after enduring more humiliation and torture at the Binza parachutist camp in Mobutu’s presence, he spent a miserable night in Nendaka’s garage. The next day, he was transferred to the élite armored brigade garrison at Mbanza-Ngungu (then Thysville). Even in prison, Lumumba continued to pose a threat to the moderate leadership in Kinshasa, as the Lumumbist government in Kisangani began expanding its control and authority in the eastern part of the Congo and encouraged Lumumba’s followers all over the country to continue the struggle for genuine independence, national unity and territorial integrity. US and Belgian officials were greatly alarmed by these developments, with the US embassy in Kinshasa preoccupied by rumors of a pro-Lumumba coup d’état and the moderate Congolese leaders worrying that the soldiers guarding Lumumba at Mbanza-Ngungu might free him. For Washington and Brussels, the time to get rid of Lumumba physically had arrived. Brussels ordered his transfer to Katanga, where it was certain that he will be killed.

Lumumba and his two companions, youth and sports minister Maurice Mpolo and Senate vice-president Joseph Okito were severely beaten on the plane ride to Katanga, in the presence of two Luba-Kasai members of the college of general commissioners: defense commissioner Ferdinand Kazadi and internal affairs commissioner Jonas Mukamba. Not too far from Luano airport in Lubumbashi (then Elisabethville), Lumumba and his companions were tortured at the Brouwez villa some 8 km from downtown, personally assaulted by Munongo, other Katanga leaders and Belgian officers; and shot by a Belgian execution squad under the command of captain Julien Gat. The next day, police commissioner Gerard Soete and his brother removed the bodies from the burial site, cut them into small pieces and dissolved them in sulfuric acid.

Lessons from the assassination

What are the lessons of the Congo crisis and Lumumba’s assassination for the African continent? The Algerian revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, noted two mistakes: Lumumba’s request for UN intervention in his attempt to expel Belgian troops from Katanga, and the willingness of African countries to send peacekeeping troops under UN cover. At the time of the first Congo crisis, the UN Secretary General and his chief collaborators shared a common Cold War outlook with Western policymakers and saw their mission in the Congo as that of preserving the then existing balance of forces in the world.

Even now, after the Cold War, Fanon’s words are correct in the assertion that “the UN is the legal card used by the imperialist interests when the card of brute force has failed.”[7] The lesson learned here, according to Fanon, is Nkrumah’s well-known dictum: Africa must unite. Instead of relying on the United Nations and remaining blind in the face of the hidden agendas of the major powers, progressive Africans must rely on their own resources and organizations to meet the challenges of peace and security.

Leadership needed for the African Revolution

That reconstruction and development are yet to take place in much of postcolonial Africa is an indication of the fact that most of our leaders have refused to follow the revolutionary path advocated by Fanon by opting for the easier road of enrichment within neocolonial structures.[8] The major consequences of this option include the emergence of an African oligarchy whose main aim is to use state power as a means of personal enrichment; the deepening of underdevelopment in most of our countries; and the impoverishment of the popular masses. Instead of establishing democratic developmental states, we are faced with predatory states and their political economies of plunder.

The first and second generations of African leaders have failed to deliver on the people’s expectations of independence. We need new leaders, and these should come from social movements of women, workers and the youth. Such movements ought to be people-centered, and not elite organizations in which ordinary members are simply cheerleaders for ambitious leaders. Their agenda is crystal clear: (1) repair the betrayal of pan-Africanism by pursuing the goal of pan-African unity and solidarity in Africa and the diaspora; (2) transform the structures of the state and the economy in order to meet the people’s expectations of independence, which were and still are freedom and material prosperity; (3) improve the administration of our states to provide more peace and security to our people; and (4) follow the revolutionary path advocated by Fanon to free our continent from neocolonialism and to strengthen ties with Africans in the diaspora.

This blogpost is part of a keynote address made by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja at the conference, ‘Revisiting the 1958 All-African People’s Conference – the unfinished business of liberation and transformation’ organized by the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon, in collaboration with the Ghana Trades Union Congress (TUC), the Socialist Forum of Ghana, the Third World Network Africa and Lincoln University Pennsylvania (USA), and hosted by the University of Ghana in Accra, December 5-8, 2018.

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is Professor of African and Global Studies in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). He is also a member of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS), former president of the African Studies Association (ASA) of the United States and the author of many books, including The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History and Patrice Lumumba.

Featured Photograph: Patrice Lumumba arrives in New York (24 July 1960).

Notes

[1] Personal communication from Mohamed Babu, London, September 1987.

[2] Kwame Nkrumah and Gamal Abdul Nasser were among the leaders who befriended Lumumba, with Nkrumah taking an active role in Congo affairs until his overthrow in 1966, and Nasser providing support to Lumumba’s followers and having his children grow up in Egypt. As a member of the permanent committee of the AAPC, Lumumba used the committee’s meetings in Conakry to develop a great relationship with President Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea, who provided support, including political advisers, to the Congolese leader. With respect to African liberation movements, the leaders he met in Accra included Amilcar Cabral of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Frantz Fanon of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FNL), and Dr. Félix-Roland Moumié of the Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC).

[3] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 122.

[4] Ludo De Witte, L’assassinat de Lumumba (Paris : Karthala, 2000), p. 83. The English version of this book, The Assassination of Lumumba was published by Verso in London in 2001.

[5] Ibid., p. 381. Emphasis added.

[6] Gordon Corera, “MI6 and the Death of Patrice Lumumba,” BBC News, April 2, 2013; Jean Shaoul, “Britain’s Involvement in Assassination of Congo’s Lumumba Confirmed,” Africa and the World, April 28, 2013.

[7] Frantz Fanon, “Lumumba’s Death: Could We Do Otherwise?” in Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (New York: Grove Press, 1988), p. 195.

[8] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 97-144.

Bobi Wine and hope for a better life in Uganda

ROAPE

January 12, 2021

Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu – better known to the public as Bobi Wine – is a singer turned politician who is currently campaigning in the general election to oust Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni who has been in power for more than 30 years. Pitasanna Shanmugathas looks at the elections and the hope for a better life in Uganda.

By Pitasanna Shanmugathas

Bobi Wine, with a widespread following and popularity among a significant segment of the Ugandan population, has emerged as a strong challenger to Museveni. As a musician, many of Wine’s songs take a socially conscious tone by speaking out against poverty, and in favor of freedom and democracy for Ugandans. Wine grew up in one of the nation’s poorest neighborhoods in the capital city of Kampala and his rise from poverty to being a successful singer, and then an elected Member of Parliament, has been viewed as an inspiration to many of his followers who regard him as ‘the Ghetto President’.

Since Wine’s election as Member of Parliament in 2017, he strongly opposed authoritarian measures imposed by Museveni such as the President’s decision to remove the Presidential age limit and Wine publicly rallied against the President’s decision to impose a social media tax to stifle opposition towards him on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter. During this time, Wine also created a national movement called “People Power” – a movement consisting of, as The Economist describes, “a messy coalition of established politicians, frustrated graduates, and the hustlers of his ghetto hinterland.” The purpose of the movement is to bring awareness to Museveni’s rule and to challenge conventional politics. In response to Wine’s public demonstrations against Museveni, Wine has been subjected to state-sanctioned torture and repeated arrest. Most notably, in August 2018, allegedly on the orders of President Museveni, the Ugandan Security Forces fired live bullets into a crowd of Wine supporters, killed Wine’s personal driver, invaded the hotel that Wine was staying in and proceeded to arrest and subsequently torture him and his colleagues.

On 24 July, 2019, Wine announced his bid to run for president in the 2021 general election. In July 2020, Wine announced himself as the leader of the rebranded and previously obscure political party, the National Unity Platform (NUP). The formation of such a party, with its conventional structure and authority over candidates, comes in contradiction with the spirit of Wine’s People Power movement aimed at challenging conventional politics. In addition, it has been reported that Wine’s new party has engaged in transactional politics. For instance, Derrick Ssonko, who is a mechanic, felt inspirited to run for local councilor, “but the party ticket went to a rival who paid a bribe. He worries that the NUP is ‘old wine in new bottles’ even though everyone he knows will vote for it.”

During his Presidential campaign, supporters of Wine have been met with police violence. In November, 54 people were killed as supporters called for the release of Wine from detention. Wine had been arrested at a campaign rally. Uganda’s security forces have routinely prevented Wine from attending his campaign rallies and the President has prevented Wine from appearing on TV and radio stations.

Most recently, the United States’ Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, publicly condemned tactics within Uganda to suppress free and fair elections. In addition, Eliot Engel, the chairperson of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, has requested that the US impose sanctions on several Ugandan security officials in response to “a worsening of human rights in the country.” There are serious doubts as to whether Uganda can legitimately hold a fair election given the overwhelming control that Museveni wields over public institutions.

The European Union (EU) in November 2020 said it would not deploy an observer mission to monitor the Ugandan elections due to the Ugandan government’s refusal to implement recommendations previously made by the EU which would “make the poll body more independent,” result in the “elimination of excessive use of force by the armed forces and more transparency in tallying.” Chrispin Kaheru, a Kampala-based political analyst, asserted that “what the EU observers do is to add an international flavour of scrutiny, that element now will not be there in 2021.”

Bobi Wine, in order to ensure greater transparency in the upcoming elections, has launched an app called “U Vote” designed to monitor the election results and aid “in their personal tallying of the votes.” The app, U Vote, Wine has stated “was developed with sophisticated technology and can be downloaded [from the Play Store] by all voters to make sure that votes are seen as they come from various polling stations.” On 2 January, 2020, during the end of year address at his home, Wine asserted that Ugandans “have experienced a lot of vote rigging for a long time and now we want to be in charge of everything. All polling agents will just have to take a picture of the DR form and upload it there and then. We shall do our own vote tallying”

Uganda consists of a nation where 80% of the population is under the age of 35, and for these individuals, Bobi Wine brings a great deal of hope for a better life. The disparity in the demographics has created a generational divide whereby Museveni is viewed as unpopular among the youth but is viewed as popular among older rural voters who view regime change as “a hauntingly perilous idea”— linking such change to the years of bloody horror that preceded Museveni. However, it must be met with cautious optimism whether, as a politician, Wine would be able to deliver on his promises or whether Wine’s victory would mean a continuation of corrupt politics.

In Wine’s campaign manifesto he states, “Our promise to the youth of Uganda, we shall ensure we find meaningful employment for you. We want to create at least 5 million jobs. We shall invest in technology and a massive scale of industrialization……A vote for NUP is an assurance that citizens will never be persecuted for disagreeing with the government. A vote for NUP is a vote for the protection of our natural resources as a country which Gen. Museveni now treats as his personal wealth. A vote for NUP is a vote for the closing of the income gap between the rich and the poor…. Our promise to all Ugandans is that we shall safeguard their land. We shall put an end to the enormous scale of land grabbing. If it is done, justice must prevail… The National Unity Platform is committed to working with all Ugandans to improve their lives. We believe that immediately after taking over government, every Ugandan from Kaabong to Kisoro, from Yumbe to Busia will experience meaningful change in their way of life……”

Despite such progressive electoral promises, it remains publicly unclear as to how Bobi Wine proposes to accomplish them. Wine’s political headquarters has images of pan-African heroes like socialist leader Thomas Sankara, but Wine has also been known to collaborate with free-market thinktanks. Wine said that his goal is to rebuild public institutions and end decades of personalized rule, but Wine himself has also said, “I don’t have a very radical programme.”

In 1992 President Museveni published a book entitled, What’s Africa’s Problem?—in which he stated, “The problem of Africa, in general, and Uganda in particular, is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power.” Bobi Wine’s call for freedom, democracy, and prosperity for Ugandans were the same political views that Museveni had once politically embraced long ago, but gradually, with time, Museveni became an authoritarian leader—if Bobi Wine won, would he be capable of ending the repetition of that cycle?

Pitasanna Shanmugathas is post-graduate student in Global Affairs at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

Featured Photograph: In January last year Ugandan police arrested Bobi Wine (6 January 2020).

Marxism, Pan-Africanism and the International African Service Bureau

ROAPE

January 7, 2021

One of the most remarkable black radical formations of the twentieth century was the International African Service Bureau, which was active in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s. Theo Williams writes about an astonishing activist group and argues that the left of today has much to learn from this Pan-Africanist and Marxist organisation.

By Theo Williams

The International African Service Bureau (IASB) — along with its predecessor, the International African Friends of Ethiopia, and successor, the Pan-African Federation — included within its ranks some of the most notable figures in the history of anti-imperialism, such as Amy Ashwood Garvey, C.L.R. James, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore. This activist formation played the central role in organising the famous Fifth Pan-African Congress, which was held in Manchester in October 1945.

The IASB was shaped by the currents of radical internationalism that developed over the early decades of the twentieth century. By 1900, almost the entire world was divided into European colonies and semi-colonies. The world’s three independent black-ruled states — Ethiopia, Haiti and Liberia — would all have their sovereignty challenged by Western powers in the coming years. In the United States, the promise of the Reconstruction era was followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the enactment of Jim Crow laws and widespread racial violence, including lynching. In this context, the First Pan-African Conference met in London in 1900. At this meeting, the African American activist-intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois famously and prophetically declared: ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.’

During the First World War (1914-18), Britain and France, which were the world’s largest colonial powers, drew extensively on the resources of their colonies, including their peoples. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans participated in the US war effort. Yet, despite this contribution to the Allied victory, black people across the world continued to face imperialist and racist violence and oppression at the war’s conclusion. During the years following the war, Du Bois organised four Pan-African Congresses, and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association reached a membership purportedly in the millions.

The First World War and its aftermath was accompanied by shockwaves and revolts throughout the colonial world, from Ireland to India. Nowhere, however, were the effects of the war more keenly felt than in Russia. The Bolsheviks took power in the October Revolution of 1917, and spent the next half decade fighting a bloody civil war. However, the Bolsheviks did not just look inwards, but instead looked outwards in order to promote world revolution. The Communist International was formed in 1919. The Comintern’s Second Congress, held the following year, declared that Communists should support national liberation movements in the colonies.

The militant anti-imperialism of the Comintern attracted many black radicals, such as Cyril Briggs and Claude McKay, to the movement. For the first time, it became possible to speak — albeit with qualifications — of a world-revolutionary movement for socialism and colonial liberation. The commitment of the Comintern apparatus to anticolonialism waxed and waned; under Stalin, the movement’s strategy and objectives were always at the mercy of Soviet foreign policy. Nevertheless, Marxism (and especially Leninism) provided a crucial theoretical tool for thinking about imperialism, and the Comintern itself often provided important resources for colonial activists who wanted to organise and fight for their liberation. Most significantly for black activists, the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, held in 1928, led to the creation of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW).

Various currents of early twentieth-century radical internationalism converged in the ITUCNW. The organisation combined the Pan-Africanist idea that Africans and people of African descent held common interests that spanned seas and oceans with the revolutionary proletarian politics of Marxism and the Bolsheviks. The ITUCNW’s most important theorist was George Padmore. Padmore was born in Trinidad in 1903. He studied in the United States during the 1920s, where he joined the Communist Party of the USA, before moving to Moscow and then eventually to Hamburg, where the ITUCNW was based.

Padmore’s 1931 book, The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, articulated a Pan-Africanist Marxism that set an important precedent for future black radical struggles. In Padmore’s analysis, the ‘Negro toilers’ were the most oppressed people in the world. His use of the word ‘toiler’, encompassing both workers and peasants, expanded on the Leninist idea that the peasantry could be a revolutionary class, and, in a way, prefigured the Maoism that animated Third-Worldist movements during the second half of the twentieth century. In Padmore’s vision, the European proletariat and the colonial peoples would work together to overthrow capitalist-imperialism. By arguing for the revolutionary potential of African peoples, Padmore reconceptualised the revolutionary subject. Lenin’s analysis of imperialism focused primarily on its implications for revolution in Europe — the ‘super-profits’ extracted from the colonies were used to bribe a ‘labour aristocracy’ and thereby retard the European socialist movement. Padmore elaborated on this theory in order to examine the formation and prospects of the African working class and peasantry. Padmore was acutely aware of the racism that plagued much of the European labour movement, but his Marxist analysis meant that he understood the building of international socialist solidarity to be central to both African and European proletarian liberation. Borrowing a quotation from Marx, he urged that ‘labour in the white skin cannot free itself while labour in the black is enslaved.’

Padmore and the Comintern split acrimoniously in 1933-34. The Comintern accused Padmore of ‘nationalism’, while Padmore accused the Comintern of moderating its anticolonialism in order to allow the Soviet Union to seek anti-German alliances with Britain and France. What is absolutely crucial about this split is that Padmore did not denounce Marxism, but instead argued that the softening of Comintern anticolonialism was a betrayal of Marxism — he left the Comintern in order to uphold the true Leninist position. After the split, Padmore arrived to live in London in 1935. He was immediately thrust into the fervour of the British socialist and anti-colonialist movement that accompanied the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-36).

In October 1935, fascist Italy invaded the independent African nation of Ethiopia, sparking an international outcry and mobilising unprecedented Pan-Africanist sentiment. Kwame Nkrumah, who was in London at the time of the invasion, later recalled that upon seeing a newspaper headline announcing the invasion that ‘it was almost as if the whole of London had suddenly declared war on me personally.’ The invasion had been some time coming, and in July 1935, Amy Ashwood Garvey and C.L.R. James founded the International African Friends of Ethiopia in order to promote the cause of Ethiopian sovereignty. The group held rallies across London, including at Trafalgar Square. At one such meeting, Ashwood Garvey declared that, ‘No race has been so noble in forgiving, but now the hour has struck for our complete emancipation. We will not tolerate the invasion of Abyssinia.’ At another, James, using the language of the African American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, said that Ethiopians would ‘die free rather than live enslaved!’

The IAFE lost much of its momentum after Italy declared military victory in May 1936, but the crisis had brought together the most radical black activists in Britain. Padmore formed the International African Service Bureau out of the remnants of the IAFE in the spring of 1937. Its most important members included Amy Ashwood Garvey (from Jamaica), C.L.R. James (from Trinidad), Chris Jones (from Barbados), Jomo Kenyatta (from Kenya), Ras Makonnen (from British Guiana) and I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson (from Sierra Leone). The IASB was the most radical black organisation in Britain and stood in contrast to Britain’s more moderate black-led organisations, the League of Coloured Peoples and the West African Students’ Union (although the IASB occasionally collaborated with these groups). Not every member of the IASB was a Marxist, but every member was, broadly speaking, a socialist who believed that colonial liberation would come through revolution. Moreover, James’s and Padmore’s intellectual and political leadership of the group meant that their collective statements and strategies were undergirded by a Pan-Africanist Marxism.

Following the analysis that Padmore had developed as a member of the Comintern, the IASB sought to forge transnational links between the metropolitan and colonial labour movements. In the Caribbean, a series of labour disturbances culminated in a number of violently repressed revolts in the late 1930s. In the context of these revolts in particular, and of developing colonial trade unionism more generally, the IASB wrote to the British Trades Union Congress: ‘At the present moment Africans and West Indians are struggling for their elementary democratic rights. What are you going to do about it?’ For the IASB, the level of engagement with anticolonial struggle was the most important index of European proletarian class consciousness. Their 1938 ‘Manifesto Against War’ stated that the coming world war was one of rival imperialisms. Colonial peoples suffered under conditions almost identical to that of European fascism — why, then, should black people fight to defend a ‘democracy’ they had never known? Instead, they should use the war to strike for independence. They ended the manifesto with a plea for global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist solidarity: ‘White brothers, do not be misled. Our freedom is a step towards your freedom. In the common effort for the independence of the colonial peoples and the emancipation of the European workers, the black and white workers will rid humanity of the scourge of Imperialism and open a new future for humanity.’

The Second World War (1939-45) severely disrupted Pan-Africanist networks. Nevertheless, at the war’s end the IASB reconstituted itself as the Pan-African Federation and played the leading role in organising the 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. While claiming the heritage of Du Bois’s interwar congresses, the 1945 congress placed greater emphasis on the centrality of labour to African liberation. Kwame Nkrumah, one of the congress’s main organisers, said the congress was attended by ‘practical men and men of action’, while Padmore called it an ‘expression of a mass movement.’ The congress’s ‘Challenge to the Colonial Powers’ declared: ‘We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry for private profit alone. We welcome economic democracy as the only real democracy.’

The Pan-Africanist movement underwent a realignment in the post-war years. Many of its members retained a commitment to Marxism, but greater emphasis was placed on building anticolonial movements in Africa rather than seeking alliances with the European socialist movement. This was because of a variety of factors, including the onset of the Cold War and the increasing maturity of African liberation movements. Nkrumah led Ghana to independence in 1957, but both he and Padmore saw this national independence as a prelude to the Pan-Africanist transformation of the continent.

Padmore died in 1959, and Nkrumah was overthrown by a right-wing coup in 1966. What, then, were the successes and failures of this movement? It is clear that the process of decolonisation did not bring about the collapse of global capitalism and the emergence of world socialism, as Pan-Africanist Marxists had hoped. Nevertheless, when the IASB was formed in 1937, mainstream political opinion would have scoffed at the suggestion that black Africa would become independent in only two decades. The end of European empires — even if the promises of independence have not been fully met — was perhaps the global left’s most significant victory of the twentieth century.

The left of today has much to learn from the IASB’s politics. On the back of accumulating economic crises, much of the world has lurched into nativist populism. The solution lies not with the neoliberal technocrats who created the conditions for this situation, nor with the nationalist ‘left’ who pander to the right on issues of race and foreign policy. Instead, we must look towards the international socialism of figures like James and Padmore, and understand that grasping the nettle of capitalism and imperialism is the only way of achieving human liberation.

Theo Williams is a lecturer in twentieth-century British history at Durham University, and specialises in the history of anticolonialism and black radical politics. His book Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation is forthcoming with Verso.

Featured Photograph: In July 1935, Amy Ashwood Garvey and C.L.R. James founded the International African Friends of Ethiopia in order to promote the cause of Ethiopian sovereignty. The group held rallies across London, including at Trafalgar Square (C. L. R. James making a speech in defence of Ethiopia in London).

ROAPE in 2021: Looking Back, Forging Forward

ROAPE

January 5, 2021

For five years ROAPE’s website has tried to reinvigorate scholar activism in and about Africa. We continue to be an important resource for radical political economy in Africa, and to build deeper connections with activists and researchers. In a new initiative this year, we are launching a bimonthly Newsletter, run by Ben Radley, and offering a roundup of all the fresh content posted on the site in the previous two months.

By Ben Radley and Leo Zeilig

The Review of African Political Economy was established in 1974, with the aim to ‘examine the roots of Africa’s present condition’ through an emphasis on critical issues such as dependency and inequality. As a fraternal voice of the new movements that were sweeping the continent at the time, the Review attempted to analyse the progressive politics of the new forces of liberation that were emerging, and interrogate already existing radical projects. The Review did not seek to promote scholarly research for its own sake, but instead sought to engage with the actions required for transformation. The first generation involved in ROAPE were scholar-activists rather than career academics and were a committed (and diverse) political community seeking to assist the continent’s radical transformation.

More than 40 years later, the Review remains committed to this project, and in 2015 launched a new website to help reinvigorate scholar activism in and about Africa, and to involve new communities on the continent and elsewhere in a host of ROAPE activities, projects, workshops and events. The twin aims were and remain to become a leading online resource for radical political economy in Africa, and to build deeper connections with scholars, students, activists and institutions who work in and on Africa.

To these ends, over the last five years, the Review website has: posted interviews with scholars and activists (including video interviews); launched a series of debates (including on Capitalism in Africa and on Popular Protest and Class Struggle); offered reports on radical and progressive conferences taking place across the continent (including some video reports), and; provided information about popular and democratic movements and campaigns.

In October 2020, the website also become an online hub to previous journal issues of the Review. In our publishing agreement with Taylor and Francis, the company has exclusive access to the last seven years of our issues (available here), while roape.net now has the full back-catalogue to all other issues since the founding issue in 1974. This is an extremely valuable resource, covering the continent’s political-economic developments and the shifting terrain of struggle over four decades. The archive was finally launched in October last year, and we hope it will be used widely across Africa, and elsewhere – freely accessible outside of paywalls and publishing agreements.

Elsewhere during 2020, the Review’s website offered coverage of Covid-19 (including through this ROAPE/BIEA webinar in May to discuss the reaction of Africa’s ruling classes to the virus), and added a range of new, important voices to the site, including those of Lai Brown, Gbenga Komolafe and Amandla Thomas-Johnson. In the last two months of 2020 alone, we published more than 20 new posts, including long reads on Covid-19 and Kwame Ture, a series of short eulogies to the radical economist and militant activist John Loxley, and a reflection to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, the iconic martyr of the Tunisian revolution.

To help keep our readers informed about this high volume of new content, and to further the website’s original aims, this year we are launching a bimonthly Newsletter, offering a roundup of all the new content posted on the site in the previous two months. Run by Ben Radley, the Newsletter will deliver six issues each year, sent out during the first weeks of January, March, May, July, September, and November. To subscribe, simply enter your email address at the top of the home page and hit the ‘Subscribe’ button. A sample of the first issue, which will be sent out to subscribers this week, can be viewed here.

This year we want to continue our focus on the unfolding of the environmental emergency on the continent, following on from a number of posts by radical campaigners and socialists last year (see Hamza Hamouchene and Nnimmo Bassey). We will also be marking major anniversaries – including the murder of Patrice Lumumba on 17 January in 1961. This is part of our efforts to commemorate major radical historical events and figures, including a post on the International African Service Bureau, the remarkable black radical formation in the twentieth century. We do not post these pieces for reasons of nostalgia – we see radical history as a key element of our efforts to unlock a frequently forgotten past, so our movements and politics can learn from these experiences.

And there is, as always, much learning to put into action this year. Zambia and Ethiopia, both in the media spotlight in recent months, are set to hold elections. While corporate media coverage of Zambia’s default in November 2020 laid the blame firmly at the door of ‘high-octane borrowing and misrule’ – in other words, the tired old trope of government corruption and mismanagement – research has documented how recent outflows of wealth likely driven by transnational mining corporations have far exceeded the $3 billion Eurobonds that were the focus of the default. The August Presidential elections present an opportunity for Zambia to move away from an externally-oriented model of extractivist dependent development. Will the opportunity be taken?

In Ethiopia, the political leadership in the northern region of Tigray went forward with regional elections in August 2020, which the federal government under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed promptly declared illegal. This sparked the full unravelling of the internal tensions underpinning the developmentalist agenda pursued by former President and Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, leading in November to the outbreak of war in Tigray. These are deeply worrying times for the continent’s second most populous country, yet the possibility to hold elections this year provides a potential opportunity for the warring parties to come to the table and move towards resolving their longstanding differences.

Attracting less media attention towards the end of last year, particularly in the Anglophone press, were several political moves by President Felix Tshisekedi to undermine the Kabila family’s two-decade long hold on political and economic power in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Citizens’ movements such as Lutte pour le Changement (LUCHA) and Filimbi have played a critical role in forcing this shift, in particular by contributing to the political climate which made it impossible for Joseph Kabila to secure himself a third presidential term. Will President Tshisekedi seize the moment to forge a nationalist agenda, in the vision of his late father and opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi?

In 2021, we will continue to provide coverage and analysis of these and other developments across the continent – both past and present – in accordance with the Review’s founding task of examining the roots of Africa’s present condition, and engaging with the struggles and actions required to secure the continent’s emancipatory transformation. Subscribe now, and stay informed.

Ben Radley teaches in International Development at the University of Bath. His work centres on the political economy of the extractive industries with a regional focus on Central Africa.

Leo Zeilig is editor of roape.net. Please contact roape.net if you want to contribute or have an idea for a blogpost: website.editor@roape.net.

Featured Photograph: Miners in 1991 on a wildcat strike in Republic of Bophuthatswana, an artificial country created by South Africa’s apartheid-era rulers in 1977 (Robert Gumpert).

Mohamed Bouazizi and Tunisia: 10 years on

ROAPE

December 17, 2020

This blogpost marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, who on 17 December 2010 set himself alight at Sidi Bouzid in an act of self-immolation that made him the iconic martyr of the Tunisian revolution.

By Habib Ayeb

Mohamed Bouazizi’s name is familiar to all; less so is his background, although the facts of his story are well known and documented. This blogpost will explore the links between the different sequences of ‘protest’ processes in Tunisia, from the 2008 strikes in the minefields, to the most recent (2017-20) El Kamour protests in the country’s south-east. It will also consider the concept of socio-spatial class solidarity, both in turning an individual suicide into the spark for a major uprising, and in facilitating collective resistance and its role in long revolutionary processes.

Two key questions arise: what in Bouazizi’s profile, life and circumstances was of such significance that his suicide sparked a huge popular uprising whose impact, direct and indirect, was felt worldwide. And what can he teach us about the origin, scale and longevity of the Tunisian revolution?

We must therefore examine the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi within its familial and personal context, but also within the more general context of the political protests against the Ben Ali dictatorship, and especially against the processes of dispossession, impoverishment and exclusion. Sidi Bouzid was clearly a focus of the protests and resistance then spreading throughout Tunisia’s marginalised regions. The prolonged mining strikes of 2008 were a key stage in the actions.

Born into poverty, Mohamed Bouazizi was raised by his mother after he lost his father at the age of three. As the eldest son he grew up with a moral ‘obligation’ to support his mother, to the detriment of his education, and he left school without qualifications. Some time before his dramatic act, he acquired a barrow and scales and started selling vegetables but his informal business attracted endless administrative hassles and police harassment. Finally, on 17 December 2010, the police seized his meagre equipment to put a stop to his trading. Angry, frustrated and desperate, he turned to the only act of resistance that still appeared open to him and thereby unwittingly triggered the countdown to Ben Ali’s fall, scarcely one month later, on 14 January 2011.

‘Individual’ suicide and class solidarity

Between the prolonged mining strike of 2008 and the shows of solidarity unleashed by Bouazizi’s self-immolation, many social movements were active across Tunisia. Among them were the protests made in Sidi Bouzid in June and July 2010 by peasant farmers whose demands focused on a number of issues: access to natural resources such as agricultural land, and water for drinking and irrigation purposes, state aid, and the complex problem of indebtedness.

According to several witnesses interviewed in Sidi Bouzid, as well as two family members, Mohamed Bouazizi took an active part in these demonstrations. Whether or not this is so, I would identify a clear link between the peasant ‘protests’ of summer 2010 and those that followed Bouazizi’s desperate act – a link that explains why this particular case, in contrast to other suicides, sparked a popular uprising across the country. First to take to the streets after Bouazizi’s self-immolation were other peasant farmers’ children identifying with his fatal act of resistance and despair.

Here was a clear example of ‘class solidarity’ among local populations directly affected by the region’s multiple social and economic problems.[1] Over the next few days that same class solidarity also found expression nationwide, moving from the ‘rural’ zones (including ‘rural towns’), to the popular quarters of larger towns, and finally to the big urban centres, including Tunis. [2] The progress of the protests suggests the existence of a distinct class consciousness embracing all the ‘popular’ classes, rural and urban.

Since the early 1980s, the governorate of Sidi Bouzid has been the site of a rapid, state-initiated intensification of farming, designed to create a modern, export-oriented agricultural hub based on exploiting deep underground water reserves and attracting private and public capital. Over the past four decades Sidi Bouzid has been transformed: from a semi-arid desert fringe with an extensive agriculture based on olives, almonds, pasture and winter cereals, it has become Tunisia’s leading agricultural region, producing over a quarter of the nation’s total output of fruit and vegetables.

But behind this undoubted technical success lies a real social and ecological failure. Socially Sidi Bouzid remains one of Tunisia’s four poorest regions (of 26 in total), while ecologically the level of the water table is plummeting, water for irrigation is increasingly saline, and soil damage is visible, even to non-specialist eyes.

Here investors – who are mostly outsiders, often called ‘settlers’ by the local population – accrue capital and profits; meanwhile peasant farmers accumulate losses, tragedies and suicides. Without this huge socio-spatial fault, which divides Tunisia between a dominant centre and dependant periphery, Mohamed Bouazizi’s death would scarcely have merited a mention. And that same divide also lies at the heart of several other shocks which will be discussed below.

After the Sidi Bouzid uprising ended with the fall of the Ben Ali dictatorship, several more protest movements arose, all forming part of the same resistance processes in the social and spatial periphery. In the rest of this blogpost I will revisit two of the largest of these movements, examining their historical, social and spatial contexts to delineate their origins, evolution and links to overall political developments in Tunisia from the 2008 mining strikes to the present day. The Jemna oasis movement began in 2011 and concerned rights to land and resources, while the El Kamour movement (2017-20) also involves rights to local resources and in particular to ‘development’: two different struggles each of which constitutes a key moment/sequence in the same process of dissent.

At Jemna and El Kamour, as in other cases, the key to mass mobilisation lies in the processes and dynamics of socio-spatial class solidarity: ‘This is where I come from, I belong to this region and this social group, I am being deprived of resources materially and/or symbolically, so I support those who dare to say “no” and resist’. In summary, this is what you can hear in Kebili-Jemna, Tataouine-El Kamour and elsewhere; what you can read in the media reports of declarations made by local populations. And underlying it all, ‘driving’ resistance and ‘cementing’ solidarity, lie profound feelings of injustice and demands for dignity.

Jemna: rights versus law; a disruptive legitimacy

Following the Sidi Bouzid episode and the fall of the dictator, in 2011 an oasis was ‘discovered’ that was probably new to the majority of Tunisians. Situated in the desert, midway between Kebili and Douz, the Jemna oasis owed its sudden appearance on the map to a significant new collective action, stemming directly from specific elements of colonial history that resurfaced after the wall of silence placed around them had been breached (See Ayeb, 2016, ‘Jemna, ou la résistance d’une communauté dépossédée de ses terres agricoles’ and Krichen, 2016, ‘L’affaire de Jemna; question paysanne et revolution démocratique’).

While most French colonists chose to settle in north or north-west Tunisia and created big cereal farms and/or stock-raising enterprises, and even vineyards and orchards, others preferred to head south and specialise in date farming – in particular the Degla variety, whose export market in France and Europe was virtually guaranteed. Among this latter group was one Maus De Rolley, who in 1937 created a new date-palm plantation around the core of the ancient Jemna oasis. The plantation today covers some 306 hectares, including 185 hectares planted with approximately 10,000 date palms.

Although local populations had held these lands as common and indivisible (tribal) property, they were dispossessed without compensation on the pretext that nomadic herding (pastoralism) was not a genuine productive activity, and that the land therefore was uncultivated. At independence, these populations – who had battled against the occupiers – held great expectations that the new authorities would return their stolen lands.

When the colonial lands were nationalised in 1964, however, the government decided to place them under state control, confiding their management to the body that administered the state’s agricultural land, the Office des Terres Domaniales (OTD), which thereby became Tunisia’s biggest agricultural landowner. Bolstering this strategy was the collectivisation policy of the 1960s, which aimed to reorganise agricultural land and create state ‘socialist’ cooperatives (see Bush and Ayeb’s 2019 book). Yet the real argument against the redistribution of the nationalised lands lay elsewhere: small peasant farmers were judged too ignorant and archaic, too lacking in the necessary financial and technical means, to develop a modern intensive agricultural sector – a stigmatisation that still recurs today whenever discussion returns to this subject and/or to questions of agricultural models and political choices related to farming and food.

Over the following decades, the heirs made some efforts to reclaim these lands, but it was not until early 2011 that the first organised occupations of OTD lands were launched by local populations describing themselves as the legitimate successors. Among them was Jemna’s local population, who occupied the former De Rolley plantation, claiming rights of property and of exploitation. The authorities demanded an end to the occupation, and the resulting impasse lasted for several years. The government argued that the occupation was illegal, while the occupiers countered that they held a legitimate right to resources and especially to community assets, including the indivisible and inalienable commons.

After a long period of tension a compromise was reached. By mutual agreement, the state ceded full management of the palm plantation to the local population while retaining ownership of the land. Might the latter have believed this negotiated settlement to be the only viable compromise?

Underlying the government position was the fear that any solution implying the grant of freehold to the legitimate heirs might create a legal precedent and set an example that would unleash a torrent of other land claims, all drawing on the same colonial and post-colonial past. But the occupation alone had set that example already, inciting other local populations to reclaim – with some attempts at occupation – the lands snatched from their grandparents during colonisation. Furthermore, I would argue that the Jemna case also served to fuel claims of a legitimate right to other local ‘natural’ resources such as water, minerals (for example, phosphates) and oil that mobilised populations in the Tatouine region.

El Kamour: the ‘will of the people’

Resistance entered another phase, not without success, at El Kamour – a locality situated in the barren steppes of south-eastern Tunisia, south of the town of Tatouine, on the tarmac road leading to the oil-fields in the extreme south of the country. The ‘dispossession pipeline’ carrying crude oil to the port of Skhira, 50 kilometres north of Gabes, runs through here, and this geographical position close to the pipeline is the immediate reason for El Kamour’s sudden appearance on political maps of Tunisia, as well as in the media.

Behind El Kamour, however, lies the governorate and town of Tataouine (Tataouine is the capital of the governorate of the same name), with over 180,000 inhabitants. Arid and barren, this region contains most of Tunisia’s oil reserves, producing 40 per cent of its petrol and 20 per cent of its gas. Yet Tataouine also records some of the nation’s highest levels of poverty: in 2017, for example, 28.7 per cent of its active population were unemployed (compared with a national average of 15.3 per cent), while for graduates the rate rose as high as 58 per cent.

Events in El-Kamour, 2017-2020: a brief chronology

The El Kamour movement began on 25 March 2017, with protests in various localities in the governorate, all converging on the town centre of Tataouine (for further details see here). The protesters were demanding a share of local resources, particularly oil, as well as greater employment opportunities and infrastructure development. Met by silence from the government, on 23 April they organised a sit-in at El Kamour. Tensions mounted on both sides, and an escalation became inevitable after the prime minister visited Tataouine and met the protesters. His plans to calm the situation with a few token promises came to naught and the discussions ended in deadlock. On 20 May the pumping station was occupied for two days before being cleared by the army, and tensions remained high.

Eventually, on 16 June 2017, an agreement was signed with the government through the mediation of the Union générale tunisienne du travail (UGTT), which acted to guarantee its implementation. The terms of the agreement promised the creation of 3,000 new jobs in the environmental sector by 2019, and 1,500 jobs in the oil industry by the end of 2017. A budget of 80 million dinars was also earmarked for regional development. But, to the frustration of the local population, the agreement was never implemented. The government simply bided its time, gambling that the militants would tire and the movement run out of steam.

On 20 May 2020, however, the El Kamour activists resumed their protests and sit-ins in several places, piling on the pressure and blockading several routes to bar them to oil-industry vehicles. On 3 July they organised a new general strike throughout the public services and the oilfields, and on 16 July they closed the pumping station, blocking the pipelines carrying petroleum products north. But the El Kamour militants had to wait until 7 November 2020 before they could reach an agreement with the government’s representatives, in return for which petrol producers and other oil-sector enterprises were to resume operations immediately. Signed by the head of government on 8 November 2020, the agreement contains a number of key points, including several that had previously featured in the 2017 accord but had not been implemented. These included, dedicated 80-million-dinar development and investment fund for the governorate of Tataouine; credit finance for 1,000 projects before the end of 2020; 215 jobs created in the oil industry in 2020, plus a further 70 in 2021; 2.6 million dinars for local municipalities and 1.2 million dinars for the Union Sportive de Tataouine.

Conclusion

The big social movements discussed above all have several points in common. Firstly, they are very largely located in southern, central, western and north-western Tunisia, the same marginalised and impoverished regions that between 17 December 2010 and early January 2011 saw huge protests in support of Bouazizi and against current social and economic policies. Secondly, while differing in detail, the principal demands of these movements all relate essentially to the right to resources, services and a decent income. None, or virtually none, are linked to ‘political’ demands (political rights, individual freedom). Thirdly, in their choice of language, and of several ‘spectacular’ actions, these social movements display a radicalism that marks a clear break with the political games played in and around the centres of power. Finally, almost all these movements are denounced and accused of regionalism and tribalism, sometimes even of separatism and treachery. Protesters are suspected of being manipulated, of being puppets in the hands of a political party or foreign power.

Yet these movements have enjoyed some, albeit relative, success – a success impossible without the class solidarity shown in the three examples discussed above, and the ties of domination and dependency that for decades have characterised the relationship between Tunisia’s centre of power (the east coast) and its deprived and impoverished periphery. Finally, these same examples, and other more recent cases, demonstrate that the ‘revolutionary’ processes launched in early 2008 are still active in Tunisia and will probably remain so for many years to come.

Habib Ayeb is a Geographer and filmmaker. He is president and founder of l’Observatoire de la Souveraineté Alimentaire et de l’Environnement (OSAE) and a regular contributor to ROAPE.

The blogpost is being co-hosted by OSAE and available in French on their website here. This version was translated by Maggie Sumner.

Featured Photograph: Paris, 15 January 2011 – A French protest in support of Mohamed Bouazizi, “Hero of Tunisia” (Antoine Walter).

Notes

[1]. See Ayeb H. 2017. 2017. ‘Food Issues and Revolution: The Process of Dispossession, Class Solidarity, and Popular Uprising: The Case of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia’. Cairo Papers in Social Science. 34, no. 4: 86– 110

[2]. The population of the region is very largely rural: 70 per cent of the inhabitants of the town of Sidi Bouzid are employed in a job linked with the agricultural sector (farmers, agricultural labourers, seasonal workers etc.)

Becoming Kwame Ture

ROAPE

December 15, 2020

Amandla Thomas-Johnson writes about how Kwame Ture played an important part in the life of newly independent Guinea, then led by Ahmed Sékou Touré. Ture became perhaps the foremost Pan-Africanist of his day and co-founded (with Kwame Nkrumah) the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, at the time the most significant Pan-African political party. Yet so little is known about Ture’s life. In these extracts from his book, Thomas-Johnson writes about Ture’s life in Guinea, and an extraordinary event in 1970.

By Amandla Thomas-Johnson

In Guinea, doors fly open at the mere mention of Kwame Ture’s name. A senior government minister met me within a few hours’ notice. And when I arrived at Villa Syli to meet a member of Sékou Touré’s old party, the PDG (Parti démocratique de Guinée), I was unexpectedly ushered into a luxurious salon, where I was instead met by Hadja Touré, the former president’s wife. Now in her eighties, she sat on a red and gold wooden carved chair, at the centre of a discussion with three men dressed in expensive fabrics cut in traditional styles. I recognised one of the men as the brother of the Senegalese radical Omar Blondin Diop. Hadja Touré acknowledged me with a deft nod of the head, as I tried to find the most appropriate French expression for the occasion.

Now used by the former first lady, Villa Syli was for several years the residence of Kwame Nkrumah. And it is easy to imagine Nkrumah and Kwame Ture seated on the red upholstered chairs around the dark wooden table at the far end of the room discussing his return to Ghana.

Hadja and Sékou Touré married in 1953. In the run-up to independence, Guinea was the only territory of France’s West African colonies to opt out of joining the French Community in 1958, which would have meant everything from foreign affairs to currencies to higher education would be effectively managed from Paris. When then French president Charles De Gaulle arrived in Guinea in August that year to try to persuade its leaders otherwise, Sékou Touré, then the vice president of Guinea’s government council, famously told him: “We will prefer poverty in freedom to riches in slavery.”

“He was very angry,” Hadja said of De Gaulle’s reaction. “The French tried everything to make us change our mind.”

By the time Guinea declared its independence on 2 October 1958, becoming the second independent Sub-Saharan African nation after Ghana, the sabotage had already begun. Days earlier, French troops had arrived and discreetly emptied the central bank, carrying off its contents by boat to France. Departing French officials then went on a bout of vengeful vandalism, cutting telephone wires in state offices, looting barracks and burning army uniforms. A non-interest loan from Nkrumah’s Ghana was a saving grace. But later, when Guinea adopted a new currency, the French flooded the country with counterfeit banknotes, crashing the economy.

“They tried everything to destroy Guinea. But those who have good intentions always succeed. We did not give up.”

But Guinea would suffer for years to come. Did her husband have any regrets?

“Regret what?” she snapped back. “He always wanted independence and he got it.”

Bordered by pro-French Senegal and Ivory Coast as well as colonial Portugal, Guinea felt increasingly adrift. The overthrow of Modibo Keita in Mali and Nkrumah in Ghana, its closest allies, compounded the sense of isolation. Sékou Touré would in time come to feel perpetually under threat and the paranoia would result in deadly political purges.

It was into this febrile atmosphere that Ture and his wife the singer Miriam Makeba moved to Guinea in 1969, where they were welcomed by the Tourés. “He was very close to Sékou,” Hadja said, “almost like a relative. We appreciated him a lot.” For his part, Ture admired the character and the politics of the Guinean president as much as he did Nkrumah and referred to them both affectionately as “his two fathers.”

And by inviting him to Guinea, Sékou Touré had saved his life. A raft of measures had been taken by the J. Edgar Hoover-led FBI against Ture as part of its efforts to prevent the rise of a “Black Messiah”. One rumour floated by the FBI was that Ture was in fact a CIA operative, putting him in mortal danger from other Black nationalist groups. And American authorities would continue to pay close attention to him while he was in Guinea.

Guinea was under the one-party rule of Sékou Touré’s PDG. With Touré, a former trade unionist, at the helm, the party had dominated the pre-independence political landscape, appealing to worker solidarity and Islam, the dominant religion, as a way to rise above ethnic differences.

Touré sought to expand the public sector and promote agricultural collectivisation along socialist principles and as a revolutionary Pan-Africanist, he sponsored liberation movements, from South Africa to the Cape Verde islands. Touré’s Guinea also attempted to chart a non-aligned course through the choppy waters of the cold war. The Soviets were invited in to exploit Guinea’s vast bauxite deposits, but the country also remained open for business with the US.

As Kwame Ture travelled through the country on PDG business, he was moved by the humility and hospitality of ordinary Guineans, and by the traditional dances and the griots. Makeba incorporated the sounds of the local instruments, the balafon and the kora into her own music. The verdant landscapes and what Ture called the people’s “African humanism” made a strong enough impression for them to build a house in a lush valley in the Fouta Djallon mountains.

But it was a major incident just a year into his time in Guinea that left an indelible impression. Just as Ture and Makeba were retiring to bed at their beachside Conakry home, he heard loud gunfire and detected movements across the sand as men disembarked from ships. Suspecting a coup, he immediately informed the president.

Uncertain of what to do and without a rifle, having left it at Nkrumah’s residence, they waited anxiously by the radio for news. A Portuguese invasion was underway. They left the house at 4 a.m. and headed for the residence of the Tanzania ambassador, so that Makeba, who carried a Tanzanian passport, could get to safety.

“It was hair-raising because you couldn’t tell exactly what was going down. The streets were deserted, but you could hear gunfire everywhere,” Ture later recalled. A firefight had escalated at the headquarters of Amilcar Cabral’s party, the PAIGC, which led the independence movement against Portuguese rule in neighbouring Guinea-Bissau from Conakry and was the target of the invasion. As Ture drove past the party’s headquarters, he put his foot down on the accelerator, and ducked as bullets flew above his head.

Women, children as well as men poured onto the streets to defend the revolution, eyewitness accounts say, as Sékou Touré mobilised private citizens and militia to fight the invaders. The angry masses hunted down the suspects, some of them dissidents who were attempting to blend back into the population. After a seven-day manhunt the people’s justice won out.

“Sékou Touré said let the people try them. So the party members set up people’s courts and convicted many of them. Some were hung. So much for their welcome as liberators,” Ture later wrote.

The events of 22 November 1970 marked Ture to such an extent that his dying wish, nearly 30 years later, was to be buried on the anniversary of the attack. He saw it as no less than an African nation repelling a European invader. But it also drove home the manifold threats that Guinea faced. By raising the alarm, Ture had helped save the revolution, Sékou Touré loyalists said. Djibril Camara, a PDG member, said that Kwame Ture’s heroics strengthened the mutual admiration between him and Sékou Touré’s party.

Ismail Conde, one of the few remaining members of Sékou Touré’s inner circle, said that Guinea’s one-party system was crucial to thwarting the invasion and more than 20 plots during more than two decades of Sékou Touré’s rule. “Guineans were united as though it was one man and that’s why they succeeded in eluding all plots against them,” said Conde, a party ideologue with bushy eyebrows and two pens stuffed in his shirt pocket.

Despite the success, Sékou Touré, who escaped yet another assassination attempt during the invasion was shaken. He began to think there was a permanent conspiracy hanging over his head. Political purges and executions followed. Camp Boiro, an internment camp in the centre of Conakry became synonymous with torture, execution and starvation. Estimates vary, but a former US official claimed around 5,000 people died at the camp. Amnesty International puts the number at 50,000. Hundreds of thousands fled, among them a disproportionate number of ethnic Fulanis.

Was this a price worth paying to defend the revolution?

Under the eyes of a dusty portrait of “Comrade Sékou Touré” perched high on a shelf in his Conakry living room, Conde swears that it was. But for many, including Abbas Bah, a former political prisoner, it was too high a price.

Then a 24-year-old hydrologist, Bah was arrested at Conakry airport in 1971 as he made his way to Mali, and accused of involvement in a Western-backed plot to kill the president. He was sent to Camp Boiro. After eight days without food, he was brought to a room and electrocuted repeatedly until he signed a forced confession.

“At the third time, I agreed, and they gave me a paper with writing, and I signed it. I went on the public radio and confirmed that I was guilty of the accusations they put upon me.”

Bah and I sat on the terrace of his home in a Conakry suburb, in the dark, amid the whir of crickets and sounds of playing children.

Bah spent seven years inside Camp Boiro. He shared a 3 x 3.5 m cell with seven other prisoners. They had just one chamber pot between them. Nourishment was a handful of rice and a litre of water served once a day.

**Stokely Carmichael organizing for the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in 1966 (Courtesy of Birmingham Public Library archives).**

Bah would see people led out one by one, never to return and he feared that his day would soon come. “Each second, I was thinking that they would take me out of prison to kill me.”

Bah’s family have for 400 years served as the Imams of Labé—the capital of the predominantly ethnic Fulani region in central Guinea. Other family members, including his brother and sisters were also imprisoned at the camp. Touré and the PDG wanted to destroy influential families like his, Bah said.

After his release Bah was ordered to meet Touré at his office. “I told him that God sent me into prison and God released me. Today I am free and safe.” Bah, who is head of an association representing the survivors of Camp Boiro, said he has forgiven his captors, but still wants accountability. He expressed disappointment towards Ture for not speaking out.

“Kwame came from the United States and was defending human rights and Black people. How could he know that Sékou was unjustly killing people and remain his friend?” he asked. Ture biographer’s Peniel E. Joseph said his silence, despite such proximity to the ruling elite, was “a moral failure as well as a political one”.

But till the very end, Kwame Ture was unequivocal in his defence of Sékou Touré and his regime. While acknowledging “that conditions in Boiro were harsh” he dismissed many of the stories that came out of the camp as “either deliberate fabrications or grossly exaggerated.” Borrowing a phrase popularised by Malcolm X, he was adamant that the revolution had to be defended “by all means necessary”.

Attempts to destabilise Guinea began before independence and continued for years after, as the country struggled to survive in a sea of hostility. Maurice Robert, the head of the powerful SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage), France’s foreign intelligence service, during Sékou Touré’s time, later admitted to training Guinean dissidents to “create a climate of security” in the country. “We had to destabilise Sékou Touré, make him vulnerable, unpopular and facilitate the seizure of power by the opposition,” Robert said in an interview in 2004.

Having wrestled a knife-wielding assailant to the floor before, Sékou Touré knew the grisly fate that awaited anti-colonialists of his kind. Amilcar Cabral had been assassinated right under his nose in Conakry. And others, such as Keita and Nkrumah had been ousted.

Having read Fanon and Nkrumah, Kwame Ture interpreted the purges as being justified forms of revolutionary violence even if there was collateral damage. In many ways, Guinea becomes the embodiment of the existential battle at the heart of his politics, between the forces of empire, neo-colonialism and white supremacy on one side, and Pan-Africanism, Black Power and anti-imperialism on the other. As far as he was concerned, you had only two options: you were for the revolution or you were against it. Ture also personally acknowledged the difficulties faced by families of purge victims and in some cases supported them materially, even if he did not speak out.

Nevertheless, Bah’s case raises important questions about some of the tensions inherent in political power, where states can exercise a monopoly on violence while at the same time claim to be working for the greater good.

It also raises the issue of accountability, and the human costs involved in defending state-led ideological projects. When is enough, enough? Bah’s torture and the lack of due process in his case suggests that it went beyond just defending a revolution.

***

In 1979, Stokely Carmichael, as he had until then been called, changed his name to Kwame Ture, in honour of his two African mentors. Joseph suggests that this represented a transformation from Stokely Carmichael, the American grassroots organiser, to Kwame Ture, the African revolutionary. “If Carmichael’s past vision of a liberated future rested on the grassroots, Ture’s beliefs leaned more toward the power of vanguard parties and the genius of African statesmen,” he writes.

This supposed optimism proved to be short-lived. In 1984 Sékou Touré suddenly passed away. A military coup led by Colonel Lansana Conte followed days later. The PDG was banned and 90 percent of its central committee executed.

Ture, now with a new wife and a baby boy, was in mortal danger and considered leaving. His decision to stay, however, perhaps represents one of the defining moments of his Guinea years. It showed that he was not just there for Nkrumah or Sékou Touré, but was committed to the country, its people, and was willing to fight without his governmental privileges. Ture would face an uphill struggle, but his decision to stay would endear him to ordinary Guineans for years to come.

Ture began to work in secret to rebuild the PDG, despite the risks. “It was tough, a complete and sudden reversal,” he wrote in his memoir. “From being the party of the government, we went back to being outlaws, hunted and repressed. And not by white racists, either, but by black reactionary puppets this time.” Kwame Ture may have gone global, as Joseph suggests, but Stokely Carmichael the grassroots organiser was also still there. And that’s when they came for him.

His arrest and imprisonment in August 1986 sparked a global campaign. The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) quickly activated their networks. Protestors picketed outside the Guinean embassy in Washington DC and at the homes of black mayors. The Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Cubans also tried to intervene, and civil rights activists Jesse Jackson and Ambassador Andrew Young lobbied hard for his release. And after four days Ture was once again a free man. It was the 40th arrest of his political career. Ismael Conde, by now working in the presidential office, was arrested, as was Hadja Touré, who recalls appreciatively that Ture drove hundreds of kilometres just to visit her. Both were eventually released.

Guinea turned to the West, bringing much-needed investment but also a spike in corruption. Back in its sphere of influence, France in 1990 mandated the country to open to a multiparty system or else lose French aid, a twist of irony that would lead to the re-emergence of the PDG.

Ture and Conde led the party’s re-emergence in 1993.

Ture joined the party’s central committee and was appointed the liaison with the Cuban embassy. His role in rebuilding the party is recognised in PDG documents where his name appears alongside Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré as one of the “illustrious Pan-Africanists” who have enriched PDG ideology. Conde described him as an “unstoppable revolutionary who believed in the liberty, dignity and pride of the black race and that imperialism in Africa was a shame for the black race”.

Sekou Mbacke, by this time living in Guinea and involved in the PDG’s youth wing, recalls travelling with Ture from neighbourhood to neighbourhood building work-study circles and “preaching the PDG doctrine to the masses”. For a time, things began to look up for the party as talk of the old president returned to the streets, despite government efforts to dirty his name, claims Mbacke. Ture’s own party, the A-APRP, pinned its continental hopes on a PDG comeback. Disappointment soon followed, however. In 1996, while Ture was away in the US, the PDG went into a political alliance with the regime of President Lansana Conte. Ture saw this as a betrayal and a turn away from its revolutionary objectives.

“He was surprised, he was mad. He could not hide that from me,” Mbacke said.

Looking out across the continent in 1995, Ture saw one counter-revolutionary setback after another. “There was very little good news,” he wrote. “The reports coming into Conakry from cadres in the field as well as from allies across the continent were almost all grim. Month after month, report after report, there were setbacks.”

Ture decried what he said was “neoliberalism brazenly resurfacing” and “arrogant military dictatorships puffing themselves up”, normalising opportunism, naked corruption and greed. Ture put this down to the delayed effects of the demise of the Soviet Union, the mere existence of which had acted as a bulwark against rampant neo-colonialism and imperialism in the Black world (though he admits that the Soviets were the lesser of two evils).

“In the liberation struggles of Africans and all oppressed and exploited peoples—some unfolding over generations, even centuries—there are low points and reverses. That’s all. The struggle continues.

Becoming Kwame Ture by Amandla Thomas-Johnson is published by Chimurenganyana Series and can be purchased here.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson is a British-born writer of African-Caribbean descent. He is based in Dakar, Senegal, and has reported from a dozen countries, including Trinidad and Tobago, Chile and Mauritania. He has worked for Middle East Eye, the Daily Telegraph, BBC, The Guardian, Al-jazeera, and Channel 4, among others.

Egypt 2020: A Journey to the abyss

ROAPE

December 10, 2020

The 2020 parliamentary elections in Egypt were held on 24–25 October and 7–8 November to elect the House of Representatives. For weeks, even in the smallest village, the streets and squares were again wallpapered with the smiling, photo-shopped portraits of the same people, with the same slogans, as if nothing had changed in this country since the uprising almost a decade ago.

In summary

– The economy is on the verge of collapse, insolvency, inability to service the debts, not to mention paying them off.

– There is no strategy whatsoever to deal with the expected water shortage after the complete failure of negotiations on the construction of the “Renaissance Dam” in Ethiopia.

– Except for propaganda and data manipulation, there is no strategy to counter the escalating Corona crisis. On the contrary, at a time when all countries affected by Corona are trying to alleviate the economic burden of the crisis on the lowest strata of society through subsidies and financial injections, the Egyptian government is raising the prices of all items that painfully affect the weak, bread, electricity, fuel, public transportation, a flood of new taxes and price increases on all government services, let’s not even talk about education and health care. Even before Corona, these had become a privilege of the rich.

– Education is the basis of all development. The estimated amount needed to solve the problem of class overcrowding is EGP150 billion. What does this amount mean in terms of government spending in other areas?

Prime Minister Madbouly has announced that state projects have been implemented at a cost of more than 4 trillion pounds over six years, which means that the amount needed for the development of education is only 0.004% of this expenditure. So, the problem is not lack of resources, but misuse and waste of resources. It is due to the economic and social policy in favour of a certain class.

– According to the Central Bank, Egypt’s foreign debt increased by almost 12.2 percent in the last three months of fiscal year 2019/2020 and stood at US$123.49 billion at the end of June, compared to US$111.29 billion in March, an increase of US$12.2 billion.

– Due to the economic policies imposed on Egypt by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the poverty rate rose from 25.2% in 2010/2011 to 26.3% in 2012/2013 and 27.8% in 2015, then jumped to 32.5% in 2017/2018, which means that 32.5 million Egyptians are poor according to the “national poverty line” (EGP736 per month and person, about US $45). The national poverty line is about 60% of the UN-defined limit (Poverty Line).

– The Severe Poverty Line also decreased from 4.8% in 2010/2011 to 4.4% in 2012/2013, then rose to 5.3% in 2015 and reached 6.2% in 2017/2018, which means that 6.2 million Egyptians – according to the national severe poverty line of 491 EGP (about US$25) per month and person – are extremely poor and not able to meet their basic needs.

– According to the World Bank, the percentage of the world’s poor, calculated on the basis of the severe poverty line of US$1.9 per person per day, fell from 36% in 1990 to 10% in 2015. By contrast, it has risen steadily in Egypt, so that the official poverty rate reported in Egypt is currently more than three times the global poverty rate.

– On several occasions, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) has called on the Egyptian government to limit the excessive use of the death penalty and to adhere to the Egyptian Mission’s proposal at the 36th session of the Human Rights Council to suspend the death penalty-albeit only temporarily-until a broader social debate on its abolition. However, the reality of the death penalty in Egypt is getting worse and worse. The number of persons whose death penalty was carried out in October 2020 (53 persons) exceeds the sum of all executions in the last three years.

– In an escalation against the EIPR, the public prosecutor’s office ordered the imprisonment of its head. Mohamed Bashseer was arrested by security forces on November 15 after midnight from his home and held. There was subsequently the arrest and release of two more EIPR workers and there is the continued incarceration of more than 10 months of Patrick Zaky. These detentions are a new link in a series of targeted intimidation measures against human rights activists. This is not separate from the overall authoritarian and oppressive climate that affects all of the constitutionally and internationally guaranteed rights and freedoms. The allegations are based on general, and misleading terms enshrined in Egyptian law.

The Constitution of 2014

In January 2014, the new constitution was adopted by a large majority (98.1%) of voter turnout (38.6%). And although I have some criticism of some articles of this constitution (too much space for clergy and military), one has to admit objectively that this was the best constitution Egypt ever had. It reflected the balance of power in 2014 between revolution and counterrevolution.

Unfortunately, this balance of power in favour of the democratic forces at the time did not last. Immediately after the presidential election, which Sisi won with practically no real competitors, the military leadership began dismantling the constitution. After a revolutionary surge, which began with the uprising of 25 January 2011, the construction of a dictatorship first requires the complete disregard of the constitution. Especially the articles guaranteeing freedoms were disregarded.

Although nothing can remain hidden in the digital age, a “democratic” image is needed for the outside world. To this end, Egyptian voters were twice chased to the ballot boxes with the whip, all numbers were fudged, and all “public” and private media were mobilized for a show. In March 2018 for the Sisi re-election, and in April 2019 for the referendum on the constitutional amendments.

The first re-election showed the political decision of the state leadership to stop any political debate, i.e., to conduct election campaigns without any debate on any issue, zero discussion in the whole society, although many issues have stretched society to the limits. This is only possible by preventing a real election campaign. And this is how it was done.

The five brave candidates were eliminated immediately after their candidacy was declared – between arrest and threat. Then a tailor-made candidate was pulled out of the sleeve who had campaigned for Sisi in his own election campaign. With a voter turnout of 41.16%, Sisi won with 97.08% and thanked the people.

The second farce was the referendum for constitutional changes. With a turnout of 44.33%, the Egyptians – allegedly – reversed the most important achievements in their constitution of five years before. Suddenly, the president is not only allowed to remain in office for two legislative periods, but until 2030, the president appoints the boards of all courts and the attorney general, extensive expansion of the powers of the military in state leadership, the economy and military justice, including completely unfounded immunity, and much more.

This happened in the following scenario:

Sisi began to criticize the constitution in strange statements that completely contradicted his earlier statements in which he praised the constitution.
The youth of the revolution at that time and also public figures were suddenly arrested on terrorism charges and mistreated in the prisons. These people had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, but the regime decided to punish them for their courage to express their opinions. The regime has pursued two goals: Firstly, to launch a pre-emptive strike against them so that they do not object to any manipulation of the constitution, and secondly, to make an example of them to those who dare to object to Sisi’s will to change the constitution.
Since the secret services completely control the media, only hypocrites and charlatans could be seen on the television channels. They directly demanded the amendment of the constitution, others begged President Sisi to remain in office for further periods until he completed his successes (!), while the president himself announced that the constitution is not a holy book and that it is only natural that it be completely supplemented or amended.

The elections 2020

For the first time, elections are being held under a new electoral law adopted after the 2019 constitutional amendments. The Egyptian parliament consists of 568 members, of which 284 are elected directly and 284 in closed ballot lists. The closed electoral list system means that if 4-5 lists compete in a constituency, the list with the majority wins all seats, no matter how many votes the other lists have received (i.e., the winner takes it all). The President of the Republic has the right to appoint up to 5% of the MPs.

The parliamentary elections, which began their first phase on October 24 and lasted until mid-November 2020, coincided with the outbreak of the Corona pandemic and the stagnation of the national economy. On this occasion, however, the treasury of the “Long Live Egypt” fund set up by Sisi will be revived and padded with approximately EGP 10 billion (approx. US$640m). These are the “donations” imposed on the candidates, who receive support from the state apparatus, which guarantees their seat in Parliament and grants them the immunity and many other privileges resulting from it.

In fact, on the first day of the elections, the government seemed to instruct, even force, the employees and servants in the administrative apparatus to vote to increase the percentage of voters. The “National Security Agency” – formerly State Security (SS) – instructed its networks of extended families, mayors and village leaders to mobilize voters.

The extremely conservative “Future of the Nation” party, loyal to the regime, held the lion’s share of seats in parliament. It took the lead in the scene to accept direct election candidates and list candidates in all constituencies of the Republic. It called on all candidates who wished to enlist its support to “donate” contributions of between EGP 5 and 25 million, depending on their chances of success. In the competitive struggle, many have far outbid or had to outbid this amount.

Since the only criterion for inclusion in the circle of beneficiaries is the amount of financial contributions, this resulted in an overwhelming majority of deputies from the rich and super-rich, at the expense of natural leaders and public figures.

The Political Money

In almost all constituencies, political money or the purchase of votes from the poor played a decisive role. This took place under the eyes, indeed with the participation, of all the relevant authorities. In the second phase of the parliamentary elections, the price of a vote in some districts in Cairo reached EGP 500 (about US$31), and the trend was rising toward the end of the vote.

In these second parliamentary elections since the fall of the late President Morsi, according to observations in the press and parties, as well as on videos in social media and also from our own observation, there is confirmation that “political money” dominated these elections.

The first form: Distribution of money to every voter who votes for candidates on the “Patriotic List”, which includes 12 parties led by the government-affiliated “Future of the Nation” party. These are sums of 50 to 200 pounds (US$3.2 to 8.8) from people who call themselves representatives of a candidate.

The second form of this political money went into the distribution of boxes of food such as rice, sugar, oil and tea, on which “The Future of the Nation Party” is written. This was repeated in the 2015 parliamentary elections and the recent Senate elections, as well as in the presidential elections and votes on constitutional amendments.

The Economist published a report on October 22 under the title ‘Another sham election highlights Egypt’s problems’. It stated that ‘Even by the standards of Egypt, where votes are routinely bought and opposition candidates imprisoned, this contest seems especially undemocratic.’ The regime has eliminated most of its critics, with candidates competing only to see who supports the regime most, while wealthy businessmen pump money into state-supported parties.

The Economist added that ‘some seats on the electoral lists were sold for millions of Egyptian pounds (tens of thousands of dollars), so much so that even one of the pro-state newspapers ridiculed this payment in a cartoon depicting a member of parliament carrying his own chair to parliament because the seats in it were too expensive for him.’

If the candidacy is only for the richest, the vote only by the poorest, paid for by donations or bribes, and the middle class is absent or increasingly reduced, a parliament, with its two chambers, will emerge, as an expression of the imbalance in government policy, which will drastically widen and deepen the gap between rich and poor. By corrupting a more just legal system originally provided for by the new constitution, the new rulers have created a hopeless situation, socially, politically, economically and legally. Egypt stands at the abyss.

Why does the West support the Sisi regime?

The Egyptian regime is pursuing an economic strategy that inevitably leads to a collision between urgently needed domestic demands for democratization and international interests. In other words, the Sisi regime is pursuing an unwavering policy that is rooted in the global financial system in order to combine its stability with the economic interests of international organizations, Western countries and big corporations.

Although the regime merchandises itself internationally as a bulwark against terrorism and illegal immigration flows, this interpretation often obscures its economic strategy. It is a policy based on heavy indebtment, which involves international parties in the repression practiced by the regime and leads to deepening of the poor-rich polarization and, consequently, destabilization and violent extremism.

Due to strong support for the global financial system, the regime in Egypt finds protection in many ways, but is also in an extreme state of dependence:

First, increasing dependence on external loans to finance government operations and major infrastructure projects. This includes an increase in long and short-term government bonds and “hot money”. Second, a huge increase in arms deals since 2014, making the regime the third largest arms importer in the world between 2015 and 2019. Finally, the high level of foreign direct investment in the Egyptian oil and gas sector has linked long-term Western investment to the stability of the regime.

These factors are directly responsible for Egypt’s repression of the population and constitute obstacles to democratization. Ultimately, this economic strategy exacerbates long-term challenges with profoundly destabilizing effects. If international capital flows are used to finance military control over the Egyptian economy, the security apparatuses can gain greater control of the state, which in political terminology means dictatorship.

Egypt relies heavily on debt to create forms of financial dependence between the regime and international parties. The regime has borrowed enormous sums. This sharp rise in debt was accompanied by an accelerated increase in foreign holdings of short-term Egyptian government bonds, which rose from US$60 million in mid-2016 to US$20 billion in October 2019. The regime was able to attract this short-term capital through interest rate offers that are the highest of any financial market in the world among other emerging markets. The yield on these funds, financed by international borrowing from the Egyptian government, reached about 13% in July 2020. Egypt thus deserves the title of “Emerging Markets Favourite”, as reflected in investor demand for a US$5 billion Eurobond issue. This is considered the largest public spending in Egyptian history.

Heavy borrowing has serious consequences for Egypt and the international community. On the one hand, in the global financial system, there is an urgent need for the survival of the Egyptian system, as the repayment of its high international debt depends on it. Therefore, the regime is to a certain extent immune to international pressure to reduce its repression, because turbulence in Egypt would have a direct impact on government revenues, increasing the likelihood of its default.

In other words, international creditors thus indirectly bear responsibility for the use of public funds to enrich the military elite through mega-infrastructure projects. These projects are financed both directly and indirectly by international financial actors (including regional allies such as the Gulf States and international organizations such as the IMF).

Egypt is economically shaken, not threatened militarily by any country and has one of the largest armies in the world. For military-strategic reasons, there is therefore no need at all for further development of its military clout. Nevertheless, the regime is pursuing a policy in the opposite direction. The regime’s expenditures for huge arms purchases from 2014 onward play a key role in consolidating its international security network. The volume of arms imports tripled between 2014 and 2018 compared to the period 2009-2013, an increase of 206%. There are no signs that this wave of arms purchases has subsided, as the regime held talks with Italy in June 2020 to conclude a major arms purchase contract worth US$9.8 billion. The Western arms industry is the main source of arms Egypt receives. At the top of the list are France, Germany, Russia and the USA. France alone covered 35% of the regime’s arms requirements between 2015 and 2019.

The arms deals include not only conventional weapons, but also the purchase of surveillance equipment and crowd control devices that are used to directly suppress protests. It is difficult to verify the sources of funding for these transactions, as they are not included in the official figures of the defence budget. However, there is evidence of the use of external loans, partly for this purpose.

In 2015, for example, an arms deal worth €5.2 billion, which included 24 Rafale fighter planes, was partly financed by a €3.2 billion loan from the French government. This means that French taxpayers lent €3.2 billion to the Egyptian regime, which Egypt’s poor will pay back including interest, i.e. Egyptian public funds were spent to finance the profits of the French arms industry.

The arms deals have made the regime one of the main customers of Western arms manufacturers, effectively linking the survival or protection of the regime with the interests of the Western arms industry.

In summary, the transformation of the regime into a major arms importer has two main consequences: the oppression of the Egyptian people by its regime and the futility of international humanitarian efforts to democratize Egypt.

First, the entanglement and accountability of Western countries and their arms industry, as the main supplier of surveillance and mass control, in suppressing popular protests. Second, the potential of Western countries to condemn and address human rights violations is thus automatically prevented.

There is a very sad and enlightening example of this, among countless others: Italy continued to supply weapons to the Egyptian regime, even after suspicions rose in December 2018 that five members of the Egyptian security forces were involved in the torture and death of the Italian student Giulio Regeni in 2016. This well-founded suspicion was substantiated by an official demand of the Italian public prosecutor’s office. Nevertheless, Italian arms sales to Egypt tripled in 2019, and the planned arms deals between Italy and Egypt for 2020 amount to €11 billion.

Other factors in international tolerance of undemocratic conditions in Egypt are the increasing foreign direct investment in the Egyptian oil and gas sector. The Egyptian regime is currently the first target for foreign direct investment in Africa. The value of these investments reached US$9 billion in 2019. Most of the investment is in the oil and gas sector, which received a major boost following the discovery of the Zohr gas field in 2015, the largest in Egypt and the Mediterranean region.

The Zohr field is jointly owned by the Italian state-owned company Eni, BP (UK) and Russneft (Russia). The share of Eni is 50%. Eni’s total investments in this sector between 2015 and 2018 amounted to US$13 billion. These steadily increasing foreign investments in the oil and gas sector reflect a deliberate policy of the regime. On August 31, President Sisi announced his support for the expansion of Eni’s investments. In view of these investments, international energy companies have a greater interest in the survival of the Egyptian regime, so investments in the billions are linked to the continuity of the regime.

As a result of this calculated policy, the regime becomes the main beneficiary of the transfer of wealth to the military elite. The middle and lower classes, the normal citizens of this state, fall by the wayside and do not benefit from the enormous financial flows. The military elite accumulates profits through interest on loans, arms deals, corruption in the mega-infrastructure projects – mostly wasteful and unnecessary – and oil and gas revenues, while the national debt is financed by the Egyptian taxpayer.

It is therefore clear that international humanitarian demands for democratization collide with international financial interests, which in turn ensure the survival of the Egyptian regime of injustice through their abundant support.

A version of this blogpost originally appeared on the Tlaxcala website (the international network of translators for linguistic diversity) and can be found here.

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