The Real Locus of Power in Algeria

May 16, 2019

Chinedu Chukwudinma argues that the proliferation of strikes before and after the downfall of Algeria’s President Abdelaziz Bouteflika suggests that only the working class has the power to lead Algerian society to liberation. Chukwudinma looks at the history of workers’ struggles and assesses the possibilities for the future.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

Revolution has again struck North Africa as the mass protests in Algeria forced dictator Abdelaziz Bouteflika to resign on 2 April. Despite this victory, Algerians have continued to demonstrate and are now demanding the removal of the entire regime.

The Bloomberg news platform expressed its pessimism about these developments when one commentator argued that ‘leaderless revolutions’ either lead to civil war or their hijacking by the military. Conversely, an analyst for Al-Jazeera ascribed Bouteflika’s removal to the ‘non-violent character’ of the protests. These perplexed interpretations and attempts to label the events indicate that the mainstream media has failed to locate where power lies in Algeria.

Instead, I argue that the proliferation of strikes before and after Bouteflika’s downfall suggests that only the working class has the power to lead Algerian society to liberation.

The present revolution constitutes another chapter in the Algerian people’s struggle against dictatorship – following from the October insurrection of 1988, the Berber spring of 2001 and the general strike of 2003. It expresses the growing confidence of workers and their resentment towards the neoliberal policies of the ruling class. On 10 March the working class answered calls for a general strike and used its social weight to strengthen the popular mobilisations that had already taken to the streets. The event merged the political struggles against the regime with those partial economic ones for better living standards. Currently, both forms of struggle continue to influence one another through the permanent presence of protests and strikes. This opens the prospect for more profound social change.

The masses enter history

On Friday 22 February 2019 nationwide protest erupted after the regime’s decision to extend Bouteflika’s presidency for a fifth term. The demonstrations grew stronger the following week, with three million people occupying the streets across Algeria’s 48 provinces. The uprising marked a turning point for Algerians who had endured decades years of dictatorship and financial hardship.

When oil prices collapsed in 2014 it meant a decline in the main source of income for the regime; its response was to impose further cuts in social services and wage freezes. People were no longer willing to tolerate it. The mostly young protesters also held the dictatorship responsible for high youth unemployment standing at 30 percent. ‘There’s nothing for the young generation,’ said one. ‘No jobs and no houses. That’s why we want the Old Man to go.’

The deteriorating living standards and lack of democratic rights endured by ordinary people contrast with the corruption of the wealthy elite and their visible factional struggles. In 2018 Bouteflika fired prominent military and secret service officials linked to a drug scandal and replaced the president of the national assembly. The act appeared to be another attempt to shift the balance of power to the presidential circle – Bouteflika’s family, industry magnates, and a faction of the army led by General Gaid Saleh, the head of the armed forces. It was a sign of ruling class weakness that they saw the infirm old Bouteflika (unseen in public since 2013) as the only consensual figure capable of ruling Algeria. The elite’s decision to prolong his mandate to maintain their networks of power backfired as the people rose up.

The uprising has proved that Algerians have overcome their fear of state repression and reclaimed the right to protest in Algiers, a city where demonstrations have been banned since 2001. Oppressed sections of Algerian society protested and rallied in their workplaces. Journalists and staff staged walkouts against censorship and forced the state media to cover the protests. Students and teachers followed them by organising marches from their high schools and universities. Judges and lawyers joined the wave of demonstrations for the first time in Algerian history. The people grew in confidence as their slogans evolved from ‘No fifth mandate’ to ‘Bouteflika get out’ to ‘Down with regime.’

Strikes and Rosa Luxemburg

The mass demonstration certainly divided and terrified the ruling class, causing some of Bouteflika’s supporters and General Gaid Saleh to voice their support for the people’s demands. But it was the general strike on 10 March that forced Bouteflika to announce two days later that he wouldn’t seek another term in office. The mass strikes that spread across Algeria closed factories and entire industrial districts, most notably in the Kabylie region and Algiers. Workers organised a sit-in in front of the headquarters of the public hydrocarbon firm Sonatrach – which employs 120,000 people – calling for better working conditions, an end to job cuts and for the regime’s departure. They cried, ‘No more redundancies, no more regime!’ The strikes paralysed the most vibrant ports and the public transport system in most cities and spread to various state departments.

Just as Rosa Luxemburg described over a century ago, the economic fight and the political movement against the dictator fed into and strengthened each other, giving new momentum to the struggle.

On 15 March the last day of strike action fused with Algeria’s largest ever political mobilisation of over 14 million people on the streets. The protesters now focused on Bouteflika’s removal. The strikes and demonstrations aggravated division within the ruling class and General Saleh overthrew Bouteflika on 2 April. A young woman protester gives insight into the combative mood of the people as this first victory sank in: ‘We were asleep but now we have woken up! Now we the people have the confidence to change the whole system.’

Army versus the working class

In his classic text, The State and Revolution, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin refers to Karl Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx wrote that where the working class is a minority, a ‘real people’s revolution’ could only come about if the workers are able to unite the oppressed behind them and smash the old state machine. While this is not yet the case in Algeria, the small proletariat has demonstrated through strikes that it is the most powerful force in society. However, the military that has remained the principal locus of power since Algeria won independence from France in 1962 presents an obstacle to workers’ power.

The origin of this problem lies in General Houari Boumedienne’s ascension to power, which marked the transformation of the National Liberation Front (FLN) from a coalition of guerrilla forces leading the independence struggle into a military state dictatorship in 1965. It is quite common to see Boumedienne’s face adorning the placards of protesters today, because he represents the attempt to drive economic development in Algeria through state-led investment and industrialisation – in stark contrast to the austerity and neoliberalism of recent decades.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Boumedienne nationalised the major foreign hydrocarbon companies and redirected oil and gas exports to build local industries such as car, steel and electricity plants. The state could offer workers stable employment, free education and healthcare and other welfare benefits that Algerians still value today.

But the general’s regime was no friend of the workers who occupied their workplaces in 1964-66. In response to the strikes and sit-ins the state incorporated Algeria’s only trade union, the Union General des Travailleurs Algérien (UGTA), after purging its national secretary and disbanding local branches. Workers’ disputes were thereafter subject to negotiations between the compliant UGTA’s leaders and state ministers.

The global recession of the late 1970s led to the decline of Algerian export-revenues and hampered Boumedienne’s state led-development. Boumedienne died in 1978 and his successor Chadli Bendjedid reduced public spending and opened Algeria to free trade and privatisation to obtain loans from the IMF and the World Bank.

While Bendjedid’s neoliberalism produced mass unemployment, job insecurity and dismantled the welfare system, it also provoked Algeria’s first major working class revolt, known as the October insurrection of 1988. The economic crisis following the crash in the oil price in the mid-1980s triggered strikes in Algiers that grew into a bloody rebellion pitting young people against the police and the army. The revolt was crushed by the state, but it forced Bendjedid to adopt a multi-party constitution and recognised the right of political association.

The outcome was that most workers supported Islamist parties. Marxist Chris Harman argued that Boumedienne and Bendjedid had promoted moderate Islamism to counteract the influence of the left, and that this opened the door to the flourishing of Islamist organisations. For instance, ministers often helped Islamists obtain funds from businessmen for building mosques.

In the absence of a strong, organised left, impoverished workers and peasants found solace in mosques where the anti-western and anti-corruption rhetoric of Islamist forces galvanised their anger towards the FLN regime. The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won major municipalities in the country’s first free municipal election in 1990 and won the first round of the general election in 1992. The army deposed Bendjedid and initiated a decade of civil war against Islamist militias. The army managed to destroy the Islamist rebellion and secured its dominance over Algerian politics. The elections of 1998 confirmed this. Abdelaziz Bouteflika was sworn into the presidency as all other frontrunners accused the military of electoral fraud and withdrew their candidacies in protest.

Meanwhile, the state continued the IMF structural adjustment programmes and sold off public companies to Algerian and foreign oligarchs.

Today, the army’s decision to oust Bouteflika should be seen as an attempt to demobilise the masses – not an attempt to support them. The military has an interest in ending the revolution because the extension of mass protests could intensify existing rivalries between military commanders and more significantly split the rank-and-file soldiers from their leaders.

However, Algerians continue to protest against the interim government and condemn General Gaid Saleh’s interference. ‘The people don’t want change within the framework of the existing constitution, we want to change society on our terms, that’s why we reject the government announcements for elections in July,’ explained a student. On 26 April demonstrations the masses shouted, ‘There can be only one Gaid, the people!’

Workers’ organisation

The Algerian working class has the potential to build and strengthen its own organisations to counterbalance the power of the armed forces. Bendjedid’s recognition of the right of association encouraged the formation of new independent trade unions such as Confederation des Syndicats Autonome (CSA) in the early 1990s. These new unions were more militant than the UGTA and organised strikes among new sectors of the working class in education, health and public transport.

The new unions played an important role during the Berber Spring of 2001, when riots erupted in response to the murder of a teenager by the police. The background to the revolt in the northern Kabylie region was one of mass unemployment, lack of political representation throughout the civil war, as well as the police brutality that led to the teenager’s death.

These issues amplified movements fighting for the region’s autonomy and official recognition of the Berber language. In May 2001 the workers followed calls for a general strike in the cities of Bejaïa and Tizi-Ouzou, giving new life to the rebellion. A month later the workers, peasants and small businesses created their own power structures through the development of local and inter-district committees across the region. From May to September these committees organised marches in Algiers and a demonstration of half a million in Tizi-Ouzou as workers deserted their workplaces to join the procession.

The workers in alliance with the oppressed stood against the state and marked the rebellion with their own demands such as the ‘supremacy of elected bodies over appointed bodies and security forces.’ The revolt failed to spread across the country, partly because the independent trade unions were not rooted elsewhere. Hence they were too weak to challenge the French and state media’s framing of the event as a Berber identity issue.

While similar committees haven’t yet resurfaced in Algeria, the independent unions have been active in the 2019 revolution. However, the CSA calls for a general strike on 12 April generated little response outside of Algiers and Kabylie. This confirmed that independent unions still don’t have enough influence to lead substantial sections of the working class. Instead, many workers prefer to fight for control of the UGTA, which claims a membership of over 4 million.

On 16 March 50 union members staged a sit-in outside the UGTA headquarters demanding the general secretary Sidi Said’s resignation. Their offensive failed after scabs attacked them. However, the proliferation of picket lines and strike meetings throughout March and April gave workers the opportunity to launch a battle to reclaim the union from the regime. Postal workers on a picket line told one journalist, ‘Shame on our union leadership for siding with company management. They don’t understand that only strike action can deliver what we want.’ On 17 April thousands of workers again rallied outside the UGTA headquarters demanding the resignation of the general secretary.

Many trade unionists remember UGTA’s powerful two-day general strike that paralysed Algeria in February 2003. Ports, airports, railways, public transport, gas pumps, banks, schools, hospitals – most public sector companies were shut down. The strike happened after the rank and file members pressured the UGTA leadership to take action against the Bouteflika regime’s privatisation of state industries. These mass protests forced Bouteflika and his circle to retreat on neoliberalism. Public companies that had been privatised, such as the steel complex Sider El Hadjar, returned to the state. The favourable oil revenues enabled the Algerian state to subsidise food prices, maintain free health and schools.

However, workers told the press the UGTA has not done anything for them since 2003. Under Sidi Said’s leadership the union had become an electoral machine aimed convincing workers to vote for Bouteflika. The resignation of Said would be a serious step forward for the working class. It opens the possibility for the UGTA’s independence from the state and this would enable the membership to initiate more industrial action against their bosses and dictators.

Belated Arab Spring?

The French yellow vest movement and the uprising in Sudan seem to have had a greater influence on Algerians than Arab Spring of 2011. Algerian revolutionaries have of late created the ‘Gilets Orange’ to protect protesters from police. They have expressed their support for the yellow vests and their animosity to French imperialism: ‘Macron make sure you collect firewood because this year you won’t have any of our gas.’

Although thousands of Algerians protested following the outbreak of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions in 2010-11, their numbers were much smaller than elsewhere in the region. Some commentators argued that revolt failed because Bouteflika made economic concessions such as lowering food prices. Others attribute the failure to the trauma caused by the Algerian civil war or to the chaos in Libya and Syria and the Egyptian counter-revolution.

Algeria’s neighbour, Tunisia, presents an example for the achievement of a bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Moreover, the last decade of the Bouteflika dictatorship saw a rising movement talking about issues such as youth unemployment and sexual harassment. The protests of 2011 can be considered part of this return of street activism by the young that paved the way for the 2019 revolution. The protests that occurred throughout Bouteflika’s rule remained irregular and disconnected from each other. One struggle would erupt as soon as the last one had vanished after facing repression.

In today’s revolution there is a greater reciprocal influence between the political and economic struggle. From late March workers in a Turkish-Algerian multinational company organised sit-ins at work for higher wages that developed into a strike against the regime. Their revolutionary consciousness appears much greater than in 2011. As one striker claimed, ‘We can change everything, we don’t want our movements to be co-opted like in 2011, and you can’t achieve democracy with those at the top.’

The Algerian revolution of 2019 continues to engage all strata of society, but the working class faces important challenges for deepening the revolution. It must reject the influence of the military and formulate its own demands. It must create its independent unions and institutions for taking power. The historical legacies of protests in Algeria, alongside the enduring strikes and protests today, leaves open the prospect of turning this democratic revolution into a social one.

Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles and the history of working class resistance on the continent.

Featured Photograph: a strike by Algerian teachers demanding higher wages in October 2011.

A version of this article was first published in Socialist Review (Issue 446, May 2019)

Appeal – Books to Change the World

ROAPE

May 15, 2019

Nigeria Labour Congress

Iva Valley Books

Situated on the second floor of Labour House, the offices of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) in Abuja, in Nigeria, a new radical bookshop has recently opened. Iva Valley Books aims to provide the books, pamphlets and periodicals that trade unionists and others in Nigeria need to understand their world.

The trade union bookstore takes its name from a strike, and massacre that occurred in colonial occupied Nigeria. On November 18, 1949 armed colonial policemen opened fire on coal miners in the Iva Valley mine in Enugu. Within minutes they had murdered 21 Nigerian workers and injured fifty-one.

Earlier in 1949 matters between the workers and management had reached a head when the bosses rejected demands for the payment of rostering, the upgrading of the mine hewers to artisans and the payment of housing and travelling allowances. The workers then began a strike. The management’s reaction was to sack over 50 of them. Fearing that the strike was part of the growing nationalist agitations for self- rule, the management also decided to move out explosives from the mines.

Iva Valley Books, the NLC’s bookstore, is now open (2nd Floor, Labour House, NLC Building, Central Business Area, Abuja)

The bookshop has a selection of new and used books but welcomes donations from trade unionists and supporters internationally. We encourage financial donations and socialist books, pamphlets, left-wing novels and histories.

If you are sending book donations from Europe or North America please send them here:

Iva Valley Books – Appeal, 8 Vincent Close, Leicester LE3 6ED, ENGLAND

Alternatively, for donations of books from other areas or financial donations please contact: roape@outlook.com

Suicide in Tunisia: acts of despair and protest

ROAPE

May 14, 2019

In a blogpost drawing attention to the large number of suicides by immolation in Tunisia, Habib Ayeb explains that there has been an average of between 250 to 300 suicides per year since 2011. These desperate political acts are intended to draw attention to the dire social and political conditions experienced by millions of Tunisians in the years since the revolution (and the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010). Translated by Max Ajl, the blogpost looks at the origins of the Tunisian revolution, and its broken promises.

By Habib Ayeb

A few months ago, a young unemployed journalist set himself on fire in a public square of the city of Kasserine, in an arid region in central Tunisia, and one of the four poorest regions of the country, in protest against his socio-economic state. It was just the latest of a long series of suicides by immolation, since December 2010.

For the majority of Tunisians, and for some foreign observers, the immolation of a person suffering socio-economic difficulties immediately recalls the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010, which triggered a movement leading to the fall of the Zineddine Ben Ali dictatorship on January 14, 2011 and initiated what has been called – for 8 years now – the ‘Arab Spring.’ There is obviously a kind of mimicry in these suicides by immolation. However, this mimicry does not extend to all suicides in Tunisia, where the average number is between 250 and 300 per year since 2011. In Tunisia, probably elsewhere, too, suicide by immolation is a deliberate public act intended to sound an alarm about social and political conditions, and to provoke collective action on the part of those experiencing the same conditions or exposed to the same risks.

Those who choose this extreme method to kill themselves, paradoxically, try to make themselves more visible and audible by transmitting a political message that no one can ignore. By its brutality, fire attracts the eye – it scares, makes for anxiety, disquiet, questions. And, in some cases, it designates, names, and accuses. When a man chooses to kill himself, he evinces a refusal of anonymity and silence. He expresses a desire to convey a message that declines the ‘sociological identity’ of the victim. Instead, he designates the factors – or the people – who pushed him to suicide. He thus articulates his refusal to accept injustice and exclusion.

That said, is there a typical profile of those who immolate themselves by fire? Answering such a question requires psychoanalytical skills and would go well beyond the problematic of this blogpost. However, some common ‘traits’ can be emphasized. Generally, the victim is male, aged 20 to 40, unemployed or underemployed, from the country’s disadvantaged areas and neighborhoods, has participated in social movements for employment or for access to certain resources. He is single, and whether he is a university graduate or not, he has already taken steps, or at least tried, to improve his economic and social situation, albeit without success.

Through these features, we find the profile of Bouazizi. Furthermore, these many suicides reflect all the elements of the social and economic crisis in which the country has been plunged for several years. These suicides also reflect the incapacity of the new decision makers who took power in the aftermath of the fall of Ben Ali to imagine new economic and social policies which could meet the expectations and demands of those who initiated the revolution, and who now consider themselves betrayed and excluded from the ‘fruits’ of their commitment and their actions.

To fully understand this new phenomenon of ‘public’ suicide, and why it has become the most violent and extreme form of individual protest and resistance against social injustice, and exclusion and marginalization, it is useful to remember who Mohamed Bouazizi was: the first to publicly immolate himself to protest against an injustice, for which he laid blame and responsibility direct on the administration and the state.

Mohamed Bouazizi was neither a university graduate nor a rebel, and no one knew him outside his circle of close relations. His father was a former farm worker. He died and left three small children, including Mohamed, who at the time was only three years old. The family inherited a plot of less than three hectares of steppe land in the governorate of Sidi Bouzid – non-irrigated, and basically insufficient to support an entire family. To improve their income, the stepfamily tried to launch a small agricultural project on the inherited plots, by converting them to permanent irrigation, thanks to a line of credit it obtained from the National Agricultural Bank (BNA) in exchange for mortgaging the land. Unfortunately, they were not lucky. The family became heavily indebted, and unable to repay the loan. Events followed a mechanical sequence: seizure and resale of the land by the BNA, and loss of the only source of income, which had also been a vital material and symbolic capital.

In the early 2000s, Mohamed Bouazizi was a farm worker at an uncle’s farm, who would experience the same ill-fated agricultural experience: credit, deadlines not met, seizure and loss of mortgaged land. Mohamed, who again found himself out of work, decided to become an informal vegetable peddler, and equipped himself with a cart and the necessary equipment, such as a scale and other small tools. He did not count on the harassment of the administrative authorities and police officers, who did everything in their power to prevent him from working, multiplying their pressure on him, until the famous day of December 17, 2010 and the seizure of his work equipment – scales, trolley, and so forth. Furious, frustrated, and desperate, he ended up committing the last act of resistance he still felt capable of carrying out.

Mohamed Bouazizi was, in fact, only one of the many direct victims of the process of grabbing agricultural land and local natural resources by private agricultural investors – a process encouraged by the state under the pretext of reinforcing food security, guaranteed by the development of export agriculture.

By his gesture of despair and revolt, Bouazizi unwittingly accelerated long and complex processes, and set in motion an acceleration of these developments, which had already been largely underway for several years. We know the rest. But it remains to emphasize here that the sequence of events and Bouazizi’s own life-story shows that, in a certain sense, he did not ‘commit suicide.’ Rather, he was suicided.

‘Individual’ suicide and class solidarity

Bouazizi’s suicide must be understood by putting him, on the one hand, in his familial and personal context, and on the other hand, in the general context of the local rejection of national agricultural policies. Neoliberal and export-oriented policies have been imposed by the state since the country’s independence in 1956, in the name of development, modernization, and economics. However, by political decision, since the end of the 1980s the governorate of Sidi Bouzid has become a pole of intensive agricultural development. During these three decades, it has received the largest share of public and private investment. It is, today, the country’s leading agricultural region vis-à-vis production and investment, and one of the country’s four poorest regions.

Without a long ‘revolutionary’ process and a certain class consciousness, the death of Mohamed Bouazizi would probably never have gone beyond being a minor news item. Thus, it is important to resituate the ‘accelerated sequence’ (17 December 2010 – January 14, 2011) as part of the global revolutionary process that began well before December 2010 and continues to the present day. Based on the continuity of actions of protest and collective resistance, such as demonstrations, strikes, and sit-ins, which imply the continuity of the ‘process,’ it seems to me suitable to situate the beginning of the revolutionary process in January 2008, with massive strikes by phosphate mining workers in the southwest, starting with Redeyef, which lasted until June of the same year, despite the fierce government crackdown on strikers and their families. This was followed by many other similar actions throughout the south, east, and center of the country, until 17 December 2010.

Among the many events that preceded December 17, 2010, we must remember the demonstrations organized by farmers in June and July 2010 in downtown Sidi Bouzid, in front of the governorate headquarters. At the root of the discontent were demands for access to drinking water and irrigation water, agricultural land, subsidies and inputs, whose prices had risen sharply. There was also the matter of the behavior of investors from other parts of the country, whom local people call ‘foreigners’ and consider aggressive and contemptuous. There was also the problem of farmers’ indebtedness, to the BNA, for loans, or to STEG, the Tunisian electricity and gas company. There was an accumulation of unpaid bills, basically due to consumption of electricity for pumping irrigation water. The accumulated indebtedness of peasants, especially the smallest among them, had gradually become widespread, thereby preventing any hope for ‘remedy.’ Indebted peasants were threatened with, or were under, prosecution and were even at risk of losing their land.

Among the many demonstrators, several consistent testimonies, gathered during my numerous trips in the region, affirm that Mohamed Bouazizi was present and active at these demonstrations and sit-ins. In any case, the link between the peasant mobilizations in the summer of 2010 and those which followed Bouazizi’s desperate act seems obvious to me, and explains why this suicide, as opposed to a different one, triggered the actions in solidarity, which are now well-known.

We are here, indisputably, facing an act of ‘class solidarity’ from the region’s inhabitants, those directly affected – as was Bouazizi – by multiple local economic and social difficulties, including limited access to land and other resources I described above, and processes of dispossession of the local peasantry. For a few days, this class solidarity manifested itself throughout the country, starting from the ‘rural’ areas – including the ‘rural towns’ – before reaching the popular neighborhoods of the big cities and, finally, the large urban centers. The route of the protests, between December 17, 2010 and January 14, 2011, as well as that of the long revolutionary process, from January 2008-January 2011, demonstrates the existence of a certain class consciousness, one that extends beyond the peasantry to reach the entire ‘popular’ rural and urban population.

Disappointed expectations push young people towards extreme solutions

In 2011, vast waves of hope swept over the country, and hundreds of thousands of poor Tunisians began to dream of a better future. With Ben Ali and his mafia gang gone, such a dream had become possible, even achievable. Soon, the list of social and economic grievances grew, and expectations multiplied. But this occurred without taking into account the political and social elite, their interests linked to those of the dominant classes, and who considered themselves the legitimate heirs of the deposed leaders, and the natural guardians of the interests of the State and its prestige (haybat eddawla, a formula dear to Beji Caid Essebsi, the current president, elected in December 2014).

An elite has organized to monopolize the country’s political and financial powers by multiplying institutions and decision-making mechanisms, and by organizing a representative democracy that has two main benefits. First, it breaks with the system of dictatorship and the maintenance of decision-making powers in the hands of a relatively small number of actors. Second, it moves away from any possibility of the population’s effective participation in decision-making.

Meanwhile, the social and political difficulties of the country are growing inexorably

The structural imbalance between the coastal regions, in which wealth, infrastructure, investment, and ‘opportunities’ have accumulated for decades, and the interior regions, naturally rich in resources but economically underdeveloped, socially marginalized, and politically dominated, remains unchanged. Unemployment of young graduates continues to grow. It is important to realize that one in three graduates is currently unemployed, while the overall unemployment rate is between 18 and 25 percent of the total labor force.

On the other hand, poverty is increasing, jobs are becoming scarce, domestic investors are leaving the country, or are reluctant to invest in the wealth and value-producing sectors of the economy, and foreign investors are still reluctant to return. Finally, the Tunisian’s dinar’s fall against foreign currencies, a decline whose only theoretical interest is to favor exports, is reflected in a vertiginous rise in the prices of consumer products, especially those of imported products.

The result is a worsening of the feeling of abandonment and exclusion among the most disadvantaged social strata, particularly among the young, jobless, and destitute, who now encounter the closure of legal migration routes, and a lack of opportunities within the country. Some are tempted by the highly risky adventure of the harga – illegal migration, usually by sea – and many never reach the northern shore of the Mediterranean. Those who do not leave, often for lack of means, since illegal emigration is very expensive and always carries the risk of ending up in a tragedy, resign themselves to day-to-day survival, but generally develop a very strong feeling of frustration and of revolt that pushes some towards violence, political or otherwise, and others towards the extreme choice of suicide, whether spectacular or discreet.

The last suicide by immolation, mentioned at the beginning of this blogpost, was indisputably a politically considered and planned act. The video of this suicide, filmed by on-site witnesses, invaded all social networks ‘virally,’ causing a wave of protests, often at night, and sometimes violent, which were ‘spontaneously’ organized by hundreds of Kasserine’s young people, who live in extremely difficult social conditions and fear reaching such extreme choices. More broadly, all the social movements – demonstrations, strikes – which have taken place since January 2011, are undoubtedly part of the same complex revolutionary (or oppositional) processes that are nourished by the different mechanisms of social and economic dispossession, exclusion, and marginalization. After, like before January 2011, the main demand of all social movements is to support the right of fair and dignified access to the resources and services that the ‘revolution,’ stolen by the country’s economic and political elites, has not been able to secure.

Unfortunately, when politicians, policymakers and journalists evoke these young rebels, they speak simply of ‘thugs,’ even criminals.

Habib Ayeb is a writer, film-maker and activist. He is professor of geography at Université Paris 8 and a contributor to roape.net. Translated by Max Ajl. Max has a PhD in development sociology from Cornell and is work on the national liberation movement in Tunisia. He is a regular contributor to roape.net.

Featured Photograph: A protest in Paris in support of Mohamed Bouazizi, ‘Hero of Tunisia’ (15 January, 2011).

The Political Economy of Aid in Zimbabwe

ROAPE

May 9, 2019

Farai Chipato discusses the massive influx of donor money into Zimbabwe’s civil society in the 2000s which created ‘briefcase NGOs’, where opportunistic ‘entrepreneurs’ attempted to draw down funding for profit, and the expansion of existing NGOs, creating employment opportunities for a growing number of careerists. Before long, the NGO sector became one of the main sectors sustaining Zimbabwe’s urban middle class, which included both junior staff and a layer of management staff who accumulated significant amounts of wealth and property. Activists from the 1990s complain of this turn from activist to professional in civil society organisations, which meant that civil society is increasingly just another industry to make a career in.

By Farai Chipato

Academics and activists have been criticising the NGOisation of political protest since at least the 1990s, arguing that as social movements transform into NGOs, they become professionalised, apolitical and conservative. Whilst this phenomenon has been observed throughout the Global South and particularly in Africa, it is important to understand how its dynamics play out in different ways, interacting with specific contexts and events. This became increasingly clear to me during a research trip to Zimbabwe in 2018, where I spent six months interviewing activists and development professionals working on democracy and human rights. What follows is an account of how and why Zimbabwean civil society organisations have become more professionalised, internationalised and apolitical over the past two decades, drawing on over 100 interviews with those involved on the ground.

The Beginning of Protest in Zimbabwe

The contemporary landscape of civil society organisations, NGOs and social movements in Zimbabwe originated in an upsurge of activism in the mid to late 1990s. The country was in the midst of a series of structural adjustment programmes, implemented by the ruling ZANU-PF party, which had devastating effects on the economic and social lives of ordinary Zimbabweans. In response, church groups joined with trade unionists, student activists and other NGOs, and attempted to engage with the government to forge a new economic path for the country, but these efforts quickly stalled. In response, activists formed a movement for constitutional change, as a means to reign in the power of the president and push for reform, quickly gaining momentum due to the worsening economic situation. Whilst the constitutional reform movement was blocked by government in the late 1990s, it’s success in building support among ordinary people led to the formation of a powerful new opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), in 1999.

In the early 2000s, the civil society organisations that gained a voice in the previous decade grew in confidence, forming a common cause with the MDC. Civil society in this period was largely an urban phenomenon, as rural politics was increasingly dominated by veterans of Zimbabwe’s liberation war, whose campaign for land reform resulted in the mass expropriation of farmland from the country’s white farmers during this period. However, in the cities, new NGOs were emerging around human rights, democracy and good governance, where the success of established civil society groups attracted attention and funding from international donors, like the US and the UK, which increasingly provided financial support for these groups. What had started as an organic movement for reform became an increasingly internationalised system of NGOs, heavily reliant on its funders to survive.

This period saw Zimbabwe descend into a series of interlinked crises, as the land redistribution programme, together with international isolation, sanctions and erratic government policies fuelled a severe economic downturn. As hyperinflation began to decimate the livelihoods of ordinary people, the confrontation between the opposition, backed by civil society groups, and the government, now allied to the war veterans, escalated. This culminated in a violent and contested election in 2008, which was eventually settled through international mediation and the formation of a government of national unity (GNU).

Whilst the 2009 to 2013 GNU allowed for both political and economic stabilisation, it also saw an increasing fragmentation and weakening of civil society groups. Splits within the major opposition party had already caused divisions within civil society, and the formation of a coalition government created further arguments between advocates for engagement with the government, backed by powerful international donors, and more adversarial activists. This worsened in 2013, when ZANU-PF won a landslide electoral victory, leading many in the donor community to blame civil society organisations. As a result, funding levels decreased, and donors demanded increasing levels of professionalism, bureaucratic capacity and co-operation in exchange for funding.

NGOisation and Economic crisis

The key driver of NGOisation during the past 20 years has been the massive increase in donor funding to Zimbabwe, that began with constitutional reform movement in the late 1990s. In one key example, the US development agency, USAID, increased its Zimbabwe budget from $22 million in 2001 to a $261 million in 2016. Moreover, from the early 2000s onwards, the majority of international donors refused to fund the Zimbabwean government directly, instead choosing to use civil society as their main means to influence the country’s politics. The massive increase in funding to NGOs specifically can be seen in the Swedish development agency’s funding to civil society, which rose from $3.6 million in 2001 to $24.8 million in 2014. This influx of money has had a number of effects on Zimbabwean organisations, which will be examined below.

One of the most important factors in NGOisation has been the interaction between increased donor funding and Zimbabwe’s volatile economy during the early 2000s, which was subject to hyperinflation and mass unemployment. This created a growing pool of ambitious, educated urban Zimbabweans who were unable to gain employment in the private or public sector or create their own businesses in a hostile economic environment. The influx of donor money into civil society thus incentivised both the creation of ‘briefcase NGOs’, where opportunistic ‘entrepreneurs’ attempted to draw down funding for profit, and the expansion of existing NGOs, creating employment opportunities for a growing number of careerists. Thus, by the late 2000s, the NGO sector became one of the main industries sustaining Zimbabwe’s urban middle class, which included both junior staff and a layer of management staff who accumulated significant amounts of wealth and property. Veterans of the 1990s surge of activism complain of this turn from activist to professional in civil society organisations, suggesting that civil society is increasingly seen as just another industry to make a career in.

The volatility of the Zimbabwean currency and the febrile political environment also created unique opportunities for profit among NGOs that received donor funding. By 2008, inflation in Zimbabwe had reached over 1 million percent, with prices in Zimbabwean dollars changing incredibly rapidly. Among those with bank accounts, savings and current account balances became worthless almost overnight, impoverishing large swathes of the country. In this environment, foreign currency became exceptionally valuable, as it not only allowed Zimbabweans access to forms of exchange that retained their value but could be converted into local currency at huge profits. Local NGOs received their donor funding in foreign currency during this period, often in cash, which was sometimes smuggled across the border from neighbouring countries like Botswana and South Africa. Employees of these organisations, particularly their directors, were able to use significant profits from their foreign currency salaries to purchase property, or other assets that retained their value. In one example from my research, a former NGO director indicated that they paid themselves US$4,000 a month at the height of the crisis. To put this in context, another informant working in the private sector informed me that it cost him US$100 in total to pay 4,000 employees at a manufacturing plant at the same time. Thus, savvy NGO directors were able to accumulate significant amounts of capital during this period.

Zimbabwean NGOs and the Global Development Industry

The increasingly large NGO sector also linked the Zimbabwean middle class into the global development industry, providing opportunities for lucrative work, either in international organisations based in the country, or abroad. Whilst NGO directors were able to access significant salaries, their positions were often precarious, both politically and financially. However, a successful stint as an NGO director could lead to a more stable and financially rewarding position at an international NGO or a donor organisation based in Zimbabwe, which are now heavily reliant on local staff. Many staff at all levels have moved on to positions in international organisations, at a local, regional and global level. In two prominent regional examples, international lawyer Siphosami Malunga is the director of the Open Society Institute of Southern Africa, based in Johannesburg, whilst Arnold Tsunga, another Zimbabwean human rights lawyer, is the director of the Africa Regional Office of the International Commission of Jurists. Zimbabweans have been able to use the skills they developed in the civil society boom of the early and mid-2000s to build successful careers in the international development industry, further incentivising more junior staff to join the career ladder.

Working in Zimbabwean civil society also brings other benefits as well, which reinforce the professionalisation of activists. Success in a local NGO provides opportunities for foreign travel through a network of fellowships, conferences and workshops provided by the wider international development ecosystem. Opportunities for advanced degrees from international universities are also on offer through funding provided by embassies and other development organisations. These experiences channel activists away from more radical approaches to change, in favour of technical proficiencies, ‘best practice’ and an apolitical view of development.

Corruption and NGOs

As well as opportunities for enrichment through career progression, there has also been the prospect of illicit accumulation of wealth through donor funding, which operates on a number of levels. One of my interviewees suggested that some NGOs write reports of workshops or training events that never happened, which allow them to use funding for other purposes, including personal enrichment. However, corruption is also rumoured to have occurred on the donor side, as employees of bilateral development agencies have been accused to providing funding in return for kickbacks. Many in both civil society and among the donor community claim that these issues have been exacerbated by the unwillingness to publicise these issues, as it plays into the ZANU-PF government’s narrative of corrupt western imperialism and venal, money-grabbing NGOs.

The issue of corruption has also been linked to the international opportunities discussed earlier, with suggestions that donors quietly remove corrupt NGO staff by sending them to universities abroad. One NGO director told me that ‘there is a joke here, that if you really want a PhD, embezzle funds… and then you come back in a few years and all is forgiven.’ The issue of corruption is a controversial one within civil society, as it has been used by donors as a blanket accusation to discipline recipients of their funding, whilst NGOs claim that the problem has been exaggerated and only applies to a few high-level offenders. Whilst there is no reliable evidence on the scale of this activity, due to its controversial nature, it is likely that the perception that people get rich through illicit practices in NGOs has fuelled entrants into the sector.

Beyond NGOisation?

All of these dynamics have had a significant impact on activism in Zimbabwe. Many Zimbabweans have lost respect for civil society activists, whilst those in the sector increasingly shy away from radical or transformative politics. Meanwhile, the marginalisation of voices of the left within civil society has contributed to the embrace of neoliberal policies by both the government and the opposition in contemporary Zimbabwe. Moreover, those employed within NGOs form an increasingly precarious workforce, as donor funding now focuses on the delivery of discreet projects, pushing junior staff from secure positions into temporary roles.

Thus, the NGOisation of Zimbabwean civil society has clearly had a detrimental effect on activism in the country over the past 20 years. However, it is important to put these issues in perspective. I do not wish to offer a moral critique of those working in NGOs, but rather to highlight the structural changes that have incentivised particular behaviours among them. In a country where only 10 percent of the population is in formal employment, it is understandable that many educated Zimbabweans will take any professional job they can find and hold on to it at all costs. Moreover, we must temper criticism of the salaries of senior NGOs staff by noting that their Western counterparts in international organisations receive salaries at the same or higher rates, without suffering from the incredible levels of stress and danger of assault, abduction, and torture than many in local organisations face.

Further, we must recognise that there are still many dedicated people working in Zimbabwean civil society, some who resist the harmful aspects of NGOisation, preferring to see themselves as activists rather than professionals. Social movements and trade unionists leading a new wave of resistance, are also supported by key NGO allies, who provide legal counsel, medical attention and other valuable aid in the face of an increasingly authoritarian government. What is important is that the NGO model does not overwhelm other, more organic forms of political mobilisation.

Farai Chipato is a PhD candidate in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. His research concerns the relationship between development donors and civil society organisations in Zimbabwe, with particular reference to democracy and human rights issues. Farai is a member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group.

Featured Photograph: Photograph taken in Zimbabwe on 12 December, 2012 (USAID, Zimbabwe).

Undermining Colonial Knowledge Structures

ROAPE

May 6, 2019

ROAPE’s Laura Mann introduces the Citing Africa Podcast Series that explores different aspects of knowledge production in and about African countries. Mann asks some profound questions about Western Africanists and their so-called expertise – how can we be sure that the research, conference presentations and journal articles produced by European and North American researchers are not based on flawed, flimsy and problematic research? The series is an important resource for young researchers from Africa.

By Laura Mann

My colleagues, Syerramia Willoughby, Tin El Kadi, Khutso Tskiene and I are very pleased to share our podcast series, ‘Citing Africa’ with readers of roape.net. Five episodes have already been released and the last four will be released in June of this year (one of our producers is taking a break to revise for exams). These episodes will be accompanied by a blogpost series and transcripts of each episode in English and French. You will be able to find all of our outputs here as they become available.

Our series explores different aspects of knowledge production in and about African countries. For example, episodes one and two discuss the falling acceptance rates of African based scholars within the leading ‘international’ academic journals and how austerity, structural adjustment and commercialisation have reshaped research on African economies. Throughout, we try to draw attention to the deeply problematic nature of a system that relies on the perspectives and research activities of non-African researchers. Speaking personally, I have come to the conclusion that much of what I read about African countries involves shallow, quick, and sometimes problematic approaches.

Yes, I have a PhD in African studies and yes, I convene and co-teach a course on ‘African Development’ (along with Professor Thandika Mkandawire). Yet all my research must be squeezed into short periods between teaching and precious little family time. At most, I have spent two years in the countries that I research. My language abilities are imperfect and sometimes I rely on translators to help me understand my data. I did not grow up in the countries that I study. There are big gaps in my knowledge, which I struggle to fill with existing studies or conversations with ‘experts’. Data is incomplete and lots of the books and data sources I need to read are unavailable in the UK. And when I submit my work to ‘international’ journals, it is entirely possible that the reviewers won’t catch inaccuracies, falsehoods or prejudices because much like me, they operate within the same restrictions. At best, we are just scratching the surface of empirical reality.

If I compare this state of affairs with that of my partner, an engineer who conducts research on offshore wind energy, I feel quite disheartened and a bit jealous. Offshore wind has gotten dramatically more efficient and affordable over time. There is real forward momentum and this progress is due to stringent quality control over R&D. The mechanisms to check and validate my partner’s research are well organised and tough going. He frets about them. If he produces weak or inconclusive evidence, his peers will hold him to account and he will not get published. He will not be invited to go to nice conferences in Hawaii, Accra or Paris. And most importantly, when it comes to the ‘impact’ he hopes to unleash upon the world, he is not going to be allowed to introduce dangerous, wobbly, or flammable wind turbines in the sea. His academic peers and their industry counterparts will not let him unleash chaos on the world! I fear the same cannot be said of African studies.

When I go to conferences on ‘African studies,’ I often watch presentations by scholars who have done even less fieldwork than me (or may never have even been to the country in question), who do not speak the language of the people they study, and who would probably feel very nervous about presenting their same conclusions to a public audience in that country. And yet all these non-African researchers (including me) are trusted as the real experts, as the people who the Foreign Office and BBC invite along to discuss unfolding events or phenomenon in African countries. Meanwhile, our governments make it extremely challenging for African based experts to come and speak at our events. Similarly, we describe European and North American journals as ‘international’ while African based journals are merely ‘local’. We seem to value the perspectives of outsiders over the perspectives of insiders. How certain can we be that dangerous, wobbly, or even flammable ideas are not being released into the world?

If we are really serious about creating strong, empirically sound and publicly engaged research on African countries, we need better data systems in African countries. We need to digitize archives and improve access to publications across borders. But perhaps most importantly, we need African based researchers and experts to participate (and really LEAD academic debates) so that all perspectives and understandings can be checked, validated, challenged and improved. We need to build our own strong structures in the sea! Without their leadership, I fear mainstream networks, journals and conferences are reinforcing a very distorted understanding of African development and dangerous, wobbly, flammable ideas are being allowed to circulate at will in the world.

Our podcast series is not going to change these colonial knowledge structures over night, but we hope our episodes will provoke some soul searching and, quite frankly, some dissatisfaction about the status quo. We also hope that our podcast series will provide concrete advice to young African scholars on the peer review process. It is completely unfair (and colonial) that written English serves as the medium through which knowledge is validated within the social sciences and yet many academics depend on journal publication to access employment, promotion and the authority to speak as experts. Episodes 6 and 7 of the podcasts therefore give practical advice about how authors can identify the right journals for their work, avoid immediate rejection and structure their ideas and arguments in ways that will make them clear to editors and peer reviewers. A successful academic does not just need good ideas or interesting data; she also needs to express her ideas in clear, simple and concise fashion. We hope our series will help young scholars to get through this difficult task and succeed.

If you feel that you have an interesting perspective on these issues and would like to contribute something to our blog series, please reach out to us.

Citing Africa has been funded by the LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fund, the LSE Department of International Development and the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) journal.

Laura Mann is a member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group and a sociologist whose research focuses on the political economy of markets and new information and communication technologies in Africa. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Talking About Revolution

ROAPE

May 2, 2019

To discuss the extraordinary events in Sudan and Algeria that have shaken these countries – and the continent – to the core in recent months, roape.net has asked some of our contributors to debate the significance and meaning of these revolutions. Both countries are confronted by a challenge: are the movements pacified in the interests of the local and global ruling classes or do the revolutionary movements successfully take-on and overturn these deep-rooted and brutal states. The contributions below look at the challenges faced by these revolutions and the possibilities of creating lasting and fundamental transformation.

Revolution and counter-revolution in Algeria

By Tin Hinane El Kadi

The counter-revolution in Algeria is well on its way. Under mass popular pressure, the army has decided to sacrifice former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to keep the regime alive. Bouteflika’s removal on 2 April represents a significant victory for the popular movement, yet it falls short from fulfilling the people’s central demand of radical regime change. In New York in 1917, while large numbers of Russian migrants in New York celebrated the fall of the Tsar, Leon Trotsky and a few radicals around him, remained skeptical. Genuine transformation in people’s lives was still far away. In Algeria today, the challenge of profound change is elusive.

The regime insists on the need for Algeria to remain in a situation of constitutional legality to avoid ‘state collapse.’ In its attempt to survive, the army, which has historically been a core centre of power, has favoured activating article 102 of the constitution which posits that in case of the president’s incapacity to rule, or in case he resigns, the head of the Senate becomes the head of state for a period of 90 days to organize elections. As such, the regime has announced that presidential elections will take place on 4 July this year. By remaining within the constitutional framework, the regime sacrifices a few figures, but largely maintains power.

The constitutional solutions suggested by the army, headed by General Gaid Saleh, does not seem to satisfy Algerians who have remained mobilized in their millions demanding a complete rupture with the old system. The emblematic slogan of ‘Yetnahaw ga3’ (all of them will be removed) resonates in the streets as strongly as ever. Algerians seem to have learned from their past, and the experiences of neighboring countries and are determined to continue the struggle until meaningful change is achieved. Change that would positively transform the lives of the people who made the revolutionary movement possible.

On the other hand, since Bouteflika stepped down the regime has shown an increased willingness to repress the mobilization. The peaceful demonstrations of 12 April were ruthlessly repressed by the police causing the tragic death of Ramzi Yettou, a 23-year-old protestor. Recent student protests were marked by police brutality and excessive use of tea-gas. Political activists and human rights lawyers have been arbitrarily arrested for several hours in an attempt to intimidate them. The message from the regime is clear: ‘We have removed Bouteflika, and promised the organization of elections scheduled soon, so now go home.’

While the people’s level of political consciousness and capacity to gather in spectacular numbers is reassuring, the lack of structures able to represent the movement pauses a severe threat for the success of the revolution. Parties, trade unions, local NGOs and associations have for the most part been repressed or co-opted during Bouteflika’s years in power, creating a vacuum in representation. In Tunisia the Tunisian General Labour Union played a crucial role in the transition and in Sudan, the Sudanese Professional Association is currently emerging as a leading force, structuring the movement. However, in Algeria, the movement has so far remained unrepresented. The absence of an organization with the capacity to define the movement’s demands and bargain on its behalf puts the revolutionary movement at high risk. Until some structure emerges, let us hope that this historical mobilization persists and achieves real popular sovereignty, social justice and emancipation.

Tin Hinane El Kadi is a member of Le Collectif des Jeunes Engagés (The Collective of Young Algerian Activists), an Algerian organisation advocating political change and youth involvement in public affairs. Her detailed analysis of Algeria’s revolution on roape.net is here.

Mass protests and strikes in Sudan (and across the continent)

By Lee Wengraf

The revolutionary movement in Sudan has re-ignited hopes and aspirations for the Arab Spring and struggles from below across the African continent. Suffering under three decades of repression and austerity, the imposition of fuel and bread price hikes in December was a bridge too far. Mass protests and strikes had been gathering strength since early 2018, and over the past five months exploded across Sudanese society – beginning outside the capital, then spreading to Khartoum – bringing down the hated President Omar al-Bashir on April 11, 2019.

With the Sudanese Professional Association and other unions and civil society organizations at the helm, mobilizations have been sustained and organized. The umbrella coalition have issued nine demands under the banner of the Declaration of Freedom and Change, including complete civilian rule, demands backed up with a powerful show of force on the streets. Centered on the Ministry of Defense, Reem Abbas describes the occupation begun in early April in the lead-up to Bashir’s overthrow: ‘In the next few days, the sit-in turned into a republic of its own. Demonstrators set up a tent dispensing food and drinks, as well as other tents to shelter people from the scorching sun during the day and act as makeshift rooms at night. Families would arrive with food, and so would trucks loaded with goods. The sit-in turned into a revolutionary carnival as people chanted, sang revolutionary songs, and held discussions…. By the third day of the sit-in, it was evident that a significant number of junior army officers were siding with the people’. The ongoing sit-in has held fast even as Bashir and his successor, Lt. General Awad Ibn Auf have fallen, and the area has emerged as a key revolutionary space not unlike Tahrir Square in Cairo or Taksim Square in Istanbul, with the resiliency of the mass sit-in drawing out millions on April 25.

Despite the determination of the resistance, their demands are running up against the intransigence of the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and the entrenched military infrastructure. Decades of military rule have conferred them massive social and economic power, including significant control over the government budget. Needless to say, the stakes for the military leadership and its state apparatus are high.

Likewise, the TMC has regional allies on its side. The Saudi and United Arab Emirates regimes have offered their support in the form of a $3 billion aid package, to include a $500 million deposit into the Sudanese central bank, a move rejected by protesters as shoring up the military regime. Meanwhile, the African Union (AU) has eased the pressure on the TMC for an immediate handover to a civilian government, granting an extension of three months. Headed by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, AU objectives reflect the urgency for stability on the part of the region’s ruling classes and fears of the spread of the uprsing, not least among them Sisi’s concerns of revolution on the southern border and the overthrow of longstanding Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to their west.

The precariousness of the Sudanese economy dependent on oil only reinforces the political will of the local and international ruling classes reliant on its extraction. The economic crisis underpinning the revolution is an expression, to an important extent, of the deep contradictions of the secession agreement of 2011 between Sudan and South Sudan.

Today’s uprising must be seen in that context and its ongoing reverberations, not least of which are a drastic revenue shortage resulting from the ongoing South Sudanese civil war and the shortfall of oil passing through Sudanese pipeline. Since the 2011 secession, Khartoum set about to repair relations with the United States and the Gulf States, meaning a wider network of states now have an interest in its political stability, including reliable oil production. Whether that ‘stability’ resolves itself in the interests of the local and global ruling classes or the revolutionary movement hangs in the balance, and necessarily rests on the ability of the revolution to successfully confront and uproot the entrenched military state.

The millions of ordinary Sudanese taking to the streets and staying off the job have wide support across the globe. On the African continent, the potential for far-reaching solidarity lies in the upheavals from Algeria to Zimbabwe – where a three-day general strike shut down the country in January – to Nigeria, home to strikes by educators and healthcare workers over the past year, much like Sudan. South Africa, over the past month, has likewise seen a renewed explosion of service delivery protests. At this moment, the TMC has pushed back against the sit-in, declaring that the roadblocks will be cleared. Protesters have rejected this call as the military attempts to up the ante. The vital importance of the Sudanese revolution – its overthrow of Bashir’s chokehold and economic immiseration – offers hope for those in struggle everywhere.

Lee Wengraf writes on Africa for the International Socialist Review, Counterpunch, Pambazuka News and AllAfrica.com. Her new Extracting Profit: Neoliberalism, Imperialism and the New Scramble for Africa was published last year. Lee is a regular contributor to roape.net.

The Inspiration of Young African Revolts

By Heike Becker

That iconic picture from Sudan – twenty-two year old architecture student Alaa Saleh, clad in bright white, standing atop a car and leading protests against al-Bashir’s thirty-year authoritarian rule – has come to symbolise the uprising that forced the Sudanese president’s resignation, and now embodying the hope inspired by the continuous protests and sit-ins of young activists who have been on the streets of Sudanese cities and towns since the protests began in December 2018, initially focused on the steep rises of food prices. Was this a classic ‘bread riot’, or was there more than that from the start?

With young Africans, and students and young professionals at the forefront this was bound to be more than just about the price of everyday living. This wasn’t the first time either that young Africans have taken to the streets in the 21st century. Everywhere they have come out with their anger and their hope – carrying with them their phones, their posts and tweets and cell phone videos, their blogs and music and creative energy. In Sudan and Algeria, like a few years ago in Burkina Faso and Senegal, young people-led revolts have challenged old men in power.

In the southern parts of the continent too a young generation has taken to the streets – from the much publicised ‘Everything-must-fall’ movements in South Africa (the title of Rehad Desai’s thought-provoking documentary about the 2015-16 student protests at Wits University in Johannesburg) to Zimbabwe’s new social movements, through to Namibia where activists of an inspiring radical movement address each other as ‘young friends’ rather than as ‘comrades’.

The specific demands may differ in different postcolonial circumstances, but everywhere young Africans are deeply angry at the postcolonial condition and austerity, at unreformed global racism and corrupt, authoritarian postcolonial elites; they share a great desire for democracy and social justice. In the 21st century young Africans with their smartphones and their music, arguably, have been at the forefront of alternative global movements from the south.

I teach in Cape Town at the University of the Western Cape, once known as the ‘intellectual home of the left’. In the 1980s the massive popular uprising of the anti-apartheid struggle, led by a generation of students and youth, surged with hopes and aspirations for a free South Africa. For the past ten weeks I have been teaching an energetic class of postgraduate students. We have been delving into the extraordinary connections of thought and activism between the Caribbean and the African continent. Thirteen of the fifteen in the class are young women of Alaa Saleh’s age; they hail from South Africa, from Zimbabwe, Namibia, Tanzania, and Gabon. We have had spirited discussions about global racism, social inequality and decolonisation. Students have raised strident questions about how the critical scholarship they are engaged in is connected to activism and the city’s townships, to Cape Town’s water crisis, the devastations wrought by Cyclone Idai in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, the ever-present spectre of violence that haunts life in Southern Africa, and the spaces black women negotiate on the volatile urban periphery.

The popular uprisings in Sudan and Algeria are arguably not about a trip back to revolutionary Russia in 1917, or even to ‘Global 1968’. Inspiring as they are, the involvement and political language of young activists point to another future, and contain an urgent sense of crisis. More than being just a revolt against the intertwined perils of authoritarianism, neoliberalism and global apartheid, they claim life and the future. My students, like the protesters in Sudan and Algeria, like the increasingly militant extinction rebellion protests around the globe, are part of a new generation that are leading global activism for their future, for democracy, social equality and the end of racism and global apartheid, for the future of our species and others, the future of the planet and for life worth living. For all of us.

Heike Becker teaches social and cultural anthropology at the University of the Western Cape. She writes about the interface of culture and politics, with special attention to the politics of memory, popular culture and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia)

Mastering its own contradictions: Sudan’s revolutionary praxis

By Magdi El Gizouli

The anonymous script writer of Sudan’s official television station is yet to identify a suitable epithet to describe Sudan’s former president Bashir. The neutral choice of ‘former’ president was often used in the first days after the 11 April coup orchestrated by Bashir’s generals, the very men who had constituted the so called ‘security committee’, now rebranded the ‘transitional military council’. When he read the coup declaration, Bashir’s defence minister, Lieutenant General Awad ibn Ouf, referred to the unseated dictator as the head of the former regime.

It took another week or so for the script writer to muster the vocabulary of change. Instead of former president, Bashir was referred to as the ‘ousted’ president and the ‘deposed’ head of state, while the protesters received the official designation of ‘revolutionaries’. The first post-Bashir televised propaganda song was a celebratory ballad of Sudanese machismo performed by a gona (urban Sudanese slang for an attractive mature female performer) accompanied by three female hijab-free dancers in bridal dress and a-preadolescent male child in a jellabiya, the traditional attire of Sudanese men.

The perplexity of the script writer is understandable. The protest movement that began in December 2018 coalesced into a broad coalition of the salaried urban classes and attracted into its orbit broad segments of the pauperised urban workforce burdened by the lift of bread and fuel subsidies. Thousands upon thousands of people assembled in front of the army headquarters in Khartoum on 6 April calling for the army leadership to step in and eliminate the regime of president Bashir and his ruling National Congress Party (NCP).

The surgical removal of Bashir and grafting of Ibn Ouf energised the protesters rather than satisfied them. The Sudanese Professional Association (SPA), so far, the spearhead of the protest movement and its trusted voice, called upon the masses to hold their ground until the SPA’s basic demand of the transfer of power to a transitional government of civilian composition was achieved. Within less than 48 hours Ibn Ouf appeared again on state television, this time to announce that he was stepping down as head of the transitional military council. Ibn Ouf named Abd al-Fattah al-Burhan as his successor, another army general with no known past record of association with the Islamic Movement.

Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (aka Himeidti), the leader of the infamous Rapid Support Forces (RSF) emerged as the deputy chairman of the transitional military council and the critical agent of ‘change’ at the top. In times of crisis memories can be notoriously short. Himeidti’s militia gained its reputation as a brutally efficient counter-insurgency force in Sudan’s peripheral war zones, foremost in Darfur, on commission of Sudan’s military leaders. Back in 2013, the same forces proved their loyalty by crushing a wave of anti-government protests in Khartoum claiming the lives of over a hundred civilians in the process. Beyond Khartoum though, Himeidti’s forces were soon entangled in global security machinations as a privatised army, on commission to the EU to guard its borders against African migrants by whatever means it wishes in the blind silence of the African Sahara and by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to carry out their war against Yemen. With Brussels, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as happy paying customers, Himeidti was also no longer in need of the bankrupt autocrat in Khartoum.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia and the UAE announced their unconditional support for the transitional military council with a pay cheque of a US$3 bn loan to equip Khartoum’s new-old rulers. The junta emerged in the alliance of counter-revolutionary forces in the region and was rewarded almost immediately with generous political support and funding but it could not wish away the explosion of popular politics at its doorstep.

The protesters who had creatively woven in elements of Sudan’s experience of popular uprising in 1964 and 1985 as well as the 2011 Egyptian revolution in their own praxis remained healthily suspicious of the junta’s moves. The massive protest in front of the army headquarters became a new city as it were, where mostly young women and men live out their identities as free citizens acting in solidarity. For much of Sudan’s population it became a site of pilgrimage and catharsis. Hierarchies were temporarily suspended, and an equality founded in the unity of purpose prevailed.

Egypt’s activist, Alaa Abd al-Fattah, published a few days ago a reluctant piece of advice to protesters in Sudan and Algeria. He asked difficult questions about the lasting power of protest, negotiations with the successors of the ousted president and the state bureaucracy, relations with established political forces and the trappings of the vocabulary of nationalism and patriotism. The fate of Sudan’s protest movement in its confrontation with the forces of reaction assembled to extinguish its flare is in part contingent on its ability to productively master its own contradictions and to imagine a new politics that factors in Alaa’s questions and deliver a cogent response from the actuality of praxis.

The most pressing of these questions I presume is the absent response to the challenge of the Bonapartist figure of Himeidti. Pilgrims to the qiada (Arabic for headquarters) cannot miss the propaganda banners raised up high praising the militia leader for siding with the people. For now, the SPA and its allies have chosen to actively ignore this glaring contradiction of an urbanite popular movement for ‘freedom, peace and justice’ safeguarded by a brutal privatised army that emerged out of the subsistence crisis of Sudan’s pastoral zones.

Magdi el Gizouli is an scholar and a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. He writes on Sudanese affairs here. Magdi’s major analysis of Sudan’s revolution on roape.net can be read here.

Featured Photograph: protest in central Algiers earlier this year (Tin Hinane El Kadi).

Black Earth Rising

ROAPE

April 30, 2019

Remi Adekoya reviews a powerful drama based on the consequences of Rwanda’s genocide. He celebrates a series that draws attention to European-owned mining consortiums still carting away the continent’s precious resources in collusion with corrupt local elites and warlords. Adekoya writes that the drama tells a story of a continent still seen by Western powers primarily as a source of wealth by any means necessary rather than a place where flesh-and-blood human beings deserving dignity and respect reside.

By Remi Adekoya

The BBC series Black Earth Rising is a must-see for anyone interested in the relationship between history, justice and power. Michaela Coel delivers a brilliant, if occasionally overacted, performance as the adopted Rwandan daughter of a British lawyer played by Harriet Walter. Kate Ashby, Michaela’s character, is a genocide survivor whose childhood experiences during the 1994 mass massacres in her country of birth have left her traumatized and depressive, yet still remarkably strong and resilient.

Beyond her sarcastic mask, she enjoys a tight bond with Eve Ashby, her adopted mum, who rescued her as a child during the genocide and has done everything to shield her from her painful past. However, any such illusions that an escape from the past is possible end when Eve Ashby decides to take a case prosecuting a former Rwandan (Tutsi) General, one of those who helped end the genocide, for war crimes. Kate is aghast and cannot comprehend why her mother would prosecute someone she considers one of the heroes who helped end the genocide of people like herself at the hands of Hutu militias.

As always though, the past is far more complicated than history books and subjective individual memories suggest, and after her mum is killed early on in the story, Kate embarks on a mission to discover the truth behind her death. It is a mission that takes her on a whirlwind journey of intrigue, deception, greed and murder while turning everything she has ever believed in her life upside down. “Everything you’ve ever been told is a lie” is a line she would hear often in her quest for the truth about the events surrounding her childhood past.

Through its various twists and turns, the story revolves around certain themes relevant to current debates, the first being on how to deal with a painful past. What is worth remembering? If a past is so painful it involved fellow citizens waging ethnic genocide on each other, is it worth talking about this today at the risk of re-opening still-raw wounds or is it better to avoid such discussions in the interest of national unity and focus solely on the future? Is there really anything tangible to be gained for anyone from reliving a past full of horror, fear and hatred? But then again, is it realistic to believe it is possible to bury the past forever? What if a suppressed past resurfaces one day with redoubled ferocity? And what about the victims of a terrible past, don’t their stories deserve to be told and heard? These are not banal questions to be answered with easy moralistic retorts, they are serious issues that those running a post-genocide state like Rwanda have to consider. Through its various characters, the series offers you some fascinatingly different perspectives on these issues.

The story also revolves around the theme of justice and primarily around the theme of who is to dispense justice for crimes on the mind-boggling scale of a genocide? In Black Earth Rising, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague serves as the main dispenser of such justice. But this raises questions being asked of the ICC in recent years, especially in Africa: why does the ICC seem to mostly prosecute Africans accused of crimes against humanity? Is this to dispense fair justice or simply another exercise in Western power cloaked in noble language? Can anyone imagine a Western leader being brought before the ICC? Can anyone imagine George Bush or Tony Blair being prosecuted for invading Iraq and provoking a conflict causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and years of chaos, all under what turned out to be false premises? What about the Western leaders who, with apparently noble intentions, ended up triggering the current chaos and insecurity in Libya by going after the Gaddafi regime? Or is international ‘justice’ simply something the globally-powerful dispense to the globally-not powerful when and where they see fit?

But then again, if country X does not seem to have the capacity or will to punish person Y who is clearly responsible for crimes against humanity, do we just let Y be and forget about their crimes and about their victims? Or is an institution like the ICC an imperfect, yet useful start to the idea of a universal justice? Also, how exactly do you measure what was ‘just’ and what wasn’t in a conflict with victims on both sides?

One thing the series did not do was explain in more detail the history of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda which did not start in 1994, but several decades earlier. The genocide was the culmination of those decades of conflict and mistrust and highlighting that would have enriched the picture for viewers. The show does, however, do quite a good job of highlighting the contradictions and tensions in the idea of a universal justice as currently being practised by the ICC.

Finally, Black Earth Rising highlights themes of post-colonial imperialism; European-owned mining consortiums still carting away the continent’s precious resources in collusion with corrupt local elites and warlords. It tells a picture of a continent still seen by Western powers primarily as a source of wealth by any means necessary rather than a place where flesh-and-blood human beings deserving dignity and respect reside. A place where the weakness of most states is exploited by foreign predators ready to do things they would never get away with in their own countries. A place where the ‘big game’ is played between Western powers.

However, the series also tells the story of an African government, in this case Rwanda’s, fighting to liberate itself economically and seize control of its own destiny. This even leads to some misguided decisions by one of its prominent officials, but rather than reveal the whole story here, I urge roape.net readers to watch this series. It is well-acted (John Goodman also puts in a great performance as a lawyer and family friend of Kate’s), the characters are believable, and the story is a universally human one, with its tragedies and its portrayal of the remarkable capacity for resilience we all possess when we have to. This is a series well worth-watching.

Remi Adekoya is the former political editor of the Warsaw Business Journal. He has provided socio-political commentary and analysis for BBC, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Stratfor, Geopolitical Intelligence Services and Radio France International among others. Remi has a PhD in politics from the University of Sheffield and is a member of ROAPE’s editorial working group. His twitter handle is @RemiAdekoya1

Connecting Social Movements in East and Southern Africa

ROAPE

April 25, 2019

Njuki Githethwa discusses a recent workshop in Nairobi of activists and researchers on social movements in East and Southern Africa. The workshop set itself the task of asking a number of questions. How do social movements build and sustain resistance? What should the relationship between scholars and activists look like? What role can universities play in building and sustaining connections among social movement scholars and activists? Githethwa argues that the analysis and understanding that came out of the workshop provided rich ammunition for scholars and activists to transform protests across the continent into struggles for radical and lasting transformation.

By Njuki Githethwa

What are the specific histories and trajectories of social movements in East and Southern Africa? Are NGOs social movements? How do social movements build and sustain resistance? What should the relationship between scholars and activists look like? What role can universities play to build and sustain connections among social movement scholars and activists? These questions were among those that foregrounded the reflections and conversations of a recent workshop aptly named: ‘Connecting Social Movements: A dialogue for activists and researchers in East and Southern Africa.’

The workshop was held at the University of Nairobi on the 4-5 April 2019. It was a collaborative effort by the Centre for Social Change (CSC), University of Johannesburg, the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), University of Nairobi and the African Leadership Centre (ALC) based in Nairobi. About 60 participants attended the workshop, drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya. By virtue of being the host country, majority of the participants came from Kenya.

History and trajectories of social movements in the region

There were presentations and conversations on the histories and diverse trajectories of social movements in national contexts. Histories of social movements in the region seemed similar, cast in varieties of contexts, neo-colonialism, neo-liberalism, exploitation of the working classes, betrayal of hopes, and involving uprisings, protests, resistance, even revolution. Trajectories of social movements differ. Social movements can be seen as mobilisations for popular uprisings, and as waves of protests, resistance, rebellions. Conversations were had on whether such social movements are waves or phases.

Social movements as waves suggest momentary mass mobilisations, involving a rise and fall. Images of waves contain a certain pessimism of people being immersed in the waves, not making them, neither being able to change them, of waves forming, growing and rising, then breaking, receding and diffusing. Social movement as phases on the other hand suggest strategic and tactical processes of mass mobilisation geared towards social transformation; an inter-generational struggle based on continuities and discontinuities. ‘Phases’ seem to contain spaces for the agency of the people to drive social change and to make their own history. There were also a variety of views on social movements as organisations, variously identified with labour unions, NGOs, pressure groups, coalitions, among other similar organisations and networks.

There was a presentation on the mapping of resistance across the continent by Kate Alexander based on ACLED interaction codes analysed by the Centre for Social Change (CSC), University of Johannesburg. ACLED is an acronym for Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), a disaggregated conflict collection, analysis and crisis mapping project. The entry point of this analysis and presentation was not necessarily on the data shared, but on whether these protests and mobilisations fit into the long history of political transformation in Africa. Key to this focus is whether there is a pattern to these protests and mobilisations. Are the protests ideological and based on class for example? Are the protests focused on dismantling the neo-colonial states or reforming capitalism and the neoliberal order? What are the current sparks and hot-spots of resistance that can be employed by social movements to liberate spaces and sites of struggle? What are the grievances and identities of the actors driving these protests and mobilisations across the continent? Such analysis and understanding provides intellectual ammunition for scholars and activists to transform protests across the continent into struggles for radical transformation.

NGOs and social movements

Are NGOs social movements? This provoked animated debates. The views presented depended on the conceptions of social movements. NGOs were critiqued for being donor dependent, with funds coming from the same agents of neo-liberalism and austerity that ignite social movements in the first place. NGOs suffer from being largely fronted by careerists and professionals, keen on scaling up career ladders, not on lifelong commitment to the struggles for a just and equitable society. They were also accused of creating a culture of dependency. The handouts, transport reimbursements, per diems, facilitation fees, media coverage, air travel are all part of what activists in Zimbabwe have described as the ‘commodification of resistance’.

Building and sustaining resistance

There were various presentations on how social movements have managed to build and sustain resistance in national contexts. For example, in Kenya, university students struggled against structural adjustment programmes outside mainstream civil society in the 1990s. In Zimbabwe, we heard about the repression by authoritarian regimes and the counterforce of resistance marshalled by civil society organisations, and the dialectical relationship between repression and resistance. In Tanzania, the struggles of wavuja jasho (toilers) against wavuna jasho (exploiters) led by Tanzania Socialist Forum (TASOFO), popularly known in Kiswahili as Jukwaa la Wajamaa Tanzania (JULAWATA) amidst the schizophrenic politics of the current regime.

Social movements employ various strategies and tactics to build and sustain resistance. Self-reliance was a key conceptthat emerged in discussions and was viewed in a variety of ways. Intellectual self-reliance of ideas as an investment in study for ideological nourishment and clarity was regarded in the debates at the conference as crucial to activism. Study, it was argued, helps to define and refine a theory of transformation. But participants were also careful to point out that a model of self-reliance must not simply justify a neo-liberal narrative of laissez faire economics. Social movements should defy the perverted logic of profit and seeing self-reliance as an end in and of itself, argued one participant. There was also a call for solidarities among different sectors of society – the middle classes, students and the working classes.

Role of research and researchers

There were insightful conversations on the role of research and researchers in social movements. How do scholars support and contribute to the popular struggles of social movements? Do they produce or synthesis theory to guide and contextualise struggles by social movements? Marx’s adage remains relevant, practice without theory is blind, theory without practice is sterile.

Scholars were urged to engage directly with social movements and locate their research in practical experiences and practices. The organic intellectual was constantly referred to, an extrapolation of Gramsci’s thoughts in his Prison Notebooks. ‘The intellectual who, through his analyses, his visions, becomes an indispensable auxiliary of social movements’, quoted Willy Mutunga in his presentation at the workshop.

Willy also cited Issa Shivji’s paper, The Metamorphosis of the Radical Intellectual, and argued there are public intellectuals who are organic intellectuals, but he agreed with Shivji that this link is hidden. ‘There are many public and organic intellectuals who are self-taught.’ This suggests that everyone in a social movement can be an intellectual as a social movement involves the process of learning and reflection. ‘The public university is not the only place where public and organic intellectuals are found’ Willy stated. He recalled the public intellectuals in the University of Nairobi (students and academics) during the 1970s and 1980s who in their writings, teaching, and activism did not hide their intellectual, ideological, and political positions.

Next steps – the road ahead

Breakout groups highlighted what was not discussed. We must not sweep under the rug questions on class and generational differences in social movements, whether or not these are categories and terms fashionable in university seminars. The was a call for interdisciplinary approaches in studying the phenomena and dynamics of social movements and of the central role of artists in social movements.

The groups also brought out some suggestions for further research on social movements. Tracing trends on the rise and decline of social movements and on locating new sites and spaces of people’s struggles for social justice. Frequent workshops and events for continuous engagements of scholars and activists, to create spaces for learning and relearning, where current research and practices on social movements are presented and critiqued, was regarded as indispensable. Bringing together seasoned activists and scholars with upcoming researchers and activists will pump fresh blood into the veins of social movements.

There was emphasis on the need for social movements to collaborate and learn from each other. There needs to be a cultivation of organic links between academic spaces and activists zones of resistance and struggle. Social movements must also engage lecturers and students and for libraries to be located in sites of struggles and in poor communities. Some argued that scholars should become workers and volunteers in the spaces of struggles and universities and research units could become places for reflection and catharsis for social movement activists. These were some of the reflections and suggestions made by the breakout groups.

The road ahead should include the establishment of a research network among scholars and activists in the region. This network will lay the foundation of an ongoing research that will be engaged in the co-production of emancipatory knowledge for and with social movements. This kind of research will be central in drawing attention to the marginalisation of social movements in Africa from within the global scholarship on social movements.

We hope that the proceedings of the workshop will also be published, as well as a book and journal articles of the presentations in the workshop. The second phase of the workshop is also a possibility, possibly somewhere else on the continent. The workshop concluded with a comrades’ dinner at the University of Nairobi.

Njuki Githethwa is a Kenyan writer and activist. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Social Change, University of Johannesburg.

Featured Photograph: a session at the workshop, ‘Connecting Social Movements: A dialogue for activists and researchers in East and Southern Africa’ (Photograph, Carin Runciman).

Connections in Dar es Salaam

ROAPE

April 23, 2019

ROAPE, with the Nyerere Resource Centre, held the second Connections Workshop in Dar es Salaam in April, 2018. The workshop focused on popular protests, the legacy of the Russian revolution and the Arusha declaration. The Special Issue from the workshop in Dar es Salaam, which has been published in ROAPE (Vol. 45, Issue. 158) is available for our readers to access for free. In videos from the workshop (also now available) and in the debates and discussions which took place, we attempted to chart a new direction for radical political economy in Africa.

ROAPE’s second workshop was held at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. The workshop which focused on popular protests, the legacy of the Russian revolution and the Arusha declaration, was organised with our partners at the Nyerere Resource Centre. We direct our readers to the second Debate Special Issue on the workshop in Dar es Salaam, which has been published in ROAPE (Vol. 45, Issue. 158) and is available for free here. From the editorial by Alfred Zack-Williams – which is free to access here – he writes about the significance of the Connections Workshops:

‘…This issue of ROAPE features the second of a series of special reports on a new ROAPE initiative to return the journal more effectively to its roots in Africa and give more space for African contributors from the Left. Amongst these we include researchers, analysts and activists, those aiming both to make sense of developing realities and to change their world. A series of three workshops, which we named ‘Connections’, has been held in Africa. The report on the first workshop in Accra appeared in ROAPE 156 (Bush, Graham and Zeilig 2018). This issue features an account of the second workshop in Dar es Salaam, including short pieces from an exciting and unusual set of speakers, and lively and thoughtful excerpts from blog commentaries submitted afterwards, reflecting on the impact of the workshop. A third workshop has been held in Johannesburg, a report of which will appear in the June 2019 issue of ROAPE. The Dar es Salaam workshop was notable for the high level of interaction between activists and scholars (and many who straddled both situations). Conversations and debates focused particularly on the issue of how young people view their conditions of life, on socialist models of revolutionary (and not so revolutionary) change, on struggles about organising politically and finding an adequate language to express their hunger for change. We anticipate that this initiative will not end with the Connections workshops. We have learnt much about the way a journal like ROAPE is viewed in Africa and the need to transform its positioning…’

In the videos below from the workshop we interview Marjorie Mbilinyi, who speaks about feminism, socialist transformation and the real achievements of Nyerere’s Tanzania in the 1960s and 1970s and we also post two videos from workshop sessions. The first on the ‘Legacy of the Russian Revolution and the Arusha Declaration’ with Matt Swagler, Noosim Naimasiah, Issa Shivji and Arndt Hopfmann. In the second video from the workshop, Issa Shivji chairs the final session of the two day workshop, and Yao Graham speaks about the two day workshop. We apologise to our readers for the poor quality of some of these videos.

A Straightforward Case of Fake Statistics

ROAPE

April 18, 2019

In the latest exposé of Rwanda’s poverty statistics, our experts reveal the methodical faking of statistical evidence. Until now the working assumption had been that this was a methodological disagreement with the figures but in the end it turns out to be a simple, straightforward (and easy to prove) case of fake statistics. The only reason it has taken so long to prove the manipulation is that our experts had not imagined the possibility that Rwandan authorities might have misreported their own results. This blogpost includes the excel files which will allow everyone, including non-experts, to check the findings. This also means that it will be impossible for the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda and the World Bank to keep denying the evidence. Heads will have to roll.

This blogpost aims to explore the question of inflation in Rwanda, which has emerged as the last remaining issue required to resolve the disagreement about Rwanda’s poverty statistics. Using Consumer Price Index (CPI) price data, the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) (2016) and the World Bank (2018) claim that poverty decreased by 6 percentage points from 45% between 2010/11 and 2013/14, and then by a further 1 percentage point between 2013/14 and 2017/18 (NISR 2018). However, blogs posted on roape.net (see the series, Poverty and Development in Rwanda on the website) have shown that the price data contained in the Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey or Enquête Intégrale sur les Conditions de Vie des ménages (EICV) survey itself, as well as in the separate ESOKO dataset, indicate a much higher inflation rate over this period, resulting in a sharp increase in poverty over the same period.

This will hopefully be the last contribution from our side into this debate, as we hope that other researchers will now take over the task of checking and certifying these results. We are making all our syntax files from EICV1 to EICV5 publicly available here (EICV1, EICV2, EICV3, EICV4, EICV5) and encourage other researchers to use these and to correct any mistakes that we might have made in the estimation of poverty. There is still room for improvement in these estimates, especially for the earlier EICV surveys, where we had difficulties replicating official results due to issues with non-standardized measurement units.

In the first section, we will compare the inflation rates generated by three different price data sources, namely (1) EICV, (2) ESOKO, and (3) CPI, and estimate the poverty rates corresponding to each inflation rate. In the second section, we add non-food inflation to the assessment, in an attempt to get closer to the results obtained by NISR. Sections 3 and 4 examine the actual inflation rates used by NISR and the World Bank in their assessments, in order to ascertain the internal consistency of their results with respect to their own stated assumptions.

Food Inflation

This section looks at the inflation rates obtained using three different price data sources, namely (1) EICV, (2) ESOKO, and (3) CPI. Historically, NISR has always used the Rwandan Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources’ (MINAGRI) ESOKO price dataset to update the poverty line, which it regarded a more detailed and accurate reflection of the prices facing the poor, than the price data contained in the CPI data sets. In 2016, however, following the controversy that had surrounded the first EICV4 poverty profile (NISR 2015, Reyntjens 2015), NISR switched to using CPI data for updating the poverty line (NISR 2016). This switch was later endorsed by the World Bank as being both appropriate and accurate (World Bank 2018).

The different inflation rates are estimated as follows:

EICV: The inflation rate is obtained by comparing the relative price of the food basket in each survey. From 2001 to 2011, we used the 2001 food basket (line l.1 in Table 5 below), and from 2011 to 2017, we used the new food basket estimated in 2014 (l.2).
ESOKO: ESOKO price data are only publicly available on the MINAGRI website from 2009 onwards. Consequently, for the period 2001-2005 and from 2005 to 2011, we used the unweighted average value of the price index (January values) reported for in NISR (2012, p.12). From 2011 to 2014, we estimated the inflation in the same way as the EICV above (i.e. comparing the price of the 2014 food basket in both years) (l.3). For the period 2014 to 2017, we did the same thing. However, ESOKO prices are missing from the MINAGRI website for the period Feb 2015 to April 2017. To obtain a comparable baseline, we therefore had to exclude prices from October 2013 to April 2014 when estimating the price of the food basket in EICV4. The fact that food price data is missing for this crucial period, which was the peak of the El Nino drought, is itself a matter for concern, which should require explanation from MINAGRI/ NISR.
CPI: The CPI food inflation is obtained from the following source: FAOSTAT =. Consumer Prices, Food Indices (2010 = 100). January prices were used for each survey year: 2001, 2006, 2011, 2014, and 2017. In this dataset, the food price index is only available from January 2004. Consequently, from January 2001 to January 2004, we used the General Price Index (i.e. food + non-food).

The results are reported in Table 1 below. They show that CPI food inflation has consistently been lower than ESOKO and EICV inflation since 2001. As explained by NISR (2012), this is due to the fact that CPI prices are heavily biased towards items consumed by wealthier urban households.

ESOKO and EICV prices, on the other hand, are similar all the way up to 2017. This suggests that EICV price data are adequate for updating the poverty line, as had been done in the ROAPE (2017) and ROAPE (2019) blogposts. The EICV inflation rate is only slightly higher than ESOKO for the period 2014-2017, when ESOKO price data are incomplete, as explained above.

Table 1: Estimated food price index (2001-2017) using EICV, ESOKO, CPI food price data (base: 100 in 2001)

Source: EICV, ESOKO, FAOSTAT

Using these three inflation rates, we calculate changes in poverty from 2001 up to 2017, starting from the official poverty line calculated by NISR in 2001. This poverty line is updated for inflation from survey to survey using the three different inflation rates, mentioned above. Since ESOKO and EICV only cover food prices, we only use the food poverty line, which was Rwf. 44,160 per adult/ year in 2001, compared to 64,000 for the total poverty line. For this reason, the absolute poverty levels are lower than those reported in our previous blogpost (ROAPE 2019), which used the total poverty line.

Despite this difference, the trends are very similar to those reported in earlier blogposts, with a 15 percentage points increase in extreme poverty between 2011 and 2017, when using the EICV and ESOKO inflation rates (see Figure 1 and Table 3).[1]

Figure 1: Extreme poverty rates estimated by updating the 2001 food poverty line using EICV/ ESOKO/ CPI inflation from 2001 to 2017.

Non-food Inflation

The results presented above, as well as those revealed in our earlier blogpost on roape.net did not include non-food inflation, since we did not have access to a reliable price data source for non-food items. The final poverty estimates should take into account both food and non-food inflation.

Since we do not have access to non-food price data, we will estimate non-food inflation indirectly by looking at the changing share of non-food consumption in total household consumption. The food poverty line is estimated in the same way as above, and then the non-food component is added to the food poverty line, based on the prevailing share of non-food consumption for 3^rd quintile households in each survey year.

If non-food inflation is lower than food inflation, the non-food share is likely to decrease, thus leading to a lower total poverty line (and thus lower poverty rate) compared to if only food-inflation had been considered. It should, however, be noted that the non-food share could decrease even if non-food inflation is as high as food inflation, by virtue of Engels law, which says that impoverished households (for instance, as a result of high food and non-food inflation) will have a smaller share of non-food consumption. The results presented here should therefore be considered as lower bound conservative estimates of changes in poverty.

The results presented in Figure 2 below yield a slightly lower final poverty rate than had been reported in our ROAPE 2019 estimate (61% vs. 64%), reflecting the fact that the non-food share of consumption decreased over this period, either as a result of lower non-food inflation and/or as a result of increased poverty/Engel’s law. However, the main conclusions of that blogpost are maintained when using the ESOKO/EICV inflation rates, namely (a) there has been a two-digit (12 percentage points) increase in poverty since 2011, and (b) total poverty is now higher than it was when NISR started to measure poverty back in 2001.

As before, the CPI inflation rate is lower and thus yields lower poverty levels in each survey. However, even with this inflation rate, we find a 10-percentage point increase in poverty between 2011 and 2017 (6). Furthermore, when CPI prices are used consistently to estimate both auto-consumption and the poverty line, the difference between the CPI poverty estimates and the ESOKO/ EICV estimates shrinks considerably (see Table 3 (10), CPI prices).

For comparison, we have also included a fourth inflation rate, here, namely the official total national CPI inflation (7). This inflation rate is not designed to reflect consumption patterns of poor people and should therefore not be used to update the poverty line, as it would have a much higher share of non-food items and be heavily biased towards items consumed by rich urban households.

The surprising finding is that even with this extremely low inflation rate, we still find a significant increase in poverty between 2011 and 2014 (+3 percentage points), and a net increase between 2011 and 2017 (+0.2 percentage points). This raises the question of how NISR (2016) and the World Bank (2018) were able to generate their much-touted decrease in poverty between EICV3 and EICV4, as we are not aware of any lower inflation rate than this one in Rwanda for this period. This question will be explored further below.

Figure 2: Poverty rates estimated by updating the 2001 food poverty line using EICV/ ESOKO/ CPI inflation from 2001 to 2017, and adding non-food component based on prevailing non-food share of consumption in each survey.

Examining NISR’s estimates

In this final section, we will use the consumption aggregates computed by NISR itself, rather than the ones that we have constructed ourselves. This is to control for the possibility that we might have made mistakes or introduced biases in the computation of the consumption aggregates that could affect the results.

As can be seen in Figure 4, the poverty rates obtained with NISR’s own consumption aggregates are almost identical for all inflation rates, to the ones reported above. In particular, they confirm that (a) there has been a double digit increase in poverty since 2011, using all price data sources (11, 12, 13), and (b) that poverty levels have returned to similar or higher levels than those observed when the NISR started to measure poverty in 2001, using EICV/ ESOKO inflation (11, 12).

The most striking finding, however, is that even when we use NISR’s own consumption aggregates, as well as NISR’s own price index, NISR’s own poverty line and even the very low untailored total national CPI inflation rate, we still get a significant increase in poverty between 2011 and 2014 (14). This is very surprising, since we have not been able to identify any assumptions of our own that could influence these results. The only transformation we have made to NISR’s own data is that we have centered the price index on its mean value in each survey, so as to remove the inter-survey inflation that NSIR had built into its price deflators.

To control for the possibility that it might be this price-index adjustment that could be driving the results, we have included two additional estimates: the first one uses no price index at all (15). The second uses the NISR price index, but instead of centering it on the yearly average value of the price index, we have centered it on the average January value of the price index (16). The rationale for centering the price index on January prices would be that NISR’s poverty lines and year-on-year inflation rates are expressed in January prices. Both alternative methods yield a higher 2011-2014 poverty increase than the original calculation, which centered the price index on yearly mean prices. This suggests that it is not our price index adjustments that are causing the increase in poverty between 2011 and 2014.

Figure 4: Poverty rates using NISR’s consumption aggregates, price index and poverty line.

To understand what might be causing this surprising result, we inspect the deflator used by NISR in its second EICV4 poverty profile (NISR, 2016). In that report, NISR re-estimated the 2011-2014 poverty trend backwards from a constant 2014 poverty line of Rwf 159,375 per adult/year. To achieve a comparable poverty rate, it had to deflate the 2011 consumption aggregates using a deflator reflecting the 2011-2014 inflation.

The mean value of this deflator was 1.00 in 2014, reflecting the fact that no deflation was required in 2014, since the poverty line was expressed in 2014 prices. In 2010/11, on the other hand, the mean value of the deflator was 0.96 (i.e. 4% lower than the 2014 deflator).[2] This implies an inflation rate of around 4.2% between 2011 and 2014. The problem is that this inflation rate does not match the inflation rate that NISR (2016, p.43) claims to have used to deflate 2011 consumption: 13.8%.[3] Had NISR deflated consumption by 13.8%, as it claimed to have done, the mean value of its EICV3 deflator should have been around 0.88, not 0.96. With a deflator of 0.88, NISR’s own consumption aggregates, its own price index, and its own poverty line of Rwf 159,375p.a./y would have yielded a 1.4 percent decrease in poverty between 2011 and 2014, not 6 percentage points as claimed by NISR.

A 13.8% total inflation rate would itself have been problematic, since NISR does not provide any price data source for this inflation rate. The official national CPI food inflation rate from January 2011 to January 2014 was 33.8% (see FAOSTAT), whereas NISR (2016, p.43) claims (without providing a source) that food prices only rose by 16.7% over this period.

The official total CPI inflation from January 2011 to January 2014 was 23%,⁷ not 13.8%. This would have implied a 4 percentage points increase in poverty between 2011 and 2014. As shown in previous sections, however, the CPI inflation rate was far too low, due to its bias towards rich urban households. The EICV and ESOKO inflation rates for this period were over 30%. After including non-food inflation, this would have meant between 6.7 and 9.3 percentage points increase in poverty,[4] using NISR’s own consumption aggregates, price indices and poverty lines (see Table 2).[5]

In summary, our findings indicate that the poverty trend reported in NISR’s second EICV4 poverty profile (NISR 2016), which was later endorsed by the World Bank as being methodologically and empirically sound (World Bank 2018), does not match its own stated inflation rate, which is itself well below the CPI inflation rate for the period, which in turn, was below the more reliable ESOKO and EICV inflation rates.

Table 2: Inspecting the deflator used by NISR between EICV3 and EICV4

	EICV3 mean deflator value	EICV4 mean deflator value	Inflation rate (2011-2014)	Poverty change
Actual deflator used by NISR*	0.96	1.00	+4.2%***	-6.9 perc. pts (46.0 to 39.1)
If NISR’s claimed inflation rate had been used	0.88**	1.00	+13.8%	-1.4 perc. pts (40.5 to 39.1)
If total CPI infl. rate Jan 2011-Jan 2014 had been used[6]	0.81**	1.00	+23%	+4.0 perc. pts (35.1 to 39.1)
If EICV infl. rate had been used	0.76**	1.00	+32.0% (food only)	+6.7 perc. pts (32.4 to 39.1)† (incl. non-food)
If ESOKO infl. rate had been used	0.73**	1.00	+36.6% (food only)	+9.3perc.pts (29.8 to 39.1)† (incl. non-food)

*obtained by dividing nominal consumption (cons1_ae) by deflated consumption (sol)

**estimate obtained by subtracting the 2011-2014 inflation rate from the average value of the price index

***Imputed from NISR price indices: Inflation= (mean 2014 deflator)/(mean 2011 deflator).

† Consumption aggregate is deflated based on food inflation only, and then non-food inflation is incorporated into the poverty line by adding the survey-specific share of non-food consumption to the original food-poverty line.

The World Bank’s Role

The question is how the World Bank (2018) could have endorsed such obviously flawed and misleading results? The World Bank was clearly aware of what inflation rate NISR used, since it noted in footnote 10, p.13 of its own paper that the NISR (2016) deflator implies an inflation rate of 4.71% for the period 2011-14.[7] It also knew that this inflation rate did not match the official total CPI inflation rate for this period, since it compared the two inflation rates in equations (6) and (6’). It must also have known that this inflation rate did not match the 13.8% inflation rate that NISR (2016, p.43) claimed to have used to deflate consumption between the two surveys.

Yet, the World Bank chose to ignore this information and to validate NISR’s results ‘as if’ they had used the official total CPI inflation. To do this, the World Bank proceeded in two steps: In the first step (section III.2.2.), it established the general validity of NISR’s chosen inflation rate by showing that if NISR had updated its original poverty line using the official total CPI inflation from 2001 to 2014, in much the same way that we have done in this paper, it would have ended up with a 2014 poverty line that was almost identical to the one calculated by NISR in 2014.[8]

In the second step (section III.2.3.), the World Bank then established the general validity of the method used by NISR (2016) to compare the 2011 and 2014 poverty rates. Since the general ‘validity’ of NISR’s inflation rate had already been ‘established’ in step 1, the World Bank seems to have decided that it could take as given whatever inflation rate that NISR used for its 2011-14 comparison, and concluded based on the generally valid method and generally valid inflation that ‘the official poverty trend, where headcount poverty declined from 46 percent to 39 percent between EICV3 and EICV4, is credible’ (World Bank 2018, p.14).

This unusual two-step validation process allowed the World Bank to avoid having to validate the specific inflation rate that NISR used for the period 2011-2014 (4.71%), which we (and they) know is nowhere near the official total CPI inflation for this period (23%). This process also meant that the World Bank was able to avoid having to look specifically at the 2011 poverty rate, which would have been around 36%, not 46% in EICV3 (see Figure 4 above and Table 4 below), using official total CPI inflation together with NISR’s own consumption aggregates, price index and poverty line. However, the World Bank could not have reached its conclusions without first calculating these intermediary steps and must therefore have been fully aware of the fact that poverty did increase even according its own preferred (but invalid) assumptions. Without fear of exaggeration, this is a shocking conclusion.

Conclusion

The results presented in this paper show that EICV and ESOKO inflation rates are almost identical at all points from 2001 to 2017, thus confirming that EICV was an adequate price data source for updating the poverty line as had been done in our previous blogposts (see all of the posts from 2017). Furthermore, the analysis shows that CPI food inflation rate is significantly lower at all points from 2001 to 2017 than ESOKO/EICV inflation, thus confirming NISR’s (2012) own assessment that CPI prices are inadequate for updating the poverty line. Finally, the blogpost shows that the discovery regarding a sharp increase in poverty since 2011 stands regardless of which method and which inflation rate (EICV, ESOKO, or CPI) is used to update the poverty line. These findings should hopefully close the Rwandan poverty debate once and for all, since they resolve the last remaining point of contention in this discussion, namely the inflation question.

The most surprising finding of this paper, however, is one that we had not checked for nor even imagined possible until now, namely that even when we use NISR’s own price index, NISR’s own consumption aggregates, NISR’s own poverty line, and even the lowest available inflation rate (i.e. the total national CPI inflation, which is not designed to measure poverty), we still find a sharp increase in poverty between 2011 and 2014, and a net increase in poverty between 2011 and 2017. This can easily be checked even by non-experts, by simply downloading the EICV3/4 datasets from NISR’s website, and using the variables already constructed by NISR.[9]

This finding provides the first direct evidence of statistical manipulation as it means that NISR reported results that corresponded to a 4.2-4.7% inflation rate between 2011 and 2014, instead of the 13.8% inflation that it claims to have used.

Most shocking of all, however, is the fact that our review of the facts clearly shows that the World Bank was aware of this discrepancy, but chose to ignore it and to work around it to ‘prove’ the validity of NISR’s results ‘as if’ NISR had used the official total CPI inflation. While, for reasons explained above, the World Bank’s paper unequivocally failed to ‘prove’ the validity of NISR’s results, our review shows that it does succeed in proving the World Bank’s complicity in manipulating and misreporting official statistics in Rwanda. We hope that those responsible for this scandal will be held accountable, as all the incriminating evidence now is publicly available and verifiable.

Featured Photograph: Jim Yong Kim, was the 12th President of the World Bank from 2012-2019. This photograph shows him with Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame on 27 March 2012. Kagame said on the appointment of Jim Yong Kim that year, ‘He’s … a leader who knows what it takes to address poverty.’

Notes

National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda. 2015. Rwanda Poverty Profile Report 2013/14

National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda. 2012. The evolution of poverty in Rwanda from 2000 to 2011: Results from the Household Surveys (EICV).

National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda. 2016. Poverty Trend Analysis Report 2010/11-2013/14

National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda. 2018. Rwanda Poverty Profile Report 2016/17

World Bank (2018), ‘Revisiting the Poverty Trend in Rwanda 2010/11 to 2013/14’, Freeha Fatima and Nobuo Yoshida, Policy Research Working Paper 8585.

References

[1] Some minor changes have been made to the EICV4 syntax file to improve inter-survey comparability (e.g. imputations of missing prices, etc.). These affect the 2014/17 trend, but not the final 2017 poverty rate, nor the overall 2011-2017 increase in poverty.

[2] This result is, rounded to the second decimal, identical to the one reported by the World Bank (2018): 0.955 in footnote 10, p.13.

[3] According to NSIR (2016, p.42), the inflation rate used to deflate 2011 consumption to 2014 levels was 16.7 for food (weighted at .659) and 9% for non-food (weighted at .341).

[4] Non-food inflation is estimated indirectly, as in the previous sections, by looking at the changing share of non-food consumption for 3^rd quintile households: Food poverty line in 2014 is given as 159,375x.6523. In 2011, the food share of the 3^rd quintile was .6388. The total poverty line for 2011 is thus calculated as (159,375x.6523)/.6388=162,845.

[5] These trend estimates are not exactly identical to those reported in Figure 5 above, as the method is slightly different: Firstly, consumption aggregates are deflated backwards to be compared to the 2014 poverty line, rather than forwards from the 2001 poverty line. Secondly we are not centering the price index in each survey, but using NISR’s own untransformed price index, which we are simply reducing by the required amount to match the stated inter-survey inflation rate.

[6] Source: FAOSTAT. Consumer Prices, General Indices (2010 = 100): Jan. 2011 =97.1; Jan. 2014 = 119.55.

[7] The 0.5 percentage points difference between the World Bank estimate and our own is due to rounding and to the fact that the World Bank used a population weighted average, whereas we used a simple unweighted average. The choice of assumption does not affect the conclusions in this case.

[8] Of course, this first step is beside the point, since NISR (2012) had already clearly established that the official total CPI is methodologically invalid for updating the poverty line, since it gives too much weight to non-food items and items consumed by rich urban households.

[9] For non-experts, the EICV3 & 4 files are available in excel format here and here.

Annex

Table 3: Poverty rates for different poverty lines and different price data sources (using our own consumption aggregates)

Table 4: Poverty rates for different poverty lines and different assumptions (using NISR’s consumption aggregates)

Table 5: Poverty lines (Rwf per adult/year) for different price data sources and inflation rates

Table 6: Food shares for different price data sources

Table 7: Average Kcal consumption per adult equivalent per day, using different price data sources

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