A Fighter for Justice – Caroline Mwatha Ochieng

February 21, 2019

Caroline Mwatha Ochieng was a tireless campaigner against police brutality and illegal arrests in Kenya, and was involved in documenting these cases. Through the documentation of these systematic injustices, Caroline was exposed to police harassment and threats but she never gave up and continued to fight for social justice. Earlier this month she was murdered. Campaigner and Kenyan social justice activist Gacheke Gachihi celebrates her life.

By Gacheke Gachihi

The disappearance and murder of Caroline Mwatha Ochieng, a foundering member of Dandora Social Justice Centre and member of the Social Justice Centre Working Group (the collective voice of social justice centres in the informal settlements in Nairobi), sends a terrifying message to human rights defenders and social justice activist who are fighting against systematic extra-judicial killings and police brutality in Kenya. Caroline Mwatha Ochieng life was spent in urban struggles fighting for social justice.

I recall a recent event that illustrates Caroline’s tireless commitment. On 13 Dec 2018, at 9pm, I received a distress call from an activist who had been illegally arrested and detained at the Kwa Mbao Administrative Police (AP) camp an informal settlement where the Dandora community Social Justice Centre was monitoring human rights violations.

Carol Mwatha was our team leader in regards to the notorious Kwa Mbao AP camp which is under the jurisdiction of the Dandora Social Justice Centre, she was responsible for monitoring and documenting cases of human rights violations and extra-judicial killings by security agencies.

Under the leadership of Carol Mwatha we spoke to the officer in charge of the AP camp, who was supervising those who had been arrested in the swoop that evening, we demanded the unconditional release of our comrades. They were being detained illegally for refusing to bribe a police officer, a culture that exposes many youth in this areas to extra-judicial killing. As a result of Carol Mwatha’s intervention our comrades were released unconditionally.

Systematic and illegal detection and extortion is part of the culture of impunity in police stations across Nairobi’s poor communities. After the release of our comrades I walked with Carol from the Kwa Mbao AP camp and we reflected on the challenges that human rights defenders face, having to confront police harassment and intimidation. I listened to how devastated Carol felt at police brutality and I could see in her a determined activist and fighter.

We face enormous challenges as grassroots human rights groups and activists documenting cases of the systematic violations in the informal-settlements where we are attempting to build community social justice centres and rethink the struggle for democracy and social justice from below.

The struggle against social injustice and deplorable living conditions exposed Carol Mwatha to dangers that eventually led to her disappearance on 6 February and her subsequent murder. Caroline’s body was dumped in the City Mortuary under a different name on Tuesday 12 February and the police reported a story of a blotched abortion to cover up her murder.

Caroline Mwatha Ochieng was a tireless campaigner against police brutality and illegal arrests, and she was involved in documenting these cases and referring them to the independent Police Oversight Authority, and other organisations that have been mandated to seek accountability and redress against human rights violations in Kenya. Through the documentation of these cases Carol was exposed to serious police harassment and threats but she never gave up and continued to fight for social justice.

Carol’s family, friends and comrades will continue to remember and celebrate a selfless comrade who sacrificed her life in defence of social justice, and paid a heavy price. Caroline Mwatha lives on in our struggles.

Long Live the Spirit of Carol Mwatha, Long Live

We will never forget you comrade and your memory will live forever in our hearts.

Aluta Continua!

Gacheke Gachihi is Coordinator of Mathare Social Justice Centre and member of the Social Justice Centre Working Group.

No Real Choice at the Ballot Box

ROAPE

February 19, 2019

Postponed hours before the poll was due to open, Nigeria will now hold its election on 23 February, voting to elect the President, Vice President and the National Assembly. These elections will be the sixth since the end of military rule in 1999. Fabiawari Batubo argue whichever major party wins the prospects for the popular masses are not positive.

By Fabiawari Batubo

Muhammadu Buhari, the current president of Nigeria was elected in 2015. It was the first time in the country an opposition party had taken power through democratic elections since independence in 1960. Buhari is now standing for re-election on 23 February.

In his first campaign, Buhari promised a fight against corruption that would fund increased spending on education, health and social protection. These reforms were constrained by a fall in the price of oil exports, but also by the practicalities of politics – a real fight against corruption would have meant imprisoning leading members of his own party. Buhari leads the All Progressives Congress (APC). Another major promise was to stop insecurity in the country, especially with Boko Haram in the north east of the country. The other major party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which won most of the elections since 1999, has gained some ground in the context of the failure of the APC.

These promises are now in tatters, but there are no clear realistic alternatives on the ballot paper – except for the other major political party who (mis)ruled for 16 years after the military era. No leading party is suggesting a proper fight against the twin scourges of inequality and corruption, despite the fact that there are minor parties offering some palliatives. At best largely nationalist solutions are provided with promises of development and industrialisation, which would be hugely dependent on the world market and especially the price of oil.

The signs are not good. The fight against corruption clearly became a partisan affair as the Chair of the ruling party – Adams Oshomole, a former trade union leader – said during an election rally in January that all the sins of the past would be forgiven for anyone that joins his party. Then the president unconstitutionally sacked the Chief Judge in the weeks before election day. The new acting Chief Judge swore in 250 members of the election tribunals the next day. These people are to hear the inevitable appeals over the election results by defeated candidates.

The government’s social protection plans were also perceived as being mired in corruption. Money for petty market traders has been offered in the weeks before the election, an attempt widely accepted as an attempt to buy votes. This followed claims of huge leakages in the school feeding program. This program was claimed to be feeding around 12 million pupils a day, approximately the same number of children said to be out of school. An important reform, but not enough in the context of education spending being lower than the African average. Education spending would have to triple as a percentage of the total budget to reach the international norm of 20 percent. A figure that Buhari had promised in his inaugural speech in 2015. But in the first year of his administration the amount devoted to education actually fell in the federal budget.

The Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), the main labour federation, has had an impressive recent record of general strikes with over ten being held since the end of the military era in 1999. The most successful was in June 2007, when after only a four-day strike most of the demands were won. A 15 percent fuel price increase was halted along with a planned doubling of the rate of VAT (which until now remains at five percent). The privatization of two oil refineries also was prevented and civil servants gained a 15 percent pay increase. The January 2012 general strike and near insurrection was the high point of recent working-class struggles. Over the course of eight days, the general strike developed into the largest social movement in Nigeria’s history. Millions struck and mass protests were held in every major urban centre, from Lagos in the south, to Kano in the north. As result, the planned increase in fuel prices was halved, although more could have been won if the strike had not been called off by the NLC leadership.

However, since the last elections there has only been a muted fight for an increase in the minimum wage that was due to have been introduced in 2016. The NLC has only threatened general strikes to continue the negotiation process, hampered as it is by sympathy for the ruling party. As a result, the proposed wage increase is still crawling through the National Assembly. If passed, this will result in only a modest increase, with the purchasing power of the minimum wage being reduced by a third compared to the time of the last increase in 2011. Again this is one of the lowest in Africa.

Unfortunately, the trade union leadership appear to be more interested in the re-election of the social democratic Buhari rather than the more elitist Atiku Abubakar, the Presidential candidate of the PDP. In reality both parties are solidly committed to neo-liberal polices. The opposition are promising the privatisation of the state oil company and have little to say about the under-funding of the public education and health sectors.

Weeks ahead of the national elections, the three-month strike by university lecturers was called off. All public universities had been closed but the only gain was a further agreement with the government, when the major reason for the strike was non-implementation of previous agreements. Lecturers have a history of strikes, but these have not been active or militant enough to frighten the government into implementing the back to work agreements.

Health workers were also threatening strike action in the days before the election. Once more their sector is grossly underfunded, and their demands are dominated by unfulfilled previous promises by the Government. In 2012, the World Health Organisation estimated that low-income countries would need to spend a little over US$60 per person per year by 2015 to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. The federal government of Nigeria currently spends only around US$7 per person. As a result, each Nigerian doctor has to try and care for 10 times as many patients as the global average for their international colleagues.

Global warming is already having a significant impact, but its affects are also being exploited by unscrupulous politicians. In the north east Lake Chad is only five percent of the size it was in the mid-1960. A major contributing factor to the Boko Haram insurgency. It also contributes to the disputes and fighting between herders and farmers in the middle belt. As the herders move south for pasture for their cattle and farmers encroach on traditional cattle pathways due to declining farm sizes resulting from population growth.

While the Niger Delta in the south could lose over 15,000 square kilometres of land to the sea by the year 2100 – resulting in 80 percent of the population of the region being displaced. Last year saw major flooding across the country with hundreds of thousands of people suffering. Climate change is making this much worse and means that severe floods come more frequently. The last serious floods were in 2012 but now, only six years later, we have seen flood levels that used to take place only every few decades.

Despite these horrors, the plans submitted to the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Paris in 2015 by the Buhari government only included an undertaking to ‘work towards ending gas flaring by 2030.’ Gas flaring is the environmentally destructive practice of burning, or ‘flaring’, of natural gas associated with crude oil production – with the right infrastructure and investment the natural gas could be used for development needs in Nigeria. This activity has been classified as illegal since 1984. It was to be ended again from 2008, but the former government actually stopped imposing fines for gas flaring from December 2014. The practice continues today across the oil-rich region of the Niger Delta.

Another major move in the fight against global warming would be for the majority of women who still depend on the traditional ‘three-stone fire’ to use kerosene or even cooking gas from the natural gas that would otherwise be flared. This would be of immediate health benefit to millions of women and contribute to reduced global warming by reducing the use of trees as firewood, and the destructive practice of ‘flaring’. But the government has allowed the price of kerosene to explode and many people are now returning to traditional methods, and even burning polythene and other material, as they can no longer afford to buy kerosene.

As the crisis across Nigerian society escalates, the popular masses are searching for any alternatives – no matter how unrealistic or desperate these alternatives are. Boko Haram in the north-east continues to attack local villages supporting and strengthening ethnic disputes. Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) in the south west are calling for independence of the former Biafra. While cultists, kidnapping and bandits continue to feed into the general feelings of insecurity.

Yet in this context it is only further repression that is on offer by the two main parties. For example, the massacre of 39 members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria in the capital Abuja at the end of October last year. Scores of IPOB members have been killed by the security forces and the police routinely torture and kill suspects. Last year popular protest actually led to the disbanding of the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad.

The African Action Congress (AAC), led by Omoyele Sowore, is one of the few parties that could perhaps provide an electoral alternative. It does appear to have been gaining significant support in many areas. But with Sowore, their presidential candidate, being only one among many minor parties it is difficult to make his voice heard. Sowore was a participant in many of the mass protests of the last few decades, yet even then the publisher of Sahara Reporters can stoop to nationalism and calls for a more consistent fight against Boko Haram. Sowore has not provide clear and consistent support to recent strikes, perhaps due to fear of detention suffered by several opponents of the government. Although the AAC are calling for a minimum wage of three time the amount currently being considered.

Though the outcome of the elections are too close to call, whichever major party wins the prospects for the popular masses are not attractive. There is also widespread fear that vote rigging which will mean the results will not reflect the popular will. Political violence is increasing as the president and other party leaders being stoned at their own party rally. This is likely to escalate in the immediate post-election period, especially if the ruling party appears to lose. Military intervention cannot be completely ruled out.

Corruption and inequality are likely to continue in a country containing 20 percent of sub-Saharan Africans and where the governments are doing less than almost any other in the world to reduce inequality. The rich are rich in global terms, graphically illustrated in May 2017, when 26 executive jets were used to ferry guests to the wedding of a former military ruler’s daughter. In contrast, there are more poor people in Nigeria than in any other country in the world. Change must come in Nigeria, though it will not arrive with the coming election.

Fabiawari Batubo is an activist and worker based in Abuja, Nigeria (and has been interviewed by roape.net here).

Featured Photograph: General Buhari holding aloft a broom during an election campaign rally in 2015 (16 January, 2015).

Walter Rodney’s Journey to Hamburg

ROAPE

February 14, 2019

In this blogpost, Leo Zeilig looks at Walter Rodney’s journey from Tanzania, his return to Guyana in 1974 and then his extraordinary lectures in Hamburg in 1978. An astonishing scholar and activist, Rodney was constantly rethinking the question of working class agency and politics, and refused simplistic political statements or formulations. In Germany, Rodney asserted the central role of the working class in socialist transformation.

In 1974, despite appeals for him to stay, Walter Rodney decided to leave Dar es Salaam, Tanzania which had been his home for a number of years. Tanzania was a place of incredible hope, the socialist government of Julius Kambarage Nyerere, had boldly declared its intention of constructing socialism in the East African country, and reversing the country’s poverty and marginalisation. Tanzania became an international base for radicals, and liberation movements. The university, in the capital Dar es Salaam, drew in socialists and activists from North America, Europe, other countries in Africa and the Caribbean. Rodney threw himself into debates at the university, as it began to transform itself from a colonial institution, and in the country as it sought to address decades – indeed generations – of underdevelopment. Though he was critical of these impressive and largely state-led initiatives – ‘briefcase revolutions’ he once quipped – he gave them his support.

Two years before he left his east African home he had published his masterpiece, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, in 1972, a breath-taking historical account of how the continent had been dragged into poverty, the ‘underdevelopment’ of the title, by centuries of European intrusion and the more recent experience of colonialism. Written largely for a Black audience across the continent, the Black power movement in the US, and the Caribbean, the book marked Rodney as a man who could write cutting edge radical history that had a vital political point – addressing the deep and pulverising sense of inferiority of Black people.

Among the book’s arguments, he was addressing a Black audience, and explaining the poverty of their societies, and the continent’s position in a global hierarchy that has systematically bled its wealth, resources and humanity. One early reader of the book from Lagos, Nigeria, wrote to Rodney in 1973, ’I have just bought your book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and I want to inform you that you are one of my heroes… I am just twenty and entering the University of Ibadan next September… So, all I need now are inspirations from you.’ For years Rodney received dozens of ‘fan’ letters from a largely Black readership inspired by his writing and activism.

Yet, two years after the book’s publication Rodney, his wife Patricia and their three children, were planning to leave the continent. When his comrade and friend Issa Shivji – the well-known socialist and writer – questioned his motives for leaving Tanzania-and appealed for him to reconsider. Rodney responded, ‘No, comrade, I can make my contribution here, but I will never be able ever to grasp the idiom of the people. I will not be able to connect easily. I have to go back to the people I know and who know me.’

In late 1974 Rodney, his wife, and children, returned to Guyana and the capital Georgetown. Rodney had secured a professorship in history at the national university. However, on the eve of his departure, the government led by Forbes Burnham, intervened and the university rescinded the appointment. Burnham led the People’s National Congress (PNC) and paraded himself, internationally and nationally, as a socialist, who supported progressive causes – despite receiving covert funds from the CIA. Under Burnham all independent political opposition was suppressed, opposition activists were targeted and murdered.

Determined to stay in Guyana despite not having formal employment, Rodney quickly became immersed in the militant organisation, the Working People’s Alliance (WPA). Before long he was one of the main leaders of the WPA, organising in the capital, Georgetown and across the country, in the regions Essequibo and Pomeroon. The country’s small and combative working class were concentrated in the extractive, primary sectors of sugar production, bauxite mining and in agriculture. For years the Indian population – transported to the country by the British colonial government as indentured labour in the 19^th century – and the Black community, former slaves, had been divided. The two main political parties played one community off the other. As the leading organiser for the WPA, Rodney sought to bring these two groups together.

Rodney’s party work was conducted under the watchful and brutal eye of Burnham’s PNC, and its repressive state. Abyssinian Carto, an activist in the WPA at the time, records, ‘You were constantly being stopped and searched … By that time the death squad had been formed as part of the police force [and] on any given day you never knew what would happen…The police would drive around with these cutlasses in their vehicle and place them next to their victims and claim they had been attacked. So, the danger of that happening was always there for us.’

Rodney quickly emerged as a leading figure of the party – its stunning orator, the party’s best organiser and coordinator. Reluctant to delegate the most difficult tasks to other comrades, Rodney involved himself in every aspect of the party’s work, delivering messages, recruiting workers, producing party propaganda and speaking at meetings. He also maintained a prodigious output of writing, articles, pamphlets and a book A History of the Guyanese Working People that was published after he was murdered; which provided an historical account of the role of Indian and Black labour and struggle in Guyana in the late 19^th century, historical evidence of the unity that he was trying to forge between the two groups.

Yet Rodney also faced a financial bind. He was essentially without a salary. His 1972 book, though selling well, it had become the ‘movements’ publication, on activist stalls in New York, in California and across Africa. So, to pay for his work as a political organiser in Guyana, and his family’s new life in the country, he was forced to accept temporary lectureships, seminar invitations and requests to speak at public events in North America and Europe. Charting his travel schedule in the years after his return home is dizzying. Though some of this travel was undertaken for political reasons, he was in huge demand to speak on African history and contemporary politics in the Caribbean.

During these last years of his life, Rodney was at the height of his powers. He had a capacity for work which was extraordinary, as well as a pleasure in partying and dancing. His friend and comrade, the Tanzanian publisher, Walter Bugoya, recalls, ‘Walter was a serious person and he seemed to be very good at scheduling. When it was time to work, it was time to work, and you could be partying next door and Walter would be busy working. This was something in Walter which I admired a great deal.’

During these years of intense activism, travel and research, his political involvement in the WPA was focussed on the self-organisation of the Guyanese working class. This represented a shift from his early, cautious support for top down projects of socialist transformation in Africa. Now Walter’s efforts had shifted resolutely to the struggles from below.

There are invaluable signs of this shift, this renewed orientation, in a fascinating trip he made in 1978 to Hamburg. Invited by Rainer Tetzlaff and Peter Lock, two radical lecturers at the University of Hamburg to teach the course, ‘One Hundred Years of Development in Africa’, between April and June. The lectures were recorded, and full transcripts were made in 1984, including the question and answer sessions with the students.

The lectures he gave on the course give a powerful impression of an activist and thinker on astonishing form – engaging with challenging and wide-ranging issues, the continent’s history, slavery, independence, projects of radical socialist development. Frequently interrupted by students to clarify a point, or justify a statement, Rodney deals with complex issues of political economy and Marxist theory with sophistication and clarity, never losing patience, or his narrative thread. The transcripts and recordings of the lectures in the archive in Atlanta also give a sense of Rodney’s own political development, reflecting on his activism, and his current work with the working class in Guyana.

The lectures are deeply reflective, referring back to his experiences in Tanzania and the conclusions that he was drawing on the weaknesses of state socialism. To start with Rodney dispensed with the widely held notion of the working class in Africa as an ‘aristocracy’, in some ways privileged in post-colonial state. As he explains, ‘In some parts of the ideological justification of Tanzanian socialism [they] come very close to saying that the worker is an exploiter of the peasantry, that the workers are part of the exploiting classes. Even though the workers earn minimum wage, even though the workers in the towns and in the countryside were in the vanguard of the struggle against colonialism…’

These may seem like obvious arguments to us today, but they were not at the time. The Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon had made the point in 1961 that the colonial working class was one of the major beneficiaries of the settler state. In 1978 Rodney argued that this argument was now being advanced by the ‘petit bourgeoise … who were trying to disseminate this idea that workers exploit the countryside.’ This was a self-serving point that could be used against wages claims and demands ‘for a larger share of the surplus which they produce.’ These were not abstract arguments in an academic discussion, but justifications made in the organisation of the Tanzanian state (and ‘socialist’ and ‘capitalist’ states across the continent). Julius Nyerere, the radical president of Tanzania, was fond of making such claims himself; Rodney explains, ‘if the workers ask for more, the bureaucratic bourgeoise would reply, “You are getting that at the expense of the peasants.”’

On the role of the state in Tanzania, which Rodney had previously defended as a vehicle for socialist transformation, his attitude had become much more critical. After independence the so-called official organisation of workers was a farce, a process of co-option by the state – independent unions were vacuumed up into a state controlled organisation. However, in the strikes and occupations reported by Shivji in his 1976 book, Class Struggles in Tanzania, and noted by Rodney, there was a new politics in formation. Reporting on the ‘workerist’ turn in the factory occupations in the early 1970s, in Hamburg Rodney described, ‘We as workers are capable of running this enterprise more efficiently than the economic bureaucracy.’ In direct challenge to the management of companies, workers were ‘making arguments that went beyond their own immediate material interests. They were carrying the class … to even higher levels by in fact posing the question who should control production …’ In these struggles from below celebrated by Rodney he saw a direct challenge to a state that had declared itself socialist, and the possibility of a new society based on that class challenge. Yet, there were serious obstacles. ‘Even though theoretically the Tanzanian revolution accepted a greater role for workers, when they made an important policy statement in 1973 called Mwongozo [a charter of workers’ rights, reviving the radical aspect of the government’s ujamaa or socialist policy] … the workers themselves tried to implement the rights that was supposedly safe-guarded by Mwongozo…’

As has often occurred with initiatives from above, workers themselves attempted to implement the rights that were ostensibly enshrined in the official ‘Mwongozo’ charter. Rodney records one of these cases, ‘In one very important instance, workers actually took over a factory and they didn’t take it over from the government, they took it over from a private owner … And they said we can run this factory which was a rubber factory, [Mount] Carmel Rubber Factory … They locked out the management and they were running the factory. And this caused the greatest excitement and fear on the part of the bureaucracy.’

Rodney draws the vital and obvious conclusion, as did Tanzania’s political elite, ’if workers were running one factory then maybe they will run another and another. And this doesn’t look too good for the economic wing of the bureaucracy … their whole rationale of production as a class would disappear if there was workers’ control… so they moved to crush those initiatives.’ In other words, it made no differences what the complexion of the government’s rhetoric had been, the threat of these occupations and the possibilities for real transformation that they contained was the same. The strikes and occupations had to be stamped out.

Rejoicing at what the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoise’ despised, Rodney goes on to explain to his audience, ‘What in English we call wild-cat strikes, [are] not strikes which the union initiates but strikes which come from below. The workers themselves decide on direct action.’ The ‘unorganised’ strike, not prearranged by trade union leaders, becomes the centre of Rodney’s focus in these reflections. Yet it was not simply a strike, rather what the strike portends. Out of the action, away from the immediate material interests of the workers themselves, were the seeds of another society and power.

Yet these strikes raised important political questions and organisational issues and posed an uncomfortable dichotomy. So, the organised working class and the strategy of organising workers was central but conversely, the action of unorganised workers with their spontaneous protests was vital to a genuine project of transformation. In Hamburg, Rodney was busy thinking through these issues.

Rodney argued that some sort of rehash of national liberation advocated at the time by the ruling party, TANU, in Tanzania was not enough. So Nyerere, still in power in 1978 (he left the presidency in 1985), who attempted to revive the politics of liberation, and ‘to reassert [the] liberation movement’ was likely to fail. Rodney was clear about this, ‘my feeling is that in spite of all the rhetoric, TANU has not been transformed, that it remains a nationalist party under the control of the petit bourgeoise… incapable of providing the basis for sustained socialist transformation.’

In other words, socialist change required pressure from outside the ruling party and in opposition to it, much as Rodney’s WPA was working against Burnham’s regime in Guyana. The regimes were profoundly different, but the essential class component was not. If working class struggle from below (in occupations and ‘wild-cat’ strikes) was necessary in Guyana, it was also indispensable for the construction of socialism in Tanzania. To those who declared that there was something unique about Tanzania, Rodney was equally dismissive, ‘it is important to recognise that it fits within the general pattern, which we have been discussing so far by which the colonisation process ended through an alliance of classes … but within this alliance the workers and the peasants never really had hegemony.’

What we see in the Hamburg lectures is a shift in Rodney’s work toward the self-activity – the occupations and ‘wild-cat strikes’ – of the working class, not as one of numerous players in the revolution, but as the central organising force. A new state would not come about by an enlightened leader, but through the frenzy of a class in the process of knowing itself, and through what it alone was capable of creating. In this scenario, the existing national bourgeoisie, in Rodney’s words, and ‘their whole rationale of production as a class would disappear.’

Tragically the full development of this politics and its realisation, with the coordination and leadership of Rodney and the WPA, was broken by his murder on 13 June 1980. In circumstances still not fully investigated, Burnham decided that Rodney must be eliminated, the unity he had helped forged between the Indian and Black working class, and the struggles he had led were simply too great a threat to Burnham’s hold on power.

A close friend in Tanzania, the radical lawyer, Joe Kanywanyi, describes the unique, unusual quality to Rodney’s character, ‘he was on some kind of a mission … that he was ready to die for. Grounding with his people, living their life, eating their food, speaking their language, taking their concerns … His commitment was distinct for the cause of the poor …’ Rodney’s turn to the working class, recorded in his Hamburg lectures, was an important moment in an extraordinary life.

Leo Zeilig is a member of the Review of African Political Economy’s editorial collective and coordinator of roape.net (some information about his work can be found here).

Corporate Suppression of Artisanal Mining in the Congo

ROAPE

February 12, 2019

In a contribution to our debate on capitalism in Africa, Ben Radley writes that the involvement of TNC-led mining in the Congo has undermined the productivity and development of locally-led artisanal mining. Researching artisanal gold mining in South Kivu, Radley argues that real progress in the sector has been led and managed by a local Congolese capitalist class through a process of technological assimilation, capital formation and mechanisation. These processes are being eroded by international capital, backed-up by the state and police.

By Ben Radley

This contribution to roape.net’s series on capitalism in Africa hopes to provide further evidence that – to paraphrase from Jörg Wiegratz’s earlier text – by directly engaging with and exploring the manifestations and contestations of capitalism in Africa, we can gain useful and fresh analytical insights into the obstacles to and struggles for development across the continent. The contribution is built upon a case study of gold mining in South Kivu Province of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which draws on around 12 months of doctoral fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017 (following a number of years living and working in the region).

While artisanal mining is the most important livelihood after agriculture in many rural areas across Africa, the sector’s low productivity and presumed inefficiency has been a core reason for its marginalisation in national mineral development strategies. This has, in turn, fed into the preference for the current dominant model of mineral sector development on the continent, which is for mineral (re)industrialisation to be led by the supposed efficiency and expertise of transnational corporations (TNCs). Indeed, it has in part been the presumed ‘pre-capitalist’ or ‘non-capitalist’ tendencies of African artisanal mining that have contributed to its marginalisation.

The contribution aims to challenge this line of thinking by arguing that, in South Kivu at least, artisanal mining is embedded in a social structure that is associated with increasing sectoral productivity via technological assimilation, mechanisation and capital formation, led by what we might consider a capitalist class of dynamic and relatively prosperous rural Congolese. While this shines light on the potential for this class to lead an alternative model of mineral sector development to that of TNC-led industrialisation, locally-led efforts at artisanal mechanisation have been disrupted and supressed by the Congolese state and its security apparatus, acting at the behest of the Canadian transnational mining corporation Banro, which holds a near monopoly on gold deposits in the province.

Banro arrived in the eastern DRC in the mid-1990s, and built its first industrial mine in 2010, at the top of a hill around 2,200 metres above sea level. Known as the Twangiza mine, several thousand artisanal miners were forcibly displaced to make way for its construction. Following their displacement, several hundred of them moved a kilometre or so downhill to another artisanal site called Kadumwa, following which production expanded rapidly. Artisanal miners at Kadumwa can be split into three categories: site workers, who work in and around the site transporting water, materials and ore; shaft workers, who work down the mine shafts to extract the ore, and; shaft managers, who provide the initial financial investment required to purchase land and construct and maintain shafts.

Most shaft managers heralded from local farming or pastoral families, and from a slightly wealthier rural background than site and shaft workers. They generally used this family wealth to assume their position in the production process, such as one who sold three cows inherited from his father to raise $1,000, which he then used to buy land at Kadumwa and begin shaft construction. In addition to taking on the associated risk through financial investment, shaft managers also mobilise and organise labour in production. At Kadumwa, many of the shafts were known as puits familials (family pits), composed exclusively of family or clan members, while others (but not all) were strongly oriented along similar kinship networks.

Over the course of the year, I collected detailed monthly financial logs from a sample of shaft managers, combined with many hours spent in conversation to help understand and interpret the data entries. The logs recorded the daily level of production, worker remuneration (which was generally made through a combination of in-kind and monetary payment), taxes (formal and informal), reinvestment in shaft maintenance and expansion, and the sale value of the remaining production to traders. The data indicated that on average shaft managers made around $20,000 in annual profits, propelling them into the upper stratum of the local economic elite.

Nearly all managers had used these profits to buy land and construct family homes in the nearby provincial capital city of Bukavu, at a cost of up to 15 thousand dollars. Most had also bought land locally, with some using it as a long-term investment for commercial tree planting and others as agricultural land on which they often employed daily wage labourers. Most had also accumulated significant livestock, and some had invested in commerce.

Having migrated their families to the city, their children were either in school or university, and they supported the education of other children or siblings either locally or in Bukavu. A typical story from the older generation of shaft managers was of one who, having bought land to construct his shaft in 1985, had put all five of his children through university in Bukavu. In 2017, one of his children was a university professor, one an engineer and one a senior provincial government official. In two generations, his family moved from rural farming to the urban professional and bureaucratic classes, and this is the trajectory aspired to and pursued by today’s generation of shaft managers.

Alongside these investments, a significant share of shaft manager profits was reinvested in production, despite the low capital intensity. In 2017, around $200,000 was reinvested in capital inputs, or nine percent of the estimated total value created by the site that year. The main inputs were timber to maintain and extend the shafts, and the use of generator-powered machines (manufactured in China and Japan and imported by Bukavu-based traders through Dubai) to circulate oxygen through the shafts and evacuate water. Most managers owned these machines, or hired them at a cost of $10 per day if they didn’t own one or their own machinery was broken.

Lastly, there was evidence that productive reinvestment was stimulating increasing sectoral productivity through a locally-led process of mechanisation. Around ten years ago in Kamituga, an artisanal mining town approximately 80 kilometres south of Kadumwa, artisanal miners began to notice a decrease in the quality of the extracted ore. In 2011, a Congolese entrepreneur brought three crushing mills to Kamituga from Misisi, a large artisanal gold site further south again, where the mills had been in use since around 2009. About the size of a cement mixer, the mills are powered by generators and grind large rocks into a fine powder, at a faster rate than can be done by manual labour. While a worker could break down around 15 to 25 kilograms of rock each day, one of the crushing mills could break down around 300 kilograms of rock in half an hour.

The entrepreneur had imported the mills from Tanzania at a cost of around $7,000 per mill. Shortly after, another Congolese set up a crushing mill repair workshop in Kamituga, which soon began to manufacture the mills locally. By the end of 2012, there were around 70 crushing mills across the three main artisanal sites in Kamituga. Around ten of the mills were owned by shaft managers, with the remaining 60 owned by local gold traders or entrepreneurs.

At around the same time, shaft managers at Kamituga were also beginning to connect sites to the local electricity grid, run by a hydroelectric power station. The aim was to facilitate the use of the same water and oxygen machines deployed at Kadumwa which – by circulating oxygen and extracting water – allow for production to continue at deeper levels underground. Through the increased use of machinery and crushing mills, a semi-mechanised mode of production was starting to organically emerge in Kamituga, with origins in productive techniques already adopted at other sites in South Kivu.

Yet Banro holds research and exploitation permits in the area, and the semi-mechanised extraction of previously unprofitable ore meant the Canadian corporation’s deposits were being exploited and exhausted at a much faster rate than had been the case under more purely artisanal techniques. This quickly became a source of tension between Banro and local miners. In early 2013, Banro opened legal proceedings against the mill owners, informing them that the mills would be appropriated if they were not moved off Mobale, the corporation’s major deposit in Kamituga. In September 2013, after owners failed to heed this warning, around 30 mills were appropriated by state agents with the support of local military and police, and transferred to state custody in Bukavu. Following this appropriation, mill owners formed and registered the firm Kamituga Development to represent and defend their own interests. In part as a result of mill owner negotiations, while mills are no longer present at Mobale, in early 2018 they continued to operate at Calvaire, a site of less strategic value to Banro.

Yet in April 2018, a letter was sent by the General Prosecutor in Bukavu to state mining police in Kamituga. The letter informed the mining police that the case against mill owners at Calvaire was still open, and that a visit would soon be undertaken by the court ‘to proceed to the suspension of all related [crushing mill] activity.’ While at the time of writing this visit has yet to take place, it nonetheless demonstrates that for Banro and the Congolese government the matter is far from settled, and as long as Banro has permits in Kamituga, state-led efforts to suppress locally-led processes of artisanal mechanisation seem likely to continue.

To summarise and conclude, in South Kivu a local rural class of artisanal shaft managers makes the initial investment to finance shaft construction, mobilises and organises labour, owns the (albeit limited) means of production, and reinvests profits, including in mechanisation. While they don’t use wage labour, as pointed out by Horman Chitonge in an earlier blogpost in the series, wage labour alone may not be an adequate concept for analysing capitalist manifestations in Africa. This also speaks to the concerns of Elísio Macamo in another contribution to the series, that when studying and writing about capitalism in Africa, we must avoid normative and deterministic pitfalls about the precise form that capitalism should take on the continent.

Understanding artisanal mining through this analytical lens questions the widely held view, including by advocates of artisanal mining (see here or here, for examples), that industrial and artisanal miners are not in competition for the same deposits, as industrial mining targets deeper veins while artisanal mining targets more easily accessible surface deposits. Yet if we conceptualise artisanal mining not as a static, low-productivity activity, but as a dynamic and mechanising mode of production, we can see immediately that artisanal miners and industrial mining corporations are in fact in direct competition for the same deposits. What a mining TNC exploits industrially today is nothing but the riches that, over a longer time frame, a mechanising artisanal sector could exploit tomorrow.

The findings also question the assumptions that have contributed to the marginalisation of artisanal mining, in favour of neoliberal mining reform promoting TNC-led mineral (re)industrialisation. The productivity of artisanal gold mining in South Kivu might be low, but it appears to be increasing, led and managed by a local Congolese capitalist class through a process of technological assimilation, capital formation and mechanisation. This class appear, then, well placed to deliver a more organic and embedded model of mineral sector development towards a semi-mechanised mode of production. The case study of South Kivu reveals the pursuit of such an alternative model is contingent upon the balance of power between TNCs, the state and artisanal miners which, at the current political juncture in the DRC at least, is unfavourable to the realisation of such a project. Nevertheless, such a model would better respond to the twin need of the DRC (and other African countries) for labour absorption and the domestic retention of the value generated by productive activity, than the low levels of employment and overseas syphoning of value for which the TNC-led model is so well-known.

Ben Radley is a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath. His research interests centre on the political economy of development in low-income African countries, with a focus on production networks and related labour dynamics.

Debt, Crisis and Resistance in Zimbabwe

ROAPE

February 8, 2019

ROAPE’s Patrick Bond looks at the context for the 14-17 January nationwide protests in Zimbabwe. The protests were called by trade unions against an unprecedented fuel price hike, leading to repression, death, injuries and mass arrests reminiscent of former leader Robert Mugabe’s rule. Bond unpicks what he argues is a full-on capitalist crisis.

By Patrick Bond

Most of the country’s economy ground to a halt. For more than a week, the cities remained ghost towns, as army troops continued attacking even ordinary civilians who are desperate to earn a living in what often seems to be the country’s main occupation these days: street vending of cheap imported commodities. A national strike of 500,000 civil service workers has been called. Most essential commodities are now vastly overpriced or in very short supply. This is what a full-on capitalist crisis looks like.

The stresses are obvious within elite politics, for as ever in Harare, rumours of political upheaval abound. But whatever happens to the ruling party’s leadership, a more brutal fiscal policy plus an even tighter state squeeze on hard currency appear to be the new constants. The stubbornness of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s leadership is partly due to the ideological fervour of his finance minister, Mthuli Ncube, an academic economist with a dubious practical track record and fast-fading international credibility (as CNN interviewers now openly laugh at answers to questions). Ncube argues that Zimbabwe’s problems boil down to loan repayment arrears to international creditors, a high state budget deficit and a trade deficit.

Post-coup, return of the ‘IMF Riot’

The protest was sparked by a 150 percent overnight price increase in petrol announced on Saturday, 12 January. At US$3.31/litre, this makes it the world’s most expensive retail fuel, with Hong Kong second at US$2.05/litre. The next day, Mnangagwa and a plane-load of colleagues departed for Russia, Belarus and Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan in search of mineral investors, energy deals and what the president called Moscow’s ‘state of the art’ (albeit unaffordable) military equipment. Indeed, Mnangagwa was meant to continue to Davos for the World Economic Forum, but was persuaded that the country – and his own leadership – were in peril, so instead headed home.

Mnangagwa’s first tweet after arriving back in Harare was in defence of the fuel price hike, ‘not a decision we took lightly. But it was the right thing to do. What followed was regrettable and tragic.’ He promised to look into army and police thuggery, but hopes for a reckoning are vain, since his own background is littered with the country’s most extreme post-liberation repression (he managed the 1980s ‘Gukurahundi’ massacres of more than 20,000 Ndebele people).

Army repression continues and leading activists remain behind bars, including five members of parliament. The term that veteran Zimbabwean social justice activist Elinor Sisulu uses to describe Mnangagwa’s dictatorial tendencies, ‘Mugabesque,’ is now very hard to refute.

Recall that Mugabe had run Zimbabwe since 1980, after leading the armed liberation struggle against the white racist Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith. Twenty years on, he was threatened with probable electoral defeat. So his belated, urgent and chaotic land reform – against a few thousand mainly-reactionary white settlers who for a century had controlled nearly all Zimbabwe’s good farmland – gained him permanent hatred from the Western establishment. Though land redistribution was justifiably popular in some circles, Mnangagwa last year admitted that the acquisitions had ‘robbed the country of its breadbasket status,’ given how much of the staple maize needed to be imported (even while tobacco production hit record highs). As a result, land acquisition was ‘now a thing of the past,’ the new president promised.

Riddled with corruption and dictatorial tendencies, Mugabe’s ruling party – the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) – had meanwhile become widely hated in the cities, which were mainly governed by the liberal opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), whose constituents gave Mnangagwa’s 2017 coup their immediate, joyful approval. But the celebration was brief and the hangover long, for MDC founding leader Morgan Tsvangirai died of cancer early last year and the mid-2018 national election witnessed Mnangagwa victory’s, one that his MDC successor, Nelson Chamisa, considered to be rigged (read the interview with Chamisa on roape.net).

Mnangagwa came to power in November 2017, assisted by then army commander Constantino Chiwenga (now Vice-President), after a relatively non-violent (and then very popular) week-long coup against Mugabe, one re-labelled a ‘military-assisted transition’ by opportunistic diplomats in order to avoid the legal consequences. Although Mugabe was often abused by Chiwenga and Mnangagwa in prior years, according to his private secretary, the ‘father of the nation’ was useful to the junta, and he was compelled to remain in office by Chiwenga after losing the first round of the 2008 election to Tsvangirai in lieu of turning over power to the MDC.

From the plotters’ standpoint, the crucial mistake made by the 93-year old leader in late 2017 was the excessively rapid elevation of his (four-decade younger) wife Grace Mugabe. She was briefly considered to be his likely successor once she managed to get Mnangagwa fired as vice president a week prior to the coup. The Mugabes now live in politically-uncomfortable and apparently careless luxury, akin to house arrest, despising the coup-makers (and endorsing last year’s electoral opponent) but also under their thumb.

The 2017 coup relied on Chiwenga’s Joint Operation Command, an army junta that was already controlling much of Zimbabwe behind the scenes, partly funded by diamond mining arranged through Chinese mining joint ventures. Given how erratic Mugabe had become, how his policies discouraged investment, and how he turned against the Chinese firms allied with Chiwenga in 2016 due to their prolific diamond looting, former allies in Beijing welcomed the change in power. Pretoria-Johannesburg elites and Western powers – especially Britain – were also upbeat.

However, aside from adopting much more pro-business rhetoric and initially liberalising politics to an unprecedented degree, Mnangagwa and Chiwenga didn’t lose their taste for repression. According to the progressive coalition known as Crisis in Zimbabwe, the repression in January has witnessed ‘Mass trials, fast-tracked trials, routine denial of bail, routine dismissal of preliminary applications, refusal of access to medical treatment and trial and detention of juveniles.’ For nearly a week, disconnections of social media and the Internet were also added to the toolbox, until a 21 January court order catalysed by human rights lawyers reversed the state’s internet-clampdown.

Under Ncube, much more explicitly neoliberal, anti-poor fiscal and monetary policies prevail, with no end in sight. The new regime has been unable to make structural changes to an impoverished economy dependent upon primary-resource exports in a time of still-low world commodity prices. Since last September, when Ncube was appointed, budget cutbacks and desperation currency manipulation have logically followed.

The society knows this feeling of despondency. It appears often as a so-called IMF Riot – i.e., when people revolt immediately after a neoliberal shock (sometimes ordered by the International Monetary Fund – a term coined by roape.net’s David Seddon) such as overnight removal of food or petrol subsidies. Zimbabwe’s prior IMF Riots were caused by severe shocks in 1998 when the currency fell 74 percent in four hours and in 1999 when Mugabe felt the need to default on foreign debt. In 2005-06 when Mugabe authorised repayment of US$200 million worth of IMF loans, the Reserve Bank officials gathered up all the hard currency they could find on the black market, sparking a wicked upsurge of inflation and another set of IMF Riots.

As for the class character of January’s protests, two progressive researchers from the Institute for Public Affairs in Zimbabwe – Tamuka Chirimambowa and Tinashe Chimedza – explain, ‘the protests were intense in specific geographies associated with the urban poor and the “barely” working class is a direct consequence of the existing political economy that is systemically unequal. The riotous protests were found and concentrated South of Samora Machel Avenue, contrasted to the affluent suburbs North of Samora Machel (Harare North), which enjoyed a peaceful stay-away. In Bulawayo, they were concentrated in the Western suburbs, in Mutare and Masvingo in the Southern Suburbs. The elite hob-knobbed on social media or their usual social spaces with very limited threats to their security and their only major outcry was the closure of shops and the Internet shutdown.’

Pay, won’t pay or can’t pay – and can’t get new loans

Zimbabwe’s notorious shortage of hard currency was the proximate cause of the fuel price hike, followed by rapid price increases in anything requiring transport, including the staple maize. In turn, this squeeze reflects the priorities of a new finance minister, the academic economist Ncube, who is considered the most neoliberal in modern Zimbabwe’s history. Exhibiting a sometimes startling self-confidence, and entirely comfortable within the circuits of world elites, Ncube is smooth and at first blush, persuasive.

But his three most spectacular prior mistakes were, first, founding and chairing the Harare Barbican Bank, which launched in mid-2003 but then ‘failed to meet obligations’ to the country’s clearance system within seven months, leading to expulsion. Two months later it was declared insolvent, as its regulator at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe explained, due to ‘serious liquidity problems as a result of imprudent banking behaviour… [including] questionable cross-border foreign exchange activities which are yet to be cleared to the satisfaction of all parties.’

A second mistake was serving well into 2018 as a top official at corruption-riddled financier Quantum Global, which ripped off Angola’s citizenry during his tenure there.

Third, as chief economist at the (Western-dominated) African Development Bank (AfDB) in 2011 at the height of ‘Africa Rising’ hype, he declared the existence of a new ‘African middle class’ of more than 330 million people. Oddly, Ncube included in the ‘middle class’ category people who barely survive on US$2-4/day, a group of more than 200 million.

His smooth, optimistic talk notwithstanding, Ncube’s finance minister role since last September has been rocky. Interviewed last 3 December by Richard Quest on CNN, Ncube argued that the most serious economic problem he believes the country faces is foreign debt repayment arrears of US$5.6 billion, most of which date back 20 years. The arrears include US$1.3 billion owed to the World Bank, US$680 million to the AfDB, US$308 million to the European Investment Bank, US$2.8 billion to the Paris Club and at least US$500 million to non-Western lenders and firms, especially the Chinese state and South African corporations.

Ncube then promoted his homegrown structural adjustment programme, the Transition Stabilisation Programme, bragging that International Financial Institutions (IFIs) just gave the plan a warm endorsement: ‘We’ve sold it internationally. And then we’re willing to move to the next step, which is to clear the debt arrears with the AfDB and the World Bank, which is what you call the preferred creditor IFIs. We’re determined in the next 12 months that is done, and then we move on the second, the third phase, which is the Paris Club negotiations with the bilateral creditors.’

Finally, he offered this extraordinary claim: ‘Zimbabwe is indeed the biggest buy in Africa right now on any asset. You talk about the rule of law. Let me tell you, this is about property rights at the end day. Property rights are secure in Zimbabwe… Clearly Zimbabwe is the biggest buy in Africa right now.’ Ncube then tweeted proudly about this ‘biggest buy’ status, a claim he just repeated in Davos.

But the gap between Zimbabwe’s local ‘soft’ currency (a combination of a local ‘Bond Note’ bill and electronic payments) and the main currency used in Zimbabwe since 2009, the US dollar, has remained in the range of 3.5-4 times, even though they are pegged as equal. Inflation soared to 42 percent in December, with an informal market raging and only US$400 million of paper US$s circulating in the banking system. Due to the physical shortage of US notes, for more than a year, day-long waits in bank queues to withdraw US$20 has been the norm. Ncube has promised to introduce a proper local currency within a year, but claims he must first clear arrears and end deficit spending so as to restore confidence.

Return of the IMF?

The most crucial bailout lender is still the much-feared IMF, to which Mugabe’s regime (questionably) repaid all arrears in late 2016. A series of self-delegitimising 21st-century leaders have helped reduce its reputation: Rodrigo Rato (jailed last October for bank fraud), Dominique Strauss-Kahn (resigned in disgrace but demanded IMF support for his 2011 rape trial) and still today (after a guilty verdict in 2016 for corruption ‘negligence’ in France), Christine Lagarde. Nevertheless, the institution remains the global policeman for the entire financial world, and since 1984 it has pummelled Zimbabwe into austerity and structural adjustment.

In early 2018, IMF spokesperson Gerry Rice endorsed the neoliberal path Mnangagwa had chosen: ‘The authorities are cognizant of these challenges that they face and the economy is facing and they’ve expressed their determination to address them. The 2018 budget which they presented on 7 December, so about a month ago, stresses the government’s intentions to re-impose budget discipline, reform and open the economy, and engage with the broader international community, which is on-going and important in terms of arrears clearance.’ For budget shrinkage, he specifically recommended more agricultural subsidy cuts.

Again last September, as pro-IMF finance minister Ncube took office, Rice made clear that his staff ‘stand ready to help the authorities design a reform package that can help facilitate the clearance of external payment arrears to international development banks and bilateral official creditors and that they would open the way for fresh financing from the internal community including potentially the IMF. But, again, just to stress as we said before, potential financial support from the Fund is conditional on the clearance of those arrears to the World Bank, the AfDB and financing assurances from bilateral official creditors. We are working with the Zimbabwean authorities in the meantime to provide policy advice and technical assistance that might help, could help move that process forward.’

In December Rice reiterated IMF support for Ncube: ‘The policies of the new administration under the Zimbabwe transition and stabilisation programme, do constitute a comprehensive stabilisation and reform effort in order to address Zimbabwe’s macroeconomic situation.’

Enter biggish brother

The next door neighbour, South Africa offers the most logical crutch. A desperation visit by leading Harare officials to Pretoria the day after Christmas late last year included a request for a loan to clear the other arrears. The lead Treasury bureaucrat turned them down: ‘Initially they wanted money, US$1.2 billion. We don’t have US$1.2 billion but what we have is the will to assist them… Our engagements are across the system — assisting from a budgeting implementation point of view, and reprioritising of public expenditure, including on their behalf engaging multilateral development institutions, which we have started.’

A year ago, the same official prepared the 2018-19 South African budget, cutting social programmes and municipal infrastructure support to such an extent that even neoliberal Business Day newspaper termed it ‘savage’ – while allowing an extra 5 percent of all local institutional investor wealth, around US$36 billion, to escape the country via exchange control liberalisation.

Zimbabweans can recount a long history of the South African ruling party propping up its liberation-era allies, Zanu-PF, when the latter turn most repressive. This occurred most regularly when Thabo Mbeki was president from 1999-2008. Laments veteran South African business journalist Barney Mthombothi, ‘What still sticks in the craw for many Zimbabweans is the arrangement concocted by Mbeki ten years ago to keep Mugabe in power despite the fact that he had been defeated by Morgan Tsvangirai.’ Adding insult to injury, even while activists remained in appalling prison conditions on 20 January, Pretoria’s Foreign Minister Lindiwe Sisulu intoned, ‘Protests in Zimbabwe have calmed down and life in the streets of Zimbabwe is returning to normal.’

When it comes to money, however, the South African finance minister reverts to type: a scrooge. According to South Africa’s neoliberal finance minister Tito Mboweni, the existing South Africa-Zimbabwe credit facility of a measly US$7 million was in any case backed by Harare’s collateral, in the form of ‘its holding of SA Land Bank bills. The extension of this facility depended on Zimbabwe being able to provide further collateral.’ The potential low-level debt relief he implied would be a tokenistic sop to elite solidarity, and would do nothing to change the structural economic power and financial deficits that Zimbabwe faces in the region and the world.

Mboweni’s South African national budget will be tabled in parliament in one month’s time. It must make gestures to reducing parastatal agencies’ outsized debt, so in talks with Ncube he may even demand that the first repayment of arrears go to Pretoria’s bankrupt national airline, South African Airways. That firm is owed an estimated US$60 million in ticket-sale revenues on the vital Harare-Johannesburg route, funds which Zimbabwe has lacked sufficient hard currency to repay. Early this month the airline’s spokesperson claimed that Ncube had begun to settle those arrears, but provided no details.

There are other solidarities, as well, including ordinary South Africans working closely with Zimbabwean organisations in networks such as the United Front-Johannesburg and the sporadic anti-xenophobia movement. With Zimbabwe’s capitalist crisis worsening from the late 1990s, South Africa began to host a vast immigrant pool who were not only political but also economic refugees, with many more expected in coming weeks and months. Hence anti-xenophobia politics remain crucial, as an angry South African working-class often takes out its frustrations on those they consider competitors, for scarce jobs, housing and township retail trade.

The two biggest potential sources of bottom-up Zimbabwe solidarity are the leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which polls around 10 percent of the vote, and the largest trade union, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) with 350,000 members. However, in neither case has a concrete strategy emerged.

On 25 January, Numsa’s leader Irvin Jim issued a statement: ‘We salute the masses for acting with courage and for rejecting the austerity measures which have been imposed on them by the Zanu-PF government. It is clear to them that the removal of former president Robert Mugabe did not result in an improvement of their conditions… We stand in solidarity with the Zimbabwean people and the working class majority and the poor in particular. We support the demands made by workers in the public sector. We are calling on all our comrades locally, on the continent and around the globe to support Zimbabwe in its hour of need.’ But again, the central question is, how to support Zimbabwe?

Can’t borrow, either – thanks to US sanctions (?)

Western sanctions against Zimbabwe’s ruling elite have essentially been limited to financial and travel bans on individuals and their closely-held firms. Trivially, the European sanctions affect only seven elites, and Mnangagwa was removed from that list in 2016. Likewise a US law – the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 (Zidera) – specifies measures against ‘individuals responsible for the deliberate breakdown of the rule of law, politically motivated violence, and intimidation in Zimbabwe.’ Zidera instructs the US Treasury to ‘identify assets of those individuals held outside Zimbabwe [and] implement travel and economic sanctions against those individuals and their associates and families.’ There are 141 people on the list at present, including Mugabe, Mnangagwa, Chiwenga and their cronies.

Setting aside the Zanu-PF elites’ desires to lubricate their overseas financial holdings, Zidera has other features worthy of debate, according to two critics in Zimbabwe, Tendai Murisa and Shantha Bloem. First, they write, ‘It also enshrined into law the US stance that funding from the likes of the IMF and World Bank could not be reinstated until the act was lifted.’ But as noted, this has not been a consideration at all, given that the Bank has not been repaid its US$1.3 billion in dubious Mugabe-era loans. When making his general pitch for debt relief in an article last September, Ncube did not even bother mentioning Zidera as a factor.

Second, Murisa and Bloem argue, last July, ‘US Congress introduced an amended version of it. Passed just days before Zimbabwe’s first ever elections without Mugabe, this renewed act included the extra demand that the vote be free and fair. It is debatable whether Zimbabwe’s 30 July elections passed that test.’ In addition, Zidera was amended to support a few of Zimbabwe’s white farmers who, in a regional court, won a case for property reimbursement after their land was dispossessed more than 15 years ago.

Do Zidera’s provisions prevent Ncube from repaying arrears (nearly impossible as that appears) and then acquiring new loans from the IMF and other multilateral financiers where the US has influence? Apparently not in Ncube’s view, as they were not raised even in passing, last September, in his own detailed article, ‘Zimbabwe’s options for sovereign debt relief.’

Do sanctions prevent Zimbabwe from receiving donor aid? In spite of Mugabe’s degenerate rule, since 2010 Zimbabwe has received far more Western (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) donor grants than it ever did prior to 2010, in the US$650mn-US$800mn/year range. Of that, more than a quarter comes from the US. From Obama to Trump there was a minor decline in 2017-18, but US$194 million was given last year, mostly in the form of AIDS medicines and ‘strengthening private sector services.’ Of course much Northern aid is a self-serving sham, remaining in multinational corporate or ‘NGO’ home-country accounts. Much of the funding that does reach Zimbabwe is hijacked by the ruling party.

Zimbabwe’s underlying financial dilemma is two-fold: not only its inability to pay the US$5.6 billion in arrears, but whether payment is even appropriate, given how badly the lenders performed when putting Zimbabwe into debt. (This was the subject of my PhD and a 1998 book, Uneven Zimbabwe: A study of finance, development and underdevelopment.)

When repaying arrears first emerged as a possibility during the period of joint Zanu-PF/MDC rule from 2009-13, at a time foreign aid inflows soared, advocacy groups including the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development and the African Forum on Debt and Development demanded a debt audit, a repayment moratorium and indeed full cancellation. As Reuters reported in 2009, at a time Tsvangirai was in a government of national unity with Mugabe, his minister of state Gordon Moyo ‘said it would be immoral for Zimbabwe to pay off its debts to the IMF, World Bank and AfDB when it could not pay teachers.’

Again in 2017, when it appeared that one of the world’s most notorious corporations, Amsterdam-based Trafigura, would lend Mugabe’s regime US$1 billion (reportedly at ‘usurious’ interest rates), former MDC finance minister Tendai Biti complained. ‘That will not help much or anything at all in reality. The biggest challenges facing Zimbabwe cannot and will not be addressed by paying off arrears on which we defaulted almost 20 years ago; what really needs to be addressed are structural economic issues, de-industrialisation and unemployment. That money could be better used to fund industry revival to create jobs and boost production, as well as increase exports and improve liquidity.’

Where to?

Zimbabwe’s progressive forces have mainly been located in trade unions, urban civic groups, feminist and youth organisations, rural social movements and a small but impressive intelligentsia. At the time of writing, we have heard only sporadic appeals for popular solidarity, some of which were answered in once-off protests by small solidarity groups against Zimbabwe high commission offices in the main South African cities, Zambia’s capital of Lusaka, and London.

Numsa’s Irvin Jim argues for a much more ambitious political agenda: ‘There are major lessons to be learned in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and all over the globe. The removal of Mugabe did not solve the crisis, which has paralysed the economy. Just like the removal of Jacob Zuma did nothing to improve the suffering of the working class in South Africa. Instead, conditions worsened, and they continue to deteriorate. The lesson is that capitalism cannot be reformed, tweaked or improved. It is a brutal system, which creates inequality and poverty. As the working class we must unite across borders, to destroy it, and replace it with a genuine democratic socialist state under the leadership and control of the working class.’

A variety of neo-colonial strategies were deployed in Zimbabwe to displace inherited structural problems, which include 1970s-era overproduction, extreme inequality and highly-concentrated crony state-corporate relations. By the early 1990s, as assimilation of a few black elites into white capital exhausted the potential for further accumulation within a closed economy, Washington-Consensus structural adjustment was introduced. What with Zimbabwe’s small production lines due to the limited middle-class base, trade liberalisation soon deindustrialised what was once Africa’s most balanced economy. Then came hyperinflationary Reserve Bank responses during the 2000s, with the second-highest price increases in modern human history (after post-war Hungary), wiping out a generation of savings and terminating the local currency.

After the turn to the US dollar from 2009, the regime more recently tried providing liquidity through a supposedly cashless society, with electronic transactions augmented by faux-currency ‘bond notes’, which soon rapidly devalued. Thus today the crisis is unfolding with one fatal, overarching characteristic: a lack of hard currency in the system. The military men in charge are now a big part of that problem, having dominated the lucrative diamond trade with Chinese partners, followed by close relations with Trafigura when illicitly managing the supply of oil. But the systematic looting by the military, politicians and corporations under conditions of structural underdevelopment has nearly exhausted itself.

Short of displacement of this elite through a revolution, which appears a long way off on the horizon given Chiwenga’s military prowess and the troops’ continuing loyalty, the strategic options for a beleaguered human-rights and economic-justice network are limited. At the least, such strategies should bolster the popular critique of any re-legitimation of Zimbabwe’s neoliberal authoritarians, such as the process South Africa’s ruling party is half-heartedly attempting.

But beyond that, the Zimbabwean masses are way overdue in re-gathering the spirit so evident exactly two decades ago, at the January 1999 Working People’s Convention held in a distant Harare township, Chitungwiza. While the Convention’s programme itself included social-democratic band-aids, at that point a new party was mandated to serve poor and working people’s interests. Workers built the MDC throughout 1999, although it was soon thereafter hijacked by middle-class elements, adopting what its leader Tsvangirai termed a ‘spaghetti’ ideology.

Nevertheless, 1999 was a leap forward, consolidating the aching demands of a society that had already suffered nearly a decade of neoliberalism. Such front-building organisation is lacking today, even if the masses’ militancy is even higher in the aftermath of the state’s recent show of force. But unity of the oppressed always lurks as a potential, and has more of a chance of re-emerging in 2019, than do the efforts of Mnangagwa-Chiwenga-Ncube have a hope of succeeding with neoliberal authoritarianism. If they continue imposing such extreme economic pain, expect more political shake-ups, as Zimbabwean capitalism continues to implode.

Patrick Bond teaches political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is part of ROAPE’s editorial collective. A version of this blogpost appeared on Pambazuka News.

Featured Photograph: Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) protest outside the Zimbabwean embassy, Abuja, in solidarity with the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) (31 January, 2018).

Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same

ROAPE

February 6, 2019

By David Seddon

In the last issue (no.12) in this series on protests, elections and social movements in Africa, I examined the background to the events that took place at the beginning of 2018 in Tunisia, when what appeared at first sight to be old fashioned ‘bread riots’ revealed the deep crisis of the Tunisian political economy and considered the significance of the local elections in May. In this issue, I examine the events leading up to the elections held in the DRC in December 2018 and assess the implications of the outcome. The election of the new government headed by President Felix Tshisekedi, the son of the veteran leader of the UDPS, Etienne Tshisekedi, who died in 2017, has been challenged across the country. The circumstances of the alleged ‘deal’ between the old regime and the new one, leave many asking what has really changed in the Congo.

The Democratic Republic of Congo

When Joseph Kabila took over the presidency of the DRC following the assassination in 2001 of his father, Laurent Kabila, few would have predicted that he would still have been in power nearly two decades later. The Constitution of the DRC limits the term of the presidency to two five year terms at most. Joseph Kabila won a competitive election in 2006 and won again in 2011, in a general election where there were widespread accusations of election rigging.

Over the last two years, however, there has been continuing political turmoil in the DRC, largely associated with efforts by Kabila and his government to ensure that he would be able to stand for the third time in the next round of presidential elections, despite the constitutional provision limiting the president to two terms in office.

In December 2016, when he should have stepped down, at the end of his second five-year term, Kabila and his ruling party did a deal with the opposition parties via a political dialogue facilitated by the Congolese National Episcopal conference (CENCO) which resulted in a decision that he would remain in power until the presidential elections scheduled for December 2017. This date was further postponed unilaterally to December 2018 by the National Electoral Independent commission (CENI).

The likelihood of his remaining in power into a third term in reality even beyond that date appeared to have increased dramatically in February 2017, when the veteran leader of the opposition Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), Etienne Tshisekedi, died at the age of 85. The UDPS was deeply divided following Tshisekedi’s death, with some favouring his son, Felix, and others preferring other candidates.

By now, the president was deeply unpopular. Polling by the Congo Research group at New York University suggested that only 17 per cent of the population would freely vote for him or his ruling party in a future election. But the regime maintained a tight grip on power. A report by Freedom House relating to 2017 (but published in March 2018), recorded that the DRC rated 6.5 in the overall Freedom Rating, 7 for Political Rights and 6 for Civil Liberties (where 1 = most free, 7 = least free). The report stated that, ‘despite the existence of numerous parties, political pluralism remains limited in practice, and opposition members do not have a realistic opportunity to increase support through elections… Opposition party members and leaders are often intimidated and face restrictions on their movement and organizing… The military, security services, and powerful armed groups hinder citizens’ political choices. The security services interfered with the activities of opposition supporters and politicians throughout 2017.’

This report also stated that ‘throughout the year, demonstrators across the country protested the stalled progress toward elections. In several incidents, security forces used live ammunition and tear gas, as well as arbitrary arrests and detentions, to quell the demonstrations. The authorities at times detained and harassed journalists who covered the protests, and occasionally shut down the internet in advance of protests.’

Following the decision of the Constitutional Court, a number of judges retired, giving Kabila an opportunity to appoint new ones. Many Congolese worried that the Constitutional Court –packed with new judicial appointments made by Kabila after several former judges retired – would rule that the ‘count-down’ to the next elections should be re-started, taking him past the December deadline, giving him the possibility of a third term well beyond 2018.

On the other hand, there was a possibility of some real opposition to Kabila on this occasion. Two of the most influential possible candidates were banned from standing themselves, but both backed Martin Madidi Fayulu, a former oil executive, businessman and leader of a small opposition group, the Engagement for Citizenship and Development Party.

On 8 June 2018, the International Criminal Court (ICC) eventually acquitted Jean Pierre Bemba, who has spent the last 10 years in prison in The Hague having been convicted of crime against humanity in 2016. The ICC overturned the previous verdict, following successive appeals by Bemba and his lawyers. In 2006, he stood against Kabila in the DRC’s first presidential election for almost half a century.

Another leading opposition figure, Moise Katumbi – a businessman and former Governor of Katanga from 2007 to 2015, who remained in exile in Belgium, allegedly in fear of his life – appeared by video link at a huge rally organised by his supporters in Kinshasa on 9 June 2018, and appeared to be a real force for change. He, like Bemba, was banned from standing. Like Bemba, he too stated his support for Fayulu.

On 16 June 2018, the Economist reported that the DRC was ‘catching election fever’ in anticipation of a real contest in December when the presidential elections were scheduled to take place.

But, while Kabila had still not yet said whether he intended to stand or not, posters were appearing with him as ‘our candidate’, adverts had begun to appear on the TV praising the president, and in cities across the country, T-shirts bearing the president’s face were being handed out at free concerts put on by his ruling party, the People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (PPRD). It was clear that, if the elections were to take place as scheduled, President Kabila would be trying as far as possible in the coming months to ensure that his candidature, if he decided to run, proved successful.

Eventually, however, under enormous pressure both from outside the country and from within, Kabila decided not to stand himself, but identified Emmanuel Shadary as his preferred candidate. Shadary was selected following consultations within the ruling PPRD and the newly formed Common Front for Congo, a coalition that supported the President and for which Shadary stood as candidate.

A member of parliament and the permanent secretary of the PPRD, Shadary was a not inconsiderable political persona in his own right and he truly represented the Kabila regime He had served as Minister of the Interior since December 2016, responsible for the police and security services. He had however, been placed by the European Union on a sanctions list on 29 May 2017 for his role in the arrests of opposition activists and for the disproportionate use of force since his appointment. The sanctions include a ban on entry into the EU and the freezing of assets as well as a ban on providing funds or economic resources to the persons on the list.

The regime clearly saw Fayulu as the main concern. The police forcibly dispersed Fayulu’s rallies in early December, killing several people and detaining many dozens more. Polling was delayed until March 2019 in two eastern provinces which are heavily opposed to Kabila, ostensibly because of concerns about the Ebola crisis. Despite this, the presidential elections took place on schedule on 30 December 2018, with three major candidates – Joseph Kabila’s man, Emmanuel Shadary, Felix Tshisekedi and Martin Fayulu. After the polls closed, the national electoral commission stated that the official results would be released around 15 January.

Fayulu had come top of a pre-election opinion poll. So, it was no surprise when a mission organized by the CENCO, that had deployed 40,000 observers to monitor the election, declared on 4 January that Fayulu had won by a good margin with more than half of the votes while Tshisekedi and Shadary were roughly tied for second place, with approximately 20 per cent of votes each.

The official count and declaration by the Electoral Commission told a very different story. These indicated that Felix Tshisekedi had won with 7.05 million votes, while Martin Fayulu had garnered 6.37 million, and so came second; Shadary, according to the Commission, secured only 4.36 million votes. This came as a big surprise to many.

At once there were expressions of concern. France has queried the official outcome. Fayulu himself has also proposed to make public the results of the Catholic observers and said he will formally challenge the official result in the courts.

The fact that the ‘Kabila candidate’ lost so resoundingly is hardly likely to be challenged. But the fact that someone from the major opposition party in the DRC appears not only to have soundly beaten the regime’s chosen candidate but to have pushed the other opposition candidate into second place is, in reality, no surprise.

Pressure had been building up in opposition to the efforts of Kabila to remain in power for more than a year, and when the UDPS, which had long-standing credibility as the major unified opposition to the Kabila regime over decades, decided to run with Etienne Tshisekedi’s son, this clearly met with widespread support among the electorate. Indeed, an October 2018 poll from the Congo Research Group found that a plurality of respondents supported Tshisekedi for the presidency, well ahead of either Shadary or Fayulu. However, this trend changed in Fayulu’s favour in December 2018, a few days prior to the elections, following Tshisekedi’s retreat from the Geneva agreement.

Tshisekedi made it clear that he could do business with the former regime, and many commentators have indicated that a ‘deal’ was struck between Kabila, his cronies and a new government headed by the leader of the UDPS. Kabila seemed to have no qualms about ditching his chosen successor. Head of the most important and longstanding party in the Congo’s modern history, Tshisekedi could protect the business interests and wealth accumulated by Kabila, as well as ensuring he remains immune to possible prosecution.

Kabila has a lot to hide. While eighty million people struggle in serious poverty, the plunder of wealth across the vast country has continued unabated since Kabila took over after his father was murdered in 2001. Successive protest movements have shaken the country since 2016, when the president first refused to step down at the end of his legal and final term in office. Scores of demonstrators were killed in further protests in January 2018, as hundreds were arrested and imprisoned. Repression in countrywide protests over two years has been severe.

Fayulu had appeared to many commentators and to the outside world as the real prospect for change. He had the support of powerful political figures and had been effectively adopted by the fragmented opposition at a meeting in November 2018. He had campaigned on a promise to reduce corruption and enforce the rule of law. But he was an outsider, a businessman not a well-known politician; the Tshisekedi brand was well-established, as was the UDPS, as a political force. As Tshisekedi was officially installed as president at the end of January, Fayulu was quoted as saying, ‘Felix has to start by telling the truth… He’s not the president-elect. He is the president appointed by Kabila.’

There is a tendency, both within the country and abroad, to suggest that Tshisekedi will pose less of a threat to Kabila and his legacy than Fayulu would have done – some have even suggested that ‘the Kabila camp was never afraid of Félix’ (Kris Berwouts, author of ‘Congo’s Violent Peace’, cited in The Economist, 10 January 2019), implying that he will not seek to disrupt the way the state operates, but rather to collaborate with Kabila and his cronies.

We can interpret Felix Tshisekedi’s statement after the official results were announced to the effect that ‘we should no longer see him (Kabila) as an adversary, but rather as a partner in democratic change’ in this way. Yet, it is my opinion that he and the UDPS genuinely believe that the DRC needs a process of gradual reform rather than a revolution – whether rightly or wrongly. This was always the UDPS way as a self-declared ‘social liberal’ and ‘social democratic’ political movement. For protestors and voters across the Congo who sacrificed so much in recent years, the current ‘deal’ is unlikely to satisfy the hunger for justice and economic transformation.

David Seddon is a researcher and political activist who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world.

In the next fortnight roape.net will be posting an interview with the Congolese scholar and activist, Charles Gimba Magha-A-Ngimba.

Featured Photograph: Felix Tshisekedi receives the presidential sash from Joseph Kabila after being sworn in on 24 January, 2019 in Kinshasa (The Irish Times, 30 January, 2019).

Ethiopia Against the Odds

ROAPE

February 4, 2019

In a blogpost on Ethiopia’s current challenges, Yohannes Woldemariam examines the hurdles facing the new leadership in the country. While the recent protest movement has determined the course of the country’s reforms, Woldemariam sees ethnic conflict, political division and violence hampering a political class that continues to have blind faith in capitalist development.

By Yohannes Woldemariam

Nation-building in polyethnic Ethiopia is proving to be a daunting challenge. Ethnicity was also contentious within the Ethiopian student movement of the 1960s. The late Marxist student leader Walleligne Mekonnen confronted it in 1969, at a time when it was taboo. Walleligne argued that there were many nations within Ethiopia and gaining social mobility was dependent on wearing an Amhara mask. Ethiopia had been described as a prison of nations. Once again, the ethnic genie is out the bottle, flaring up in every corner, testing the new Abiy administration’s ability to hold the country together.

Upon assuming power in 1991, the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) federal structure purported to ensure equality of ethnic groups but in practice became dominated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and some elites from within the EPRDF. The effect of TPLF/EPRDF rule was to normalize the hegemony of the TPLF, sidelining the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) in 1992 and instituting a system of kleptocracy. The original reason for the founding of the TPLF in 1975 was to demand self-determination for Tigray which overtime vacillated between outright secession or autonomy within a democratic Ethiopia. The Tigray represents about six percent of Ethiopia’s population.

Eight months into Abiy’s administration, the EPRDF is all but history. The Amhara Democratic Party (ADP), the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR) and the Oromo Democratic Party (ODP) have been making a concerted effort to separate themselves from the TPLF and to appear as agents of change.

Clashes, claims and counterclaims

Clashes over claims and counterclaims of boundary areas and identity questions have intensified in Ethiopia. These disputes have territorial and descent-related emphasis. There is a long-standing dispute between Oromia and the Somali region over land, which have become deadly, causing displacement of an estimated two million people. Efforts at ethnic consolidation in different regions are being accompanied with violations of the rights of other ethnic groups residing in territories where they are considered non-indigenous.

Ethiopia has nine regions (known as ‘Kilils’). The Southern region, which consists of 56 ethnic groups has seen demands for a separate regional status from the Sidama, after multiple deadly clashes against the Wolayta in Hawassa. The Gurage are asking for Kilil status and that number is increasing. The reasons vary from deep socioeconomic inequality, competition for land, resources and the deliberate mobilization of ethnicity for political ends. The language-based formula of EPRDF federalism has further perpetuated the ethnic based conflict. There are over 85 languages in Ethiopia.

Many agree that some form of federalism is the way forward but the current language-based system is blamed for promoting sectarian violence. A federal project that ignores social realities, local capacities, and histories of particular places, while exclusively focusing on the consequences from a national perspective has been damaging communities. In Ethiopia, federalism has benefited local predatory powers who collaborate with TPLF elites, land grabbers, and investors from India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and China. Very little power has permeated to the grassroots. The Benishangul-Gumuz and Gambella areas have been targeted because of their endowment with natural resources.

Clashes are ongoing between Oromia and Benishangul-Gumuz regions. The predominantly agro-pastoralist Afar are clashing with the Issa-Somalis. Issa Somalis from across the border in Djibouti and Somaliland are assisting Issa Somalis in Ethiopia against the Afar, threatening to block Ethiopia’s vital railway line to Djibouti’s port. Though there is now a more sympathetic administration to Abiy’s reforms in the Afar region, TPLF officials are fueling conflict with their deep networks in contraband trade in the region. Many in the Amhara region are also believed to harbor claims over territories from Oromia. The conflict against the Amhara in the Benishangul region has displaced many and lives have been lost.

Even university campuses have not been immune from ethnically inspired violence. There were 34 injured at the University of Assossa with three fatalities. Students from Tigray refuse placement in universities outside Tigray because of concern for their safety and security. The proposition that a region should have self-government assumes a correspondence between the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of those who live in a specific Killil. Yet, in most of Ethiopia there are people in every Killil who are not members of the dominant ethnicity. There has never been a consensus on where one boundary begins and ends. For example, some Oromo nationalists claim territories as far as Wollo in the north. There are also ethnic enclaves whose national affiliations are ill-defined and overlap with territory claimed by two or more groups.

The Amhara region has claims over areas currently in Tigray, such as Humera, the Wolkite and Raya areas. Conversely, the TPLF believes there are no identity issues among the Raya and Wolkite, arguing instead that there are territories still included in the Amhara regions that belong to Tigray. Some Tigrean ethnonationalists claim land as far as Metema and argue that even present-day Gondor was once Tigrinya speaking. Meanwhile, ethnic violence in the Raya and Alamata areas of southern Tigray have been dealt with ruthlessly by Tigrean forces. Many ordinary Tigreans have also fled to Tigray from persecution and mob violence in other regions. While key leaders of the TPLF, including the former spy chief Getachew Asseffa targeted and indicted by Abiy’s anti-corruption campaign, are fanning Tigrean nationalism.

Abiy’s message of ‘Ethiopiawinet’ (pan-Ethiopianism) is viewed with suspicion by some within the Oromo opposition who see it as assimilatory, even as it has gained resonance with the Amhara, in the multi-ethnic city of Addis Ababa and within the vocal diaspora. Yet, the Oromo see the Amhara as expansionist and disrespectful of Oromo culture. It is a historic grievance that was buried briefly because of common opposition to the TPLF. The Oromo youth movement (recently discussed on roape.net) which helped propel Abiy to power, is impatient with what they see as slow pace of reform at the local Woreda and Kebele levels. While former EPRDF officials with a history of benefiting from corruption and enforcing TPLF human rights violations are still in place.

Abiy succeeded in convincing the OLF to abandon its armed struggle based in Eritrea and return to Ethiopia to wage ‘peaceful competition’ for power. Yet, the leader of the OLF, Daud Ibssa, is in a contentious relationship with Abiy over disarmament and the reintegration of OLF troops. Although Ibssa’s troops repatriated from Eritrea have been disarmed, other troops already in parts of Western Wollega are in open warfare, reportedly robbing banks and destroying government property. Other decentralized armed bands also operate in the area, making it difficult to know who is responsible.

In contrast, another faction of the Oromo resistance led by General Kemal Gelchu seems to have reached an understanding with the ODP, which Abiy chairs. Indeed, Gelchu has been appointed as the security chief for the Oromia region where Lemma Megersa, a close ally and adviser of Abiy’s, is the regional president. This is resented by his rival Daud Ibssa. Another faction, the Oromo Democratic Front (ODF) led by Lencho Letta, was among the first to embrace Abiy and return to the country.

These elite rivalries have a regional character. Gelchu’s supporters hail mainly from the southeast and have generally warmed up to ODP views, while Daud’s supporters are mainly from Wollega and tend to be closer to secessionist opinions. Western Wollega is where law and order has been persistently violated. Some horrific killings have also been carried out in Burayo against the southerners and the Amhara. Within the Amhara region, violence has occurred against the Kemant and the Agew. Recurrent violence in the Moyale area perpetrated by armed Oromo militants towards Garre Somalis continues to spill over into Kenya. Businesses, homes and livelihoods have been destroyed with thousands seeking refuge across the border in Kenya.

Federal troops have intervened in the Somali region by arresting the notorious Abdi Illey – currently in prison awaiting trial – and appointing as president a sympathetic Somali economist Mustafa Omar, who was in exile until recently. This region of Ethiopia has experienced much communal violence under Illey’s Special Forces in cahoots with TPLF generals. A mass grave implicating Illey was uncovered in the region.

The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) fighting a low intensity guerilla war in the region since 1984 is another group returning from Eritrea that has abandoned its armed struggle to wage a peaceful struggle for ‘self-determination.’ This is a region where the Chinese have been exploring for oil and gas. The conflict in the Ogaden is in part due to the investment in resource extraction and the grievances associated with the lack of development.

Other groups that have similarly returned from Eritrea include the Tigray People’s Democratic Movement (TPDM), Amhara Democratic Forces Movement (ADFM) and Patriotic Ginbot 7 (PG7). PG7 leader, Berhanu Nega says his organization’s task is to assist in the stability of the country before any political competition can take place. His troops have disarmed. Some have demobilized and the majority are in camps being assisted to reintegrate into society. Yet, some of his own troops accuse him of making false claims, reneging on his promises and abandoning them.

In addition, the much-heralded peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia has yet to be accompanied by the implementation of the border demarcation according to The Hague verdict. The peace overtures towards Eritrea seem to exclude the Eritrean people with opaque agreements concluded in secret, increasingly angering the long-suffering Eritreans. The language used by the Eritrean dictator, that the ‘border doesn’t matter’, is creating deep anxieties and suspicions among Eritreans. Eritreans value their independence which came at a huge cost.

Initiatives for Peace

To remedy human rights concerns and regional disputes, the Abiy administration has proposed the establishment of a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission and an Identity and Branch Commission to resolve border and identity disputes. The House of Peoples’ Representatives approved a bill to establish a commission with a mandate to carry out an investigation related to identity and regional boundaries. The bill was opposed by TPLF members as a violation of the constitution but the ADP, ODP and the SNNRP members voted for it overwhelmingly. The Commission, accountable to the Office of the Prime Minister, is mandated to produce research-based recommendations on disputes over identity and regional boundary issues.

There are no details yet on the scope, depth and duration for these commissions. Will reconciliation entail an investigation only into TPLF/EPRDF years or will it go further back to the Dergue period? Can Ethiopia move beyond ethnic politics and towards policy, class or citizenship-based politics? Will the commission’s recommendations be accepted by the TPLF which views its very formation as a violation of the constitution? Currently, there are more questions than answers.

Though Abiy mania is still pervasive, increasingly there are questions about his ability to restore law and order. Random vigilante violence and ‘score settling’ is widespread while federal troops are intervening in certain areas to put out localized fires.

Forthcoming elections

It is against this background that elections are scheduled for 2020. It is hoped that elections might channel ethnic competition into nonviolent democratic expression. The rules of the game have yet to be laid out. Birtukan Medeksa, a former judge and political prisoner under the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, has been appointed by Abiy to head the National Electoral Board. Ethiopians have little faith in the neutrality of the electoral board from past elections. The only contested election was in 2005, where the opposition surprised the EPRDF by winning most of the seats in Addis Ababa, resulting in bloodshed and a crackdown on opposition leaders.

For some it is hard to imagine a credible election taking place in the country considering the fragile security situation. Politician and activist, Berhanu Nega, thinks more time is needed to establish the rules of the game to ensure fair and free elections. Berhanu emphasizes the importance of building durable institutions rather than holding hasty elections for the sake of holding elections. While those arguing for the scheduled elections see the poll as essential for changing the composition of parliament which is currently dominated by the EPRDF and its exclusionary notion of democratic centralism.

There is a proliferation of numerous political parties, 81 by some estimates. Many of these political parties are organized along ethnic lines with few organized around ideas, ideology and political differences that cut across ethnicities. Abiy is urging that the number of parties be limited to three or four. Ethiopians must quickly weigh the suitability of various consociational, federal, or other decentralized constitutional arrangements and of coalition governments, proportional representation, and other electoral systems.

In some ways, Abiy’s situation resembles that of Mikhail Gorbachev who was an international celebrity while the Soviet Union was crumbling from within. Nations with many different ethnic groups, can still develop a national culture around shared history but Ethiopia appears to be finding it difficult to find such common convincing references. Abiy persists in trying to inculcate ‘Ethiopiawinet’ by mentioning symbolic battles where Ethiopians died together, fighting foreign invaders. However, the human and social cement that creates and sustains identity in Ethiopia still lies in the family, the ethnic, the sect, or religious confession, not in statehood or nationhood – and here lies the challenge.

In conclusion, it is hard to imagine Ethiopia will be ready for any meaningful elections in a year and half with some fearing elections might further fuel ethnic violence. What the protests in the last three years did was to weaken the state. In one sense this was good because it was a repressive and violent structure, but it left a vacuum in law and order that could accelerate the unravelling of Ethiopia as a country. We should celebrate the protests, but we must remain sober about the challenges that Ethiopia now faces.

Yohannes Woldemariam is a political economist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe, Costa Rica, Africa and the United States. He can be reached at: ywoldem@gmu.edu

Featured Photograph: A 1999 map of Ethiopia (Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division).

The Making of Neoliberal Africa

ROAPE

January 30, 2019

Introducing a new collection on neoliberal restructuring in Uganda, the editors argue in this blogpost that the country has been a hotspot for capitalist restructuring, transformation, contradiction and crisis, past and present. Uganda has undergone an unprecedented political, socio-economic, cultural and ecological transformation, brought about by neoliberal capitalist reorganisation since the 1980s. Rather than seeing a post neoliberal world they argue that there is much more to come.

By Jörg Wiegratz, Giuliano Martiniello, and Elisa Greco

Neoliberalism as a project of reframing the social order and advancing market civilization appeared on the scene of global politics almost forty years ago. Exploring the key features of this restructuring might help understand the character of current political, economic and cultural structures and dynamics, the future direction of social change and perhaps anticipate major implications, contradictions and tensions embedded in this process. We argue that this is a central task in analysing the development of capitalism in Africa.

In our view Uganda is an exemplary case of neoliberalism, not only in Africa but across post-colonial, aid-dependent regions in the Global South. Many of the proto-typical, text-book characteristics of neoliberalism are present in Uganda. Why is that? Why does the caricature-type definition of neoliberalism – power and handouts to the bourgeoisie, immiseration for the subaltern classes – actually look like a pretty good approximation for the realities of neoliberal Uganda? These are questions that are of central importance in contemporary scholarship and beyond.

In the future, historians will probably debate what neoliberalism was all about. They may discover different takes on this in the literature from that time and perhaps they, like us, will find more useful the studies that focussed not on specific policies – ‘free market’, liberalisation, privatisation, etc.- but on the overall trajectory of social change, of what in academic speak is also called ‘social engineering’. Perhaps, these future historians will see that neoliberalism was about institutionalising a particular type of capitalism around the world, about embedding and locking-in a particular architecture of social relations. Perhaps, they will agree that the world was not post-neoliberal at all by the late 2010s, as some analysts of that age had prematurely claimed. Indeed, as we approach 2020 the world has never been more capitalist, neither has Africa.

If like our imagined future historian-of-neoliberalism, you also think this is a good way to understand ‘neoliberalism’, then you might be struck by how little data and analysis exists for the various African countries regarding the embedding of the ‘market society’ model . There is very little written on how this specific capitalist ideology and model of social order was institutionalised, not just in the realm of economic policy making or the economy more broadly, but across polity, society, and culture. In this broader sense, the making of African neoliberal capitalism in the various societies of the continent is rarely demonstrated in detail by scholars and other analysts. Rather, analyses of development and politics dominate African studies, as well as public debates while there is relatively little written about African capitalism.

This is the political and research background against which we, as editors of the new collection titled Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation, had started years ago. We wanted the volume to distinguish itself from the existing scholarship in at least two ways. First, we wanted it to be a collective, multi-disciplinary undertaking to overcome the limitations of one-researcher-type monographs and articles. Second, we aimed at a collection that has authors focused squarely on neoliberal Uganda.

A major objective of this undertaking was to map, understand and explain the key features of both, the making and operation of neoliberal-capitalist Uganda. We did not want a volume that spoke of government ‘shortcomings’, or one that included a SWOT analysis, or used development speak, or offered policy advice. We were not interested in identifying dysfunctional policies in order to correct them, or states of mal-governance that needed betterment. Rather, we focused on revealing and understanding the purposes, objectives, and interests that underpinned the actions of the powerful – governments, donors, corporations, etc. There were several major questions we wanted to address in the collection. What does 30 years of neoliberal reform and transformation do to a particular society? What is the New Uganda, the new neoliberal-capitalist market society, all about? What are its characteristics?

When we started working on this collection, we felt that there was only a budding scholarship available on Uganda that gave neoliberalism the analytical seriousness and treatment that it deserves. Social science scholarship on Uganda has not sufficiently analysed the many characteristics of the all-encompassing process of change triggered by neoliberal reforms. And yet Uganda is a hotspot of capitalist restructuring, transformation, contradiction and crisis, past and present. The collection includes 25 researchers – with a range of data sets and analytical frames – offering a critical, multi-disciplinary heterodox analysis of the unprecedented political, socio-economic, cultural and ecological transformations brought about by neoliberal capitalist restructuring in the country since the 1980s.

For Western donors, corporations, and development agencies – and many Western academics too – Uganda was a testbed for getting capitalism to work on the continent, for creating a fully fledged market society, including a corresponding culture and politics. There are many examples but let’s take a contemporary one: Uganda is currently hosting one of the largest experimental programs of genetically modified organisms on the continent under the aegis of funders including the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Monsanto and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There are similar interventions being aggressively promoted in other African countries which have a similar status of ‘pilot country’ with international donors (such as Ghana and Tanzania). Such ‘experiments have been the hallmark of neoliberal societal re-ordering and daily life for the last three decades. We argue that a systematic analysis of African neoliberalism in these donors ‘darling’ states would constitute a meaningful contribution to broader understandings of contemporary capitalism at the global level.

Notably, in Uganda, donors and IFIs have thrown not just money, but also all sorts of other resources to make this neoliberal restructuring work. ‘Reform’ has become a decades long mantra. All sectors of economy, society and culture have been forced to open up to neoliberal restructuring: ‘Reform for a better Uganda’ became the dominant call. These reforms had to clean the international image of an unsettled and unstable country, to ‘civilise’ the country, yet again. So reforms were cast as bringing about transition from chaos. The mantra became ‘normalise’, ‘modernise’ and ‘be like us’ – like the West. This is how the reform rationale was set up. In other words, for Uganda to ‘reform’, to become properly capitalist, was the raison d’être for the intervention of dozens of foreign actors, from multi- and bilateral donors (i.e. foreign governments), to aid organisations, corporations, religious organisations, global entertainment industry celebrities, etc.

Yet what did all this restructuring result in? This is probably one of the most awkward and critical questions to confront the reformers. Not just because there is no easy answer but because much of the data, let alone experiences and opinions of life in the new society, tell a story of conflict, crisis and social harm for millions of Ugandans, while other data indeed supports the government-donors’ narrative of ‘Uganda as a success’.

The global chorus of approval for Uganda’s restructuring is predictable enough. IMF Managing Director, Cristine Lagarde calls Uganda – in respect to the Fund’s GDP growth and poverty reduction objectives – an African success (incidentally, she said this in 2017, at the height of post-election crisis in the country). While, the UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative in Uganda, Rosa Malango, approvingly uttered in a 2018 speech, ‘Uganda is widely recognized for producing a wide range of excellent policies on social, economic and development issues’.

And yet, the newspaper front-pages tell a very different story. Alongside the reports about various national improvements and achievements including the openings of new factories, infrastructural developments and symbols of state power and purpose – a new bridge, a new highway, a new building for the Uganda Revenue Authority (now the highest building in the country) – one typically finds reports about how the neoliberal project is in crisis, or, indeed, under attack.

Do you want a glimpse of some recent examples? The Bank of Uganda faces a parliamentary probe over in-house fraud and mismanagement (in relation to controversial closures of commercial banks in the past 25 years); state agencies target and beat up critics; investors get defrauded, robbed, and attacked – leading to threats by members of the Chinese business community that they will leave if the security situation does not improve; military and police officers are protecting factories of foreign investors – the list goes on and on. At the same time investors, businessmen and -women, the ruling party, the National Resistance Movement, and many prominent advocates of reform, together with members of the ruling class, are regularly denounced and mocked in the public debate.

Between international acclamation and domestic ridicule what has actually happened to the rates of poverty, hunger and food security? Here is a section from our introduction, titled ‘Interpreting change in neoliberal Uganda’:

[Reports from the mid-2010s showed:] Millions were food insecure …[and] could not afford two meals… And, almost 2/3 were estimated in the recent Uganda poverty status report to earn less than 2$/day, thus classed by government statistics as ‘poor’ (19.7 per cent, at up to 1$/day) or ‘non-poor insecure’ (43.3 per cent, 1–2$/day) (2012/13). Other estimates suggested that 88.3 per cent of Ugandans (30.6 million) could live on less than 3$/day… The latest official poverty figure has increased between 2012/13 and 2016/17: from 19.7 to at first 27 per cent; then UBOS [Uganda Bureau of Statistics] revised this figure downward a few months after publication to 21.4 per cent [56 per cent in 1992/3, eds.], signalling a contentious politics of numbers which involves a plethora of competing methods of measuring.

Against this background, our book intervenes in the debate about what constitutes the New Uganda, more than 30 years into the neoliberal experiment. Our volume confidently confronts the accounts of the powerful, by questioning the mainstream narratives of a highly successful post-1986 transformation and contrasts these with empirical evidence of a prolonged and multifaceted crisis generated by a particular version of severe capitalist restructuring. Such an approach has, to date, been given little space in the context of neoliberal academia. We thus critique and challenge what thinkers from Rosa Luxemburg to George Orwell observed as the ‘truth’ of the ruling classes – we see this as a crucial political act.

In conclusion, we would argue, as we do in the book, that we are witnessing neither the last breath of neoliberalism, nor are we on the way out into a post-neoliberal world. Looked at from Uganda, the neoliberal project is alive and kicking and it is going through new rounds of restructuring, imbalances, tensions, conflicts, protests, and, you guessed it, more restructuring. There is much more to come.

Click here to read the introduction to the collection released from ZED and until the end of January there is a 50% discount on the volume.

The book production was financially supported by ROAPE with the purpose of advancing radical political economy analyses.

Jörg Wiegratz is a Lecturer in the Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds and a member of the editorial board of ROAPE. His is a regular contributor and an editor of roape.net.

Giuliano Martiniello is an Assistant Professor and Director of the MSc in Rural Community Development at the Faculty of Food and Agricultural and Food Sciences, American University of Beirut.

Elisa Greco is a member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group and an expert on the political economy of food and agriculture in Africa. She is a Research Fellow in Agricultural Value Chains at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds.

Featured photograph: Motorcycle taxi in Kampala (Jörg Wiegratz, January 2019).

Revealing Lies, Questioning Complicity

ROAPE

January 29, 2019

Continuing our exposé of the Rwandan government’s subterfuge (and World Bank and IMF complicity) roape.net’s expert reveals what is really going on behind the states recent poverty statistics. This blogpost finds an increase in poverty which is too large, too sustained, too wide-spread, and the findings too robust and too compelling to be ignored, or to be dismissed as mere statistical blips or methodological quirks. The evidence published on roape.net, shows that as the government continues to spend its meagre resources on unprofitable five-star hotels, empty skyscrapers, and even the president’s favourite football club, and imprisons or kills anyone who dares to question the official narrative of success, the lives of ordinary Rwandans continues to deteriorate.

Following years of controversy surrounding the results of the EICV4 survey (the Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey or Enquête Intégrale sur les Conditions de Vie des ménages), the National Institute of statistics of Rwanda (NISR), has released the much-anticipated results of their latest household survey, EICV5. To their credit, the NISR immediately made available the EICV5 datasets following publication of the first official results, which makes it possible for the public to verify NISR’s results.

In this blogpost, we will estimate changes in poverty from 2014 to 2018, based on the recently released EICV5 survey data. For this exercise, we have used the same syntax files that were initially published on roape.net as part of our review of EICV4 poverty estimates (see the post here). Some minor changes have been made to the syntax files in order to ensure full comparability across surveys and to bring our estimates closer to the official NISR estimates. [1] We have clearly indicated in the syntax file each place where changes have been made, to allow other researchers to replicate our results (click here to download the syntax file). None of the changes made affect the main conclusions of this paper.

We will start by looking at poverty trends estimated from the EICV5 and EICV4 data. We then look at disaggregated results and additional supporting evidence from the EICV surveys, that will help us to triangulate the initial findings. Finally, we will compare per capita household consumption estimated from the EICV with the same indicator estimated from National Accounts Statistics, in order to update our assessment of the reliability of official GDP growth statistics.

Poverty

The poverty trend is estimated using a number of different plausible poverty lines, to verify the robustness of our results. The chosen poverty lines are the same that were used in our initial review of EICV4 results in 2016 (see the post here).

The main difference between our estimates and those published by NISR in the EICV5 poverty profile (NISR, 2018) is that we update the poverty lines based on the cost of the underlying food basket, using detailed price data available within the EICV surveys themselves (self-reported prices by respondents in the farming module), whereas NISR is thought to have updated their poverty line using an aggregated inflation rate derived from CPI price data. Both methods are, in principle, valid and should yield similar results if (a) the inflation/poverty line calculations are correct, and (b) if the price data sources are reliable and of good quality.

Unfortunately, no information was provided in the EICV5 poverty profile report (NISR, 2018) to explain how the 2018 poverty line was calculated by NISR nor which inflation rate/ price data they used to update their poverty line since 2014. Therefore, it has not been possible to replicate the official NISR results, nor to verify whether their calculations are valid for their chosen price data (point (a) above).[2] Our contribution will thus be limited to checking point (b), namely whether NISR’s conclusions still hold when EICV price data are used to update the poverty line instead of CPI data. We have not checked the robustness of our own results against other alternative price-data sets mentioned in the debate (MINAGRI, ESOKO, CPI), as we were not able to access those datasets. We hope that other researchers will take up this task.

We start with the official poverty line used in the latest EICV5 poverty profile (NISR, 2018), which was re-introduced in NISR’s second EICV4 poverty profile (NISR, 2016) after having been initially dismissed in the first EICV4 poverty profile on the grounds that it was out-of-date (NISR, 2015). This poverty line (called acttotpoor01 in the syntax file and annex) is based on a food basket calculated in 2001 based on the consumption patterns that were prevalent at that time. In 2014, according to prices reported in the EICV4 survey, this basket would have cost 333.19 Rwf. per adult equivalent per day (see Table 7 in the annex). Based on prices reported in EICV5, this same consumption basket cost 473.95 Rwf. per adult in 2017 (see Table 8 in the annex). In 2014, 51.6% of the population fell below this poverty line (i.e. were unable to afford the basic consumption basket + associated share of non-food consumption). In 2018, 57.6% of the population fell below this poverty line. This implies an increase in poverty of 6.1 percentage points between 2014 and 2018, which is statistically significant at the 1% level (see Table 1 below).

As pointed out in NISR’s first EICV4 poverty profile (NISR, 2015), the 2001 poverty line is woefully out-of-date, as it reflects consumption patterns that were prevalent almost two decades ago. For this reason, we agree with NISR’s own assessment that it is better to use the new poverty lines calculated by NISR in 2015, which reflect consumption patterns that were prevalent in 2014. For EICV4, NISR calculated two different poverty lines: one 5-step semi-normative poverty line reflecting the minimum cost of reaching 2500kcal per day of nutrition using low-cost and high-calorie food types (called adjtotpoor14), and one 4-step non-normative poverty line reflecting actual consumption patterns that were prevalent in 2014 (acttotpoor14). Methodologically, the 4-step non-normative line is identical to the one that was estimated in 2001, and can therefore be used to make valid inter-temporal comparisons that take into account changing consumption patterns over time, based on the criteria defined by the World Bank (proposition 1) (World Bank, 2018).

The first of these poverty lines is based on a food basket that cost 274.76 Rwf in 2014, and 410.98 Rwf in 2018. Based on this basket, the poverty rate increased from 42.8% in 2014 to 52.4% in 2018, meaning that poverty increased by 9.6 percentage points (statistically significant at 1%). The second poverty line is significantly higher, since it is based on people’s actual (low-calorie and high-cost) consumption patterns, rather than expert-determined ‘optimal’ consumption patterns. This food basket is thus significantly more expensive (342.66 Rwf in 2014 and 509.17 Rwf in 2018), with correspondingly higher poverty rates (56.6% in 2014 and 64.8% in 2018). This basket yields an increase in poverty of 8.3 percentage points between 2014 and 2018 (statistically significant at 1%).

In other words, as we had already shown in our review of the EICV4 results, both the high (4-step) and the low (5-step) poverty lines calculated by NISR in 2015 yield very similar trends, when consistently applied across surveys, even though they naturally show very different absolute levels of poverty depending on the cost of their respective food baskets. More poverty lines are available in the syntax files and in the annex, which all confirm the increase in poverty of around 7 to 9 percentage points when used consistently across surveys.

For full transparency, we also report the results for the survey-specific poverty line (acttotpoor) that we have computed based on the consumption patterns prevalent in 2014 and 2018, respectively. This poverty line takes into account changes in consumption patterns that have occurred between the two surveys. As in our previous blogposts, the survey-specific poverty line yields a smaller increase in poverty of 3.8 percentage points, compared to the poverty lines that are fixed across surveys. Importantly, however, even this conservative increase in poverty is statistically significant at the 1% level.

The smaller increase in poverty for the survey-specific poverty line is due to the fact that people have shifted to cheaper and lower quality foods between 2014 and 2018 in response to the price shocks that they have faced,[3] thus mitigating the effect of the price increase on the average food basket (the cost of this food basket increased 38% between the two surveys, compared to close to 50% increase for the other food baskets). As pointed out during the discussion with Donal Ring, these changes in consumption patterns reflect negative coping strategies, that lower people’s wellbeing, rather than voluntary consumer choices, that improve wellbeing. It would therefore be wrong to conclude that the increase in poverty has been moderated by the shift to lower costs and lower quality foods. On the contrary, this shift constitutes additional strong evidence of deteriorating living conditions between the two surveys. We therefore do not recommend using this poverty line for trend assessments.

As had been the case for EICV4, our analysis shows, once again, that NISR’s claim of decreasing poverty hinges on the acceptance of NISR’s price data (presumably CPI data) as the best data source to assess the prices faced by the poor during this period. As we already argued in our response to the World Bank’s (2018) defense of the EICV4 results, the onus should therefore be on NISR (and on the World Bank, which now publicly endorses the NISR statistics) to show that their price data provide a more accurate reflection of the prices faced by the poor than the price data available in the EICV surveys themselves (as well as in MINAGRI and ESOKO surveys up until 2014 at least). This is especially true, given that that CPI data had not previously been used in Rwanda to estimate food inflation, due to the fact that it had been deemed inappropriate for this purpose. In 2012, the following reasons were given by NISR for not using CPI data to estimate food inflation:

An alternative source for food price data could have been the food price data collected for the CPI. The MINAGRI data were preferred because: (a) in the EICV1 and EICV2 periods, the CPI had only covered urban areas; (b) because of the change in the index in 2009; and (c) particularly because of the large number of comparable observations the MINAGRI price data offered. Nevertheless, over the period January 2006 to January 2011, the rate of inflation given by the index based on the MINAGRI price data was very close to that given by the CPI, even though the weights were different. (NISR 2012, p.34)

If, as appears to be the case, MINAGRI and CPI data no longer give similar inflation rates, the rationale for using MINAGRI data instead of CPI data would appear even stronger today than it was in 2012. Yet, neither NISR nor the World Bank, have explained why they decided to change price data source mid-course (and revert to a two-decades old poverty line), and why they now consider the CPI price data to be more appropriate for poverty estimation than the previously used price data sources.

Even if NISR were to convincingly show that the CPI data provide the best reflection of food prices faced by the Rwandan poor, they would still need to ensure that this data is applied consistently across all their calculations. At the moment, NISR and the World Bank are using the allegedly unreliable EICV price data (i.e. high prices) to impute auto-consumption levels for subsistence farmers who do not purchase their food in the market, but they are then using the lower CPI prices to estimate the poverty line faced by those same farmers and to deflate aggregate consumption based on the Cost of Living Index. If CPI prices had been applied consistently both for computing the consumption aggregate and the poverty line, the poverty rate would be approximately 55% in 2018, using the 4-step non-normative poverty line. This is still 10 percentage points higher than the 2010 poverty rate and similar to the 2005 poverty rate, using the methodologically consistent and comparable poverty line (for details on the calculations, see comment by EICV below this article). This provides an absolute lower limit and best-case scenario for poverty in Rwanda, in case NISR were to prove that their price data are more reliable than the price data contained in the EICV and other price data sources.

Disaggregated results and other evidence

From 2014 to 2018, the food share of total household consumption increased from 67.5% to 68.9% for the population as a whole, and from 73.2% to 73.5% for the bottom two quintiles.[4]. Since poverty now stands at over 60% (up from mid-40s in 2010), we also report the food share for the bottom 3 quintiles of the population, as these are most likely to cross the poverty line. For this group, the food share of consumption increased from 72.4% to 73.0% from 2014 to 2018.

The share of food expenditures in total household expenditures (i.e. excluding auto-consumption and in-kind transfers and payments) increased even more, from 49.9% to 57.9% for the population as a whole, and from 54.0% to 62.2% for the bottom two quintiles. For the bottom 3 quintiles, the food share of expenditures increased from 53.0% to 61.5% (see Table 2 below). All results but one are statistically significant.

Finally, the average caloric intake decreased from 1199 kcal per adult equivalent per day in 2014, to 1180 kcal in 2018, providing further evidence of deteriorating living conditions during this period (see Table 2 below). This result would mean that the average caloric intake now is lower in Rwanda than it was in 2001 (1347 kcal per adult per day), although it is unclear whether the two estimates are exactly comparable, since we do not know exactly how the 2001 consumption basket was computed.

The disaggregated results by province confirm NISR’s finding of a decrease in poverty in Kigali City, but show that poverty increased significantly in all other provinces and in both urban and rural areas according to most other poverty lines (see Table 3 below, as well as Table 4 and Table 5 in the annex). The increase in poverty is not statistically significant in the Northern Province when using the 2001 poverty line, but is significant at the 1% level when using the 2014 poverty lines (see Table 4 and Table 5 in the annex).

The worst affected province was the Southern Province, where poverty increased by between 12 and 16 percentage points between 2014 and 2018, depending on which poverty line we use (see Table 4 and Table 5 in the annex). In urban areas outside of Kigali, poverty increased by between 13 and 15 percentage points using the 2001 and 2014 poverty lines (see Table 6 in the annex).[5]

GDP

Before concluding, we will update another part of this discussion, which concerns the GDP statistics. In an earlier blogpost, we had questioned why the per capita consumption estimated from household survey data (HHS) had increased much more slowly since 2005 than the per capita final household consumption estimated in the National Account Statistics (NAS) (sourced from the World Development Indicators databank). While it is not uncommon for household consumption estimates from NAS to differ from those estimated from household surveys in a given year, ‘it is more worrying if the two sources give very different estimates of the rate of growth in average consumption’ (Ravallion, 1992).

In the figure below, we provide an updated version of an earlier published graph, which now includes data up to 2017. We also disaggregate GDP figures by final household consumption and other components, to allow for more direct comparison with the EICV. The updated graph, including EICV5 results, confirms that the gap between HHS and NAS estimates of household consumption has grown even wider, as official GDP growth, as well as growth in final household consumption in the NAS, have accelerated, while growth in per capita consumption estimated from HHS has continued to decelerate since 2014. By 2017, per capita GDP was almost twice as large as per capita consumption estimated from the EICV (see figure 1 below).

The figure shows two things. First, the share of household consumption has decreased from 86% of GDP in 2000 to 75% in 2017. This suggests that at least part of the growth in GDP has been driven by government consumption that is not benefiting Rwandan households (especially up to 2010). Given the nature of Rwanda’s investments in large public debt-financed and unprofitable vanity projects, such as the Kigali Convention Centre, the Marriott Hotel, and Rwanda Air, this should not come as a surprise. Secondly, at least part of Rwanda’s allegedly stellar macro-economic performance remains unexplained and unaccounted for, as NAS household consumption has continued to grow at an inexplicably faster rate than HHS household consumption. This is especially true from 2010 onwards, where final household consumption in the NAS has skyrocketed, while HHS per capita consumption has decreased in real terms.

To date, no explanation has been provided by NISR, the World Bank nor the IMF to explain this mysterious discrepancy. Yet, if the discrepancy is due to a mere difference in definition and methodological assumptions between the NAS and HHS, it should have been easy for them to settle this debate long ago, by simply explaining publicly what those differences are and how they affect the results. Given the now proven sharp and long-term increase in poverty in Rwanda, and given NISR’s and the World Bank’s less-than-impressive record when it comes to producing accurate, credible, and transparent statistics about the true nature of this poverty, we have every reason to be concerned about this still unexplained discrepancy. We sincerely hope that other researchers will take up this important task to try to shed more light on this important issue.

Conclusion

The EICV5 survey shows that the increase in poverty has accelerated in the past 4 years in Rwanda, rising by between 8.3 and 9.6 percentage points between 2014 and 2018, using the poverty lines calculated by NISR in 2015 (NISR, 2015). This increase in poverty comes on top of the at least 5-7 percentage points increase that had already occurred between 2010 and 2014.[6] This means that poverty has now been increasing for a total of at least 8 years in Rwanda, and now stands at 64.8%, which is higher than it was when the EICV surveys started to measure poverty in 2001 (using a methodologically consistent and comparable poverty line according to the World Bank’s own criteria). The data also show that the gap between final household consumption used in official GDP figures, and the one estimated from the household survey, has continued to grow over this period, casting further doubts on the reliability of official GDP statistics.

During these 8 years of growing poverty (and possibly also of stagnating GDP growth), the IMF has regularly held press conferences where they praise Rwanda on its economic achievements. The IMF representative in Rwanda, Laure Redifer, even publicly dismissed the claims of rising poverty on the sole grounds that she ‘could see with [her] own eyes’ that poverty was decreasing. And the World Bank went even further, publishing a paper that endorsed Rwanda’s official statistics and provided theoretical cover for NISR’s controversial methodological and data choices, despite failing to address the substantial body of adverse empirical evidence that had been presented by various researchers on roape.net and in the journal and elsewhere.[7].

And all the while, the Government of Rwanda has continued to spend its meager resources on unprofitable five-star hotels, empty skyscrapers, and even the president’s favorite football club, while imprisoning or killing anyone who dares to question the official narrative of success.

Tragically, this is not the first time that this scenario has played out in Rwanda. In the years preceding the genocide, a similarly failed donor-supported forced agricultural reform played a significant part in creating the conditions that enabled Rwanda’s subsequent descent into violence. Then, as now, donors were busy praising the clean streets and efficient policies of the then ‘Switzerland’ (now ‘Singapore’) of Africa. But this time around, donors had no excuse for not knowing, as researchers and people working on the ground, have been trying to warn them for years that something was amiss in Rwanda’s ‘green revolution.’ And, most crucially, the Rwandan government’s own data showing the increase in poverty have been publicly available for everyone to see since at least 2015. Anyone with an internet connection could (and should) have downloaded the datasets from NISR’s website to check for themselves whether the claims made on roape.net were true or false.

The complexity of the technical arguments involved mean that the ‘Rwandan miracle’ myth has largely prevailed in the media and amongst donor, despite mounting and converging evidence from various different sources and sectors pointing to problems in Rwanda’s official statistics. The EICV5 results mean that it will become increasingly difficult to keep this story of success going. This time, the increase in poverty is simply too large, too sustained, too wide-spread, and the findings too robust and too compelling to be ignored, or to be dismissed as mere statistical blips or methodological quirks. It may take some time, but eventually other researchers and independent institutions will verify the evidence published on roape.net, and will produce their own research to establish the facts independently of Rwandan government and donors’ interests. We can only hope that when this happens, it will not be too late to change course to prevent a repeat of Rwanda’s tragic history.

The authors of this article have asked for anonymity.

Featured Photograph: President Paul Kagame of Rwanda in discussions with the officials of the Russian Federation (13 June, 2018).

References

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.

Ravallion, M. (1992) ‘Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper No. 88: Poverty Comparisons, A Guide to Concepts and Methods’, LSM- 88 FEB. 1992.

Notes

[1] The main change was made to the estimation of food consumption, where we now multiply the monthly consumption by 12 to get the annual total instead of multiplying by the number of months in which the respondents declared that they consumed the product. This modification ensures that the food shares we obtain for each item are almost identical to the food shares reported by NISR in NISR (2015), table B4 (see table 7 in annex for a detailed description of our consumption basket with the NISR 2014 4-step actual consumption basket). We therefore suppose that this new assumption more closely approximates the assumptions made by NISR in their own calculations. In addition, we now use the price index computed by NISR (centered on the survey-median) in order to estimate price level differences between regions and across months within each survey. Using NISR’s own price index removes one possible source of discrepancy between our estimates and NISR’s, and therefore allows us to focus on the other possible drivers of change.

[2] In our initial reaction to the EICV5 poverty profile, we had noted several inconsistencies in the official NISR result, which may point to problems in NISR’s calculations and would require independent verification (see comments below this post). Chief among them was the fact that NISR claimed that the national poverty rate had decreased faster than both the urban and rural poverty rates since 2014. In theory, the national decrease in poverty should correspond to a weighted average of the urban and rural poverty change, and should therefore lie somewhere in between those two numbers. Without further detail on the methodology used by NISR to compute their poverty rate, it is not possible to determine the source of these inconsistencies, nor to assess the validity of their calculations.

[3] Table 7 and Table 8 in the annex clearly show that consumed quantities decreased most for the items that increased most in price between 2014 and 2018.

[4] The food shares reported here differ slightly from those reported in our responses to the World Bank a few weeks ago (see here), as we have changed the method for computing food consumption to more closely approximate the official NISR results (see footnote 1 above and attached syntax files).

[5] In an earlier reaction to the EICV5 poverty profile results, which was posted before the datasets were released, we had estimated that the increase in poverty in urban areas outside of Kigali might have been as high as 17 percentage points (see comments below this post). This was because we had assumed that 100% of the population in Kigali City is urban, when in fact 25% of the population in Kigali City is rural. With this correction, the two estimates are consistent.

[6] The 2010-2014 trend was estimated using a slightly different methodology, as explained in footnote 1 above. This means that the reported 2010-14 and 2014-18 trends might not be exactly comparable. We will leave it to others to fine-tune these numbers and estimate historical trends going further back in time.

[7] Most crucially, the World Bank failed to explain or justify NISR’s sudden switch to CPI data, which had previously been deemed inappropriate by NISR itself for estimating food inflation in Rwanda (NISR 2012, p.34), or to explain why this new price data source generated such radically different poverty rates from the price data previously used by NISR for poverty estimations.

Annex

Click here for Tables 8 & 9 (EICV4 food baskets and EICV5 food baskets)

Protest, Repression and Revolution in Ethiopia

ROAPE

January 24, 2019

Protesters chant slogans during a demonstration over what they say is unfair distribution of wealth in the country at Meskel Square in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, August 6, 2016. REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri - RTSLDSE

By Mebratu Kelecha

Since 2014 protests in Ethiopia have taken an unexpected and unprecedented turn, which has pushed the regime into permanent crisis. One of the triggering factors was in April 2014, when the Addis Ababa City Administration officially launched an urban expansion plan aimed at responding to the industrial and human growth of the capital city. Soon, the popular movement, known as the Oromo protests, began when students across Oromia protested a plan to expand Addis Ababa by 1.1 million hectares deep into the neighbouring Oromia region. Since then, an unprecedented wave of popular struggles have rocked Ethiopia.

There are two main reasons for these protests. The first concerns the existing political tensions, especially on land, socio-economic development and identity issues in the Oromo communities gathered around the city of Addis Ababa. The second is a violent security reaction that created a vicious circle of state repression. As usual, the government responded violently to protests, killed thousands, arrested and accused of terrorism many thousands of others. The desire to impose development projects from the above is another factor that partly explain the protests.

Before continuing, some context needs to be provided. Since 1991, the current regime in Ethiopia has been marked by recurrent violent incidents. Conflict with the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) from 1992 has been a continual feature for nearly three decades of EPRDF rule. For decades the OLF was outlawed and labelled a terrorist organisation. The 2005 elections, illustrative of state repression, left a legacy of trauma and pain: about 200 people were shot by security forces, and thousands were imprisoned. Yet for most of the period since the seizure of power, state repression remains largely ‘invisible’ to the outside world, except for well-informed observers, while international condemnation is rare. Ethiopia had long won this international acquiescence by becoming a key partner in the global war on terrorism, especially on the Somali front.

However, we need to look more deeply at the context of the Oromo protests to understand the significance. Several indicators point to a social explosion in Oromia region, even before 2014. For example, there were tensions between 2003-2004 on the transfer of the administrative capital of the Oromia region from Addis Ababa to Adama. After several protests over the political marginalization of Oromo, the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s government decided to return the regional capital to Addis Ababa after losing all city council seats during the 2005 elections. Yet such actions failed to quell dissatisfaction.

On the contrary, the feeling of not benefiting from the fruits of development has increased with the disappointing promises of the so-called developmental state in the last decade. There is widespread disgruntlement against expropriations, repressions and corruption. Taking advantage of this growing discontent, Oromo activists in the diaspora began reuniting with young people at home, promoting nonviolent resistance to engage in advocacy and hold demonstrations against government policy particularly since 2009. This began in response to the absence of an organized Oromo group at a time, and a general frustration at the internal politics in the OLF.

Despite these problems, the movement of young activists developed rapidly, and within a few years they successfully established Oromo media houses in the diaspora and the creation of networks of Oromo activists at home. Thus, when the protests began in April 2014, it was relatively easy to mobilize young people, and concerns about the fate of farmers on land that the government wanted to transfer to Addis Ababa, for example, could be clearly articulated.

What actually happened?

At this point the protests were relatively small and student-led and limited to university campuses, though there were still many casualties among the students. The pre-election period in May 2015 prompted the government to suspend the city expansion project temporarily, which was due to resume immediately in the post-election period. On 12 November 2015, protests were resumed in Ginchi, a small town about 80 km southwest of Addis Ababa, because of the local authorities’ decision to remove forests and football field for an investment project. The Ginchi incident sparked protests that pulled the surrounding areas into a wider wave of action and spread into several other parts over the coming weeks and months.

By mid-February 2016 in the West Arsi area of Oromia, near the city of Shashamene, the federal police arrested a bus full of guests going to a wedding, they were playing Oromo songs in honor of brides and grooms. The police claimed there were Oromo activists on their way to ignite protests. The incidence prompted clashes between crowds of local farmers who gathered around the bus and the federal police. The police quickly used their weapons indiscriminately, causing multiple deaths and raising to the ground the nearby towns of Siraro, Shala and Shashamene. Police violence continued for nearly for a week. Led mainly by students from high schools and universities, further protests gained momentum quickly after they spread rapidly into more than 400 different locations throughout the Oromia region, students were now joined by farmers, government employees and other groups.

From the outset, the government accused the protest movement of infiltration by rebel groups, including the OLF. As we have seen the government long held that these groups were terrorist organizations supported by external forces such as Eritrea and Egypt. These kinds of label were actively used to discredit protesters and to justify the deployment of the Antiterrorist Task Force in the region, which was eventually deployed on December 15, 2015. Added to this was the surprising arrests of several moderate opposition leaders, such as Bekele Gerba and Merara Gudina of Oromo-Federalist Congress.

In 2016, there were two further important and symbolic victories for the movement. In May 2016, Oromo activists leaked Ethiopian national exams before the exam date. This incident, while sending a strong message that the Oromo protests were a grassroots mobilization, also seriously embarrassed the government which had claimed mass support for decades. There was another symbolically important moment later in the year. On August 21, 2016, the marathon runner Feyisa Lelisa crossed the finish line in Rio de Janeiro and immediately crossed his hands over his head, expressing his solidarity with the protest movement in Ethiopia. The athletes’ gesture cames directly from the nonviolent resistance movement that was organizing demonstrations across Oromia. Lelisa’s solidarity was important to Oromo and other oppressed people in Ethiopia and was a call to global public consciousness. Such incidents helped to galvanize popular protests in the country and solidarity action abroad.

Repression continues, protests intensify

As government repression intensified, activists effectively deploy Oromo’s resistance music to promote protests, represent their experiences of marginalization and resist official narratives. Activists established contacts with prominent Oromo musicians and provided them with the resources they need to travel around the country and abroad, as well as to organize concerts that brought together Oromos from all walks of life. Dozens of such resistance songs were released during the protest movement.

These musical events played a central role in providing alternative spaces for voicing Oromo issues, exploring concerns of unemployment, poverty and exclusion and clarifying the complex dilemmas facing the struggle for political freedom. Stages were effectively used to mobilize resources, build networks and organize people for nonviolent resistance. Without fear of exaggeration, Oromo music became the driving force of Oromo-nationalism, to protest the injustice and repression in Oromia.

Accordingly, Oromo protests continued and were relayed by the Oromo in the diaspora throughout 2016, peaking in October 2016 after a tragic event during the Irreecha celebration, the annual Oromo Thanksgiving festival in Bishoftu, a city fifty kilometers from the capital. A stampede at the festival, provoked by the security forces, killed dozens of people and fuelled public actions that caused the destruction of government institutions, including foreign companies they believe had exacerbated their suffering. A national state of emergency was declared on November 9, 2016, and government repression intensified, as federal military units were deployed throughout the Oromia region. A few months after declaring a state of emergency, the regime announced itself the winner, believing that the movement was dead.

However, despite the restrictions imposed by the state of emergency, in parallel there have been significant developments. First, the decrease in riots and protests led to an increase in political activity that prompted opposition movements to unite their forces against the regime. Second, since the beginning of 2017, many Oromo public figures have spoken out against a marked increase in attacks by paramilitary groups, including the Liyu police (a paramilitary militia). The growing attacks of the Liyu police were provoked by the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF), the leading party within the ruling EPRDF, helped spread conflicts between ethnic Somalis and Oromo, giving the military the excuse to further weaken protests. Third, despite the regime’s assertion that the state of emergency succeeded in suppressing Oromo protests, Oromo activists made a conscious decision to regroup and strategize for the next phase of the struggle.

Thus, despite the repressive tactics used by the regime against demonstrators, Oromo protest action managed to sustain itself and began to organize another wave of protests in August 2017. The economic boycott and the Stay at Home campaign was announced by Oromo activists on August 23, 2017. As planned, the campaign began on the scheduled day throughout Oromia. For three days, businesses in large and small towns, daily markets in rural villages and intercity transportation remain closed. Across the Oromia region the shut down and boycott was complete.

Failed concessions and a widening movement

As of January 2016, the authorities announced a series of corrective actions, including the removal of the Addis Ababa master plan, ministerial reshuffles at the federal and regional levels and the opening of discussions between the government and opposition parties. However, the appearance of these measures failed to reassure demonstrators. In addition to lost confidence, the withdrawal of the master plan was regarded as an attempt to conceal the lack of genuine concessions. Thus, the protests continued, taking advantage of a surge of new discontent — a serious disappointment over an illegal tax increase and the invasion of the Liyu police in Oromia, as we have seen.

The Oromia region was not the only region affected by a wave of popular protests. The persistence of Oromo protests in the face of the government’s harsh reaction inspired other regions to air their grievances, especially Amhara, where repeated tensions intensified from 2016. The tensions stemmed from a series of events that caused deep discontent. For example, repeated rumors about the transfer of border lands to Sudan were spread by opposition groups and the diaspora in the United States. There was also discontent at the fate of the Amhara people from other regions, where there were reports of harassment and forced displacement caused by TPLF ’militias’. The Ethiopian Satellite Television and Radio (ESAT), a Washington-based opposition television station, repeatedly aired these issues, presenting them as genocide against the Amhara people. In addition, the Wolqayt identity questions, suppressed in the Tigray region, similarly raised protests and violent reactions around Gondar in August 2016. Lastly, there is another question concerning the issue of identity by the Qemant people in the Amhara region, whose activists met with violent reactions from the authorities. Protests have spread in these two regions and more widely at the country level. Increasingly, we were witnessing a national movement.

Estimating the number of deaths of protesters across the regions from government repression is exceptionally difficult. However, while we cannot find an accurate figure, we can establish several facts. The protests were for an extended period, three years, during which repression, violence and murder were a feature from the start. As the scholar, Yohannes Woldemariam, has shown that the commissioner for human rights wanted access to investigate but this was denied. Yet mass graves are still being discovered. Woldemariam states, ‘One figure that was given in the last three months is 669. A gross underestimate in my view… another estimate of the death rate by Human Rights Watch is over 1000 deaths and tens of thousands detained.’ This is also likely to be a serious underestimate.

Understanding the protests

The large-scale movement in the Oromia region certainly took the name of Oromo protests, but the protesters were highlighting social and political injustice, unemployment, forced evictions, unequal representation, constitutional rights violations, marginalization, repression, undemocratic practices and corruption that impacted every Ethiopian. These are slogans that were chanted throughout the protests.

In addition, there is was a political event that played an important role in intensifying the crisis within the ruling party and to provoke the arrival of reformist Abiy Ahmed to the EPRDF’s helm. Over the years of Oromo protests, the voices calling for an historic alliance between Amhara and Oromo groups have grown louder. This appeal first appeared in a foreign country in July 2016 thanks to the rapprochement of two competing online TV channels based in the United States: the Oromo Media Network (OMN) and ESAT. The former is directed by Jawar Mohammed, who was a leading advocate of the Oromo protests, while the latter is founded by Amhara intellectual circles.

In Ethiopia, however, this call struggled to bear fruit, until solidarity demonstrations in August 2016 were held in the Amhara region to condemn violence in the Oromo region. Many expressions of solidarity were made at rallies, at one in the Amhara region it was stated that, ‘the blood flowing in Oromia is also our blood.’ Immediately this challenged the ruling party’s ‘divide and rule;’ tactics, pitting the Oromo and Amhara against one another.

In November 2017, the Oromo Democratic Party (ODP) reached out to Amhara Democratic Party (ADP) in a spirit of solidarity and cooperation that led to renewed hope of ‘expropriating’ power from the TPLF. However, the broader alliance established by ODP and ADP to wrestle power away from TPLF was tactical from the outset, and not strategically anchored on a shared political visions. Ethiopia’s political history shows the difficulties faced by the main elites of Oromo and Amhara to ally themselves durably. The regime has often tried to use ethnic and ideological cleavages to precipitate the fall of popular movements. It was the popular movements from below that provided the impetus for community solidarity.

These facts revealed the limitations of the EPRDF’s overall political project. The protests point not only to the patterns of governance that must be changed, but also to the highly indoctrinated EPRDF political project, which is anchored in revolutionary democracy and its organizational discipline of democratic centralism. EPRDF, which often relies on its seven million members, finally appears to be struggling: the Amhara branch (ADP) has begun to break away from the messianic doctrine of the ruling Front. Under these pressures, big political changes were about to take place. The EPRDF – and its principle anchor, the TPLF – faces the most serious challenge in its decades long struggle for political hegemony.

We can say categorically that without the conditions prepared by the protests the reform process that was embarked on in 2018 would have been unthinkable. As Woldemariam has explained, emboldened by the protests and the general climate of ungovernability, the constituent parts of the EPRDF, particularly the ADP and the ODP outmanoeuvred the TPLF in the selection process that saw the election of Abiy Ahmed.

Manoeuvres and reforms from above

On 15 February 2018, Hailemariam Desalegn, Ethiopia’s beleaguered prime minister, resigned hoping to facilitate an end to ‘unrest and political crisis’ in the country. A second state of emergency was also declared the day after Hailemariam’s resignation, mainly to subdue tensions within the EPRDF by placing the country under military control. The resignation was another concession to the popular protests that already created a rift between hardliners and soft-liners in the ruling coalition.

One of the most categorical achievements of the Oromo protests is the emergence of a faction known as Team Lemma, named after Oromia President Lemma Megerssa, and offering an alternative future for EPRDF and Ethiopia. The package included replacing the old guards with a new generation of leaders and including tthe reformist Abiy Ahmed. Once in place Prime Minister Abiy quickly moved in to convince people that real change was being made. Being the country’s first Oromo leader, the ethnic group at the centre of three years of anti-government protests, Abiy Ahmed was officially sworn in as the prime minster in parliament on April 2, last year. He was again almost unanimously re-elected as the head of the ruling coalition at the EPRDF Congress, held in Hawassa at the end of October 2018. His election saw the release of tens of thousands of political prisoners, including Bekele Gerba, the key figures of the Oromo protests and the abducted Briton Andargachev Tsege, who had been on death row.

Thus, having produced Team Lemma as its overall effect, the Oromo protests have since become, in the opinion of some commentators, a full-scale revolution that is increasingly triggering fundamental changes in the country. Abiy has initiated intense and inclusive discussions with members of the public inside and outside the country including members of the Ethiopian diaspora in North America and Europe and called on political parties in exile to return to their home and resolve differences through dialogue. Political prisoners have been released, armed groups decriminalized, massive human rights violations and torture practices by state security and police have been openly addressed. Reform of the judicial system and democratic institutions have begun, and women have been appointed to half the posts in Abiy’s new cabinet, he has also created a new ministry of peace to strengthen the momentum of his radical reform programme and boldly mobilized to build consensus on a common national agenda to help lay the foundation for a stable political culture.

As roape.net has already reported, the rapprochement between Ethiopia and Eritrea was unlikely until Abiy Ahmed came to power as a result of the popular protests. There is no doubt that the dawn of peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea will continue to serve as a catalyst for resolving the long-standing conflicts in the region and becomes an instrument for rectifying the diplomatic impasse. Eritrea seems to be moving towards improved relations with its neighbours, which have raised hopes for a more stable Horn of Africa. The open rejection of revolutionary democracy by ODP and ADP, much to the chagrin of the TPLF, is another sign that Ethiopia seems to be moving in a dramatic new direction. The success in this political ‘spring’ and the return of dissidents has created a completely new situation in the country. The prime minster seems to believe that elections are the basis of a democratic Ethiopia. The concrete step in this direction was the consultative meeting held on 27 November 2018, with the leaders of political parties. The discussions focused on the process of democratization, as well as the electoral reforms needed to ensure that the forthcoming elections are free and fair, enhance democratic space, ensure justice and the rule of law.

It can be assumed that the 2020 elections will lead to fierce competition between federalist and pan-Ethiopian groups that support and oppose the current federal structure, respectively. One of the risks facing the new prime minister is also the ways in which the basic contradiction between these two groups can be accommodated in his initiatives and future reform programs. Thus, the 2020 election will certainly be an unprecedented test for the new regime, but also a great success if it leads to a new form of fair electoral competition alongside the already established popularity.

We can say, without exaggeration, that the protests of the last three years erased the status quo and allowed the government of Abiy Ahmed to emerge, and embark on a project of serious political and democratic reform. However, despite the real hopes, there are still many systemic problems to be solved. First, there is an urgent need to organize rules for political engagement and participation. A clear political roadmap is needed to support the impressive measures that have been announced. Failure to build consensus on the rules of the game could threaten the regime’s survival. Second, the conflicts that occur here and there, if not dealt with properly, could turn into a threat to the existence of the Ethiopian state, giving way to possible political regionalism raising its head. Such a scenario has the a capacity to plunge the entire region into chaos.

I think that the collapse of the state amounts to committing collective suicide, and Oromo youths and others have a vested interest and moral responsibility in preventing such an outcome. As the majority, the Oromos do not lose anything from democracy taking root in Ethiopia, but they can end oppression and give young people the opportunity to play a key role in the region. This was revealed when protesters chanted for democratizing the system, creating an inclusive political community and making the country home to every Ethiopian, with jobs, rights and dignity for all.

Finally, the democratic transition that Ethiopia currently needs is a complex process, in which the interaction of social forces with organized politics will influences its trajectory and results. The transition requires the simultaneous destruction of the existing authoritarian structures and the construction of a new democratic order, based on popular participation and action.

Mebratu Kelecha is currently a Doctoral Researcher at the School of Politics and International Affairs, University of Westminster. He works on comparative religion, public policy federalism, democratization, and developmental states. Mebratu is a member of the editorial board of the Review of African Political Economy.

Featured Photograph: Protesters during a demonstration chanting against the unequal distribution of wealth in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa, August 6, 2016).

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