African Studies in Eastern Europe – Connections and Agendas

March 2, 2019

ROAPE’s Jörg Wiegratz discusses a conference in Hungary that pulled together African studies associations across much of Eastern Europe. It was an opportunity for important connections between researchers from the region and Africa. In a selection of interviews from the conference Jörg asks about the dynamics of research for Africanists across Eastern Europe.

The workshop series that ROAPE co-organised with local partners across Africa in 2017-18 is pointedly called ‘Connections’. The videos you see below are an outcome of the connection dynamics that emerge from these important and productive gatherings. In Dar es Salaam I met for the first time the Hungarian scholar Tamás Gerőcs, and we have been in contact ever since. Tamás has subsequently written for ROAPE, amongst others a blog about a debate at the workshop, as well as a Briefing on Russia in Africa that will be published soon. Thanks to the connection made in Tanzania I was informed about a bi-annual African Studies Conference in Pécs, in Hungary, that was taking place a few weeks after our workshop in Dar es Salaam held in April last year.

One of the purposes of my attendance at the conference in Hungary – besides learning about the main workshop debates, the political economy analyses of speakers and African studies perspectives more broadly – was to connect ROAPE with the scholarly community that gathered in Hungary, including the respective African studies associations across much of Eastern Europe, and to learn more about the dynamics of African studies in these countries as well as to enquire about possible collaboration.

The programme of the 5th Pécs African Studies Conference titled Africa’s changing international relations and realities can be found here. Scholars came from various countries, including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Austria, Turkey, Russia, China, the US, the UK, and Italy. The conference included a session titled, ‘Visegrád Political-Scientific Symposium on Africa Policies and African Studies’ (the Visegrád Group, is an alliance of four Central European states – Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) that was a dialogue among and between representatives of university departments/research centres of African Studies of the four Visegrád countries and heads of departments of African Affairs in ministries of foreign affairs.

If you are interested to know more about the conference, the research and teams working in African studies you can contact the main organiser István Tarrósy (University of Pecs, tarrosy.istvan@pte.hu) who is also the current Director of Hungary’s Africa Research Centre. These are the links to some of the African studies associations/research centres in Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic.

Below you can find videos of interviews (mostly) with scholars from Eastern Europe – Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania – mainly about African studies in their countries. May the connections continue to grow and blossom.

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 recent book is Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (co-edited with Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco, Zed, 2018). His is a regular contributor and editor of roape.net.

https://youtu.be/ylKmrMwOwhM

The Real History of Imperialism: A Comment on Recent Debates

ROAPE

February 28, 2019

In a major contribution to our debate on imperialism, James Parisot argues that the discussion has centred on a non-historical, economistic variation of historical materialism that, in reducing capitalism to the capital-wage labour relation, ends up doing injustice to the real history of imperialism and the expansion of capitalism. A full history of imperialism is also a history of capital exploiting a wide variety of racialized and gendered labour forms along a complex gradation including ‘free’ wage labourers, chattel slaves, and unpaid housework.

By James Parisot

The continuing debate over contemporary imperialism triggered by John Smith’s criticisms of David Harvey and Harvey’s reply on roape.net has been wide ranging and brought forth many important questions for 21^st century global capitalism. The discussion was primarily centered around insights from Smith’s book Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century regarding questions of economic exploitation between those countries which continue to have wealth stripped from them based upon highly exploited and lowly valued labor, and those, such as the United States, whose companies generate great profits through transfers of value to what Smith calls the ‘imperialist countries.’

The central questions in the discussion are centered around transfers of value: to what extent are ‘imperialist countries’ generating wealth through the super-exploitation of the global labor pool? To what extent are the profits of this accruing to capitalists in the global north? What has the rise of East Asian capitalism meant for this?

The tendency, though, particularly in Smith’s conceptualization, has been to economize the concept of imperialism. In other words, imperialism is primarily seen as an economic process through which a particular country extracts profits from exploited countries. This is similarly repeated in a different way in Usta Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik’s recent book A Theory of Imperialism wherein imperialism is seen as primarily an economic project.

In both cases the goal is to develop a concrete understanding of imperialism and update classical Marxist theories of imperialism for capitalism today. As Patnaik and Patnaik put it, ‘economics does not look at capitalism as it has really existed.’ They aim to correct this. But, I would argue, both accounts ultimately fall back upon a non-historical, economistic variation of historical materialism that, in reducing capitalism to the capital-wage labor relation, end up doing injustice to the history of imperialism in itself. Most importantly, the history of imperialism is also a history of capital exploiting a wide variety of racialized and gendered labor forms along a complex gradation ranging including ‘free’ wage laborers, chattel slaves, and unpaid housework.

More generally, Marx’s goal in Capital was famously to criticize political economy in order to superseded it. Instead, many variants of Marxism have been caught within an alternative political economy, as E.P. Thompson pointed out decades ago. To keep moving forward and expanding the ‘level of abstraction,’ though – and moving towards the concrete -also requires moving beyond a conception of capital centered around wage labor and capital.

Patnaik and Patnaik hint at this in a certain way when they argue that ‘in addition to the capital-wage labor relationship’ imperialism works to immiserate the petty commodity producers of the world. This could potentially lead to an argument in which other forms of labor besides wage labor are seen as historically part of capitalism. But much of the rest of their account falls back on discussing, for instance, the ways that the ‘metropolitan’ wage labor class depends upon a lesser paid wage labor class in the periphery. Thus while the authors could potentially expand on the question of capitalism’s diverse labor forms, they instead fall back on an analysis abstracted purely to the level of economics, in doing so they tend to fall back to what historical materialism has the potential to criticize.

In Smith’s account he defines capitalism primarily along the classic Marxist circulation of capital M-C-M prime discussion. For Smith, merchant capital is characterized by ‘buy cheap sell dear’ as oppose to real capitalism, defined by surplus value extracted by capital from wage laborers. Again, capitalism is defined abstractly, essentially as the capital-wage labor relationship. And imperialism in this regard is primarily about how capital in ‘imperialist countries’ exploits labor in different parts of the world to different extremes.

Harvey’s account, written a decade and a half ago, presents a somewhat more nuanced approach. Most importantly, he tries to bring together the question of capital’s drive for profit with an analysis of the state’s drive for territorial control and expansion. Harvey’s account also moves past economism by examining issues of militarism, nationalism, and racism in more or less detail, and sees these all as historically specific aspects of imperialism. The Marxist framework Harvey uses throughout his work – not just this book – again focuses capitalism on the wage labor-capital relationship. Additionally, historically speaking, the distinction between a territorial logic of politics and an economic logic of capital may not be so clear cut, as will be discussed below.

Capitalism and imperialism beyond wage labor

As Jairus Banaji has written, modes of production are not the same as relations of exploitation. In other words, capitalism has not historically exploited only one type of labor, but a variety. This has included, as Marxist feminists have discussed since the 1970s, gendered unpaid household work, and also a wide variety of forms of coerced labor from indentured work to chattel slavery. Historically, capital has subsumed pre-existing labor forms, brought them ‘formally’ into its control, and gradually remade them to create profits through the exploitation of different types of social labor.

More generally, within historical materialism this is a historical problem. Too often, the lessons of Marx’s Capital have been extrapolated and forced upon capitalism’s ‘actually existing’ history. The result has been that the ‘origins of capitalism’ are pre-framed as a search for the generalization of the wage labor-capital relation and market dependence. This has also led to the overly-sharp distinction between so called merchant’s capital and productive, industrial capital. But in the case of, for instance, the colonization of (what became) the United States, the divisions between merchant and industrial or productive capital were never so clear cut. The joint stock companies that brought over white settlers – or what might be better called European settlers in the process of inventing ‘whiteness’ – did so to profit. In the case of Virginia, the Virginia Company was not simply ‘merchant capital’; the company itself, early on, actually ran the colony with the goal of generating profit regardless of what type of labor form was dominant. And when the Dutch West India Company started New Netherland (eventually lost to the British, becoming New York) the goal was to build a profitable colony using a variety of labor forms including indentured and indebted hired out wage laborers and slaves.

And while slavery was an uneven type of labor, as slaves worked in conditions ranging from having been purchased by small, partly self-sufficient farmers to large plantations, so on plantations slavery was a form of calculated capitalism. Additionally, not all slavery was agrarian; in some cases, slaves worked in factories, built railroads, and so on. In these cases, it was not unusual for companies to use both wage laborers and slaves interchangeably, or else assign different jobs to each work category, as for capitalism firms, the goal was profit regardless of the particular labor form. To a certain extent racially organized chattel slavery could even be seen as an unusually ‘pure’ form of capitalism as the entire body of the slave is entirely owned by the capitalist, not just their labor power and time.

And it was a mixture of capitalism and complex labor forms that drove imperialism across the expanding American Empire. For much of this history until the decades before 1900, different social forces pushed westward expansion. Capitalism was always there, especially in the plantation south, but was somewhat less dominant in the north. A ‘society with capitalism’ became a ‘capitalist society’ as, over time, northern petty commodity producers were pushed into capitalist relations. This occurred in a variety of ways, from debts pushing farmers towards commodity production, to rising land costs and decreasing land availability, to capitalist speculators taking control of western land, and so on. And – of course – empire was built through the racially organized elimination of native peoples.

But in the American south, for example, the questions of imperialism and capitalism are inseparable from the question of slavery. States including Texas were brought into the expanding American Empire as slave states as capitalist plantation slavery moved west to generate profits: here capital pushed to acquire new land, which drove war and imperialism against Mexico and native American groups in the area.

Similarly, much of the far west, places like Montana, Colorado, and California, were incorporated into empire through capitalist driven imperialism. In particular, the state sought out and worked with capital to locate profitable zones of resource extraction in, for example, the mining industry. Thus the imperial conquest of space was pushed by capital. But the types of labor used in building this region included for instance Chinese coolie labor as, again, capital sought out whatever most effective and profitable racialized labor forms it could, not just traditional wage labor.

In this regard, also, the question of a distinct political-territorial logic of expansion and a capitalist logic of power remains blurry. Very often, political actors and economic actors were not separate, nor were the institutions that engaged in expansion. While Harvey has suggested that the agents of politics and economics in capitalism are different, and politicians aim to increase their power via other states, while capitalists seek our profit (and imperialism is driven by the interconnections between these) in practice these lines remained historically blurry. In the history of American expansion very often the speculators and capitalists moved west were the same people who build governments in new areas, and political authority was built with the goal of stabilizing their capitalist interests. In other words, just as it cannot really be said that Donald Trump’s political interests as President are distinct, exactly, from his business interests, so records show speculators moving to the frontier and forming states and becoming politicians with the overarching goal of generating profits from land acquired from dispossessed native Americans.

What this history shows, then, is that some of the analysis discussed above has too narrowly framed the question of imperialism as primarily driven by capital and the state using wage labor. In other words, an economistic view of capitalism derived from Marx’s Capital has substituted an actual historically grounded perspective on the history of capitalism and imperialism. The result is, essentially, an anti-historical, flawed concept of imperialism.

And while in our era it does appear, to an extent, that wage labor has become the dominant form of capitalist labor, slavery continues to persist in different ways. Capitalist labor, for that matter, rarely lives up to the level of ‘pure’ freedom economic perspectives suggest, workers tended to be forced to work through debt, state control, and coercion. The International Labor Organization for instance estimated in 2016 that almost 25 million people across the world continue to work as forced laborers in slave-like conditions. These are primarily people living in poor countries and often working in resource extraction jobs, as in these cases it may be possible to examine the ways that imperialism in the global north benefits from forced labor in the global south. In other words, even today, a theory of imperialism needs to account for the persistence of coerced and non-waged or indentured forms of labor.

In summary, this blogpost has suggested that the questions of capitalism and imperialism debated on roape.net are inseparable from the history of the racialized and gender labor forms including and beyond wage labor that capital has historically exploited. Imperialism remains a process structured beyond wage labor, and accounts that overly-economize this miss, in many regards, the deepest and most malignant aspects of capitalism’s exploitation: the ways capitalism conquers not only the labor time of the world’s people but all aspects of their lives. Not all workers under capital have even the luxury of spending 40 hours a week exploited directly by capital, and the rest of their lives consuming for capitalism to continue functioning. Rather, historically, capitalism and imperialism have rested on a bedrock of racialized and gendered entirely forced labor, and continue to do so.

James Parisot currently teaches in the sociology department at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA and is author of How America Became Capitalist: Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West.

Vasily Grigoryevich Solodovnikov – A Fighter for African Liberation

ROAPE

February 26, 2019

Vladimir Shubin celebrates the extraordinary life of an African scholar, activist and diplomat. Vasily Grigoryevich Solodovnikov, who died last year, spent decades working with African liberation movements. He worked tirelessly for the liberation of Southern Africa, and movements for colonial freedom across the continent. Shubin celebrates a legendary figure who was the first Russian citizen to be awarded the South African Order of O.R. Tambo.

By Vladimir Shubin

In November 1995 some weeks before my departure from the University of the Western Cape I was invited to deliver a lecture in the South African Military Academy in Saldanha. The Academy, a year and half after the first democratic election looked still like a ‘whites only’ establishment – it did change, but much later.[1] I was received by Chief of the Academy, South African National Defence Force Brigadier, who as soon as I mentioned my affiliation to the Institute for African Studies in Moscow struggled to pronounce a Russian name, difficult for outsiders – Solodovnikov.

This episode happened almost 20 years after Professor Solodovnikov left his post at the Institute for diplomatic service and ten years since he retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but his name was still well remembered both by his friends and also, should I say, his opponents. Born on 8 Match 1918, just four months after the Russian revolution, he lived a long life, but what he managed to accomplish could fill several lives.

As a rural boy from the ‘Old Believers’ village of Chrnorechye (Black River) in the Samara region he began working after finishing primary school and at 15 years old he became a tractor driver.[2] However his life changed when he saw a notice about the ‘workers faculty’, a bridging course for young workers to prepare them for tertiary education. Officially his primary education was not sufficient to register, but nevertheless he was admitted as a smart young man who proved to be a hard worker.

The road to knowledge had opened for Vasily. His studies were interrupted when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. Solodovnikov was not conscripted and tried to join the Red Army voluntarily but was refused for health reasons. However, with fellow students he made a contribution to the victory. Studying in the evenings, in the day students worked at the local aircraft factory, installing and then operating the equipment that was evacuated from the territory occupied or threatened by the enemy.

After receiving a degree as an industrial engineer, he began teaching in the institute where he trained but the next year he was recommended to the All-Union Academy of Foreign Trade. From that moment, Solodovnikov’s life took an important turn. After studying in the Academy, he worked in AMTORG, a Soviet foreign trade company in the USA, based in the Ministry of Foreign Trade in Moscow, then he joined the academic Institute of Economics as a doctoral student and after the successful completion of the degree he became its academic secretary. In 1956 Solodovnikov was one of the founders of the famous IMEMO – the Institute of World Economy and International Relations – and soon became its Deputy Director.

However, from 1961 he became involved in practical work once again, in the UN Secretariat and then as the Soviet Deputy Representative to the United Nations, but this did not last for long. In June 1964 he was appointed Director of the Institute for African Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Professor Ivan Potekhin, the Institute’s founder and first director by that time was terminally ill).[3]

So, administratively Solodovnikov became involved in African studies only in 1964, when he was 46 years old, but already by that time he had developed a deep (though distant) knowledge of the continent, dealing with what was called ‘underdeveloped’ and then ‘developing’ countries both in his practical work and academic studies, in fact his first monograph was titled ‘Export of Capital’ and one of his first articles was ‘Economic co-operation between the Soviet Union and Underdeveloped Countries.’

Solodovnikov was director of the Institute for 12 years and visited 21 African countries not only as an inquisitive researcher (he published 12 books and over 300 academic articles) and experienced diplomat, but also as a major public figure. During his years at the head of the Institute he was elected Chair of the Soviet Association of Friendship with Peoples of Africa and Vice-Chair of the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee.

The latter position meant that this author, who at that time was the Committee’s secretary for Africa, grew to know him well, especially when we were both involved in participation (and sometimes in organization) of international conferences of solidarity with liberation movements. Of them I would single out the International Conference in Support of the Peoples of Portuguese Colonies held in Rome in June 1970.

These days everybody tries to show that they supported the struggle against colonialism and apartheid, but this is very far from the truth. In particular, the government of Italy did its best to prevent the conference taking place, directed as it was against the then colonial regime in Portugal, a fellow NATO country. When the Preparatory Committee met in March the visas for Soviet representatives were issued but only on the day of the meeting.

The Italian government had good reason to worry. The conference was vital for the rise of solidarity movements in Western countries, in particular the trip of António Agostinho Neto – then leader of the liberation movement in Angola – to Sweden immediately after the conference, which signalled the beginning of direct assistance from Scandinavian countries to the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). However, the most important element of the conference was the reception of the leaders of the liberation movements – Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto and Marcelino Dos Santos by the Pope. This had the effect of a bombshell on Catholic Portugal.

For us the conference had important consequences as well. With approval of Professor Rostislav Ulyanovsky, who was a major figure in the Communist Party’s International Department, Solodovnikov stated clearly (and for the first time) in Pravda that Moscow was supplying ‘arms, means of transport and communications, clothes and other goods needed for a successful struggle’ to the liberation movements of Southern Africa and that ‘military and civilian specialists are being trained in the USSR.’ [4]

However, when a year later, in 1974, Solodovnikov headed another delegation of the Solidarity Committee to a conference in Oslo, the atmosphere was quite different, beginning from its title – the International Conference of Experts for Support of Victims of Colonialism and Apartheid in Southern Africa. The title reflected the ambiguous attitude of the organizers, both in the UN and in Nordic countries towards the liberation struggle, while we regarded ourselves as its supporters rather than experts, and our African comrades regarded themselves as fighters and not just victims.

As Vice-Chair of the International Congress of African Studies, Solodovnikov did a great deal to broaden contacts of the Soviet Africanists with their colleagues on the continent as well as in West and Eastern Europe in particular. [5]

A new stage in Solodovnikov’s activities began when in 1976 he was appointed the USSR Ambassador to Zambia. It is hard to believe now but at that very period the situation with anti-colonial forces in Zambia was at a critical moment. President Kenneth Kaunda openly supported Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA movement in the civil war in Angola and this effectively meant that he was on the same side as Pretoria. He bitterly criticised Moscow and Havana for their involvement in Angola saying, ‘A plundering tiger with its deadly cubs is now coming in through the back door.’

No doubt the main reason for Kaunda’s ‘change of heart’, his rapprochement with MPLA (and with the ANC for that matter) was the defeat of South African intervention and the strengthening of the Angolan government’s control over the country’s territory at that time. However, it is hard to overestimate the role played by the new Soviet Ambassador.

Prior to Solodovnikov’s departure from Lusaka the US Embassy in its dispatch to the State Department wrote in 1981, ‘Solodovnikov, a long favourite of the American and Western European media which touted him as Moscow’s Southern African wizard, leaves behind an impressive record in Zambia… Solodovnikov can take considerable personal credit for Soviet successes in Zambia. His patient, unaggressive style coupled with an impressive understanding of Africa put him in a good stand with Kaunda and the Zambian leadership.’[6]

His influence was impressive. Indeed, Solodovnikov even became a protagonist in four novels published in South Africa and the West! Solodovnikov’s stay in Lusaka coincided with the rise of the liberation struggle in South Africa and in particular with successful operations of the Umkontho we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the ANC. When MK fighters on 1 June 1980 attacked several strategic targets, South African Minister of Police Louis de Grange stated, ‘The Russian Ambassador in Lusaka, Dr Solodovnikov, played an important role in the planning of ANC and communist strategy and he was assisted by a South African refugee woman, Frene Ginwala’, though by that time Solodovnikov had not met her.[7]

As Soviet Ambassador he kept very close to his heart all matters of co-operation with the liberation movements based in Lusaka, sharing their achievements and difficulties. Naturally he was disappointed with the results of the March 1980 general election in Zimbabwe when ZANU prevailed over ZAPU. ZAPU was the party of Joshua Nkomo, Solodovnikov’s good friend. Soviet diplomatic relations were delayed until February 1981. Meanwhile, as Solodovnikov wrote bitterly later, ‘The government of R. Mugabe was in a hurry to establish diplomatic relations with those countries that in the period of the struggle of independence of the people of Zimbabwe were openly calling ZANU leaders and its rank and file fighters terrorists, who were allies of Ian Smith’s regime and who were clandestinely supplying him with oil and weapons, used to shoot Zimbabwean refugees in the camps in Mozambique and Zambia and fighters of the PFZ [Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe] including those from ZANU.’[8]

Soon after returning from Zambia, Solodovnikov retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and went back to the Academy of Sciences combining his research with public activity in the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee. His role in this period is reflected accurately in the title of his 2002 pamphlet – ‘USSR and South Africa 1987-1991: I opposed the policies of Gorbachev-Shevardnadze in South Africa.’[9] As head of the Solidarity Committee’s delegation to Lusaka in the end of February 1990 he met Nelson Mandela in the Zambian capital and then in March 1991 led the first Committee’s delegation to come to South Africa after the unbanning of the ANC.

Solodovnikov passed away on 30 September 2018, half a year after his centenary was celebrated. Even though reaching an advanced age, he continued to work, to share his vast knowledge and rich experience. During his long life Solodovnikov met many prominent revolutionaries and statesmen, from Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara to the presidents of African countries, and he also became a legendary figure who was rightfully the first Russian citizen to be awarded the South African Order of O.R. Tambo.

As to his political views let us quote his own words: ‘I, like my distant ancestors, who refused to accept church reform, remain in my previous positions, remain an ideological and political Old Believer.’ [10]

Vladimir Shubin is Principal Research Fellow, Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences and Research Fellow, Centre for Military Studies, Stellenbosch University.

Notes

[1] I can confirm its present non-racial character as Research Fellow of its Centre of Military Studies.

[2] ‘Old Believers’ are part of Orthodox Christians who left the Church after the reforms of the Patriarch Nikon of Moscow in the 17^th century.

[3] This version of the Institute’s name in English is accepted now, but I would prefer a more direct translation – Africa Institute (ИнститутАфрики in Russian).

[4] Pravda, 7 July 1970.

[5] Accidentally or not, the last congress was held in Khartoum in December 1991, in the days of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

[6] Report sent to Solodovnikov. American Embassy, Lusaka to Secretary of State, Washington DC. Subject:‘Soviet-Zambian relations; the end of Solodovnikov era.’ Doc_nbr:1981Lusaka0149/

[7] Frene Ginwala, future speaker of the National Assembly of democratic South Africa was living in the UK at that time.Rand Daily Mail, 3 June 1980.

[8] V. Solodovnikov. K istoriiustanovleniyadiplomaticheskihotnosheniimezhdu SSSR I Zimbabwe [On the history of the establishment of the diplomatic relations between the USSR and Zimbabwe] in Afrika v vospomnaniyahveterabovdoplomaticheskoisluzhby [Africa in Reminiscences of Veterans of Diplomatic Service], Moscow: XXI vek-Soglasie, 2000. P.165.

[9] V. Solodovnikov. SSSR n Yuzhaya Afrika 1987-1991: YavystupalprotivpolitikiGorbacheva-Shevardnadze v YushnoiAfrike. [“USSR and South Africa 1987-1991: I opposed the policies of Gorbachev-Sheverdnadze in South Africa]. Moscow: InstitutAfriki, 2002.

[10]V. Solodovnukov. Tvorcheskii put v afrikanistiru I diplomatiyu.[A Creative Path to Africa Studies and Diplomacy], Moscow: InstitutAfriki, 2000, p.25.

Support the Boycott

ROAPE

February 24, 2019

The Review of African Political Economy supports the boycott of the University of London central administration. The boycott is part of the campaign of outsourced workers in the union, the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), for the same treatment as their directly employed colleagues. The boycott will continue until these workers are made direct employees of the University of London on equal terms and conditions with other directly employed staff.

Currently outsourced cleaners, receptionists, security officers, catering staff and porters at the University of London central administration suffer from far worse terms and conditions. This means they receive worse sick pay, holiday pay, maternity pay and pension contributions than their colleagues for no other reason than they are outsourced.

Outsourcing is a key pillar of neoliberalism and it has devastated working conditions in public services and universities across the world. In Africa such practices have been part of the long-running restructuring of economies and states. Yet, the continent has also been at the cutting edge of campaigns against outsourcing. In South Africa, for example, in recent years the campaigns to decolonise higher education, end privatisation and scrap fees have also demanded and secured an end to outsourcing (see here).

We call on our readers and supporters to boycott all events organised at Senate House, University of London, support the campaign and sign the petition (please click on the link here).

For years outsourced workers at the university have campaigned, demonstrated and taken strike action against bullying, lies and repression.

For an end to bullying

Outsourced workers are much more likely to suffer from discrimination, bullying and harassment than directly employed workers. For example, the IWGB dealt with 54 complaints from outsourced workers at the University of London in 2017, over issues including unlawful deduction of wages, discrimination and failure to provide a statement of particulars. In the same period of time it dealt with only two complaints from direct employees.

For fairness

Outsourced workers have repeatedly been on strike and the university still refuses to sit down and negotiate with them.

For an end to lies

After initially committing to end outsourcing, the university has since gone back on its commitment and said that cleaners will remain outsourced until 2020 and catering until 2021, when in-house options will be presented alongside other commercial bids.

For accountability

Outsourced workers continue to live under a regime of bullying and with managers that are not held to account. In June 2018 the IWGB revealed that a senior manager for outsourcing company Cordant that had previously assaulted a migrant worker was a supporter of the far right. In October, the IWGB revealed that outsourcing company Cordant and the university failed to remove a Cordant manager after three separate women brought complaints of sexism and homophobia against him. Two of these women continue to be managed by the culprit.

For an end to repression

The University is responding to legitimate industrial action by the workers by hiking up security. The Guardian reported in June that just two months of heightened security cost the university almost half a million pounds. In the last strike on 30 October the University used bailiffs with handcuffs and extendable batons in a clear attempt to intimidate workers and protesters.

A Fighter for Justice – Caroline Mwatha Ochieng

ROAPE

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).

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