Popular Protest & Class Struggle in Africa – Part 9

July 5, 2017

Cows wade across a river beneath the skyline of Niamey, the capital of Niger, July 17, 2007. Niger, one of the world's leading producers of uranium, aims to more than double its output within the next four years as two new Chinese- and French-run mines come on line, a senior mining official said. REUTERS/Samuel De Jaegere (NIGER)

By David Seddon

In the last issue of the project, I reviewed the most recent developments in four countries I have recently discussed – Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe and the DRC – in all of which long-standing ‘elected dictators’ have refused to stand down, in some cases against growing internal opposition and external pressure, but with significantly differing outcomes. In this issue, I review the recent political history of Niger, where President Mahamadou Issoufou has – by contrast – recently announced that he would not amend the constitution to allow him to seek a third term after his second and final mandate ends in 2021.

Understanding Niger

The Republic of Niger became independent from France in 1960. It is one of the UN’s Least Developed Countries with an average per capita income of less than $2 a day (just under $400 a year in 2015) and is consistently one of the lowest-ranked countries in the world according to the UN Human Development Index (HDI): it was ranked last at 188th in 2014. Most (80 per cent) of Niger – the largest country in West Africa in terms of territory (almost 1.27 million sq kms) – is desert, and even the non-desert regions are constantly threatened by periodic drought. The majority of the 20 million or so inhabitants rely on dry-land farming and pastoralism, with some export agriculture clustered in the more fertile south. The country also exports minerals, especially uranium ore, and is the world’s fourth largest uranium producer. Since 2011, it has also started producing, refining and exporting oil. Output is currently around 20,000 barrels a day, which is about the same as its refining capacity. The country also exports minerals, especially uranium ore, and is the world’s fourth largest uranium producer. Since 2011, it has also started producing, refining and exporting oil. Output is currently around 20,000 barrels a day, which is about the same as its refining capacity.

Independence and the First Republic

Following the Overseas Reform Act (Loi Cadre) of 23 July 1956 and the establishment of the Fifth French Republic on 4 December 1958, Niger became an autonomous state within the French Community. Having organised a powerful coalition of Hausa, Fula, and (most prominently) Djerma leaders, including chiefs and traditionalists, in support of Niger’s independence referendum, Hamani Diori, leader of the Nigerien Progressive Party (PPN), gained French favour; and on 18 December 1958, after the referendum, when the Republic of Niger was officially created, Diori was appointed Head of the Council of Ministers (the provisional government) of the Republic of Niger. He became Prime Minister of the republic in 1959. During this period, the French government banned all political parties except the PPN, effectively making Niger a one-party state.

On 11 July 1960, Niger decided to leave the French Community and it acquired full independence on 3 August 1960 with Diori as its first president. Shortly after independence, Diori made the PPN the only legally permitted party. His government favoured the maintenance of traditional social structures and the retention of close economic ties with France. From the early 1960s, he ruled through a small number of pre-independence notables who sat on the PPN Politburo and largely by-passed even the cabinet. In addition to being both president of the republic and president of the PPN, Diori also directly headed a number of Ministries. From 1960 to 1963 he served as his own Defence Minister and Foreign Minister and again took over the Foreign Ministry from 1965 to 1967. The National Assembly of Niger met in largely ceremonial annual sittings to ratify government policies. Traditional notables, elected as parliamentary representatives, often unanimously endorsed government proposals. As president of the PPN, Diori was the only candidate for president of the republic, and as such was re-elected unopposed in 1965 and 1970 – an early ‘elected dictator’.

He gained a worldwide reputation for his role as a spokesman for African affairs and as a popular arbitrator in conflicts involving other African nations. Domestically, however, his administration was rife with corruption, and the government was unable (or perhaps unwilling) to implement much-needed reforms. Increasingly criticized at home for his negligence in domestic matters, Diori put down a coup in December 1963, which occurred concurrently with a border dispute with the Republic of Dahomey (now Benin). He also narrowly escaped assassination in 1965. Faced with an attempted military coup and attacks by members of Sawaba (an opposition movement that, from exile, attempted an abortive guerrilla campaign in the mid-1960s), he used French advisers and troops to strengthen his position. Close links with France led to student and trade union protests against what they described as ‘French neocolonialism’. However, his relationship with France suffered when his government voiced dissatisfaction with the low level of investment in uranium production on the occasion of a visit by Georges Pompidou to Niger in 1972.

In 1974, the combination of devastating drought and growing political unrest resulted in widespread civil disorder associated with allegations that a privileged few, including some government ministers and members of Diori’s family, were misappropriating stocks of food aid. On 15 April 1974, Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountché led a military coup that ended Diori’s rule. Diori was imprisoned for six years; after his release in 1980, he remained under house arrest until 1987. After being released from house arrest, he moved to Morocco, where he died on 23 April 1989 at the age of 72.

The new government led by Seyni Kountché declared itself to be the Supreme Military Council (CMS). Tandja Mamadou – who was later to become president himself – participated in the 1974 coup that brought Kountché to power and became a member of the CMS. In 1991, Tandja emerged as the head of one of two powerful factions in the ruling National Movement of the Development Society (Mouvement National pour la Societé de Développement, MNSD) and at a party congress held in November 1991, he was elected as MNSD President.

President Kountché ruled the country through the CMS until his death in 1987. The first action of the Kountché military government was to address the food crisis which was one of the catalysts of the military coup. While political prisoners of the Diori regime were released after the coup and the country was stabilized, political and individual freedoms were strictly limited. The Constitution was suspended, the National Assembly dissolved, and political parties were banned. On the other hand, a consultative National Council for Development (CND) replaced the National Assembly and, although political parties were outlawed, opposition activists who were exiled during Diori’s regime were allowed to return to Niger.

Despite the restrictions on civil and political liberties, the country enjoyed improved economic development with the creation of new companies, the construction of major infrastructure (building and new roads, schools, health centers) and minimal corruption in government agencies, which Kountché did not hesitate to punish severely. This economic development was helped by the uranium boom as well as strategic deployment of public funds. Generally amicable relations were maintained with France, and new links were formed with Arab states. Domestically, the country stabilized although personal and policy differences developed within the CMS.

Economic development was impeded by the recurrence of drought in 1984 and 1985 and by the closure of the land border with Nigeria from 1984 to 1986. Niger’s dependence on external financial assistance increased. Relations with the United States (by now the country’s principal source of food aid) assumed considerable importance. Meanwhile, a period of renewed tension between Niger and Libya had fueled Libyan accusations of the persecution of the light-skinned, nomadic Tuareg population by the Kountché regime. In May 1985, following an armed incident near the Niger-Libya border, all non-Nigerien Tuaregs were expelled from the country.

The Second Republic

Seyni Kountché’s health deteriorated in late 1986 and continued to worsen during 1987. He died at a Paris hospital of a brain tumor on 10 November 1987. He was succeeded by his Chief of Staff, Col. Ali Saibou, who was confirmed as Chief of the CMS on 14 November 1987, four days after Kountché’s death. Saibou introduced political reforms and drafted a new constitution, with the creation of a single party. A referendum in 1989 led to the adoption of the new constitution and the creation of the Second Republic of Niger. General Saibou became the first president of the Second Republic after winning the presidential election on 10 December 1989.

Saibou efforts to manage political reforms from the centre were opposed by trade unions and student groups which demanded the introduction of a multi-party democratic system. On 9 February 1990, a violently repressed student march led to the death of three students, which led to increased national and international pressure for a National Conference. The Saibou regime acquiesced to these demands by the end of 1990. There were other pressures on the regime as well, including Toubou and Tuareg rebellions in the north, as these groups demanded greater political recognition and a more substantial effective share of the country’s resources.

From 29 July to 3 November 1991, a National Conference gathered a wide range of different interest groups to examine the political, economic and social situation of the country and make recommendations for its future direction and development. A transitional government was installed in November 1991 to manage the affairs of state until the institutions of the Third Republic were put into place in April 1993.

After the National Sovereign Conference, the transitional government drafted a new constitution that eliminated the previous single-party system of the 1989 Constitution and guaranteed more freedom. While the economy deteriorated over the course of the transition, there were certain notable political accomplishments, including the successful conduct of a constitutional referendum; the adoption of key legislation such as the electoral and rural codes; and the holding of several free, fair, and non-violent nationwide elections. Freedom of the press flourished, with the appearance of several new independent newspapers.

The Third Republic

Mahamane Ousmane won elections in 1993. One achievement of the Ousmane government was the signing of peace agreements with the Toubou and Tuareg groups that had been in rebellion since 1990. This was in effect the outcome of an initiative started under the National Sovereign Conference. These groups claimed they lacked attention and resources from the central government. The government agreed to absorb some of the former rebels into the military and, with French assistance, to help others return to a productive civilian life. The Ousmane presidency was, however, characterised by exceptional political turbulence, with four changes of government and early legislative elections in 1995. The parliamentary election led to a forced cohabitation between a rival president and prime minister and ultimately to governmental paralysis

Government paralysis and the prevailing political uncertainty were used as justification for a second military coup. On 27 January 1996, Col. Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara led a military coup that deposed President Ousmane and ended the Third Republic. Col. Maïnassara created a National Salvation Council, composed of military officials, which he headed. The Council supervised what it defined as a six-month transition process, during which a new constitution was drafted and presidential elections were held – on July 7–8, 1996 – in which Mamadou Tandja ran again, as did Ousmane. On the second day of polling, however, both Tandja and Ousmane were placed under house arrest along with the other opposition candidates and held for two weeks. When the results of the election were announced, Tandja took third place (with 16 per cent of the vote) behind Maïnassara (with about 52 per cent) and Ousmane (with about 20 per cent).

The Fourth Republic

The elections were viewed nationally and internationally as irregular since the electoral commission was replaced during the campaign (not to mention the house arrest of several candidates). Despite this, Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara became the first president of the Fourth Republic. His efforts to justify what were undoubtedly questionable elections failed to convince donors to restore multilateral and bilateral economic assistance; as a result, a desperate Maïnassara ignored the international embargo against Libya and sought Libyan funds to aid Niger’s economy. In repeated violations of basic civil liberties by the regime, opposition leaders were imprisoned and journalists often arrested, and deported by an unofficial militia composed of police and military.

In January 1997, following a pro-democracy demonstration, Tandja was arrested along with former President Ousmane and former Prime Minister Mahamadou Issoufou and held until 23 January. On 9 April 1999, Maïnassara was assassinated during a military coup led by Maj. Daouda Malam Wanké, who established a transitional National Reconciliation Council to oversee the drafting of a constitution for the Fifth Republic with a French-style semi-presidential system.

A new constitution was adopted on 9 August 1999 and was followed by presidential and legislative elections in October and November of the same year. The elections were generally found to be free and fair by international observers. Significantly, and unusually, Wanké withdrew himself from government affairs after the new and democratically elected president was sworn in office.

The Fifth Republic

After winning the election in November 1999, President Tandja Mamadou was sworn in office on 22 December 1999 as the first president of the Fifth Republic. Tandja was of mixed Fula and Kanuri ancestry and was the first President of Niger who was not ethnically Hausa or Djerma. He immediately introduced a number of administrative and economic reforms that had been halted due to the military coups since the Third Republic. Niger was heavily in debt and was not receiving any foreign aid due to the 1996 coup and subsequent suspension of democratic institutions. Tandja focused on economic development, negotiating with the civil service unions and with foreign donors.

Many did not approve of Tandja’s measures in reducing government spending. In 2001, students at the University of Niamey staged violent protests against the reduction of their government grants. On 31 July 2002, some soldiers in Diffa started a mutiny demanding pay and improved living conditions; this briefly spread to Nguigmi and the capital Niamey a few days later. Loyalists defeated the mutineers and restored peace by 9 August, but Tandja came under political fire for his decrees blocking communication about the rebellion.

President Tandja Mamadou was re-elected for a second term in 2004, thus becoming the first president of the republic to win consecutive elections without being deposed by military coups.

From 2007 to 2008, the Second Tuareg Rebellion took place in northern Niger, worsening economic prospects at a time of political limited progress. The political environment actually worsened during 2008 as Tandja and his supporters sought to extend his presidency by modifying the constitution, which limited presidential terms in Niger. Proponents of the extended presidency rallied behind the Tazartche (a Hausa word meaning ‘continuity’) movement, were confronted by opponents (anti-Tazartche) composed of opposition party militants and civil society activists.

Food Price Crisis: 2007 to 2008

From the beginning of 2007 to early 2008, the prices of some of the most basic international food commodities increased dramatically on international markets. The international market price of wheat doubled from February 2007 to February 2008, hitting a record high of over $10 a bushel. Rice prices also reached ten-year highs. In some nations, milk and meat prices more than doubled, while soy – which hit a 34-year high price in December 2007 – and maize prices have increased dramatically. Total food import bills rose by an estimated 25 per cent for developing countries in 2007. This inevitably had an impact on food aid: as food aid is programmed by budget rather than volume, rising food prices meant that the World Food Programme (WFP), for example, needed an extra $500 million just to sustain current operations.

To ensure that food remained available for their domestic populations and to combat dramatic price inflation, major rice exporters, such as China, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Egypt, imposed strict export bans on rice. Conversely, several other nations, including Argentina, Ukraine, Russia, and Serbia either imposed high tariffs or blocked the export of wheat and other foodstuffs altogether, driving up prices still further for net food importing nations while trying to isolate their internal markets

This created a global crisis and resulted in widespread political and economic instability and social unrest across the developing world in particular. In the period from February to April 2008, there were popular protests in a number of countries across Africa – including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Gabon, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal and Tunisia – and Niger.

On 30 April 2008, Thailand announced the creation of the Organization of Rice Exporting Countries (OREC) with the potential to develop a price-fixing cartel for rice. This was seen by some as an action to capitalise on the crisis. The prospect of the release of Japan’s rice reserves onto the market had already lowered prices by mid-May.

December 2008 saw sharp decreases in the price of staple crops from their earlier highs. Corn prices on the Chicago Board of Trade dropped from US$7.99 per bushel in June to US$3.74 per bushel in mid-December; wheat and rice prices experienced similar decreases. The FAO, however, noting that food prices remained high in developing countries and that the global food security situation had worsened, warned against ‘a false sense of security’, noting that the credit crisis could cause farmers to reduce plantings. By early 2011 food prices had risen again to surpass the record highs of 2008. Some commentators saw this as the resumption of the price spike seen in 2007–08.

In Niger, the government weathered the food price crisis and the popular response to it. But the President was about to throw a spanner in the works In March 2008, during meetings with French President Sarkozy, Tandja had explicitly stated that he would not seek a third term. In early 2009, however, he announced his plan to organize a constitutional referendum on the extension of his presidency in order to remain in power at the end of his two legal five-year terms. He claimed that he was responding to the desire of the people of Niger. Despite opposition from political parties and against the decision of the Constitutional Court which ruled in June that the referendum would be unconstitutional, Tandja went ahead with his plans.

The referendum would vote on the dissolution of the Fifth Republic and the creation of the Sixth Republic under a fully presidential system of government, offering a yes or no vote on the suspension of the constitution and granting President Mamadou Tandja a three-year interim government, during which the constitution of the Sixth Republic would be formulated. On 20 June, the Constitutional Court declared the plan illegal, but Tandja subsequently assumed emergency powers and dissolved the Court. The opposition boycotted the referendum but a referendum was held in Niger on 4 August 2009; and a new Constitution was adopted with a 68 per cent turnout and 92.5 per cent of voters, according to official results.

The (Brief) Sixth Republic

This resulted in the overturning of the 1999 Constitution, and created a Sixth Republic with a presidential system, as well as a three-year interim government with Tandja Mamadou as president. The new Constitution was declared illegal by the Constitutional Court; but the President dissolved the Court and assumed emergency powers. Political and social unrest grew, however, before, during and after the referendum project, and ultimately led to a military coup in February 2010 that ended the brief existence of the 6th Republic.

A military junta led by Captain Salou Djibo was established specifically in response to Tandja’s extension of his presidency by the adoption of a new constitution. The Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, under Djibo (now a General) carried out a one-year transition plan, drafted a new Constitution and held elections in 2011. These were judged internationally as free and fair. In these elections, Mahamadou Issoufou was elected as the first president of the Seventh Republic.

The Issoufou Era

Issoufou had been Prime Minister of Niger from 1993 to 1994, President of the National Assembly from 1995 to 1996, and he had been a candidate in each presidential election since 1993. He led the Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism (PNDS-Tarayya), a social democratic party, from its foundation in 1990 until his election as President of Niger in 2011. During the Presidency of Mamadou Tandja (1999–2010), Issoufou was the main opposition leader.

In 2009, the PNDS and Issoufou strongly opposed Tandja’s efforts to hold a referendum on the creation of a new constitution that would allow him to run for re-election indefinitely. At an opposition rally in Niamey on 9 May 2009, Issoufou accused Tandja of seeking ‘a new constitution to stay in power forever’ and the establishment of ‘a dictatorship and a monarchy’. As leader of the opposition coalition – the Front for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) – he said on 4 June 2009 that a planned anti-referendum protest would be held on 7 June despite an official ban. On 27 June, Tandja assumed emergency powers on 27 June. Accusing Tandja of undertaking a coup d’état, ‘violating the constitution and … forfeit[ing] all political and moral legitimacy’, Issoufou called on the armed forces to ignore his orders and urged the international community to intervene. He was detained at his home by the army’s paramilitary police on 30 June; he was questioned and released after about an hour. A nationwide strike called by the FDD, held on 1 July, was deemed partially successful by the press.

The referendum was held on 4 August 2009, despite the opposition’s furious objections and calls for a boycott, and it was successful. Speaking on 8 August, shortly after the announcement of results, Issoufou vowed that the opposition would ‘resist and fight against this coup d’etat enacted by President Tandja and against his aim of installing a dictatorship in our country’. On 14 September 2009, Issoufou was charged with misappropriation of funds and then released on bail. He said that he was actually charged for political reasons. He left the country. On 29 October 2009, international warrants for the arrest of Issoufou and Hama Amadou were issued by the Nigerien government, and Issoufou returned to Niamey from Nigeria late on 30 October in order ‘to cooperate with the judiciary’.

In February 2010, Tandja was ousted in a military coup, and the new transitional junta enabled the opposition leaders to return to active politics in Niger while preparing for elections in 2011. At a meeting in early November 2010, the PNDS designated Issoufou as the party’s candidate for the January 2011 presidential election. Issoufou said on the occasion that ‘the moment has come, the conditions are right’; and he called on party members to ‘turn these conditions into votes at the ballot box’.

The Issoufou Republic

Issoufou won the January–March 2011 presidential election in a second round of voting against MNSD candidate Seyni Oumarou and was inaugurated as President on 7 April 2011In July 2011, a plot to assassinate Issoufou was allegedly uncovered; a major, lieutenant, and three other military personnel were arrested. In April 2013, a court lifted a government ban on opposition marches.

On 10 May 2013, it was reported that thousands of opposition supporters staged a protest rally against what they said was the failure of President Issoufou to improve living standards in Niger, one of the world’s poorest countries. The rally, in the capital Niamey, was the largest in Niger since pro-democracy protests against then-President Mamadou Tandja that helped to block his bid to serve a third term and ushered in a military coup that toppled him in February 2010. It was the first public show of strength by the Alliance for the Republic, Democracy and Reconciliation in Niger (ARDR), a coalition of 15 opposition parties formed in October. The ARDR was formed in response to the creation of a national unity government by Issoufou, including breakaway members of MODEN and former president Tandja’s National Movement for the Development of Society (MNSD).

Police sources, who asked not to identified, said some 20,000 people attended the rally, while organizers put the figure at 30,000. The National Police said in an official statement around 5,000 demonstrators took part. ‘Mahamadou Issoufou promised an end to food insecurity but the population continues to be decimated by hunger and thirst’ said Amadou Hama, president of the National Assembly whose Nigerien Democratic Movement (MODEN) who had broken away from the ruling coalition that year. Hama and MNSD leader Oumarou Seyni were widely regarded as the main challengers to Issoufou for the 2016 presidential election.

On 7 November 2015, the PNDS designated Issoufou as its candidate for the 2016 presidential election. In February 2016, Issoufou won 48 per cent of the votes in the first round of the elections. As no candidate obtained a majority, a second round was needed. A coalition of opposition parties boycotted the second round. Issoufou subsequently won with 92.5 per cent of the votes. The Constitution of Niger currently limits the president to two terms of five years. Issoufou, 65, was re-elected in March 2016, following the end of his first term, albeit in elections boycotted by the opposition.

On 2 April 2017, Issoufou announced – in an interview on state television on the occasion of the first anniversary of his inauguration for his second mandate – that he did not intend to seek re-election in 2021. ‘One of my greatest ambitions is to organise free and transparent elections in 2021 and pass the baton to another Nigerien whom the Nigeriens will have chosen’, he said. ‘I am a democrat at heart (…) I don’t have the arrogance to think that I am an irreplaceable providential man’, he added. If he keeps his word, then he will be the first democratically elected president of Niger to ensure a peaceful transition of power to a new head of state.

We shall have to wait and see. For, as The Economist remarked on 26 November 2016, in an article on the US military presence in Niger: ‘though a staunch ally of the West, Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, is no exemplary democrat. He was re-elected in February, but only after the opposition boycotted the second round of the vote. His main opponent was locked up and then fled the country for exile abroad’.

David Seddon (criticalfaculty1@hotmail.co.uk) is a researcher and political activist who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world.

Featured Photograph: the skyline of Niamey, the capital of Niger, July 17, 2007.

Voices of the Next Generation

ROAPE

June 28, 2017

My students make me much more optimistic about the future of Africa’s political economies. Unwilling to accept the criticism with which academics attack almost every actor involved in African development including politicians, businesspeople, international organisations and multilateral institutions, my students don’t just want to stand on the side-lines and analyse the problems, rather they want to get onto the pitch and find ways to change the world. This mission is particularly strong among my students from African countries, who see development, not as an abstract concept, but as a concrete and tangible future they want for their societies.

Inspired by our students, this year, Thandika Mkandawire and I decided to ask our African Development course students at the LSE to write critical and thoughtful blog-posts about the most pressing issues concerning economic and social development within African countries. We then asked students to vote on the best submission from each week. The results are now being published on ROAPE.net, Africa@LSE and ID@LSE. They represent the views of an emerging body of critical young scholars interested in structural economic transformation and development within African societies.

Their posts are cutting edge, both at the forefront of academic debates and current affairs. They tackle the pressing issues of today’s world such as UK-Africa trade after Brexit and the impact of the election of Trump having on ideological battlefields within development. They also bring fresh eyes to long-standing challenges such as driving agricultural diversification, tackling youth unemployment and mobilising domestic resource mobilisation.

Together, these blogposts grapple with the twin challenge of development: how can African economies transform themselves within a competitive world in which their development ‘partners’ are actively competing with them over the real spoils of development – knowledge and ‘dynamic rents’ – WHILST STILL dealing with the instabilities that economic growth brings with it, such as rising economic inequality, political rivalry and the often coercive means with which states and capitalists reshape land, property and relations of labour. Our course tries to engage with development on its own terms; it’s extremely hard (something that is often taken for granted). It’s often unfair (not all boats rise with the tide). And that it destroys as much as it creates. Yet, we come into the classroom with the core belief that development contains the seeds of a better world. To me, I study, teach and research development because I believe it is the greatest tale on Earth and like all great tales, there is no simple morality and the characters are fully fleshed and complex.

We hope these contributions will make our readers both more cognisant of the immense challenges facing African economies but perhaps more hopeful about the future as well. As our students make clear, there are real opportunities in 2017 for African development, both with the ideological shifts happening around us as well as the opportunities that new technology and growing domestic and regional markets offer up. Determining how and for whose benefits these opportunities will be realised will ultimately be a political challenge for each society. Development cannot be administered or delivered through best practice guidelines. It has to be fought over and improvised from day to day and from place to place. For this reason, it is crucially important for scholars and teachers to bring new voices into the discussion and to engage with young African scholars and activists who will take part in these struggles first-hand.

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

These are the posts so far but watch this space for more:

The Rise of Trump: An Opportunity for African Industrialisation?

Tinhinan El Kadi and Avelino Chimbulo

Call for more Diversification in AGRA’s vision of Agriculture Modernisation

Denise Ntonta

A New Vision for Addressing Youth Unemployment in Africa

Marta Santoboni and Alexandra Karlsson

Benefits for all? How the UK can shape trade relations to promote African development and economic transformation

Elsa Makouezi and Tom Brady

Domestic Resource Mobilisation in Africa: A Need for Intervention

Gretta Digbeu

Are Developmental States Accidents of History?

Fadekemi Abiru

The Evidence Mounts: Poverty, Inflation and Rwanda

ROAPE

June 28, 2017

By Sam Desiere

In a recent blogpost an anonymous researcher on roape.net showed that poverty in Rwanda has increased from 2011 to 2014 by 5 percentage points. This contradicts the official poverty statistics and narrative, which claim that poverty decreased by 5.8 percentage points, namely from 44.9% in 2011 to 39.1% in 2014 (NISR, 2015). Importantly, the author published the Stata-files used to analyse the data of the EICV 3 and EICV 4 household surveys, enabling other researchers to verify his claims.

Recently, I also calculated trends in poverty using the same datasets. Although I used a slightly different (and, arguably, less sophisticated) methodology, the results confirm that poverty did not decrease. In addition, I show that the poverty trends are very sensitive to the inflation rate used. With an inflation of 16.7% (as reported by the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda, NISR), poverty indeed decreased by at least 5 percentage points. With an inflation rate of 30% – which is in my view more in line with the ‘real’ inflation rate – my estimates show that poverty increased by 1.2 percentage points.

The fact that two researchers arrive – independently from each other – at the same conclusion, strengthens my belief that the EICV surveys show that poverty in Rwanda has increased. This has important implications for the current debate about (rural) policies in Rwanda, but I leave a discussion of these implications to researchers and policy makers more familiar with the reality on the ground and focus in this blogpost on the technical aspects of estimating poverty trends.

In this this post, I briefly describe my methodology and key findings and discuss (food) price inflation, which turns out to be a critical parameter. The Stata do-files required to replicate my findings can be found here.

Methodology

Rwanda’s poverty estimates are based on the Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey (EICV by their French acronym), which are conducted every three years. I used data from EICV 3, conducted in 2010/11 and EICV 4, conducted in 2013/14, which are made publicly available by the NISR. More specifically, I used the modules on food consumption purchased on the market and food consumption from own production. In both waves, the questionnaire of both modules is nearly identical. Food consumption is reported for more than 100 food items.

Unlike the anonymous researcher, I did not use the modules on non-food expenditure. I did so for two reasons. First, the NISR reports that most households spend over 60% of their budget on food. Hence, food expenditure is a good proxy of poverty. Second, non-food expenditure would require some additional data cleaning, which requires additional assumptions. Hence, I simply calculated food expenditure in both waves.

The meta-data of EICV 4 (available on NISR’s website) clearly stipulates that each sampled household in Kigali was visited 11 times over a period of 33 days. The modules on food consumption were administered during every visit. Rural households were visited 8 times over a period of 16 days. The meta-data of EICV 3, however, does not provide information on the number of times a household was visited. I simply assumed that the same methodology, for both rural and urban households, was followed in wave 3 as in wave 4. If this assumption is wrong – something I could not check – the results presented below will be erroneous.

In both waves, households reported how much they had spent on food purchased on the market by food item since the previous visit of the enumerator. I simply added up expenditure on all food items. Households also reported how much they had consumed from own production. Converting the consumption from own production in monetary values was more challenging. Households typically reported consumption from own production in kg. Some households also reported in the same module how much they would have paid on the market for this food item. I used this information to calculate the median, national price for each food item and used this price to convert consumption from own production in its monetary value. Since relatively few households reported prices, I did not attempt to calculate region specific prices nor did I correct for price seasonality. On this point my methodology differs from the anonymous researcher, who calculated a Laspeyres price index to account for spatial and temporal price variation.

To verify my assumptions, I checked whether my estimates of food expenditure are correlated with the household poverty status as reported by the NISR and included as a separate variable in the datasets. In both waves, food expenditure was lower for households classified by the NISR as extremely poor compared to household classified as poor, and the expenditure of this group was in turn lower than the expenditure of non-poor households. These results, available upon request, confirm that my assumptions are at least partially similar to the assumptions of the NISR.

Food expenditure can only be compared between the waves if the food inflation rate between 2010/11 and 2013/14 is known. I used two different inflation rates. First, I used an inflation rate of 16.7%, which is reported by the NISR (NISR, 2016, p. 43). Second, I estimated inflation based on food prices reported by the respondents, which I also used to convert food consumption from own production in monetary values. Inflation is then defined as a weighted average of the price increase of nine important crops. I used the same weights as those used by NISR to construct the 2013/14 adjusted food poverty line (NISR, 2015, table B4, p. 38). These estimates of inflation will be discussed in greater detail below.

Since I did not calculate total expenditure, but only food expenditure, I could not use the poverty lines proposed by the NISR. I therefore followed the ‘inverse’ methodology. First, I assumed that the NISR correctly estimated poverty in 2010/11 (44.9%) and used this information to determine the food expenditure threshold in 2010/11 prices that corresponds with this poverty rate. Second, I deflated food expenditure in 2013/14 using two different inflation rates, namely 16.7% and 30%. The first inflation rate corresponds with the inflation rate used by the NISR and thus allows me to replicate the findings of the NISR. The second inflation rate corresponds with my own estimate of inflation using the price data from EICV 3 and EICV 4. Third, I used the food expenditure threshold as an alternative to a poverty line to estimate the poverty rate in 2013/14. This approach is valid because I am not interested in ‘absolute’ poverty figures, but only in poverty trends.

In all analyses, I used the population weights to make the results nationally representative.

Results

Poverty trends

Using the EICV 3 and EICV 4 datasets, I calculated food expenditure per adult equivalent, respectively in 2010/11 prices and 2013/2014 prices. In order to estimate poverty trends, food expenditure in 2013/14 has to be deflated to express it 2010/11 prices. Poverty trends are very sensitive to the inflation rate used to deflate food expenditure. Results are presented for two inflation rates: (1) an inflation rate of 16.7% as reported by NISR and (2) an inflation rate of 30%, which is at the lower end of my inflation estimates based on ESOKO price data or EICV price data (see below for a discussion of inflation).

Figure 1 shows cumulative frequency distributions of food expenditure for these two situations, while table 1 summarizes poverty trends

With an inflation rate of 16.7% (left panel, figure 1), real food expenditure per adult equivalent increased for all households from 2010/11 to 2013/14 and, as a result, poverty decreased. Assuming a poverty rate of 44.9% in 2010/11 (which corresponds to a food poverty line of 100,232 RWF per adult equivalent), poverty decreased by 7.9 percentage points. This poverty reduction is even more pronounced than reported by official statistics, which states than poverty decreased by 5.8 percentage points.

With an inflation rate of 30% (right panel, figure 1), food expenditure does no longer increase between 2011 and 2014 for all households. Again assuming that poverty is 44.9% in 2010/11, poverty even increased by 1.2 percentage points.

Figure 1: Cumulative distribution of food expenditure per adult equivalent for EICV 3 and EICV 4 for an inflation rate of 16.7% and 30%

Table 1: Poverty trends in function of the inflation rate

	Inflation: 16.7%	Inflation: 30%
Poor HH EICV 3 (official statistics)	44.9%	44.9%
Poor HH EICV 4 (own estimates)	37.4%	46.1%
Trends in poverty (percentage points)	-7.5	+1.2

In sum, the poverty trends are very sensitive to the inflation rate. With an inflation of 16.7% from 2011-2014, poverty decreased by at least 5 percentage points, which is in line with the official reports. With an inflation rate of 30%, poverty does not decrease. The question thus boils down to an accurate estimation of the inflation rate between 2011 and 2014.

Inflation rate

The EICV survey is not an ideal dataset to estimate inflation, because it does not contain much information on food prices. As explained earlier, some households report prices for those food items consumed from own production. This does not only mean that the number of observations is relatively limited, but also that households report prices of those items they did not buy on the market. I nevertheless used this information to calculate mean and median average prices by food item. I calculated national averages without taking into account price seasonality or regional price differences. In order to estimate ‘average’ inflation, a weighted average is taken over nine crops. The weights are proportional to the weights used for the construction of the 2013/14 adjusted food poverty line (NISR, 2015, table B4, p. 38). These nine crops account for 86% of the total calorific intake of the food basket. Two crops dominate this index: cassava (fermented) (weight: 38%) and dry beans (weight: 25%).

Figure 2 shows the increase in mean and median prices between 2010/11 and 2013/14 for nine crops, while the horizontal lines indicate the weighted average. The increase in median prices ranges from 10% for sorghum to 50% for cassava (both flour and roots). Median and mean inflation are 33% and 42%, respectively. This corresponds to an annual inflation of 9.5% and 12.5%, respectively.

Figure 2: Price increase for nine crops from 2010/11 to 3013/14 (mean and median prices)

These inflation estimates are substantially higher than the ones reported by NISR, which states that food prices increased by 16.7% between Jan 2011 and Jan 2014 (NISR, 2016, p. 43). Moreover, the estimates based on the EICV surveys are remarkably similar to the estimates based on detailed ESOKO price data, where I estimated inflation at 30.5% over the 2011-2014 period (details not reported here).

In sum, I believe that the ‘real’ food inflation rate is substantially higher than the one used by NISR to estimate poverty trends. This probably explains why I find that poverty increased, while the NISR reported that poverty decreased. These findings raise concerns, not only for Rwanda’s (rural) policies, but also for international donors that have presented Rwanda as a model for development because of the supposedly strong poverty reductions.

Sam Desiere is currently a senior researcher at HIVA, the research institute for work and society of the University of Leuven, Belgium. In 2015 he obtained a PhD in agricultural economics from Ghent University, Belgium, which focused on data quality of household surveys in developing countries.

Featured Photograph: As part of the DFID funded Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme (VUP), Rwanda’s flagship Social Protection Programme, women and men in northern Rwanda work on a public works site in 2012, building terraces to prevent soil erosion.

ROAPE Workshops: Structural Transformation in Africa

ROAPE

June 26, 2017

Editorial Working Group

The Review of African Political Economy (with the support of the Journal of Southern African Studies) is convening a series of three workshops in Africa in the 2017-18 period to explore Structural Transformations in Africa today: interventions from the Left. The workshops will help link analysis and activism in contemporary Africa from the perspective of radical political economy; consider whether a new politics is emerging from sites of contestation in Africa and reflect on lessons which might be drawn for the continent from revolutionary historical transitions. The workshops will include analysis of state formation following popular uprisings; the opportunity for socio-economic transformation and the frequent betrayals of revolutionary promise. There will be an examination for example of continuity and change between colonial and post-colonial development in Africa, and in the year of the Bolshevik revolutions centenary opportunity to revisit the Soviet Union’s dealings with Africa and potential for revolutionary action and international solidarity in the 21st century. Each workshop will be organised around the themes of structural transformation and will be looked at through three linked topics of: (i) Economic strategy and industrialisation; (ii) Africa in a neoliberal world; and (iii) Resistance and social movements in Africa. All three topics will be examined in all three workshops but there will also be a local focus at each meeting after an initial recap on the overall themes. There will be one key note speaker for each meeting and one speaker to summarise and provide context for the meetings ensuring continuity from previous meeting and rationale for each meeting. The first part of first the day of each workshop will be on this common theme ensuring continuity and connectivity with the previous meeting. The rest of the time in each workshop will relate general themes to local circumstances and conditions and in doing so will bring together key speakers from Africa and Europe, combined with a call for local contributions and interventions. The three interlinked workshops each of two days will take place in Ghana (November 2017), Tanzania (April 2018) and South Africa (September 2018). We plan to have about 50 participants at each meeting; and three/four sessions for each workshop day.

The historical context of the initiative include: the centenary of the Russian Revolution (that indicated the need for a cool and critical appraisal of its betrayal of revolutionary promise, the state-sponsored models it delivered of industrialisation and economic development and its interventions in Africa); 50 years since the Arusha Declaration in Tanzania; 60 years since independence, reassessing the legacy of ujamaa and so on. These anniversaries are all acknowledged within the remit of our conference themes and questions.

The aspiration of the workshop series idea is also to reaffirm ROAPE’s political and intellectual project and to return it to its base in Africa by way of direct engagement on the ground; to decentralise its activist agenda and promote outreach in Africa; to create and recreate networks of debate and solidarity; to link critical theory with practice and the potential for popular resistance; and to imagine a new vision of development.

The meeting in Ghana will detail analysis on economic strategy and industrialisation. This debate will take note of the example and character of Soviet industrialisation compared to the puny efforts to date in Africa. The meeting will discuss the history and consequences of industrial strategy in Africa as well as possible development options for industrial and non-industrial struggles for alternatives to existing globalisation. What is the discussion regarding alternative strategies for trade and aid, investment and relations between agriculture, industry and services in Africa? And what are the important debates about labour and employment opportunities with a re-evaluation of neo-liberal African development and the emergence of capitalist social relations and challenges to them?

The Dar es Salaam meeting will recap debates form the previous meeting and detail local responses and strategies that have critiqued the promise of decolonisation. Africa remains a dependent cog in the globalising logic of world capitalism and one intention of this meeting is to explore the neoliberal environment in which Africa has been situated and the limitations this poses to alternative futures. We will explore the dynamics of contemporary imperialism, trade and aid, and interrogate national, local and pan-Africa responses to modern day relations between the continent and northern and BRIC actors. What has been the impact of the dramatic ‘entrance’ of Chinese capital onto the continent, and subsequent debate about a role for the BRICS, financialisation, the 2008 crash and strategy employed by the international financial institutions to reform global financial and trade architecture? African responses to the challenges of the post 2008 crisis for analysis include migration, regionalism and pan African and national strategies.

In South Africa, we will recap themes from previous meetings. The discussion then centres on resistance and social movements and will examine how neoliberal reconfiguring of African economies does not go without ‘kickback’. Protest and social movements abound, but we need to assess their nature and prospects and consider which social forces they might consolidate. Documentation of African struggles for justice and development can help reflection on trade union action and informal organisations in urban and rural settings. The meeting can explore the reasons behind protest, whether it is enough to see a link between spikes in food prices and protest or whether and to what extent other political, social and economic issue drive resistance to neo-liberalism. What are the dynamics of protest, the contributing factors that lead to full-scale (and occasionally ‘insurrectionary’) challenges to state power on the one hand and demobilisation and disintegration of popular protest on the other? What sort of viable, counter-hegemonic politics, is emerging, or could emerge, on the continent to challenge neoliberal and elite monopolisation of political and economic power? This workshop will focus not only on South African case-studies but other cases of African resistance. Activists and social movements are at the forefront of political and economic struggles from both rural and urban settings and the inter-relationships between these two spatial locations will also be explored.

Workshop format, organisation and speakers

Each workshop will include a group of local activists and scholars that are a key part of the gathering. This will be supplemented by elements of a core group from RoAPE which includes: Ray Bush, Janet Bujra, Peter Dwyer, Peter Lawrence, Gabrielle Lynch, Jörg Wiegratz, and Leo Zeilig. In Accra for the meeting in November 2017 the convenors are Third World Network (contact Yao Graham), in Dar es Salaam for the April 2018 the local organisers (contact Issa Shivji) and in Johannesburg for the the local organisers are The Society, Work and Development Institute, at Witwatersrand University (contact Karl von Holdt) and the Social Change Research Unit, at the University of Johannesburg (contact Peter Alexander)..Local organisers are also tasked with organising local venue, accommodation and other arrangements. Additional key participants may also lead discussion in the workshops; already confirmed for this capacity are: Ben Fine., Samir Amin, Sarah Bracking, Bayo Olukoshi, Yao Graham, Dzodzi Tsikata, Trevor Ngwane, Issa Shivji, Raymond Sango, Tafadwa Choto, Thandika Mkandawire, Jayati Ghosh, Tetteh Homeku, Omar Gueye, Chambi Chachage, Munyaradzi Gwisai, Qondi Moyo, Rudi Dicks, Hameeda Deedat, Hilma Shindondola-Mote, Femi Aborisade, Moussa Demba, Baba Aye, Amani Mhinda, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Munyaradzi Gwisai, Ali Kadri, Max Ajl.

Keynote speakers: Currently we have Samir Amin, Ben Fine, Munyaradzi Gwisai and Sarah Bracking. Yao Graham will speak at all three workshops. Issa Shivji will be a key speaker in Dar. Peter Alexander and Karl von Holdt in South Africa are taking charge of the workshop in September 2018. For the workshops in Dar es Salaam and Johannesburg we can confirm the attendance of Tafadzwa Choto, Dzodzi Tsikata, Baba Aye and Ambreena Manji.

Funding is extremely limited, but if you are interested in finding out more about these workshops, or attending please contact: roape@outlook.com

‘Le Pain et la Liberté’: A Tribute to André Tibiri

ROAPE

June 22, 2017

By Bettina Engels

Life is like a cord, as one speaker at his funeral said, some are long, others are short, but what counts is that it carries something. André Tibiri’s cord was short, but it carried so very much. A central figure in the last two decades of social struggles in Burkina Faso, a charismatic leader of the student and youth movements, an honest and dedicated militant for democracy and social justice, André passed away, aged 46, on 24 May 2017.

Student struggles in the 1990s

André began his studies at the University of Ouagadougou in the early 1990s, during the first years of the regime of Blaise Compaoré, who became President after the shooting of Thomas Sankara in 1987- a period characterised by the harsh repression of social movements in Burkina Faso, particularly the student movement. The death of Dabo Boukary, one of André’s comrades at the university, marked the starting point of his struggles. Dabo was killed in 1990 after the Presidential Guard had violently put down a student demonstration.

André rapidly became a key figure in the student struggle in Ouagadougou, the Burkinabè capital. From 1995 onwards, he was president of the Association Nationale des Étudiants du Burkina (ANEB, National Association of Burkinabè Students), the branch of the Union Générale des Etudiants Burkinabè (UGEB, General Union of Burkinabè Students) at the University of Ouagadougou, and from 1997-2001 he was president of UGEB. In 1996-1997, he led the massive protests to demand greater financial support for students, a wave of mobilization that would eventually lead to the creation of the Aide FONER (Fonds National pour l’Éducation et la Recherche, National Fund for Education and Research), a refundable grant for undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students, which until today, is one of the most important achievements of the student movement.

In 1997 André, together with three other activists, was arrested and accused of issuing “death threat[s], willing coups and injuries, and damage of public goods”. He was locked up in the Maison d’Arrêt et de Correction de Ouagadougou (MACO, the main prison of Ouagadougou) for 45 days. This was not the only price he had to pay for his commitments: The granting of his PhD in biology, focusing on the biochemistry of natural substances, was also delayed in response to his activism. Despite such hurdles, André had fond memories of the turbulent times in the late 1990s, which were characterized by great social and political upheaval.

In an interview in 2013 André reported that one day a student whom he did not know stopped and greeted him on the street. The student asked: “Tibiri, what about your thesis?” He replied: “I am still doing it, and I think I will complete it soon.” “You have to keep up your courage”, the student said. “We are praying for you all day.” As André emphasised, “It is an honour to me, and I am proud that I have benefitted from the confidence of thousands of youth traversing the campus.”

The student protests focused on conditions on campus, on the forced introduction of the BA/MA system, and on the unrelenting and repressive way the regime of Blaise Compaoré reacted to their claims. André’s keen analysis of the overarching context, in particular the impact of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) urged by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, was highly appreciated by his fellow students. “Most of these measures [inspired by the SAPs] are taken without considering the social situations of the students and lecturers”, André explained in the 2013 interview “After the measures of expulsion and intimidation of the population, [the regime] launched a charm offensive addressing the media, by announcing the investment of millions of CFA Francs for capacity building, infrastructure, and enhancement of the students’ social situation. But for me, the veritable Achilles’ heel of all this are the SAPs: We have to break through the SAPs if we wish to get out of this situation.”

Unity of the popular classes

The student union, UGEB, was also among the organisations leading the civil rights struggles after the murder of journalist Norbert Zongo on 13 December 1998. Zongo, the founder and editor of the independent newspaper L’Indépendant, had conducted research on the death of David Ouédraogo, a driver for Blaise Compaoré’s brother, François. The journalist was found shot dead in his burned-out car. The government declared his death an accident. The next day thousands took to the streets and demanded an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death and an end to impunity. André, together with trade union and human rights movement leaders, set up the Collectif d’Organisations Démocratiques de Masse et de Partis Politiques (Collective of the Democratic Mass Organisations and Political Parties, or ‘Collectif’) to gather the various protests together under one umbrella. On 1 December 1999, André, the Collectif’s president Halidou Ouédraogo, and the president of the trade union federation Confédération Générale du Travail du Burkina (CGT-B), Tolé Sagnon, were arrested after a protest march organised by the Collectif. On 3 December, they were accused by the judiciary of “incitement of military turmoil, incitement of civil disobedience, and endangering state security. The charges were finally dropped, and the accusation reduced to “sapping the morale of the troops.”

André consistently argued that the ‘popular classes’ – students, employees, small-scale farmers, self-employed informal workers, petty traders – share the same interests and should therefore unite in their struggles. “UGEB has always stated clearly […] that its militants must position themselves in the camp of the people”, André explained. “This builds the unity of the student struggles at the campus and the engagement in the activism after campus life.”

Based on these convictions, André was not only engaged in the student movement but also in human rights and labour movements. On 7 December 2000, together with fellow militants, he created the Organisation Démocratique de la Jeunesse du Burkina Faso (Democratic Mass Organisation of Burkinabè Youth, ODJ), a cross-class movement defending the democratic and social rights of and promoting solidarity among youth – where youth is understood as a social rather than an age category. “In the context of Burkina, which is essentially characterised by imperialist domination, and by the struggles of our people for social liberation”, André explained, “every youth, whatever his or her ethnic origin, philosophical or political conviction or religious beliefs, can be a member of ODJ.”

André never withdrew from his political engagement, neither when he completed his PhD or when he became a senior researcher at the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé (Institute of Health Sciences Research, IRSS), one of four state research institutes that form the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique (National Centre for Science and Technology Research, CNRST). He was president of ODJ until his death. As such, he played an important role in the struggles of the popular classes against the high cost of living resulting from the global food and fuel price crises in 2008; in the insurrection that finally overthrew Blaise Compaoré after 27 years in the presidency on 30-31 October 2014; in the popular resistance against the Presidential Guard’s coup d’état in September 2015; and in the mobilization related to the presidential elections of 29 November 2015. ODJ called for a boycott of these elections: “What do promises count for if we know that the candidates are those who have helped Blaise Compaoré to seize power and to keep it for 27 years?” André questioned in 2015. For him, to boycott the election was a claim of citizenship. Militants should rather organise themselves to struggle to achieve substantial change, rejecting “the illusions of putschists and electoralists.”

A life dedicated to struggles for social justice and equality

André’s biography resembles a chronology of recent social struggles in Burkina Faso. It was only from mid-2016 onwards that his illness obliged him to limit his political activities. His engaged life was impressively reflected by the many speakers at his funeral, with moving discourses by leaders of trade unions and human rights, women’s and student organisations. André passed away in a hospital in Tunis, where he had been transferred the week before. When his body arrived at the airport of Ouagadougou at 4 am on 29 May 2017, hundreds awaited him, silently lining the streets and accompanying the funeral car, on foot, through the city to the Maison de Peuple, the hall where the ceremony was held. Later in the morning, hundreds again were there to greet him at the municipal Gounghin cemetery in Ouagadougou, where Norbert Zongo is also buried, shouting “Pain et liberté pour le peuple” (Bread and liberty for the people). One of his comrades posted on a social network site: “Those who leave us are considered in French to be buried, in Africa, we say that they are hidden. […] We have not buried André; we have rather hidden him. His ideas, courage, engagement and dedication cannot be buried. André now sleeps the sleep of the just.”

Bettina Engels is political scientist at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, www.land-conflicts.net.

Propertied Proletarians? The Kenyan Cut-Flower Industry

ROAPE

June 21, 2017

By Nungari Mwangi

The roape.net debate series has discussed capitalism in Africa through forward looking industrial policy and possibilities for structural transformation. Yet, the backbone of many African economies continues to be in agriculture. Nungari Mwangi contributes to ROAPE’s debate by looking into export horticulture in Kenya and its role in the expansion of capitalism in Africa. Using a case study based on her PhD research of marginalized small scale flower farmers, she challenges the orientation towards European export markets, and calls for a focus on local and regional markets for their survival.

The expansion of capitalism in African agriculture developed through the systematic orientation of exports to Europe. This was part of a diversification approach fostered by the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) through which the export of high value horticultural commodities such as flowers, fruits and vegetables propped up many African economies. For example, in Kenya, cut flowers have been grown for export since the 1970s. Providing approximately 38% of the total cut flower imports to the European Union, the country is the third largest exporter of cut flowers in the world after Colombia and Ecuador. The sub-sector is the second highest earner of foreign exchange in agriculture after tea, and is the driver of growth in horticulture providing for 70% of the total value of horticulture exports. Cut flower production has historically been dominated by large scale growers and exporters who produce up to 97% of flowers for export predominantly roses.

What is interesting is that according to the literature, Kenya is the only country in the world that has smallholders growing cut flowers for export. They typically grow what are known as ‘fillers’ or summer flowers which are all the colourful varieties (such as Arabicum, Eryngium, Alstroemeria, Agapanthus and Craspedia among others) that make-up a bouquet of greenhouse varieties such as roses or chrysanthemums. These are grown in the open, in areas between a quarter acre to five acres of farmland. The farmers are scattered in the central highlands and Rift Valley areas and are few – not more than 10,000 in total. It is difficult to get exact numbers because there is no central database updating figures. The last estimate of their contribution in 2008 by N.M Muthoka and Alice Muriithi and placed it between 5-13% of the value of cut flower exports. The last comprehensive smallholder survey was done in 2010 by Fintrac and estimated their contribution at between $7-10 million. The earliest instance of involvement of smallholders in the Kenyan cut flower industry goes back to the 1970s when the government was trying to indigenize an industry largely seen as being dominated by foreigners.

The Nairobi Flower Market where smallholders bring their flowers to sell (Nungari Mwangi, 2016)

Today, smallholders grow cut flowers as a diversification strategy from other high value crops such as tea, green-beans, peas and potatoes, and so these smallholders are experienced farmers. In interviews for my research into export floriculture in Kenya, they often described cut flowers as ‘gold’ for them and argued that they were more financially secure and therefore food secure after venturing into flower production. Of the approximately 10,000 smallholder cut-flower farmers in Kenya, the vast majority operate as out-growers for export firms such as Wilmar Agro Ltd. These are networks of unorganized smallholder farmers who supply fillers to export companies which are responsible for the coordination of supply, logistics and marketing to the Dutch flower auction. Outgrower schemes are the only form of organization for smallholders in this sub-sector given that there is currently no flower farmers’ cooperative.

The Dutch auction has been the centre of the global flower trade for the last century and brings together thousands of varieties of flowers and hundreds of big buyers from all over Europe and arguably one of the world’s most sophisticated logistical supply machines. It is a buyers’ market in that prices are determined by buyers’ demand as regulated by the Dutch auction clock, which is unique as it begins the bid with the highest price per stem and descends. This system is meant to match the flowers which are in highest demand with the best possible price. Producers are therefore only price takers. The only bargaining power they have is to build a strong reputation based on high quality and consistency at the auction so that their flowers stand out. The auction works well for smallholders because it absorbs all supply irrespective of volumes and varieties and has minimal restrictions in terms of entry certifications. However, costs of doing business are high which encourages trade in large volumes.

The Dutch Auction in Aalsmeer (Nungari Mwangi, 2016)

It is often easier for smallholders to set out as out-growers working for an export company which navigates the complexities of temperature-sensitive supply and logistics, export handling and the politics of market access. In some cases, these export firms provide farmers with inputs and crop specific training as well as quality checks. However, as Maurice Bolo wrote about in 2010 export firms’ relationships with smallholders often limit the farmer’s ability to move beyond production into say, value addition or even to trade, where they might be in direct competition with the export firms. This situation renders them into what Lenin once described as “propertied proletarians, workers cultivating company crops on private allotments”.

Nevertheless, a few experienced farmers have evolved beyond these out-grower schemes to also operate as farmer-entrepreneurs exporting directly to the auction, while others have tried, with limited success, to consolidate varieties and form their own exporting companies. The idea of a farmer-entrepreneur here stands not as an idealized state of smallholder development but rather as a figure of resistance against becoming appendages to the interests of global capital.

Since the release of the World Bank Development Report, ‘Agriculture for Development’ in 2008 and a subsequent report in 2009 entitled ‘Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant’, there has been a revised interest on how best to integrate otherwise marginalised smallholders in the production of fruits, flowers and vegetables to European export markets and beyond. In 2004, Tanya Korovkin wrote that in Ecuador, where the flower industry is at a more advanced capitalist stage than in Kenya, the rise of large scale flower production led to increases in land prices and crises in peasant agriculture namely fragmentation, declining yields and reliance on off-farm income leading to the proletarianization of the rural labour force. This model of inclusion in development often assumes that deeper integration is always the better deal, rather than engaging them and thinking through the most strategic means for smallholders to engage with markets, both globally and locally, in such a way as to enable them to become entrepreneurs in their own right as opposed to labourers on plantations or out-growers. It tends to overlook the realities of “adverse incorporation”, so the many complex ways in which integration can be disempowering and exploitative to how people are able to earn a living over time. Andries Du Toit and Sam Hickey have written widely about the notion of adverse incorporation which they see as enacted by unequal power relations operating within imperfect markets in a globalizing world economy marked by transnational capital flows, and patriarchal norms.

I interviewed smallholders in Kenya who had broken away from export firms to form their own flower export company. They felt these export firms were paying them considerably less than their produce was worth based on the prices at the auction. Disillusioned, they described how their “hearts were broken” from failing to manage how seasons affected the dynamics of demand and the very high cost of doing business at the Dutch auction. Further they explained how they failed to appreciate the overwhelming cost and complexity of managing the high-tech, temperature sensitive processes of getting the flowers from farm to auction in a matter of hours. Brokers and consolidators nevertheless remain pivotal for farmers’ access due to their market knowledge and export networks that remain beyond reach for the average farmer.

In search of access to year-round markets which the traditional Dutch auction does not offer, farmers are increasingly seeking new trade relationships such as direct partnerships with supermarkets. The ability to negotiate the price in direct markets prior to supply provides precious bargaining power that is not available when selling to the auction. However, a different set of capabilities is required to branch into these ‘direct’ markets such as the ability to produce consistently and to meet increasingly stringent supermarket certification standards. Florists are much less policed by certification requirements but are much less directly accessible for smallholders. Some supermarkets such as ASDA – a major player in the UK – have moved into direct sourcing where they partner with large farms that consolidate supply from smallholders, manage the quality checks and package the flowers into bouquets. However, this model is exclusive and its ability to involve a wide number of farmers is yet unclear.

Farmer-entrepreneurs who grow niche varieties of summer flowers have greater autonomy to seek a relationship that allows them the option of taking on more value-added functions and/or to specialize in production. The survival of smallholders in the flower industry as entrepreneurs is dependent on them working together towards these more ‘relational’ terms of trade, which may not necessarily mean deeper integration into the seasonal, tightly policed buyer-driven European export markets. Indeed, it may well lie in exploring the potential in local markets.

Researcher with small-holder, Felista Thuo, in March 2016 on her five acre farm (Phinna Farm) in Njabini. The photograph was taken in a field of Agapanthus flowers. Felista has been growing flowers since 1982 (Nungari Mwangi, 2016)

So, the expansion of local and regional supermarkets in Kenya such as Nakumatt and Game, as well as international players such as Carrefour which are considered ‘upmarket’, offer new opportunities for smallholders to supply their produce locally. Other local opportunities include the real estate boom that exhibits a demand in landscaping floriculture, as well as the prevalence of corporate events and weddings with demand for cut flowers. However, more research is required into the size, dynamics and evolution of the local market. Farmer entrepreneurs might be better off exploring opportunities in local supermarkets and malls that have fewer or lower entry barriers and that might offer year-round consistency of demand and more opportunities for skills-based activities such as the creation of bouquets locally. In particular, targeting local markets could be a better option for newer less-organised farmers who struggle with production of large volumes and the complexities of export logistics. Smallholders currently trade the overflow of their high quality harvest at the Nairobi Flower market which is open from 4 am to 7 am daily and is an important source of cash flow for them. Large scale farms sell their rose “rejects” (whatever did not make it for export) at this market at a throw-away price and so the quality of produce sold at this market for local consumption is variable.

Yet, access to local and regional markets comes with its own set of challenges – not least because not enough is known about these markets. The cost of transportation in East Africa is very high given poor quality of rural roads, lack of refrigerated trucks and cold chain infrastructure, inefficient taxation regimes and other bureaucratic hurdles. In terms of trade policy, tensions between Kenya and Tanzania have been high since Tanzania last year declined to sign the Economic Partnership Agreement which would guarantee duty free access of East African agricultural imports into the EU. Tanzania argues that it may lead the EU to dump cheap agricultural imports and in the long term jeopardize the country’s infant manufacturing industries. Looking towards West Africa, the government of Kenya has been working to overturn the ban on horticulture exports to Nigeria. Absurdly, Nigeria currently imports Kenyan flowers via a convoluted trade route from Holland or the UK – perpetuating the neocolonial hegemony of Europe as the hub of trade.

A strategic shift to exploring alternative opportunities in local and regional markets returns us to Samir Amin’s concept of delinking. In it he lays out a form of resistance to the dominant logic of capitalist globalisation by turning towards local and regional markets as an alternative from those developed in Northern countries. This is premised on Amin’s understanding that the centre develops at the expense of countries in the periphery through unequal exchange. In the large-scale export-led flower industry, this can be seen in the shift of production from Holland to the Global South to save on energy costs after the crisis of the early 1970’s, as well as benefiting from the suppression of wages and unions in the developing world after years of neoliberal policies. It can also be seen in the monopolization of the international flower trade at the auction in Holland, as well as the practice of storing profits offshore (see, for example, Kenya government sues Sher Karuturi for transfer pricing). Amin discussed the establishment of monopolies in the north and the capture of super profits as part of the mechanisms of capitalist globalization that reinforce unequal exchange and ‘underdevelopment’ which is when countries undergo economic growth but in ways that do not contribute to long term development (see also Christopher Hope’s blogpost in this series).

Acknowledging the unequal power of the Dutch auction over the long-term bargaining power of Kenyan producers, the Kenyan government (in the draft national horticulture policy of 2012) highlighted the possibility of setting up a regional flower auction in a bid to shift power dynamics to producers in the value chain. Though noble, this is a complex proposition that should first investigate the value and efficiency of services provided by the Dutch auction as well as the trends in the nature of demand for cut flowers in Europe and beyond. More achievable perhaps is robustly exploring local and regional markets that could present smallholder, cut flower farmer entrepreneurs with less restrictive options and greater bargaining power over the long term. Though this, in turn, might require a radical reorientation of national, regional and continental political-economy.

Nungari Mwangi is a PhD researcher at the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD research is on shifting power dynamics in the Kenya – EU cut flower value chain.

Featured Photograph: Netherlands 2009, (Dutch Flower Auction).

Youth in Africa: Resistance and Transformation

ROAPE

June 7, 2017

By Laura Mann

On 15 May, Pritish Behuria and I hosted a workshop on one of the key developmental issues facing African countries: growing youth populations. Although some view this on-going growth as a boon for African business in a global context of shrinking labour forces and consumer markets, others have been more cautious, pointing out that many African countries do not have productive ‘youth bulges’ (in which the working age population is larger than dependents) but rather growing dependency ratios (in which children out-number working adults). These more cautious observers claim demographic transitions have stalled in many African countries and even in countries where the birth-rate has fallen and a youth bulge is emerging, there are simply not enough formal jobs for the youth.

A ‘demographic dividend’ depends both on a youth bulge and on productive economic activities that make developmental use of that bulge. Much of the recent economic boom within African countries has been resource-intensive and “jobless”. So if African societies are going to turn their growing youth populations into assets rather than liabilities, what then is to be done? To answer this question, we welcomed over 60 academics, students, business people and developmental practitioners to discuss the challenge that Africans societies face in reimagining their economies and social policies in light of this demographic pressure. I will set out what I think were the two most important insights of the day:

First, one of the recurring themes of the day was the idea that development itself is destabilising, a theme that is really brought to the foreground when we start talking about changing population structures.

As Tim Dyson and Kate Meagher reminded us in the opening panel, changes in the population structure can fundamentally disrupt social order. Growing or slowing populations dislocates society and forces it to reimagine and restructure its economies and social policies. This attention to demography reveals the dynamism of development for rich and poor countries alike. ‘Development’ is not something a society passes through; it never ends. Development creates social change, social change creates social dislocation, and in turn social dislocation warrants social response and political recalibration. In other words, both lack of development and development itself can put pressure on society.

For example, Portia Roelofs talked about ‘development as demolition’ in Oyo State, Nigeria. To upgrade markets and make way for development infrastructure and real estate, traders are being forced to relocate to the city’s margins where new formal stalls and marketplaces have been built. Business is slow in these new markets and traders struggle to make profits yet they are still being convinced to move. A moral economy of expropriation has emerged in which the government labels those that accept this demolition-led development as ‘enlightened citizens’ who understand the ‘sacrifice’ necessary in the here and now while those that resist are deemed deviant or disruptive, as ‘bad youth’ holding back the country’s future. The youth themselves try to subvert this discourse by insisting that they are part of the rising tide of formality, carefully sweeping the pathways in front of their stalls and keeping a safe distance from the road. Eyob Gebremariam similarly discussed how the Ethiopian government has claimed that recent protests are being driven by the country’s growth; patience is required while the government adjusts itself and tries to find solutions. His work focuses on the evolution of the government’s youth policies over time. Across African countries, the ‘youth’ have been identified as a threatening social group although as Eyob and others point out, the youth is not a single coherent category. I was really struck by his claim that the Ethiopian government has admitted the slow pace and limitations of growth and that growth itself, rather than lack of growth is responsible for frustrations among the youth.

While this kind of political rhetoric indicates a sensitivity to what development really involves, it also opens the door to anti-developmental political mobilisations as people feel they do not benefit from the cherished growth promised and promoted by their political leaders. This possibility forces us to think about the temporality and unevenness of development. If development only exists in a distant future or for other groups, populism and political violence can emerge in the here and now. Development therefore does not only entail growth but the articulation of social responses to manage the unevenness and pace of that growth. This social response may take the form of innovations in social policy and/or corporatist social contracts, but as Karl Polanyi warns such ‘social protection’ may also take deadly form. ‘Development’ is a rocky sea upon which societies struggle to keep afloat.

Adam Branch provided a fascinating lens to examine this rocky sea, focusing on recent Uganda protest movements such as the 2011 Walk to Work protest. Due to the difficulties that opposition parties face in uniting disparate constituencies of urban poor, urban middle classes and rural poor, the democratic system has struggled to translate frustrations about development into more inclusive policies. In such a political context, a developmental model has emerged that is not based on a stable working class and productive relations between capitalists and workers but rather on a form of securitized urbanism in which elites are physically separated from the poor. Both security services and NGOs help discipline and regulate their behaviour so as to maintain the status quo. Instead of seeing violence as outside of development and as politics as something ‘issue-less’ or merely ‘patrimonial’, Branch suggests that we should see these frustrations and the repressions they provoke as part of development, as particularly messy attempts by opposition groups to upset that status quo and as attempts by the state elites to ‘protect’ their growth from the destabilisation wreaked in its path (for more details, see his new book).

Simply put, while we tend to think of social conflict as responses to lack of growth or economic activity, what we might actually be witnessing are reactions to forms of growth deemed morally reprehensible or corrupt. This moral ambiguity was addressed by other speakers as well. Eschewing simple narratives about youth unemployment and violence, both Luisa Enria and Akin Iwilade described the context in which violence can emerge from youth employment/unemployment. Luisa Enria repeated the words of one of her respondent’s: “As long as we face embarrassment, it is not a job.” Rather than the labour market being a clearinghouse for the supply and demand of labour, Enria frames the labour market as a social site imbued with meaning, identity and social networks. Young people come into contact with politics not as members of a ‘youth category’ but as members of particular occupational categories and social groups with different ideas about what constitutes dignified and undignified work. Similarly Akin Iwilade describes contexts in which labouring can become both subversive and complicit: when legal work is unimaginable, crime can become employment and ‘legal’ employment, crime. At their best, the youth involved in oil patronage in Niger Delta see themselves as businesspeople and entrepreneurs, and at worst, they are freedom fights subverting an oppressive social order. Development is therefore not understood as the mere presence or absence of growth (or even its distributions across social categories) but as reflecting power struggles over who gets to determine what is legitimate and what is crime.

In all three cases of Uganda, Sierra Leona and Nigeria, developmental frustrations did not find voice in formal political structures or parties but rather in forms of political violence and subversion. Such research reveals one of the key weaknesses of the liberal imagination that emerged in the 1990s. While proponents of political and economic liberalisation believed that elections would naturally translate into better economic policies as parties would have to compete for votes, what African countries have instead inherited are societies struggling to voice their political frustrations through formal structures and states struggling to contain those frustrations in liberal ways.

The popular response to youth unemployment has often been job creation programmes, particularly in post-conflict environments such as Sierra Leone or Niger Delta. Yet panellists discussed the lack of imagination surrounding these programs as well as the disjuncture between self-employment strategies, youth aspirations and national growth strategies. After all how many hair-dressers or taxi drivers can one economy absorb and does such work take people ‘off the streets’ and out of social contexts in which they experience ‘embarrassment’?

This brings us to the second key insight of the day: that we need to connect youth employment programmes into broader strategies of economic transformation.

Emma Murphy discussed some of the results of her project, POWER2YOUTH, which sought to explore the dynamics of youth exclusion and inclusion in North Africa and the Middle East. Moses Oketch similarly discussed his research into TVET programmes in African countries. They spoke of how a ‘supply side myth’ had emanated from within the European Union and spread into other regions of the world through ‘active labour market programmes’. These initiatives imagine that the problem is one of skills mismatch or lack of skills and that if young people simply acquire the ‘right skills,’ then they will become developmental assets for their countries, helping to drive innovation and economic upgrading. Yet this myth is premised on a ‘free market’ vision of development in which private firms willingly absorb those skills and upgrade into (riskier) higher value activities. In this view, there is no need to examine the ‘demand for labour’ because the private sector will sort it out on its own.

However, we have pretty conclusive evidence that the highest unemployment rates are among graduates of university and training colleges. From my own doctoral work on higher education expansion in Sudan, expanding educational opportunities in the 1990s (in which Sudan went from having three public universities to twenty seven) did not result in a more dynamic and more highly skilled economic activities but rather in higher levels of graduate unemployment and intense frustrations among the youth. We really can’t keep believing that training young people is automatically going to result in economic upgrading and innovation. Rather we have to confront the unwillingness of private firms to engage in the kinds of (risky) economic activities that would require and use those skills. If we fail to do so, we are in effect asking the youth to live in a surreal ‘as if’ world in which their new skills are in demand when they are not.

While both business school practitioners and heterodox development economists believe the private sector plays an extremely key role in development, these two groups conceptualise the private sector very differently. While one speaks of entrepreneurs and their dispositions for risk-taking and hard-work, the other speaks of capitalists and their strategies of accumulation and political influence. As Thandika Mkandawire highlighted in his keynote speech, over the past three decades or so, the word ‘entrepreneurship’ has come to be universally favoured while the word ‘capitalism’ is seldom spoken out loud. Is it mere semantics or does the ascendency of ‘entrepreneurship’ over ‘capitalism’ reveal something more profound about the imaginative space in which development debates exist?

Catherine Dolan’s presentation helpfully described the history of Kenyan developmental discourse, recounting the continuities and change over time. The colonial state saw Kenyans primarily as labourers that needed to be trained and dislocated from their social networks. Policies sought to create stable ‘civilised’ working classes with new ‘dispositions’ and new habits. Education was vocational, rather than academic or professional for colonial officers felt Kenyans lacked ‘the flexibility of mind’ to become businesspeople. Upon independence, the discourse changed dramatically as the context was not one of labour shortage but of labour surplus. Kenya now needed businessmen to grow the economy, redress the racist colonial policies and help create jobs for its labour. This was the era of state-led growth with Kenyan capitalists positioned as the midwives of development. Over time, due to liberalisation in the 1980s and the more recent inclusive market paradigm, the figure of the capitalist has slowly faded and the entrepreneurial petty trader has emerged in its place. Entrepreneurship is no longer seen as a class category or as a group that acts in concert with larger economic plans but rather as striving individuals possessing talents and special dispositions.

Yet in Marco Di Nunzio’s presentation, Why don’t hustlers become businesspeople? he made it clear that being an entrepreneur is anything but an individual endeavour. Hustlers often fail to become businesspeople because they lack the resources and social connections to turn their ‘street trust’ into ‘shop trust’. Becoming an entrepreneur requires hanging out with other entrepreneurs and moving in such circles requires money and connections. These are important insights when we think about contemporary processes of formalisation, be it the cannabis sector in rich countries or informal transport systems in poor countries. Formalisation changes the parameters of who can take part in business. The myth of the self-made man (or woman) minimises stories about useful connections while the language of entrepreneurship disguises the need for broader strategies of economic development.

We invited an entrepreneur/capitalist to speak at the workshop. Perez Ochieng shared her experiences of running a successful business, SACOMA. Her firm aims to capture more value from basic crops like sweet potato by working with universities on innovation into storage, production/recipes and branding. She is frustrated that so many of her fellow Kenyans spend time chasing development funds rather than building successful businesses. To her, entrepreneurship should be placed at the forefront of developmental efforts. Yet her firm is currently working with UK based universities on upgrading. This arrangement means that much of the upgrading strategy is being captured by UK actors and workers, not Kenyans. In future, she wants to work more with Kenyan universities yet this requires broader strategies and support networks.

One of the striking aspects of her talk was her discussion about the importance of these helpful networks and institutions within British universities and the British government in helping to propel her business forward. Her experience demonstrates the importance of situating discussions of entrepreneurial-led growth within broader economic plans that coordinate efforts between private firms, universities and government departments. Thandika’s comments about capitalism moved her to wonder if she herself was a capitalist or entrepreneur and what that meant for Kenyan development.

Our last panel of the day addresses some of these bigger issues by looking at youth employment in different sectors of the economy: Cathy Boone discussing the position of youth in agriculture, Tom Goodfellow and Pritish Behuria discussing the Rwandan government’s strategy to boost employment in services and Roy Macconachie discussing the slow (and somewhat unintentional) diversification of the Sierra Leonean economy. In all three presentations, there was a sense that we have to shift our attention away from thinking about ‘supply side’ programs towards an approach that examines the interplay between skills and broader economic strategies to absorb those skills.

Thinking about capitalism (as opposed to entrepreneurship) focuses our attention back on relationships between capitalists, states and labour and on strategies to diversify and structurally transform economies. Job creation programs that focus merely on training or on self-employment among the youth close down this imaginative space and individualise the structural failure of neo-liberalism on the African continent. And until we see economic development as a holistic process in which development itself can create social dislocations, and we are honest about the distribution of those benefits and harms across society, we will not be able to manage the demographic and economic pressures facing African societies.

Featured Photograph: South African students celebrating after examinations, 2016.

The Smoking Gun: Britain, North Africa and the Manchester Boys

ROAPE

June 2, 2017

By John Pilger

The unsayable in Britain’s general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy.

Critical questions – such as why the security service MI5 maintained terrorist “assets” in Manchester and why the government did not warn the public of the threat in their midst – remain unanswered, deflected by the promise of an internal “review”.

The alleged suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was part of an extremist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, that thrived in Manchester and was cultivated and used by MI5 for more than 20 years.

The LIFG is proscribed by Britain as a terrorist organisation which seeks a “hardline Islamic state” in Libya and “is part of the wider global Islamist extremist movement, as inspired by al-Qaida”.

The “smoking gun” is that when Theresa May was Home Secretary, LIFG jihadists were allowed to travel unhindered across Europe and encouraged to engage in “battle”: first to remove Mu’ammar Gadaffi in Libya, then to join al-Qaida affiliated groups in Syria.

Last year, the FBI reportedly placed Abedi on a “terrorist watch list” and warned MI5 that his group was looking for a “political target” in Britain. Why wasn’t he apprehended and the network around him prevented from planning and executing the atrocity on 22 May?

These questions arise because of an FBI leak that demolished the “lone wolf” spin in the wake of the 22 May attack – thus, the panicky, uncharacteristic outrage directed at Washington from London and Donald Trump’s apology.

The Manchester atrocity lifts the rock of British foreign policy to reveal its Faustian alliance with extreme Islam, especially the sect known as Wahhabism or Salafism, whose principal custodian and banker is the oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Britain’s biggest weapons customer.

This imperial marriage reaches back to the Second World War and the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The aim of British policy was to stop pan-Arabism: Arab states developing a modern secularism, asserting their independence from the imperial west and controlling their resources. The creation of a rapacious Israel was meant to expedite this. Pan-Arabism has since been crushed; the goal now is division and conquest.

In 2011, according to Middle East Eye, the LIFG in Manchester were known as the “Manchester boys”. Implacably opposed to Mu’ammar Gadaffi, they were considered high risk and a number were under Home Office control orders – house arrest – when anti-Gadaffi demonstrations broke out in Libya, a country forged from myriad tribal enmities.

Suddenly the control orders were lifted. “I was allowed to go, no questions asked,” said one LIFG member. MI5 returned their passports and counter-terrorism police at Heathrow airport were told to let them board their flights.

The overthrow of Gaddafi, who controlled Africa’s largest oil reserves, had been long been planned in Washington and London. According to French intelligence, the LIFG made several assassination attempts on Gadaffi in the 1990s – bank-rolled by British intelligence. In March 2011, France, Britain and the US seized the opportunity of a “humanitarian intervention” and attacked Libya. They were joined by Nato under cover of a UN resolution to “protect civilians”.

Last September, a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry concluded that then Prime Minister David Cameron had taken the country to war against Gaddafi on a series of “erroneous assumptions” and that the attack “had led to the rise of Islamic State in North Africa”. The Commons committee quoted what it called Barack Obama’s “pithy” description of Cameron’s role in Libya as a “shit show”.

In fact, Obama was a leading actor in the “shit show”, urged on by his warmongering Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and a media accusing Gaddafi of planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew… that if we waited one more day,” said Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

The massacre story was fabricated by Salafist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda”. The Commons committee reported, “The proposition that Mu’ammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence”.

Britain, France and the United States effectively destroyed Libya as a modern state. According to its own records, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties”, of which more than a third hit civilian targets. They included fragmentation bombs and missiles with uranium warheads. The cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. Unicef, the UN children’s organisation, reported a high proportion of the children killed “were under the age of ten”.

More than “giving rise” to Islamic State — ISIS had already taken root in the ruins of Iraq following the Blair and Bush invasion in 2003 — these ultimate medievalists now had all of north Africa as a base. The attack also triggered a stampede of refugees fleeing to Europe.

Cameron was celebrated in Tripoli as a “liberator”, or imagined he was. The crowds cheering him included those secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS and inspired by Islamic State, such as the “Manchester boys”.

To the Americans and British, Gadaffi’s true crime was his iconoclastic independence and his plan to abandon the petrodollar, a pillar of American imperial power. He had audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would have happened, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships”.

The fallen dictator fled for his life. A Royal Air Force plane spotted his convoy, and in the rubble of Sirte, he was sodomised with a knife by a fanatic described in the news as “a rebel”.

Having plundered Libya’s $30 billion arsenal, the “rebels” advanced south, terrorising towns and villages. Crossing into sub-Saharan Mali, they destroyed that country’s fragile stability. The ever-eager French sent planes and troops to their former colony “to fight al-Qaida”, or the menace they had helped create.

On 14 October, 2011, President Obama announced he was sending special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops were sent to South Sudan, Congo and the Central African Republic. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent was under way, largely unreported.

In London, one of the world’s biggest arms fairs was staged by the British government. The buzz in the stands was the “demonstration effect in Libya”. The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry held a preview entitled “Middle East: A vast market for UK defence and security companies”. The host was the Royal Bank of Scotland, a major investor in cluster bombs, which were used extensively against civilian targets in Libya. The blurb for the bank’s arms party lauded the “unprecedented opportunities for UK defence and security companies.”

Last month, Prime Minister Theresa May was in Saudi Arabia, selling more of the £3 billion worth of British arms which the Saudis have used against Yemen. Based in control rooms in Riyadh, British military advisers assist the Saudi bombing raids, which have killed more than 10,000 civilians. There are now clear signs of famine. A Yemeni child dies every 10 minutes from preventable disease, says Unicef.

The Manchester atrocity on 22 May was the product of such unrelenting state violence in faraway places, much of it British sponsored. The lives and names of the victims are almost never known to us.

This truth struggles to be heard, just as it struggled to be heard when the London Underground was bombed on July 7, 2005. Occasionally, a member of the public would break the silence, such as the east Londoner who walked in front of a CNN camera crew and reporter in mid-platitude. “Iraq!” he said. “We invaded Iraq. What did we expect? Go on, say it.”

At a large media gathering I attended, many of the important guests uttered “Iraq” and “Blair” as a kind of catharsis for that which they dared not say professionally and publicly.

Yet, before he invaded Iraq, Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that “the threat from al-Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq … The worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals will increase significantly”.

Just as Blair brought home to Britain the violence of his and George W Bush’s blood-soaked “shit show”, so David Cameron, supported by Theresa May, compounded his crime in Libya and its horrific aftermath, including those killed and maimed in Manchester Arena on 22 May.

The spin is back, not surprisingly. Salman Abedi acted alone. He was a petty criminal, no more. The extensive network revealed last week by the American leak has vanished. But the questions have not.

Why was Abedi able to travel freely through Europe to Libya and back to Manchester only days before he committed his terrible crime? Was Theresa May told by MI5 that the FBI had tracked him as part of an Islamic cell planning to attack a “political target” in Britain?

In the current election campaign, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has made a guarded reference to a “war on terror that has failed”. As he knows, it was never a war on terror but a war of conquest and subjugation. Palestine. Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Syria. Iran is said to be next. Before there is another Manchester, who will have the courage to say that?

John Pilger is a campaigning journalist who has written against imperialism and corporate power for more than fifty years. This blogpost was originally published by counterpunch. roape.net has posted two recent blogposts on Libya and Western complicity, see Gary Littlejohn’s two-part blog here and here.

Featured Photograph: Libyans show off a leaflet that was released from NATO during Operation Unified Protector.

Rwandan Poverty Statistics: Exposing the ‘Donor Darling’

ROAPE

May 31, 2017

KromerGorillas - 20050804 - Rwandan Children - Sarel Kromer (09- — Parc National des Volcans, Rwanda. August 4, 2005. Children on a Rwandan farm. Anywhere you go in Rwanda, as soon as you pull out a camera a group of curious children will form to meet the strangers and shyly pose. These children lived on the mountainside farms we crossed on the first part of our trek to see the gorillas. Credit: by Sarel Kromer.

In his book entitled Poor Numbers, Morten Jerven cautioned against taking African development statics at face value, given the high political and financial stakes attached to these numbers, as well as the lack of institutional mechanisms to prevent political interference in many countries. Few countries illustrate his case more starkly than Rwanda. As An Ansoms et al pointed out in an article in the print issue of ROAPE earlier this year, ‘Statistics versus livelihoods: questioning Rwanda’s pathway out of poverty’ , the Rwandan government has used its record on poverty reduction and economic growth to legitimize its authoritarian rule and to deflect criticism of its human rights record, just as the previous regime had done up until 1990. Furthermore, Rwanda’s spectacular recovery after the genocide has made it somewhat of a “donor darling”, and has enabled the government to attract significant foreign resources in the form of aid from donors desperate to claim a share in this African success story.

Yet, questions have been mounting in recent years about the reality and sustainability of the “Rwandan miracle”, given the heavy-handed nature of the state-led agricultural transformation project (Dawson et al. 2016), and the government’s propensity for debt-financed investments in unproductive prestige projects, such as the Kigali Convention Centre. These questions came to a head in September 2015, when the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) published a poverty profile (NISR, 2015) based on the most recent household budget survey (EICV4 by its French acronym). The report claimed that the proportion of Rwandans living below the poverty line had fallen from 45% in 2010 to 39% in 2014, after a string of similarly successful decreases in the previous surveys. Two months later, Filip Reyntjens published a critique, claiming that the “decrease” in poverty had been artificially engineered by NISR by changing the type of poverty line used, from an “average” consumption basket based on actual consumption patterns of poor Rwandan households, to a “minimum” or “optimal” consumption basket, containing mostly highly caloric and inexpensive food types.

The change is not in itself problematic, as the choice of a poverty line is always, to some extent, arbitrary and there are many different acceptable ways to define a poverty line. The normative minimum consumption basket adopted by NISR is one such way. However, to make trend comparisons, all experts agree that it is crucial to use consistent methodologies, assumptions and definitions across time. Reyntjens claimed that had they done that, they would have found the proportion of people living below the minimum poverty line to have increased by 6 percentage points between 2010 and 2014. Unfortunately, Reyntjens never published the syntax files he used to compute his estimate. Neither did NISR accept to publish its own syntax files. Without this key piece of evidence, the debate has never been closed from a technical point of view, as it is impossible to show convincingly whether poverty has actually increased or decreased in Rwanda between 2010 and 2014.

We hope to contribute to settling this issue by publishing open, transparent and verifiable syntax files built using a publicly available dataset, which can be downloaded from NISR’s own microdata catalogue on its website (the two syntax files can be opened with .txt notepad or STATA software here). There are many ways to compute these things and there are innumerable adjustments and assumptions that must be made to arrive at an aggregate number. Consequently, it is difficult to replicate exactly the official estimates without access to the original syntax files. However, we hope that by submitting these to public scrutiny, such differences can be ironed out in an open and transparent manner, and any mistakes can be corrected to arrive at an estimate that all parties can accept. In constructing these estimates, our main priority has been to ensure consistency between the two surveys. We therefore try to use exactly the same code and assumptions in both years wherever possible. Below, we provide an overview of the key parameters and assumptions that entered the construction of these indices. Since there are several different poverty lines that have been generated by now, we decided to compute trends for all of them, namely:

Average consumption basket: representing the minimum amount required to consume 2,500 kcal per day (adjusted for age and gender), using prevailing culinary habits of poor Rwandan households in 2001. This was the official poverty line used in 2001, 2005, 2010.
Updated average basket: representing the minimum amount required to consume 2,500 kcal per day (adjusted for age and gender), using prevailing culinary habits of poor Rwandan households in 2014. This was the new poverty line computed by NISR in 2014, which should have been used in EICV4, but was never used because it was deemed too high.
Minimum consumption basket: representing the minimum amount required to consume 2,500 kcal per day (adjusted for age and gender), using optimal (i.e. cheap and highly caloric) food types. This was the official poverty line used in 2014 (EICV4).
Reyntjen’s poverty line: Reyntjens argued that since the minimum consumption basket was 19% lower than the updated average basket, trend comparisons with 2010 should have been made using a poverty line that was 19% lower than the one used in 2010.[1] For this poverty line, we did not construct a food basket, but simply calculated 81% of the figure from the total poverty line computed from the average consumption basket.

In all consumption baskets, the quantities and caloric values are kept constant across surveys. Prices for each item are given as the national median price across regions and across months, as reported in the auto-consumption module of the EICV survey (see table 3 below). Consumption aggregates have been adjusted for spatial and temporal price differences using a Laspeyres index (see table 2 below). The Laspeyres index was chosen because it yielded estimates that were closest to official poverty estimates in EICV3 for the average basket. The choice of price index does not affect the conclusions of this blogpost.

The results are reported in table 1 below. All poverty lines yield similar trends when used consistently over time, indicating that poverty increased between 5% and 7% points between 2010 and 2014. All changes are statistically significant at the 5% level.

It should be noted that our results differ from those obtained by simply updating the poverty line for inflation using CPI data, as was done by NISR in their 2016 trend report (NISR, 2016). In principle, if the data are of good quality and sufficiently disaggregated, both methods should be equivalent and should not yield significantly different results. This therefore raises questions about the quality / reliability of official CPI data, and/or the quality of price data collected by the EICV. In either case, this would undermine our ability to correctly estimate poverty levels in Rwanda. The discrepancies found here should invite us to more closely scrutinize official statistics coming out of the Rwandan statistical office. GDP growth figures appear to be incompatible with the findings of the EICV survey, given than agriculture still accounts for about one third of GDP and two thirds of the labour force.

Tables

Table 1: Summary of poverty lines and poverty rates

	Average basket		Updated basket		Minimum basket		Reyntjen’s poverty line
	2010	2014	2010	2014	2010	2014	2010	2014
Share of non-food[2] (% of total cons.)	31		34.8				–
Total caloric intake (kcal/ adult/ day)	1346		1215		1212		–
Total food cost per pers./year (Rwf)	96,797	121,795	98,069	125,504	77,559	101,116	–	–
Non-food component (Rwf/ pers/year)	43,489	54,720	52,344	66,987	41,397	53,899	–	–
Total poverty line (Rwf/ pers/ year)	140,286	176,515	150,413	192,491	118,956	155,015	113,632	142,977
Poverty rate (% of pop< tot. pov. Line)	45.2	50.2	49.2	55.8	35.2	42.2	32.5	37.1
Change in poverty rate	+5*		+6.6*		+7*		+4.6*
*Change is statistically significant at 5% level

Table 2: Laspeyres price index by quarter and province (computed from price data in auto-consumption file)

2010	Kigali City	Southern	Western	Northern	Eastern
First quarter	1.47	0.98	0.89	0.98	1.14
Second quarter	1.31	0.98	0.92	0.96	1.05
Third quarter	1.38	0.98	0.92	0.98	1.13
Fourth quarter	1.31	0.98	0.92	1.00	1.14

2014	Kigali City	Southern	Western	Northern	Eastern
First quarter	1.22	0.93	1.01	0.96	1.09
Second quarter	1.20	0.95	0.96	0.91	1.08
Third quarter	1.27	0.98	1.06	1.05	1.04
Fourth quarter	1.14	0.92	1.07	0.99	1.02

Table 3: Food baskets used to compute poverty lines

PRODUCE NAME	KCAL/ 100G	PRICE[3]		QUANTITY CONSUMED (KG/ ADULT EQUIVALENT PER DAY)
				AVERAGE BASKET	UPDATED BASKET	MINIMUM BASKET
	both years	2010	2014	both years	both years	both years
Sweet potato	92	80	100	0.4033	0.3114	0.0915
Irish Potato	67	120	150	0.1763	0.1257	0.0242
Banana – cooking (Inyamunyo)	75	120	150	0.0573	0.0783	0.0227
Dry beans	341	300	400	0.1130	0.0758	0.0758
Cassava (root)	109	100	150	0.0410	0.0694	0.0694
Cassava (flour)	338	200	300	0.0134	0.0391	0.0063
Sorghum juice(Ubushera)	173	150	180	0.0000	0.0000	0.0000
Tomato	17	200	200	0.0106	0.0146	0.0146
Corn (flour)	363	300	350	0.0100	0.0184	0.0012
Cabbages	19	100	100	0.0207	0.0172	0.0172
Local Banana beer	48	300	300	0.0096	0.0000	0.0000
Avocado	119	90	100	0.0036	0.0143	0.0494
Amarante (small leafed green)	22	100	150	0.0124	0.0150	0.0150
Local sorghum beer(ikigage)	173	150	180	0.0150	0.0000	0.0000
Cassava (fermented)	362	150	200	0.0056	0.0113	0.1097
Dry maize (grain)	356	180	240	0.0103	0.0138	0.0225
Eggplant	21	150	200	0.0070	0.0082	0.0082
Cassava leaves	53	150	200	0.0068	0.0093	0.0093
Local rice	280	500	600	0.0027	0.0092	0.0035
Tarot/amateke	86	100	150	0.0098	0.0189	0.0476
Maize (fresh)	36	100	150	0.0065	0.0000	0.0000
Fresh milk	61	150	200	0.0010	0.0062	0.0062
Fresh bean	53	200	250	0.0002	0.0000	0.0000
Banana fruit (Imineke)	60	150	200	0.0038	0.0056	0.0028
Sorghum (flour)	343	300	350	0.0031	0.0051	0.0075
Onion	24	250	325	0.0017	0.0024	0.0024
Curdled Milk	75	200	200	0.0007	0.0053	0.0053
Local banana juice	48	200	200	0.0000	0.0035	0.0020
Groundnut flour	387	900	1000	0.0004	0.0000	0.0000
Sorghum	343	250	250	0.0253	0.0028	0.0143
Amarante (large leafed green)	22	100	170	0.0039	0.0028	0.0028
Pumpkin	19	100	100	0.0068	0.0058	0.0058
Pineapple	26	100	125	0.0002	0.0013	0.0013
Carrot	38	200	250	0.0003	0.0011	0.0011
Papayas	26	100	150	0.0006	0.0014	0.0014
Mangos	45	100	125	0.0000	0.0022	0.0074
Beef meat	150	1400	1400	0.0006	0.0016	0.0000
Green pea (fresh)	37	400	500	0.0006	0.0000	0.0000
Fish (fresh / frozen)	49	1000	1020	0.0005	0.0000	0.0000
Eggs	139	70	240	0.0007	0.0009	0.0009
Guava	17	70	100	0.0002	0.0000	0.0000
Soya (dry)	335	300	400	0.0000	0.0004	0.0004
Yams/Ibikoro	109	130	160	0.0000	0.0104	0.0104
Pepper	17	250	300	0.0002	0.0000	0.0000
Plums	24	425	600	0.0001	0.0000	0.0000
Pork meat	220	1150	1400	0.0000	0.0003	0.0000
Wheat (flour)	364	350	450	0.0001	0.0000	0.0000
Goat meat	164	1500	1800	0.0002	0.0000	0.0000
Orange (local)	34	200	200	0.0000	0.0002	0.0002
String bean	32	200	200	0.0068	0.0000	0.0000
Soya (fresh)	405	200	250	0.0023	0.0000	0.0000
Green pea (dry)	339	500	700	0.0010	0.0000	0.0000
Ground nuts (peanuts)	567	800	1000	0.0009	0.0001	0.0001
Fish (dry / smoked)	199	500	500	0.0000	0.0127	0.0127
Other Meats	126	550	800	0.0000	0.0000	0.0005
Bread	261	239	303	0.0011	0.0000	0.0000
Imported rice	363	460	583	0.0014	0.0000	0.0000
Palm oil	884	668	846	0.0036	0.0000	0.0000
Sugar (local)	380	500	634	0.0027	0.0000	0.0000

The authors of this article have asked for anonymity.

Featured Photograph: Parc National des Volcans, Rwanda. August 4, 2005

References

Reyntjens, F. 2015. “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Poverty Reduction Rwandan-style and How the Aid Community Loves It.” Blog of 3 November 2015 posted on www.africanarguments.org.

NISR. 2015. Rwanda Poverty Profile Report 2013/2014: Results of Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey. Kigali: NISR.

An Ansoms, Esther Marijnen, Giuseppe Cioffo, and Jude Murison, “Statistics versus livelihoods: questioning Rwanda’s pathway out of poverty”, Review Of African Political Economy Vol. 44 , Iss. 151, 2017.

National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR), Poverty Trend Analysis Report, June 2016.

Jerven, Morten. Poor numbers: how we are misled by African development statistics and what to do about it. Cornell University Press, 2013.

Dawson, Neil, Adrian Martin, and Thomas Sikor. ‘Green revolution in sub-saharan Africa: Implications of imposed innovation for the wellbeing of rural smallholders.’ World Development 78 (2016): 204-218.

Notes

[1] Note that Reyntjens argument is not strictly speaking correct, since it would still require us to compare two different consumption baskets. To be methodologically sound, the 19% reduction would thus need to be applied to the same basket in both years, as we are doing here.

[2] In the average consumption basket, the non-food component is computed based on the average food share for households in the 7^th decile in 2001. In the updated and minimum baskets, the non-food components are computed based on the average food share for households in the 5^th decile in 2014.

[3] National median price of product as reported in the auto-consumption module.

“Zuma Must Fall” and the Left: Lessons from Zimbabwe

ROAPE

May 25, 2017

Faced with a growing crisis in South Africa, President Jacob Zuma has raised the prospect of a radical reorientation of the ANC and the possibility of radical economic transformation. Alarmed, another faction of the South Africa’s capitalist class, has thrown its support behind the Zuma Must Fall movement. In this blogpost Zimbabwean socialist Munyaradzi Gwisai unpicks the situation in South Africa. He explains that the working class and poor must avoid the dangers of both Zuma’s ‘fake left-turn’ and the Zuma Must Fall protests. What are the lessons, Gwisai asks, for South Africa from the movement that rose-up against Mugabe in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s?

By Munyaradzi Gwisai

South Africa is at crossroads, facing its biggest upheavals since independence in 1994. Globally, since the 2008 Great Recession there are growing explosive class and social conflicts due to the deepening crisis of capitalism.

Economic apartheid remains a stark reality today. According to OXFAM South Africa is the most unequal country in the world where a 10 per cent minority, largely white, controls 65% of the wealth, 3 white male billionaires own as much wealth as half the population, 28 million people. Blacks control only 3% of companies listed on the JSE. Over 85% of the land is owned by 20000 white farmers, or 0.03% of the population. Whilst only 4.1% of white workers earn less than the living wage of R6880, about 71% of blacks earn less than this with over 50% of black youths unemployed. According to Forbes Index, one third of Africa’s richest billionaires live in South Africa. A few blacks have been co-opted like Cyril Ramaphosa, the former trade union leader, who is worth an estimated $450million. [1]

The central theme of South Africa in the last decade is the growing revolts of the poor and workers. From the township social service delivery protests, the great Marikana Strike, the five months’ platinum miners strike, the Cape farm strike, and the 2015-6 Fees Must Fall protests. Long before Zuma’s recent condemnation of the concentration of wealth in the country, leading figures of big white capital were raising the issue. Johann Rupert, until recently the richest person in South Africa, said ‘we cannot have 0.1 percent taking all the spoils’, and that the nightmare that kept him awake at night was the coming class warfare, unless the ‘glaring inequalities in this country’ were fixed. [2] Similarly, in 2014 billionaire Nick Hanauer, denounced ‘the idiotic trickle-down policies’ as not working and that ‘No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out… Or an uprising… It’s not if, it’s when.’ [3]

So, the worsening poverty, an unreformed Apartheid economy, a global neoliberal offensive and the escalating revolt of the poor is the central issue in South Africa today. It is in this context that we have to view the rapid rise of Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), articulating such anger, even if opportunistically and increasingly erratically.

The ruling classes are tearing each other part. The traditional wing sees the solution as increasing the neoliberal austerity offensive against the working classes. But a growing minority is calling for a partial retreat from the neoliberal policies towards economic nationalism. We saw this with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe after 1997. Desperate after losing key towns in the 2016 local authority elections, Zuma is attempting the same with a threatened radical economic transformation. In early April he dismissed Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, who was supported by big white capitalists. This has touched off the Zuma Must Fall protests of tens of thousands by the opposition, supported by some of South Africa’s biggest capitalists.

This blogpost considers the way forward and argues that the popular classes must not repeat the mistake of the Zimbabwean working class whose uprisings in 1997-2002 were eventually co-opted by their class enemies. I look briefly at the experience of Zimbabwe from the late 1990s, then examine in detail the situation in South Africa. What can South Africa’s popular movements learn from their northern neighbour?

Revisiting Zimbabwe

In 1999 the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was formed. The MDC—initially founded as a pro-poor coalition with the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU)—swore to unseat the ruling party. Activists who had participated in the mass poor and working-class struggles of the mid- 1990s set up branches across the country. One leader, who later became finance minister of the discredited Government of National Unity in 2008, Tendai Biti, described the period of revolt: ‘This was a momentous occasion in the history of this country because it brought confidence—you could smell working-class power in the air.’

This was not an exaggeration. Between 1996 and 1998 Zimbabwe saw national public-private sector strikes, the first general strike since 1948, a shutdown of the national university in the capital, and a nationwide student revolt—which politicized war veterans. Ex-fighters from the 1970s liberation war supported by poor peasants seized farmland in a widening arch of protest that challenged the ruling party’s power. Yet the opposition became increasingly cautious, facing repression that claimed the lives of hundreds of activists. The MDC moved right. As the party grew in influence it attracted a markedly mixed crowd of supporters. Unreconstructed “Rhodesians”—remnants of the white settlers, who had kept their land and farms after independence—business owners, and the Zimbabwean 1 percent, all disillusioned by ZANU-PF, which they had supported for years, flocked to the new party.

ZANU-PF saw its opportunity. It started to champion the war veterans and encourage their occupation of white farms after it was defeated in a referendum in 2000. ZANU-PF became the representatives of land-poor Zimbabweans. In simultaneously bizarre and disheartening circumstances, the MDC— now under the influence of white interests, business owners, and the middle class— promised to return the farms to white landholders in the interest of “legality.” ZANU-PF outflanked the MDC from the left and presented itself as a party of a radical African renaissance. Zimbabwe, the party said, was undergoing its third Chimurenga (uprising).

Mugabe presented himself as the champion of a renewed fight against colonialism. He was often taken at his word—his redistribution of land as well as his promises to nationalize businesses and introduce price controls on basic foodstuffs seemed to testify to his sincerity. But the reality was dramatically different. As the Zimbabwean socialist, Tafadzwa Choto, has recently commented: ‘For all of its black empowerment bombast, [ZANU has failed] to make any serious efforts at controlling the country’s riches for itself. Zimbabwe is endowed with vast mineral wealth with only a minority, approximately 1 percent, enjoying access to enormous wealth in kick-backs from deals with multinational corporations. At the same time more than 90 percent of the population struggle to afford to send their children to school.’

Having briefly inspired the struggle against the ZANU-PF state—the high point of popular resistance across the continent—the opposition entered a protracted period of meltdown. It fractured into different groups led by various politicians and NGOs, which funneled activists in other directions. Ultimately the political opposition, now operating in non-profits or mobilized by contaminated political parties, disarmed the movement from below and shifted the public’s attention from the actual struggle to other arenas—paid workshops, foreign scholarships, and political stunts.

What is happening in South Africa, and how can its radical movements and parties learn from Zimbabwe?

Radical Economic Transformation

The radical socialist trade union, NUMSA, is correct to point out that both elements of the capitalist class, those pushing for further and deeper neoliberalism, and those wanting a partial retreat, are the enemies of the working classes and should not be supported. But the working classes must strategically intervene in the unfolding struggles and debates, to take advantage of the splits amongst our rulers and push a radical agenda.

The popular classes should strategically support the call for radical economic transformation, even if called by a corrupt and desperate Zuma. Yet they must not join the opposition-led and big capital supported Zuma Must Fall marches and instead accelerate the struggles for the immediate implementation of anti-neoliberal and pro-poor policies to end the apartheid economy.

Such a radical reformist narrative goes to the root of the unfinished business of 1994, where the ANC –SACP (South African Communist Party) elites, in return for a few crumbs, betrayed the Freedom Charter demand of nationalization of the mines, banks and redistribution of land. Instead they agreed to a rotten deal which ended political Apartheid but left the economy in the hands of a tiny elite of white and international capitalists who grow fatter on the super-exploitation of the black working classes.

The Zuma Must Fall campaign seeks to change the central narrative in society, from the rising struggles against the unreformed Apartheid economy, to that of Zuma’s corruption. While important, this is not the central issue, instead it seeks to disguise, co-opt and neutralize the rising struggles.

General Secretary, Jim Irvin of NUMSA, noted on 5 April that it would not join the anti-Zuma marches for ‘NUMSA cannot allow the working class to be used for advancing the interests of its enemy classes once again, to endorse a narrow neoliberal agenda.’

As an alternative, NUMSA called for mass protests for the implementation of the Freedom Charter and radical demands, including full employment, a national minimum living wage, fully paid maternity leave, universal medical cover, decent housing for all, expropriation of land without compensation, industrialization, free quality and decolonized education, and that the mines, banks and monopoly industry be placed under democratic worker control. After some hesitation and confusion, the leadership of COSATU, likely under pressure from its rank and file, took the same position, declaring, ‘We will never march with the agents of monopoly capital to remove a democratically elected government… our strategic enemy is still monopoly capital and white monopoly capital in particular… We refuse to be useful idiots of those who want to … protect their ill-gotten wealth and inherited privileges.’

Marching with the Democratic Alliance and Big Capital

Joining the Zuma Must Fall campaigns, as done by ex-COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi and much of the left, is very dangerous. The forces that have coalesced around these campaigns are huge, with the biggest war chest of any movement on this continent, desperate to avoid another ‘Zimbabwe situation’ in South Africa.

Comparison with what the left did in Zimbabwe in 1997- 2002, joining the MDC, is wrong. Zimbabwe is a highly authoritarian regime, unlike South Africa which has the most advanced bourgeois democracy in Africa. The left was tiny in Zimbabwe. Yet as we have seen there was a rising working class movement, and the MDC was contested terrain. This is not the case with the anti-Zuma campaign, which is entirely submerged under big neoliberal white capital, whilst organized labour has stayed away. Participation of the left merely gives legitimacy to a campaign whose essential objective is to defend the status quo of the Apartheid neoliberal economy and co-opt and roll back the rising revolts.

The focus must be regroupement of the small, fragmented left groups, and the hundreds of thousands of cadres in radical unions and youths, into an ideologically, organizationally and politically independent united front of the left. The launch of a radical labour federation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) provides a huge impetus. Especially with the growing exposure of the SACP leaders. In December 2016, the SACP called for unity against ‘the imperialist supported regime change agenda of the Zuma Must Fall agenda.’ Barely four months later the SACP supported the same marches, likely in defense of their fat ministerial salaries, which they felt threatened after the firing of Gordhan.

Analyzing Mugabe’s landslide victory in 2013, former South African President. Thabo Mbeki argued that after Mugabe had, in the face of the Southern African Development Corporation (SADC) and western resistance, delivered land to 300000 peasants, quite simply the MDC couldn’t win the rural vote, 70% of the voters: ‘they couldn’t …because they were identified by that rural population to have opposed land reform.’ MDC had dismissed Mugabe’s land reform as fake.

Mbeki, said this was why Zimbabwe, an otherwise small and unimportant country, became of ‘such enormous, global, geo-strategic importance,’ and hammered by an imperialist onslaught. He said Africa must defy this onslaught because, ‘it’s about the future of our continent (and) Zimbabweans have been in the frontline in terms of defending our right as Africans to determine our future, and are paying a price for it… it is our responsibility as African intellectuals to join them, the Zimbabweans, to say, No!’

In the coming 2018 elections in Zimbabwe, after the most successful agricultural season since 2000 and with thousands of artisanal miners gold panning in previous no-go white farms plus thousands of people given stands in the towns, together with a still regimented and intimidated rural populace from the 2008 horrors, the MDC and its leader Morgan Tsvangirai, whether alone or in grand coalition with the other neoliberal opposition, face certain annihilation. Even a fractured ZANU-PF, whether under a doddering 94 years old Mugabe or whoever is his heir, will likely emerge a landslide winner.

Similarly, if the working class and left in South Africa join the regime change agenda and Zuma delivers on radical economic transformation, the poor will not forget who stood for them and who betrayed them. It will allow Zuma, like Mugabe with the MDC, to outflank them on the left, and create the basis for the long-term renewal of the bourgeois anti-poor ANC and set back by decades the building of a radical, socialist agenda in South Africa.

Dangerous to Underestimate Zuma and the Black Capitalists

It is equally dangerous to underestimate how far Zuma and the black capitalists may go, as the NUMSA statement seems to, dismissing them as con-men ‘fighting for their own personal radical economic transformation’ and that of their families and friends.

The deepening crisis of capitalism is radicalizing sections of the beleaguered black capitalists, which desperately need state tenders and protection for survival. Cornered, this class is being pushed to play its last card – abandon its previous role as defenders for the neoliberal economy moving swiftly to economic nationalism.

Their objectives are not just personal. One objective is to wring concessions from frightened white capital. As well as win back their historical leadership of the black masses, ahead of both the ANC 2017 presidential elections and the 2019 national general elections. The 2016 local authority elections were a wake-up call just as Mugabe’s defeat in the February 2000 referendum, made him take a radical shift to the left.

With their backs to the wall, especially Zuma who faces possible jail time if he loses, the black capitalists, supported by the Gupta family [wealthy South African businessmen who had banked-rolled Zuma in exchange government tenders and contracts], may go far. They have shown serious intent by breaking the unwritten rule of 1994, that the Finance Ministry/Reserve Bank are controlled by a person approved by big capital. Zuma fired big capital’s man at the Finance Ministry in April this year, and is threatening to open the doors of the dining room to the hungry, black hordes outside. The leadership of the ANC have looked down and scorned on the junk down-grades by the global rating agencies. Internally they have dared the neoliberal wing to fight an open civil war, heckling its leaders at the Chris Hani rally. Desperate, they sense radical economic transformation as their only hope of survival, learning not only from Mugabe but they have been emboldened by renewed economic nationalism in the west. Bolstered with the resources of the Guptas’ and ideologically radical left Africanists led by Andile Mngxitama, they are feeling confident.

Without serious concessions to the working class, the black nationalists will not survive the unfolding tsunami from big white capital, imperialism and the pro-Ramaphosa wing of the COSATU labour bureaucracy Preventing Zuma from addressing the COSATU May Day rally after booing from the crowd foretells this. Ironically it is Thabo Mbeki, ousted from power by Zuma who is the philosophical father of the turn to radical economic transformation by the black nationalists of South Africa, as reflected in his seminal lecture on Zimbabwe.

The junk down-grades, the mini-run on the Rand and the unprecedented demonstrations in Cape Town, Tshwane, Johannesburg, and the splits in the ANC Alliance show that big white capital is taking the threat of radical black nationalism seriously. It had long seen this coming.

Don’t Trust Zuma and the Black Capitalists

It would be a mistake to dismiss the threatened radical economic transformation by Zuma as a mere con trick. Instead the central strategy must be to put Zuma to the test through mass united demonstrations and strikes in support of the demands put forward by NUMSA and COSATU, adding a strong anti-xenophobic stance to unite the multi-national South African working class. Key is a massive campaign for the state to drop Ramaphosa’s R3500 minimum wage for a minimum equivalent to a living wage. Other important campaigns being for an increase of social grants; free university education; expropriation of land without compensation, with a mass house building project from funds taken from the big banks.

The key strategy for achieving this is mass action. No less than Mbeki has vindicated this as the right strategy. He said when the farm occupations started in Zimbabwe, the leaders of SADC tried very hard to discourage Mugabe ‘from the manner in which they were handling the issue of land reform. We were saying to them, ‘Yes indeed we agree, the land reform is necessary, but the way in which you are handling it is wrong.’ We tried very hard, ‘No, no you see all of these things about the occupation of the farms by the war veterans, this and that and the other, all of this is wrong”… But fortunately, the Zimbabweans didn’t listen to us, they went ahead.’[4]

Zuma and the black capitalists must not be trusted. If they refuse or fail to deliver, they must be exposed to the masses as fakes and liars and put to the cross, but by a working-class sword.

On their own the black capitalists are incapable of real radical economic transformation. The key reason why the Zimbabwe land reform went so far, eventually taking 13 of 15 million hectares of white land, when Mugabe had initially aimed for only 5 million, is that there was a class of radicalizing peasants led by war veterans pushing for the redistribution. But when it came to indigenization of the banks, mines, and factories, there was no such radical class, as the working class had been co-opted, or simply ‘declassed’ by deindustrialization. Not surprisingly, Mugabe faltered, and indigenization was frozen, and after 2013 agreed to a new Constitution which has the most conservative provisions on the protection of private property in the region. Big capital now seeks to turn the 30,000 new black capitalist farmers into capitalism’s long-term bedrock in Zimbabwe. [5] Today the dominant faction in ZANU-PF and the state is an IMF- British supported neo-liberal cabal around Vice-President Mnangagwa, Finance Minister Chinamasa and the generals.

Presently there is no similar anchor for the Zuma programme, other than the black capitalists. But as Zimbabwe shows, the national bourgeoisie are not a reliable fighter against big capital. They are petty, individualistic, notoriously timorous, inconsistent, and half-hearted. As a component of capitalism they will compromise and back down before big capital, once political survival is assured. Ultimately their fear of the potential of the working classes revolt is much greater than their fear of their rival capitalist bed-mates, big white capital. It will thus ultimately seek accommodation rather than the overthrow of capitalism.

For now, South Africa is not yet at the decisive Zimbabwe moment of 2000. Rather it is similar to November 1997 when Mugabe conceded to the demand for pensions and land by war veterans and designated over 1400 white farms for acquisition. Big capital’s warning shot was a run on the Zimbabwe dollar, 72% of whose value was wiped off on Black Friday. Mugabe held back and only decisively moved after February 2000, after losing the referendum.[6]

South Africa is at cross-roads and can go either way. Either Zuma and the black capitalists are frightened into a retreat by the robust response of big capital, the middle-class demonstrations and the ANC right-wing, or they radicalize. Whether Zuma will indeed proceed to appropriate Malema and the EFF’s radical rhetoric as he threatened to when calling on the ANC MPs to back the motion for expropriation of land without compensation. Whether Malusi Gigaba, the new finance minister, will be what Mugabe called “amadhoda sibili” (a real man) remains to be seen. What will be critical is the working class and if it moves to take advantage of the space opened-up by Zuma’s opportunistic call for radical economic transformation. Independent mass actions in the workplace, communities and rural areas must be accelerated. Unlike Zimbabwe, peasants in South Africa are only 35%, meaning it is only the working class that can provide a sustained basis for the above radical action.

Without such mass action from the working class, Zuma and the black capitalists will likely try and give as little as possible, and minimize the backlash from big white capital and imperialism. Their fundamental objective is to buy breathing space, and political survival and not a full scale radical transformation programme that could either go beyond their control or provoke an offensive of capital and imperialism.

The fundamental contradiction of capitalism today remains the advanced and globalised productive forces and relations of production imprisoned in private ownership and the nation-state for private gain and profit instead of human need. This is shown in the obscene fact that nine male capitalists own more wealth than half of the world, or 3.5 billion people!

This contradiction can only be resolved by the socialization of the means of production at the global level under the democratic control of the main producing class, the working class – that is what we understand by socialism. A process that was pioneered a hundred years ago by the workers and peasants of Russia. Today we must continue in the path they pioneered. To succeed the fundamental lesson from the Bolsheviks, the party who led the 1917 Russian revolution, is the urgent need to build mass socialist parties to spearhead the struggles of the working classes and the poor. Today it is the turn of the South African working class to pick-up the baton! They have much to learn from the failures of the popular and working class struggles in Zimbabwe.

Munyaradzi Gwisai, a former Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) parliamentarian, is a law lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe and coordinator of the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe.

Featured Photograph: Munyaradzi Gwisai and fellow activists celebrate as they are released from prison in 2011.

Notes

[1] Oxfam International, 2017 Report, “An economy for the 99 percent: it’s time to build a human economy that benefits everyone, not just the privileged few”, www.oxfam.org.

[2] Morken B, “South Africa: “Social warfare” keeps Johann Rupert awake at night”, In Defence of Marxism, 16 June 2015, www.marxist.com-south-africa-social-warfare

[3] Coleman N, “A National Minimum Wage for South Africa”, 27^th Annual Labour Law Conference, The Changing Face of Labour Law: Tensions and Challenges’, 5-7 Aug 2014, Johannesburg, www.cosatu.org.za

[4] Mbeki T, “Mbeki on Zim polls, land reform”, New Zimbabwe. Com, Aug 2013, www.newzimbabwe.com/news/printVersion.

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