Che Guevara in the Congo

April 5, 2017

Jointly published by Jacobin and ROAPE, David Seddon writes about Che Guevara’s doomed, heroic mission to the Congo in 1965.

By David Seddon

The death of Fidel Castro in November 2016 prompted me to re-visit the extraordinary history of the Cuban Revolution, and in particular the diplomatic recognition, political support, and military assistance provided by Cuba under Castro to national liberation struggles and independent states all over Africa — from Algeria and Western Sahara, to Eritrea, Ethiopia, Zanzibar, and the Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique. Cuban soldiers’ victories against South African forces in Angola in 1975–76 and again in 1987–88 played a crucial role in the successful struggles against white rule in Namibia and in South Africa itself.

The earliest Cuban aid effort went to the 1961 Algerian liberation movement when Castro sent a large consignment of American weapons captured during the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. After the Algerians won independence in July 1962, they reciprocated by helping train a group of Argentinian guerrillas, even sending two agents with the guerrillas from Algiers to Bolivia in June 1963. Two years later, Cuba provided systematic support to a potentially revolutionary movement by sending an elite group of volunteer guerrillas, the vast majority of them black, to the eastern Congo. Che Guevara was among them.

Congolese Independence

Following independence from Belgium in June 1960, the Congo elected left-wing prime minister Patrice Lumumba. Soon after, the army mutinied; the mineral-rich Katanga province, under Moise Tshombe, seceded; the Belgian troops returned; and, finally, at Lumumba’s request, United Nations peacekeeping forces arrived to protect the country’s territorial integrity and his new regime.

When Lumumba asked for additional military assistance from the Soviets, President Kasavubu — supported by Commander-in-Chief Joseph Mobutu — deposed him. After Lumumba’s murder and UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold’s death in a plane crash, the Congo descended into further chaos.

By early 1964, Cyrille Adoula, weak and unpopular, was trying to lead the country. As the UN withdrew, four different rebellions broke out, most operating under a leftist umbrella group called the National Liberation Council. Since Adoula had shut down the official parliament, this opposition coalition had effectively replaced it.

Gaston Soumaliot led the movement in the country’s northeast — his lieutenant Laurent Kabila orchestrated a related group further south. For a few weeks in mid-1964, these forces controlled much of the Congo’s eastern region. One of Lumumba’s former colleagues, Christophe Gbenye, had taken control of much of the rest of the country with backing from China and the Soviet Union.

In March 1964, President Lyndon Johnson sent Averell Harriman to the capital, Leopoldville-Kinshasa, to assess the situation. With Cyrus Vance, the deputy defence secretary, Harriman drew up plans for an American airlift, which began May. In July, Moise Tshombe seized power, replacing the ineffective Adoula, and called for help from the United States, Belgium, and South Africa.

They heeded his call, and Belgian officers and white mercenaries from Rhodesia and South Africa reinforced the Congolese military. Its immediate task was to crush Gbenye’s rebellion, which had established a government in Stanleyville-Kisangani. In November, the United Kingdom joined the effort, allowing Belgian paratroopers to be flow in by US planes from its South Atlantic base on Ascension Island. The newly elected Labour government under Harold Wilson approved the action. Paratroopers landed on Stanleyville at the same time the white mercenaries arrived.

Guevara Looks to Africa

In response to these Western interventions, a group of radical African states, led by Algeria and Egypt, announced that they would supply the Congolese rebels with arms and troops. They called on others for help, and the Cuban government announced it would oblige.

In December, Guevara — already one of the most internationally oriented members of the Cuban leadership — gave an impassioned speech at the UN General Assembly. He referred to the “tragic case of the Congo” and denounced the Western powers’ “unacceptable intervention,” referring to “Belgian paratroopers, carried by U.S. planes, who took off from British bases.”

Guevara then embarked on a tour of African states, visiting Algeria, then Mali, Congo-Brazzaville, Senegal, Ghana, Dahomey, Egypt, and finally Tanzania. In Dar es Salaam, he met Laurent Kabila, who sought his help maintaining the liberated areas in the Congo’s east and southeast; in Cairo, he met Gaston Soumaliot, who wanted men and money for the Stanleyville front; and in Brazzaville, he met Agostinho Neto, who requested Cuban support for the Angolan liberation army, the MPLA. Guevera was excited by these potentially effective liberation struggles and the role Cuba could play in them.

In February 1965, he flew to Beijing to see what help the Peoples’ Republic of China might provide for the Congolese rebellions. There he met Chou en Lai, who had taken his own tour of ten African countries between December 1963 and February 1964. Soon after meeting Che, Chou made a second visit to Algiers and Cairo, where he may have met the Congolese rebel leaders. In June, he flew to Tanzania, where he certainly had an audience with both Kabila and Soumaliot.

In the meanwhile, Guevara himself went back to Cairo to discuss his plan to lead a group of guerrillas with Colonel Nasser. According to an account of the meeting from Nasser’s son-in-law Mohammed Heikal, the Egyptian leader advised Guevara “not to become another Tarzan.” “It can’t be done”, he said. Guevara did not heed the warning; he was already fully committed to applying his experience with the Cuban Revolution’s success to movements all over the world. He returned to Cuba, where he was greeted by Castro. This was the last time he would be seen again in public until after his death two and a half years later in Bolivia.

Before leaving Cuba, Che wrote a farewell letter to Castro – which was read out in public in Havana six months later, in October – declaring he would extend the Cuban Revolution’s influence: “other nations are calling for the aid of my modest efforts. . . . I have always identified myself with the foreign policy of our Revolution, and I continue to do so.” He now felt that his destiny called for him to export the revolution and lead a guerrilla movement in Africa.

Disorder on the Front

The decision to intervene in the Congo had already been made before Che returned to Havana. An elite group of volunteers, all black, had been recruited at the beginning of the year and underwent training at three different camps in Cuba. The plan was for one contingent of Cubans to travel in small detachments to Tanzania and across Lake Tanganyika into North Katanga; a second contingent — named the Patrice Lumumba Battalion — would fly to a base near Brazzaville, just across the Congo River from Leopold-ville-Kinshasa, the capital of Congo.

Captain Victor Dreke — a Cuban of African descent — would lead the smaller eastern column, which comprised 150 guerrillas, including Guevara himself. Che later wrote to Castro that his captain “was . . . one of the pillars on which I relied. The only reason I am not recommending that he be promoted is that he already holds the highest rank.” Jorge Risquet Valdes Santana, a member of the central committee of the Cuban Communist Party, was to head up the Patrice Lumumba battalion.

On April 1, 1965, after a final meeting with Castro at the guerrilla base in Havana, Guevara flew with a small advance guard first to Moscow and then to Cairo, and on to Dar es Salaam. The new Cuban ambassador, Pablo Rivalta, greeted Guevara and his soldiers at the airport outside Dar es Salaam. Guevara worried that their arrival would draw the CIA’s notice, but the Americans had just withdrawn their ambassador from Tanzania and were otherwise occupied. Unfortunately, the Congolese rebel leadership also paid them little attention. Kabila and Soumaliot were meeting other leaders in Cairo to try and reduce the political divisions within their movement, and only relatively junior personnel were available to Guevara.

Cuba’s preparations for their intervention were – as we have seen – thorough; but they clearly underestimated the level of cooperation they would receive from the rebel leadership itself. Nevertheless, on April 22, 1965, Guevara and his comrades set off from Dar es Salaam for Lake Tanganyika, drove south and established a supply base in the lakeside town of Kigoma, near the village of Ujiji — where Dr David Livingstone and Mr Henry Stanley had met nearly a century before. We don’t know whether Guevara was aware of Ujiji’s place in the history of African imperialism when he established his anti-imperialist base in Kigoma.

After crossing the lake, the Cubans met a well-armed detachment of the People’s Liberation Army and started a seven-month campaign in what pro-Tshombe mercenary leader Colonel Mike Hoare named “the Fizi Baraka pocket of resistance,” an area that covered over sixteen thousand square miles. More Cubans arrived in dribs and drabs between April and October. During this period, the Cubans and the Congolese explored the terrain, and the Cubans began assessing their enemies’ and their allies’strengths and weaknesses.

They noted that the enemy’s forward bases were well defended, supported by small aircraft and white mercenaries; they also noted that the Cogolese rebels were suffering from low morale. They regarded their leaders, including Kabila, as strangers — or, more pejoratively, as tourists. The local commanders “spent days drinking and then had huge meals without disguising what they were up to from the people around them. They used up petrol on pointless expeditions.” On June 7, in an unexplained accident, Leonard Mitoudidi, the most senior rebel leader present — Kabila was still in Dar es Salaam — drowned in Lake Tanganyika.

Soon, instructions came down from Kabila that the Cubans should organize an attack on the Bendera garrison, which was defending a hydroelectric plant. Guevara did not agree with the plan but decided to go ahead anyway. On June 20, a combined force of Cubans, Congolese, and Tutsis (some of whom originally came from Rwanda) set off and carried out the attack, as requested. Many of the Tutsis ran away, the Congolese refused to take part, and four Cubans were killed, revealing to the enemy that Cuba was now involved in the rebellion on the ground. The Cubans considered this operation to be not only a failure but a disaster. Mercenary leader Mike Hoare, on the other hand, was impressed. In his memoirs, he noted:

[O]bservers had noticed a subtle change in the type of resistance which the rebels were offering the Leopoldville government. . . . The change coincided with the arrival in the area of a contingent of Cuban advisers specially trained in the arts of guerrilla warfare.

At this point, the Cubans felt depressed and disillusioned. They had all now been ill at one time or another since their arrival; Guevara himself suffered from bouts of asthma and malaria. Their small military successes — like the ambush of a group of mercenaries in August — seemed negligible, and the political climate was undoubtedly deteriorating.

Differences between the rebel factions and their leaders seemed to be coming to a head, and a coup d’etat in Algeria changed the balance of forces. Ben Bella, one of Guevara’s principal supporters, was replaced by army commander Houari Boumedienne, who wanted to reduce the international community’s commitment to the Congolese rebellion.

Although Guevara noted the low morale, the lack of progress, and the shifting political climate, he kept his concerns to himself. When Soumaliot went to Havana early in September 1965, he convinced Castro the revolution was going well. Cuban guerrillas contined to arrive in Tanzania. Also, despite the odds, the Cuban training must have counted for something. As Hoare recorded later:

The enemy were very different from anything we had ever met before. They wore equipment, employed normal field tactics, and answered to whistle signals. They were obviously being led by trained officers. We intercepted wireless messages in Spanish . . . and it seemed clear that the defence . . . was being organised by Cubans.

But, by October, the Cubans and their Congolese allies found themselves on the back foot. The combined forces of the white mercenaries and Tshombe’s troops were advancing in a counter-offensive. Guevara retreated to their base camp at Luluabourg and expected a long, last resistance. Events, however, proved as unpredictable as ever.

Changing Ground

President Kasavubu began to recognize that he would never get approval from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) if Tshombe continued as prime minister, so he replaced him with Evariste Kimba.

For a moment, it looked like the revolution would be saved. In reality, however, the end of Tshombe’s regime presaged a political reconciliation effort that would eventually undermine the rebellion, ending the support it had been receiving from African states. On October 23, 1965, Kasavubu attended a meeting of African heads of state in Accra, presided over by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. Kasavubu announced that the rebellion was virtually over and that he would be sending the white mercenaries home. This sufficed to convince many African leaders. It also represented a signal defeat for the radical African states, allowing a more conservative alliance to coalesce within the OAU.

On November 11, 1965, sensing that the climate now favored him, Ian Smith, the White Rhodesian leader, unilaterally declared independence from the United Kingdom. In South Africa, a renewed attack on the African National Congress effectively crushed the mass movement against apartheid for half a decade, and the Portuguese were encouraged to maintain their grip on Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau for another decade. Meanwhile, Ben Bella had already been overthrown; Nkrumah was removed from power while on a visit to China in early 1966; and Ben Barka — the radical Moroccan leader who had been organizing Cuba’s Tri-Continental Conference, a gathering of international revolutionary movements to be held in Havana in January 1966 — was kidnapped and murdered.

Back in the Congo, Mike Hoare heard about Kasavubu’s speech and flew to Leopoldville to see Mobutu in person. “The general was furious,” he recalls, “he had not been consulted . . . and felt bitter in consequence.” The new prime minister, Evariste Kimba Muondo, had to make a statement explaining that no mercenaries would go home until the Congo was thoroughly pacified.

Guevara was also struggling with the turning political tide. On November 1, 1965, he received an urgent message from Dar es Salaam warning him that the Tanzanian government had decided to end the Cuban expeditionary force. President Nyerere, all too aware of the feuds within the Congolese leadership and concerned about its implications, felt he had little choice.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Guevara considered staying behind “with twenty well-chosen men,” continuing the fight until the movement developed or until its possibilities were exhausted. He asked for help from China, and Chou en Lai advised him to continue building resistance groups but not to enter combat himself. Guevara himself entertained the idea, at the end, of making a forced march across the Congo to join forces with Mulele’s rebels in Kwilu, but he did not receive backing for such a wild notion.

On November 20, Guevara organized the crossing of Lake Tanganyika back into Tanzania. “All the Congolese leaders,” he wrote, “were in full retreat, the peasants had become increasingly hostile”. He recognised that such a situation made the continued presence of the Cuban guerrillas pointless. Others agreed. e recognised Years later, Castro would say:

[I]n the end it was the revolutionary leaders of the Congo who took the decision to stop the fight. . . . In practice, this decision was correct; we had verified that the conditions for the development of this struggle, at that particular moment, did not exist.

Whether that was indeed the case remains debatable. In any case, after a few days in Dar es Salaam, most of the Cubans flew home via Moscow.

To Another Front

Victor Dreke returned to Cuba to head a military unit preparing internationalist volunteers; in 1966, he led the Cuban military mission to Guinea-Bissau/Cape Verde, where he served alongside Amílcar Cabral. He performed a similar function in the Republic of Guinea. He returned to Guinea-Bissau in 1986, heading Cuba’s military mission there until 1989.

Jorge Risquet became head of the Cuban Civil Internationalist Mission in the People’s Republic of Angola between 1975 and 1979, eventually leading 55,000 Cuban troops against the CIA-supported South African Defence Forces. Other members of Guevara’s guerrilla force also returned to Africa to fight.

Che Guevara did not return to Cuba with his comrades. He remained in the Cuban embassy in Dar es Salaam to write his account of the Congolese campaign. Early in 1966, he traveled to Prague, where he stayed for several months. He finally returned to Cuba, where he secretly helped prepare the expeditionary force that would establish itself in eastern Bolivia in November 1966. While in the eastern Congo, Guevara formally accepted the number-three position, in Bolivia, he insisted on openly leading the force. This – combined with the fact that the revolutionary left in Bolivia was deeply divided as a result of the Sino-Soviet dispute – meant that his guerrillas received little support from the largely Moscow-aligned Bolivian Communist Party, leaving them desperately isolated.

In March 1967, only three months after they had arrived, the Bolivian government forces discovered the Cubans and their local allies and obliged them to fight. With virtually no external support, the band slowly dwindled in numbers, and its morale ebbed away. In October 1967, Guevara was captured and shot.

From one perspective, we might see Che’s decision to fight on against hopeless odds in Bolivia as evidence that he learned nothing from his experiences in the Congo. From another, we might argue that he had already planned something like this back in the Congo, when he considered staying behind. He even may have made up his mind back in April 1965, when he wrote his letter to Castro renouncing his positions in the party leadership, his ministry post, his rank of commandante, and his Cuban citizenship. He was, after all, an Argentinian and had always been, to a certain extent, an outsider.

He was also an idealist who had traveled widely on his motorbike in Latin America as a young doctor, becoming familiar with how poor people lived. He believed that revolutionary action could improve their lives, and his participation in the Cuban Revolution’s extraordinary success showed him what a few determined people could achieve. Before he left for the Congo, Guevara wrote to his parents: “once again I feel under my heels the ribs of Rocinante.”

This image of Guevara — as a twentieth-century Don Quixote, setting out on his ancient horse to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, who, against all odds and despite a series of disastrous encounters, survives with spirit undiminished until the very end — appeals to the romantic in all those who see themselves as revolutionaries. But the Cuban intervention in the Congo was not undertaken lightly, or without serious preparation; and the divisions within the various Congolese movements and the failings of their leadership, although very real, did not seem to the Cuban leadership, at least at first, to be insurmountable.

Whatever the situation on the ground in the Congo, it was, arguably, the changing political environment in Africa as a whole, and particularly the withdrawal of support by President Nyerere of Tanzania for the Cuban expeditionary force, that adversely affected the situation facing Guevara and his guerrillas. Furthermore, it is clear that the decision to abort the mission was not taken by Guevara alone. As Castro remarked years later, “in practice, this decision (to withdraw) was correct; we had verified that the conditions for the development of this struggle, at that particular moment, did not exist’.

Guevara, however, remained heroically, if tragically, optimistic regarding his capacity to contribute to revolution elsewhere. Representatives of Mozambique’s independence movement, the FRELIMO, reported, for example, that they met with Guevara in late 1966 in Dar es Salaam regarding his offer to aid in their revolutionary project, an offer which they ultimately rejected. As Guevara secretly prepared for Bolivia, he wrote a last letter to his five children to be read upon his death, which ended with him instructing them: ‘Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary’.

David Seddon is co-author (with David Renton and Leo Zeilig) of Congo: Plunder and Resistance, Zed Books. He is also the co-ordinator of a series of essays on ‘popular protest, social movements and the class struggle’, under the project of the same name, published on roape.net. This article draws heavily on the Introduction by Richard Gott to Che Guevara’s The African Dream: the diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo.

Featured Photograph: Che Guevara participating in an guerrilla insurgency in the Congo in 1965.

The Rise of Trump: An Opportunity for African Industrialisation?

ROAPE

April 4, 2017

This blogpost is part of a series composed by Masters students on the African Development course at the London School of Economics and Political Science. They represent the views of an emerging body of critical young scholars interested in structural transformation and growth in African economies. The series will be featured over the coming months on roape.net, Africa@LSE and ID@LSE blogposts.

By Tinhinan El Kadi and Avelino Chimbulo

Industrial policy is making a comeback in both mainstream and heterodox literature as noted by Pádraig Carmody in this blog series. For years, critical political economists have been sceptical about the future prospects for African industrialisation considering the restrictive policies put in place by neoliberal institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). After briefly discussing what form industrial policy should adopt today, we suggest that the current crisis in neoliberal globalisation, best represented by Donald Trump’s election as the US president, may result in an unintended increase in policy space for African nations to engage in industrial policy, upgrade their economies and move up into global value chains.

From 18th century Britain to the more recent East Asian miracle, development has been synonymous with ‘industrialisation’. While sub-Saharan Africa has grown at an average rate of 5% over the past 15 years, this was largely driven by a boom in commodity prices, and Africa’s industrial sector remained underdeveloped. Falling commodity prices have already fallen and Africa’s growth rates in recent years reflect this – expected to be just about 3% in 2017. This short lived growth symbolises Samir Amin’s concept of ‘development of underdevelopment’ whereby growth does not translate into broader economic transformation and poor countries remain in their peripheral position in the global economic order (see the ROAPE interview with Samir Amin here).

Industrialisation, defined here as the deliberate process of introducing large-scale manufacturing, advanced technical enterprises, technological upgrading and an overall shift from low productivity activities to high productivity ones, is argued to be critical for Africa to improve the living realities of millions of its residents. The Prebisch–Singer thesis for example suggests that industrialisation is the most promising process to free developing nations from their subordinate status in the global economy in the long run.

East Asia’s remarkable economic rise was characterised by a significant increase in the share of manufacturing and dirigiste policies including the promotion of certain sectors over others, the control over state’s finances and the implementation of disciplinary measures to private capital for the creation of competitive industries; the so called ‘carrots and sticks approach’. This model succeeded in not only lifting millions out of poverty but it also allowed ‘late-comers’ to catch-up with early industrialisers and compete with them, defying the deterministic assumptions of dependency scholars. Two important points to note. Firstly, East Asian countries transformed their economies using industrial policies that explicitly rejected the neoliberal paradigm that became the dominant, fashionable development strategy from the late 1970s. Secondly, this developmental story came with violent processes including large scale land grabbing, a rise in inequalities and serious environmental damage, and extremely harsh forms of authoritarianism.

Industrialisation, like any major transformation, creates winners and losers, yet future industrial strategies do not necessarily have to be as socially and environmentally devastating as they were elsewhere. African nations could engineer a comprehensive set of social and environmental policies to balance the negative impacts of industrialisation and ensure more inclusive and sustainable forms of growth. However, analytical caution should be applied: despite achieving significant growth rates, of around 8% between 2004 and 2014, with an increase in the share of manufacturing since 2012, Ethiopia’s acclaimed growth is accompanied by persistent popular protests and the permanent risk of large scale popular uprising. The failure of the government to address mounting social demands and inclusively distribute the gains of the country’s growth, represents a real challenge to the sustainability of Ethiopia’s developmental model.

A comment by Ray Bush on Carmody’s blog on roape.net suggests that industrial policy should be accompanied with a broader set of transformative measures including the use of agricultural policies, the redefinition of the relationship between town and country and the establishment of sovereign surplus funds, which would distribute surpluses democratically to citizens. Indeed, we would argue along that the challenge today is in shaping developmental institutions that have the potential to create long-term growth and structural transformation while creating social institutions that ensure inclusiveness and abide by democratic rules that respect the human rights. These are some of the considerable challenges of industrialisation on the continent today.

Over the past forty years the majority of African nations have seen their policy space constrained by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) to engage in industrial policy or to ‘learn by doing’. Internal factors such as the given country’s political settlement, state-capitalists’ relations, the distribution of power across classes, and the exposure of the country to internal and external threats, these ‘systemic vulnerabilities’, are all critical factors in understanding the dynamics behind industrial policy in previous experiences of rapid industrialisation. However, we must focus on global structural factors which have largely limited African states’ ability to adopt industrial policy.

Breaking from Neoliberalism?

Despite the strong theoretical and empirical evidence behind the effectiveness of industrialisation in transforming economies, for decades, African nations have been restricted from engaging in comprehensive industrial policies by IFIs. Rooted in the neoliberal paradigm, IFIs have often advised African nations to focus on their ‘comparative advantage’ in natural resources and agriculture while staying away from industrial programme. According to the neo-classical theory of comparative advantage activities that ensure rapid gains in order to engage in expensive scale ups or the establishment of backward and forward linkages, can harm growth. This policy orthodoxy has been a disaster for the continent.

These restrictions have resulted in a significant wave of deindustrialisation across the continent over the past three decades. According to World Bank Data, from 1983 to 2009 the contribution of sub-Saharan Africa’s manufacturing to the economy dropped from 15.2% to 9.8%, the lowest share in any developing region. Not surprisingly, Ethiopia, the so called new ‘African industrial powerhouse’ is a non-WTO member. In fact, many of the instruments used by the Ethiopian government in its development strategy—tariffs, direct state subsidies, non-tariff barriers, are restricted by the WTO, several bilateral trade agreements and other forms of conditionality.

However, if norms and regulations in international trade have made it difficult for African nations to upgrade their economies and move up global value chains in the past, some recent shifts, mainly the weakening of the intellectual legitimacy of the neoliberal paradigm and the election of nationalist leaders with protectionist agendas in developed nations, may unintentionally provide African nations with more policy space for the adoption of industrial strategies. The 2008 financial crisis represents an important shift in this direction. Rich nations, it’s worth recalling, which had long advocated for free trade and the restriction of state intervention in the economy, undertook massive bailout plans to protect and rescue their industries. For instance, in 2008 the US spent $17.4 billion to bailout its automobile industry alone.

Moreover, the overall failure of structural adjustment programmes to deliver sustainable and transformative growth and the sharp increases in inequality levels across the African continent have raised serious concerns about the ability of so-called free-trade to respond to the developmental needs of the continent. This concern seems to have penetrated the structures of the IMF, which published in June 2016 a report entitled Neoliberalism: Oversold? in which the notorious institution of globalisation expressed scepticism regarding the benefits of unfettered markets.

The recent election of Donald Trump, a vocal advocate for the revival of the American manufacturing industry, as the president of the US, has the potential of accelerating the intellectual erosion of free-trade globalisation. Within his two first months in office, President Trump has called for the adoption of protectionist measures such as high tariffs on imports to achieve what he called a “new industrial revolution” for the United States. He has also announced the removal of the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and has promised to revise some major free-trade agreements. Similarly, Theresa May’s government in the UK has announced a return to industrial policy on several occasions and has drafted an industrial strategy which promises new ‘sectoral deals’ and large scale infrastructural projects. From the world’s two most powerful champions of free trade, these statements – even if still at the level of rhetoric – are extremely significant. Can these rhetorical shifts make industrial policy more acceptable for African nations?

Indeed, Donald Trump’s Trade Policy Agenda, publically released in late February 2017, signals an important break from the previous U.S. approach to international trade. The policy agenda announced that the US will ignore WTO rulings if these are judged to go against its interests. The 336-page report also mentions that the US will consider leaving the WTO, if the international institution attempts to infringe with its sovereignty.

The vocal criticism of the US of the widespread damages caused by free-trade and global integration significantly undermines the hegemonic position that neoliberalism has enjoyed so far. Protectionist measures and industrial policy severely weakens the ability of the WTO to impose a different set of prescriptions on low income and middle income nations. Hence, the current backlash against unrestrained globalisation represented by the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, and the consequent shift in rhetoric and action regarding free-trade, will surely impact power dynamics within the WTO and increase African nations’ bargaining power within the institution.

While Trump’s policies include massive cuts to public spending and tax-breaks for the wealthiest – the global 1 % – an unintended consequence of his ‘America First’ policy is to widen space for African states to engage in industrial policy. These are potential opportunities. Yet we should not ignore the fact that the Trump’s ‘America First’ strategy could see the repeal of AGOA which provides trade preferences and duty-free entry into the US market for certain goods coming from sub-Saharan Africa.

We do not intend to suggest that the paradigm of neoliberal globalisation is over, far from it. However, the failure of structural adjustment programmes, the sharp increase in social inequalities, the 2008 financial crisis and the election of a free-trade skeptic at the head of the US, pose serious challenges to the legitimacy of the current paradigm. In 1962 the philosopher Thomas Kuhn argued that ‘paradigm shifts’ in scientific development emerge in reaction to mounting anomalies in dominant models and the development of new paradigms. The task is to frame a comprehensive alternative to the current order, one that does not only deliver economic transformation to the continent, but also ensures equality and justice.

Tinhinan El Kadi and Avelino Chimbulo are Master students in Development Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Their interests are the political economy of social policy and industrial reform for development in Africa.

Featured Photograph: section of the Addis Ababa Light Rail completed in 2015, Ethiopia.

Faking the Poor: Counterfeits and Class

ROAPE

March 29, 2017

By Dave Johnson

Previous ROAPE contributors have highlighted that today’s global economy is characterized by a significant and rising level of fraud. In the UK for instance, the cost of economic fraud in 2016 rose above £1 billion for the first time in five years. Fraud and anti-fraud measures are thus timely research topics, with this blog based on desk research on anti-fraud measures in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Earlier research from Nataliya Mykhalchenko on the dynamics of anti-fraud initiatives in Africa identified some of the key measures taken to combat this phenomenon. Usually, they take the form of arrests; seizure and elimination of products; awareness raising and sensitization campaigns; wide applications of anti-fraud technology; task force formation of various state and non-state actors; and cross-border partnerships that are usually led by states in the Global North. These mechanisms were all found in the countries studied in this research too.

However, two things were striking from my own research. First, in all sampled countries, government reports, news articles and corporate investigations highlighted that instances of fraud have increased since the liberalisation of their respective economies. In the words of one Indian think tank, a liberal economy has become the driver for a “parallel economy” (FICCI-CASCADE, 2012). In response to this dynamic, the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation was forced to establish a separate Economic Offences Wing in 1994 due to an “increased work load relating to Securities Scam cases and [a] rise in economic offences with the liberalization of [the] Indian economy” (CBI, 2005; emphasis added). The relationship between neoliberal economic policies and a rise in fraud cases is echoed by a recent working paper by the Indian Institute of Management, which reports that “although banking frauds in India have often been treated as cost of doing business, post-liberalisation the frequency, complexity and cost of banking frauds have increased manifold resulting in a very serious cause of concern for regulators, such as the Reserve Bank of India” (Singh et al, 2016: 3; emphasis added).

This concern has manifested itself through the proliferation of state and non-state anti-fraud actors, and the prevalence of an entire anti-fraud industry. However, as Mykhalchenko has noted, many of these anti-fraud initiatives “may be only addressing the symptoms rather than the root causes” of fraud, i.e. are emphasising for instance technological fixes rather than changes to the deeper power structure in the (political) economy of concern. The link between the liberalisation of economies and the rise in fraud identified at the level of analysis in official reports is thus regularly ignored or marginalised at the level of actual response to fraud (i.e. policy and programme).

Furthermore, the well-financed and more prevalent measures are, perhaps unsurprisingly, mainly focused on financial frauds: those affecting core business interests, profits, intellectual property rights and domestic revenues. In awareness raising campaigns by the likes of Indian think-tank FICCI-CASCADE, the impact of counterfeit and substandard goods were framed around a breakdown on Indian tax revenues – in 2012 this was estimated to stand at around US $582 million. Thus, even when discussing counterfeit goods in which consumers are the main victims, the impact of fraud is generally assessed mainly in aggregate monetary terms and framed around revenue loss for the powerful, i.e. states, businesses, and copy rights holders; only after this (if at all) losses experienced by (ordinary) consumers come into the equation. In other words, the wider social harm of consuming and using fraudulent goods (particularly by the subaltern classes) seems low on the official anti-fraud agenda. This discourse has been upheld when considering that fraudulent goods, services and practices in everyday life that directly affect wide sections of the population have until recently hardly been given priority of international aid organisations and donors, who instead have for years rather focused on political corruption (Whyte & Wiegratz, 2016).

The second, and interrelated, issue to highlight from my research is that the sale of substandard and counterfeit goods seems to disproportionately target and affect low-income households and consumers. This raises questions such as: How are low-income consumers affected by fraud? What anti-fraud initiatives are taken to combat this? And do they differ to those of financial frauds that affect rather large players? When investigating the prevalence of counterfeit goods, there is a link between a very high cost of living that the subaltern face and the potential for subsequent exploitation from fraudulent companies, distributors and merchants as people attempt to get by; hence buying the ‘cheapest’. There are also those consumers that willingly and knowingly purchase counterfeit goods in order to “keep up with the Jones’”; in effect keeping up with the norm of conspicuous consumption in (global/national) society but employing counterfeit goods as a replacement for ‘original’ goods. However, it is the former group that is more concerning here.

Echoing this sentiment, Sri Lanka’s Director of Consumer Affairs argued recently that the framing of counterfeit goods as a domestic problem for the economy and rights holders ignores that “it is a global problem fuelled by socio-economic variables such as poverty, ambivalent consumer attitudes towards…[intellectual property rights], the involvement of criminal networks and easy-access to [and affordability of] illegal goods”. This acknowledgement – of poverty as a driver of counterfeit goods and the link between fraud and the state of wider societal structures – is somewhat of an exception from any type of establishment spokesperson.

The real-world consumers of many counterfeit products, such as illicit alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals are usually those with lower incomes. In Sri Lanka rural pharmacies “seeking quick profits” have been accused of perpetuating the availability of counterfeit medicines in these areas; and counterfeit alcohol in India has been deemed a business that thrives on poverty. One dynamic to this is that, according to Sayeed (2014), more than the concern for public safety, officials in India have been particularly alarmed about recent incidents stemming from counterfeit alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals discrediting the image of India abroad. This is a common theme throughout the researched countries – that the image, of both country and rights holders (e.g. to attract tourism and foreign investment), is more of a priority (at least in official discourse) than public safety in the anti-fraud fight.

In 2013, the Pakistani media were tasked by the Anti-Counterfeit and Infringement Forum (ACIF) – a group of multinational and local corporates that have been hit by locally manufactured fake or counterfeit smuggled products – with doing more to raise awareness of the “menace of counterfeiting and piracy” for consumers and investors. Here, it was argued that “counterfeiting, piracy, substandard production and smuggling are barriers to innovation and economic progress of a country”, again not actually prioritising the wider detrimental social impact (e.g. deaths from alcohol, or adverse health impacts from pharmaceuticals). Private organisations are seen here to frame debate and coverage of counterfeit goods around the loss to the economy. Furthermore, intellectual property rights are the issue for multinationals and governments as it is simultaneously a barrier to investment and domestic economic growth. However, other evidence disputes this. In the US for example, testimony submitted to the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs found that foreign direct investment to China was actually one reason for the proliferation of domestic counterfeiting and international export of counterfeit goods from China to the US (Chow, 2004).

I see here, two interrelated political-economic aspects of the prevalence of fraud and anti-fraud initiatives. First, the proliferation and normalisation of fraudulent activities that stems from liberalised economies (Wiegratz, 2015) has created a steep rise in initiatives that combat the concerns of major business actors that actually benefit from neoliberal policies. So, the concerns of the already powerful are tackled and underpinned by orthodox economic measures and framing that allow a prioritisation of anti-fraud measures that address these issues over the effect on the wider population (much the same as poverty reduction and inequality are subordinated to GDP growth). Second, this concern has led to a dynamic that sees low-income households disproportionately targeted and affected by sellers of counterfeit goods, while the initiatives, investments and research needed to understand who is affected by fraud, it seems, have not been forthcoming at an appropriate level. This seems driven by a lack of funding and commitment from governments and donors to address these types of fraud, reinforced by the prioritisation of financial frauds. The research reveals some of the unequal power relations between those producing counterfeit goods in a “parallel economy”, those leading the anti-fraud discourse and those who are (often unknowingly) on the receiving end of these goods.

Dave Johnson studies international development at the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Leeds. His research on the political economy of anti-fraud measures in the Global South is informed by ongoing work into anti-fraud measures conducted with Jörg Wiegratz.

Featured Photograph: Counterfeit bags for sale in public.

Notes

CBI (2005) CBI Crime Manual – Chapter 4 (http://goo.gl/9JxzwM)

Chow, P (2004) Counterfeiting In China And Its Effect On U.S.

Manufacturing, HSGAC (https://goo.gl/49xNC2)

FICCI-CASCADE (2012) Socio-Economic impact of counterfeiting, smuggling and tax evasion in seven key Indian industry sectors – Executive Summary (http://goo.gl/Z4a9Ev)

Sayeed, A (2014) Know Your India: “Turn a New Page to Write Nationalism”, Delhi, Vij Books

Singh, C et al (2016) Working Paper 505: Frauds in the Indian Banking Industry, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (http://www.iimb.ernet.in/research/working-papers/frauds-indian-banking-industry)

Whyte, D & Wiegratz, J (2016) Neoliberalism, moral economy and fraud in Whyte, D & Wiegratz, J (Eds.) Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud, London, Routledge.

Wiegratz, J (2015) ‘The New Normal: Moral Economies in the ‘Age of Fraud’.’ in Whyte, D (Ed.) How Corrupt is Britain?, London, Pluto

Libya’s Plunge: Gaddafi, Western Intervention and Imperialism

ROAPE

March 27, 2017

Since the revolt in 2011, Libya has been overwhelmed by chaos, plunging into civil war in the summer of 2014 when Libya Dawn, an alliance of Islamist and Misratan militias, took the capital Tripoli. Meanwhile tribal forces opposed to Libya Dawn have emerged in eastern Libya, grouping around Khalifa Belqasim Haftar’s Libyan National Army, who supports the national parliament in Tobruk.

Last year the UN installed a Government of National Accord in Tripoli, but this government does not have the backing of Haftar, or even the full control of the capital. Militias continue to fight each other in sporadic street battles in the city.

For every side in the conflict, the struggle for oil is central – each attempting to control oil fields with the support of foreign backers and multinationals. In the first part of a two part blog-piece, Gary Littlejohn looks at the issues behind western intervention in Libya in 2011. It is part of a long history of Western involvement, he writes, within and beyond Libya and the MENA region.

By Gary Littlejohn

In this two part blog-post for roape.net I examine the Western motives for the NATO military intervention in Libya in 2011, arguing that the real objective was not to protect civilians. I argue that its timing and results can be better understood as a means of protecting the predominant international financial institutions, with a secondary opportunistic outcome being a clandestine flow of arms from Libya to Syria.

Introduction

It is now over five years since the government of Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by a multinational coalition in which the USA, France and the UK predominated. In the Western media, this intervention was greeted as a success initially, although the aftermath has been ongoing conflict that has seen renewed military intervention by the US and EU countries including the UK, France, Germany and Italy. This blog-post raises questions about the dominant narrative concerning these events, which claims that the initial goal was to protect civilians in Benghazi, arguing instead that regime change was always the goal, and that the countries intervening have benefitted in various ways from the ongoing chaos.

I intend to examine the stated reasons for the intervention and offer an alternative understanding of its timing and outcome. In doing so, the focus is on the motives of external actors rather than on the internal social problems, or the political and economic dynamics of Libyan development during the Gaddafi years. Such an analysis is most definitely necessary, but this does not claim to be it. While it is true that on various measures the Libyan economy improved during the period prior to 2011, this does not mean that macroeconomic management was faultless; nor does it imply that one should ignore corruption, human rights abuses including torture, or unwarranted interference in the affairs of neighbouring countries. I hope that this piece might elicit a response that concentrates much more on the importance of internal Libyan dynamics, including where appropriate major policy failures, which rendered Libya vulnerable to foreign intervention despite its evident comparative resilience to UN sanctions.

I argue that it was fairly easy for Western agencies to play on existing grievances, and to run a media campaign to ‘justify’ a military intervention using the spurious doctrine of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ as a cover for the start of a process of regime change.

Context for Libyan Regime Change

Whatever his failings, Gaddafi’s time in office was characterised by the investment of oil revenues in vital infrastructure and services for Libya, resulting in significantly improved health and living standards. For example, substantial underground aquifers were tapped for the ‘Great Man Made River’ (a huge concrete pipeline network) that brought clean water to cities. Gaddafi also supported various initiatives that were designed to increase the autonomy of African governments and/or Arab governments. These included the African Union and various liberation movements, including the South African, African National Congress. Such activities constituted an important motive for the demonization of Libya, which was one of the countries that US General Wesley Clark had mentioned in 2007 as being a future target for regime change. He had listed seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Yemen.

The claim that the invasion was prompted by a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) citizens in Benghazi who were being threatened by Gaddafi is questionable when one considers the evidence that has recently emerged from Wikileaks and elsewhere, evidence that the Western Mainstream Media (MSM) has basically ignored.

The recent report into the Western intervention in Libya in 2011 published by the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 14 September 2016 raises important questions. The report, Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK’s future policy options, argues that the shift from R2P to regime change was basically initiated by France and that the UK did not manage to persuade other allies to keep to the original terms of the intervention. The decision to go along with this change of objectives is laid at the door of the then Prime Minister David Cameron, who had decided not to cooperate with this inquiry and who resigned as an MP not long before the report was published. It is worth looking at the report in some detail.

UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Foreign Affairs Report

The opening Summary of this report states that the intervention led by the UK and France, and supported by the USA, was to protect civilians from attacks by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, but that this policy was not informed by accurate intelligence. This is the same narrative that was used for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Yet in that case we know from Hans Blix’s public testimony and from Frank Chikane (2013) that prior to the invasion Tony Blair had received two independent detailed briefings – from Hans Blix and from then South African President Thabo Mbeki – indicating that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq. In the case of Libya, the deployment of SAS troops early in the operation, rather than peacekeeping troops who could have been stationed in or near Benghazi in defensive positions, already suggests that the motive was regime change.

The report Summary goes on to say that the drift to the opportunist policy of regime change was not supported by a strategy to shape and support post-Gaddafi Libya. ‘The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.’ It places the blame for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy on the then Prime Minister David Cameron. These are scathing conclusions.

The alleged intelligence failures, if true, would be a damning indictment of the work of the joint French/American/British intelligence office in Paris, which had been in place at least five years before. It is notable that there is no reference in the report to internet sources of evidence and analysis, when presumably the committee could have employed a researcher to analyse relevant material. Instead, it took evidence from a fairly limited number of people without any indication of the criteria by which they were chosen. Only one academic researcher from outside London was called as a witness.

Still the report overall is damning in its assessment as given in its Conclusions and Recommendations. The UK government failed to identify the extremist element in the rebellion. The report rightly points to the lack of formality in decision making in the UK National Security Council, and fairly explicitly sees this as a continuation of the ‘sofa government’ style introduced by Cameron’s predecessor Blair – a style that protects senior politicians from proper accountability because crucial decisions are not properly recorded. One could see the effect of this from the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq invasion of 2003, which failed to find documentary evidence that Blair had been fully informed about the lack of WMD in Iraq. The Select Committee report specifically draws attention to the Chilcot Inquiry in recommending how the National Security Council should operate in future.

With regard to reconstruction resources, it is only recently that sequestrated overseas funds of the former Libyan government have been partially released, and this will not be fully resolved until there is an effective functioning government. Given that there are two rival administrations at the moment in Libya, this will not happen quickly. I shall argue in the second blog that the UK government’s approach to this issue of securing an effective legitimate government shows an ongoing disconnect between rhetoric and reality. The same seems to be true of the USA.

The failure to secure weapons and establish security on the ground after the overthrow of the Gaddafi government is rightly criticised by the report. The ongoing conflicts in Libya and the growth in migration from Libya to the EU by people from other African and Middle East countries are the obvious direct results of this. The report supports the arms embargo on Libya, and condemns the dispersal of arms from Libya into other parts of North Africa, but does not ask if that is all that has been taking place – with arms being transferred from Benghazi to Syria via Turkey. But there are some other issues that should be discussed first.

Libya’s Brief Rehabilitation

Some years before 2011 Libya was welcomed back into the ‘international community’, sanctions imposed for the country’s alleged involvement in the Lockerbie bombing were dropped and various countries started to court Libya in the hope of securing lucrative contracts in the newly re-opened economy. Leading these efforts was Tony Blair who went out of his way to personally accept Gaddafi ‘into the international community’. This is unsurprising because in the interval Libya had built up a sovereign wealth fund worth about US$60 billion and the higher living standards in Libya also offered other market opportunities for foreign governments. So as part of the competition for contracts in the newly accessible Libya, Gaddafi family members were courted by various Western institutions. In addition, it is alleged that the UK was involved in ‘extraordinary rendition’ to Libya of opponents of the Gaddafi government.

This ‘international acceptance’ probably helps to explain why in March 2011 Gaddafi was so slow to understand that the R2P operation could constitute a threat to his government. Unrest alleged by Gaddafi to have been stirred up by a group of Al Qaeda militants would not have seemed much of a problem for the international community, given that they were vocally opposed to precisely such terrorists.

Yet the real reason for the intervention in 2011, and hence its timing which required a rapid reversal of the ‘rehabilitation’ of Libya, can be seen from the Hillary Clinton emails released in 2016. As discussed by the well-known author F. William Engdahl on the New Eastern Outlook website in March 2016, the ‘problem’ with Libya was its proposed use of its wealth to establish a ‘Gold Dinar’. Libya was becoming a threat to the current international financial architecture. This will be the focus of the second part of this blog-post.

Gary Littlejohn was Briefings and Debates editor of the Review of African Political Economy from 2010 to 2015. He is the author of Secret Stockpiles: A review of disarmament efforts in Mozambique, Working Paper 21, Small Arms Survey, Geneva, October 2015.

Featured Photograph: Muammar Gaddafi road poster near a Libyan frontier 2007.

Between Repression and Resistance: Egyptian Workers’ Struggles

ROAPE

March 23, 2017

MahallaEgypt — MAHALLA, EGYPT - APRIL 7, 2008: Tens of thousands of protestors took to the street to protest rising food prices and government attempts to privatize state-owned factories. The group became known as the April 6 Movement and played a major role in Egypt's 2012 revolution. (James Buck / PBS)

By Mostafa Bassiouny and Anne Alexander

Only two years after Abdelfattah el-Sisi welcomed international investors to a glitzy development conference showcasing opportunities in Egypt, his regime’s promises of a brighter economic future are looking threadbare to millions of Egyptians. Reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund as the price of a $12 billion Extended Fund Facility loan have led to spiralling inflation, and despite repression, rising levels of frustration are spilling onto the streets and workplaces in a new wave of social protest. At the end of last year the Sisi regime managed to force through some of the most painful changes – such as last November’s currency devaluation, the imposition of a new Value Added Tax, and further cuts to subsidies on fuel – without significant protest on a national scale reflecting repression on an unprecedented scale, rather than a genuine indicator of acceptance of these policies. Although fragmented and spontaneous, levels of grass roots economic and social protests are high, and the workers’ movement in particular has remained relatively resilient in the workplaces. Crucially, the regime’s success in implementing the IMF’s conditions for the loan is also contributing to the draining away of its popular support.

In this blog-post we will assess the current state of the Egyptian workers’ movement and the potential for its revival. The workers’ movement remains, we will argue here, the most important potential location for effective popular resistance to the neoliberal policy agenda, reflecting organised workers’ capacity to paralyse sections of the economy and the state apparatus itself and the legacy of over a decade’s sustained experience in self-organisation. Despite the regime’s efforts to break this tradition, current levels of strike action and attempted strike action suggest that it has not succeeded.

Two competing pressures are operating on the workers’ movement, and it is not yet clear which will prove decisive. One the one hand, the intensity of the economic and social crisis for Egypt’s impoverished majority is pushing workers and wider layers of the poor into taking collective action. On the other hand however, levels of direct repression of worker activists in particular have significantly increased over the past year, as we will outline below. This targeted repression takes place in a context marked by intense state brutality, including an unprecedented campaign of enforced disappearances, endemic torture and extrajudicial killings by the security services.

The economic measures taken by the state in order to meet the conditions of the IMF loan of $12bn over 3 years have imposed unprecedented burdens on the poorer classes and in particular the working class. These measures have included cutting fuel subsidies by more than 40 percent for the 2016-7 budget, leading to a wave of strong inflation, combined with the new inflationary burdens resulting from the imposition of a new VAT of 13 percent on goods and services. And with the decision to liberalise the Egyptian currency on 3 November 2016, these inflationary pressures increased even further as the result of the Egyptian’s pounds collapse to half its previous rate against the dollar, leading to the rise in the price of a number of goods and services, including basics such as medicines, health services and education services.

On the other hand, any rise in wages was very weak, for example the allocated portion of the state budget for wages rose by 7.6 percent in 2016-7, while inflation was at least 11.5 percent according to official figures, meaning that the six million state employees faced at least a 4 percent pay cut. In reality the wage cut has been more than the estimate in the state budget, because of the rise in inflation was in reality much higher. The Central Bank of Egypt announced in February this year that the annual inflation rate was 33 percent, up from 28 percent in January, and 24 percent in December 2016, with the expectation that it will have report a rise further in the last quarter of the financial year 2016-7.

An attempted strike by textile workers at the giant Misr Spinning company in the Delta town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra on 7 February this year is a tell-tale sign of rising anger in industrial workplaces. Workers in a number of the Misr Spinning company factories organised a strike on that day, with around 4,000 workers taking part. The action was concentrated in the ready-made garments factory, the sheets factory and the towels factory, which have the greatest concentration of women workers. Their leading role recalls the strike of December 2006, which was begun by women workers, who raised the famous slogan, “Where are the men? Here are the women!” The same chants were raised again during the attempted strike in February.

In 2006 the women’s action triggered a strike which brought out the rest of the factory and marked a turning point in the development of the workers’ movement across Egypt, unleashing a wave of strikes across the textile sector and beyond. In this case, management was able to abort the action before it could take off, but the general picture over the past year is one of rising levels of social protest, including hundreds by workers. These are a direct response to the worsening of economic and social conditions for the poor, reflecting the weakening of the social security net and the decrease in the value and impact of subsidies on goods and services and the state’s reduction of its social role.

Just a few weeks after the attempted strike at Misr Spinning demonstrations took place in seven governorates across Egypt in protest at the reduction in the subsidised bread ration. In 2016, according to a report by the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights, there was a noticeable increase in protest levels, and in particular protests by workers, with more than 1700 protests recorded in 2016, of which 700 were workers’ protests and a further 600 were of a social character. This indicates a transformation in mood compared to the period from 2013-2015, when the frequency of workers’ protests dropped noticeably. This likely reflected a number of factors, including on-going repression, the impact of official propaganda under the slogan “war on terror”, and the expectations raised by the regime of new economic projects following the Sharm el-Sheikh conference, and the widening and development of the Suez Canal and the surrounding area.

The rise in the frequency of workers’ strikes and social protests in 2016 has been accompanied by another rise in the level of repression and crushing of strikes. A significant development was the referral of the Alexandria Shipyard workers to a military trial on charges of incitement to protest, and the arrest of workers’ leaders from the Public Transport Authority in Cairo on charges of incitement to strike, while workers from the IFFCO food plant were also hauled before the courts on charges of striking.

This is the context in which we must evaluate the attempted strike in Misr Spinning in February this year, which sparked such hopes on its announcement, but it cannot be separated from the general conditions which the workers’ movement is experiencing. The development of security prosecutions of striking workers casts a long shadow on the workplace and makes any steps towards the organisation of a strike fraught with danger. However the conditions in the Misr Spinning factory itself have also played an important role. As it was this company which led the rise of the workers’ movement from the end of 2006, it has also experienced a heavier degree of repression than many other workplaces, both in terms of security prosecutions and management victimisations. This has had the effect that most of the workers’ leaders who played a significant role in previous years are no longer able to do so, because they have been sacked from the company or transferred to sections of the company where they are unable to have an impact on the workers, while those that remain are under constant surveillance by management, making the possibilities of organising a successful strike much more difficult than previously. This however, also makes the fact that between 2500 and 4000 workers did join the strike all the more important.

The events in Mahalla in early February are thus another confirmation of the interplay between the two competing pressures on the workers’ movement: the whip of worsening economic conditions and the truncheons of the police. The number and scope of protests over the past year suggests however that the effectiveness of the second of these in inhibiting the rise of the workers’ movement has begun to weaken. It is also significant that 2016 saw a new wave of important political protests over the agreement to hand over the Tiran and Sanafir Islands to Saudi Arabia.

And behind these immediate pressures on the Sisi regime, other factors are also at work. The longer-term effects of the recent round of neoliberal reforms are likely to further undermine the regime’s viability. For the past four decades (despite pursuing previous programmes of ‘structural adjustment’), successive Egyptian regimes have relied on mechanisms to ensure continued social stability inherited from the state capitalist policies of Gamal Abdel Nasser. These do not only include the system of state subsidies which the IMF’s managers are so keen to dismantle, but also the wages of millions of civil servants. Over the same period, both Sadat and Mubarak continued to depend on barely-modified versions the corporatist ruling party and state-run ‘trade unions’ which Nasser also created to manage discontent. Sisi’s economic policies mark another wave in the neoliberal assault on the public sector. Yet beyond the febrile atmosphere of the ‘war on terror’ and the white heat of repression in aftermath of the 2013 coup, Sisi’s regime has not found anything stable to fill the gap left by the hollowing out of the old ruling party and the state-run union apparatus.

The action by women workers in Mahalla on 7 February thus cannot simply be written off as a failed attempt at a strike. Rather, considered in this wider context, it may be a harbinger of a new rise in the workers’ movement and a sign of possibilities for greater resistance to come.

Mostafa Bassiouny has more than a decade’s experience as a reporter and editor in the Egyptian and regional press. He was industrial correspondent for the Al-Dustour newspaper between 2005 and 2010, reporting on the uprising which rocked the town of Mahalla in 2008. He reported on the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January 2011 before returning to Egypt to participate in the uprising against Mubarak. Between 2011 and 2014 he was Head of News for liberal daily Al-Tahrir and is currently Egypt correspondent for the Lebanese daily Al-Safir. Anne Alexander is a research fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on Middle Eastern politics, social movements and digital media, and is the author of Nasser, a biography of Gamal Abdel-Nasser (2005). Mostafa and Anne are co-authors of Bread, Freedom and Social Justice and contributors to Where are the Unions?

Featured photograph: Egyptians demonstrate in Mahalla on April 7, 2008, these protests took place after the 6 April strike. The 6 April Movement, as it became known, was formed in the wake of the uprisings in Mahalla and help to generate revolutionary energy that eventually fed into the 2011 revolution.

Cashless Banking: Fraud in Nigeria

ROAPE

March 21, 2017

By Nataliya Mykhalchenko

2015 was the first year where cash was used for less than half of all payments made by customers in Britain. Moreover, the use of contactless cards rose 250% in the country in that year. The UK, along with other European countries such Denmark, Norway and Sweden are leading the way towards cashless societies. The arguments being made for such a transition include simplifying the way we spend and save, improving security of transactions and eliminating the black economy. However, another major argument for the adoption of technologies in the banking sector is helping the ‘’unbanked’’ and ‘’underbanked’’ to enter the club of online banking users. This position is also prominent in emerging economies, for example in Nigeria. Yet, electronic fraud related to e-payments, online banking and card use, for example, is rising in Nigeria, the UK and elsewhere.

This blog looks at Nigeria as an example of a country that is rapidly adopting new technologies in its banking sector. It highlights both the phenomenon of rising fraud in this sector as well as the adoption of new technologies to counter this in various anti-fraud initiatives. The blog also explores the question raised in my previous blog on whether the ‘technological fix’ is a solution to the rising levels of fraud in sectors such as banking.

One of the trends that has emerged as part my research on ‘The political economy of anti-fraud measures in Africa’ (led by Jörg Wiegratz) is the increasing adoption of technology in the Nigerian banking sector both by state and commercial actors.

One example of such initiatives is the adoption of automatic biometric identification system by 23 Nigerian banks and the Central Bank of Nigeria supplied by the German company Dermalog. Customers are given a Bank Verification Number and are identified using their fingerprints and face recognition before they open or access their account. In another similar initiative, biometric information is used to roll-out National Electronic Identity card in collaboration with the American corporation MasterCard. The card can be used as a form of payment and a travel document. According to the division president for sub-Saharan Africa at MasterCard ‘by giving every Nigerian of 16 and older an identity card with payments functionality, the government can effectively eliminate financial exclusion in Nigeria, and help citizens to improve their livelihoods’ (see BBC News, ‘The card aiming to end Nigeria’s fraud problem’).

Another example is a wider initiative ‘Cashless Nigeria’’ that was introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in 2012. As part of the initiative, a levy was introduced on cash withdrawals and deposits exceeding a certain daily limit. This initiative is in line with the country’s’ Payment System Vision 2020 – aimed at enhancing financial inclusion, reducing incidents of fraud related to handling of cash and helping the country to ‘modernise’. According to CBN, ‘an efficient and modern payment system is positively correlated with economic development, and is … key … for economic growth’. Sensitisation campaigns, by companies such as Visa – the United States-based global payment technology company – are also part of the trend to encourage people to use credit and debit cards. Last year in Nigeria, this year in Senegal and Kenya, such campaigns have become regular and are spreading across the African continent. The official goal is to raise awareness of the benefits that the EMV chip cards bring to fraud prevention in banking. The economic imperative in rolling out hi-tech solutions to fraud (as well as in working with countries such as Nigeria to match the ‘near-cashless’ economies of the North) is apparent in the involvement of global players such as Visa, MasterCard and others. Present and future profits are on the line.

The growing penetration of internet access and new technologies in Nigeria, smart phones in particular acts as one of the enabling factor in growth of usage of remote banking and contactless payments. According to some estimates, mobile phone penetration has hit 94% in Nigeria, with smartphones making 30% of the figure. However, one issue stands out prominently and that is the growing level of electronic fraud, particularly in the banking sector. According to the Annual report of the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation fraud on e-payment platforms of the Nigerian banking sector increased by 183%, between 2013 and 2014, while it is estimated that Nigeria loses N127 billion to cybercrime on the whole, which represents 0.08% of the country’s GDP.

The above echoes the global trend of rising levels of fraud in different sectors of the economy. As was outlined in my previous blog, a number of initiatives are being increasingly put in place across African countries, many of which rely on technology as a solution. However, a number of commentators suggested that perhaps the introduction of alternative payment systems is in fact fuelling new forms of fraud, thus, having a negative effect on addressing fraud. Moreover, there is a sense that ever more sophisticated technology (in banking and in other sectors) is needed to counteract these emerging methods of fraud, which poses a question: does the ‘technological fix’ offer a sustainable solution to the growing levels of fraud?

In the case of Nigeria and the banking sector, another interesting phenomenon emerges. There is a sense that technological advancement in the banking sector (and hence sophisticated fraud protection) is one of the prerequisites towards a more beneficial integration of the country into the global economy. Last year’s Cybercrime Act, which outlines measures for prohibiting, preventing, detecting, responding, investigating and prosecuting of cyber-related crimes, including, for the worst offences, the death penalty ‘for an offence committed against a system or network that has been designated critical [to the] national infrastructure of Nigeria that results in the death of an individual’ (Techcabal, 2015). These ‘harsh’ measures have been framed as an initiative that will help to ‘clean’ Nigeria of fraud. According to some commentators: ‘’it [preventative measures] will not only prevent the billions lost to cybercrime in past times, it will also drive revenue generation as it will encourage local and foreign investment’ (Nigerian Tribune, 2016). This optimism about a bright fraud-free future, i.e. that technology can indeed provide the fix, is notable.

However, this type of fraud is not characteristic of emerging economies only. In the UK for example, the overall financial fraud saw a 25% increase in 2015 when compared to 2014, with remote banking fraud leaping by 72%, causing the loss of more than £168m. Internet banking fraud growing 64%, and telephone banking fraud jumping to 92% according to a report by Financial Fraud Action UK. Moreover, the UK seems to be leading the way in card fraud among European countries. It is interesting that in a country where the IT industry is one of the most advanced in the world, this type of fraud is on the rise. This suggests that the issue is deeper than the availability of the latest anti-fraud technology, and rather points to the engrained social and political conditions brought about by global capitalism that are proving to be fraud-conducive, in both tech-rich and -poor countries.

The fact that countries in the Global South, in this case in the banking sector, adopt anti-fraud measures to match those in the countries in the Global North, which, it is suggested are unlikely to be sustainable, reflects a common pattern in the global order: ‘solutions’ are drafted in the North. As always, watch out for the links between commercial, slick tech-solutions on one hand and hard interests, both economic and political on the other.

Nataliya Mykhalchenko graduated from the University of Leeds in 2016 with a BA in International Development. She now works in London for a company that helps education, research, healthcare, non-profits and civil society institutions. Nataliya started researching anti-fraud initiatives in 2015 as part of a five week ESSL Summer Research Internship Scheme, funded by the alumni Footsteps and Q-steps project. The research included looking at six countries on the African continent, identifying and analysing various drivers, characteristics and repercussions of the anti-fraud measures. In 2016 Nataliya (supported by ROAPE), continued the research by looking at three more countries, including Nigeria. The above study is informed by an ongoing research project titled ‘The Political Economy of anti-fraud measures in the Global South’ (Jörg Wiegratz, University of Leeds, British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant).

Featured Photograph: Finger-tip identification is a Biometric Security application that can be used to secure online login to bank accounts.

Revolutionary Change in Africa: an Interview with Samir Amin

ROAPE

March 16, 2017

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig interviewed Samir Amin in Dakar on 5 February 2017. Samir Amin is a Marxist economist, writer and activist. He is one of the continent’s foremost radical thinkers, who has spent decades examining Africa’s underdevelopment and Western imperialism. With great originality and insight he has applied Marxism to the tasks of socialist transformation in Africa. In this interview Amin reflects on a life spent at the cutting edge of radical theory and practice, African politics and the legacy of the Russian revolution. The interview was held the day after he spoke on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Marx’s Capital, organised as part of the monthly series ‘Economic Saturdays.’ These are left-wing economic debates organised by African Research and Cooperation for Endogenous Development Support (Arcade) an initiative established by the Dakar based writer and activist Ndongo Sylla in 2013.

So, can I first ask you to tell me a little bit about your political background? How you developed politically, how you became a communist and a Marxist, so if you can go back to those early days?

I considered myself a communist already at secondary school. Probably we did not know exactly what it meant, but we knew it meant two or three things: it meant equality between human beings and between nations, and it meant that this has been done by the Russian revolution, the Soviet Union. That was our definition, and at secondary school in Egypt at that time, there were about 40%, say, of the youth who claimed to be communist in that sense. 40% claimed to be nationalists – that the only problem was getting rid of the British occupation and nothing more. And there were 20% who had no opinion.

Both the two politicised groups considered the 20% as inferior human beings [laughs]. But the two groups, we were fighting every day, and fighting from the age of 12 or 13 to the age of 16 or 17 in vocabulary but also [laughs] physically. Immediately after my secondary school, I got in contact with the Communist Party in Egypt and I joined it.

So, I have been a communist since then. When I was a student in France, there was a rule at that time, that if you were a communist, you had to be a member of the communist party in the country where you were. It was a very internationalist principle, even if you were a foreigner and belonged to another communist party, so I was a member of the French Communist Party during all my time as a student in France. Then when I came back to Egypt, of course, I remained a member of the communist party.

These were Nasser’s years. It was a very, very difficult time. I went back to Egypt in 1957 after both the Bandung Conference and after the move, relatively speaking, to the left of Nasser. We had very strong arguments, which opposed the Egyptian communists to Nasser, on the ground that the struggle was not just a national liberation struggle; it has to be associated with radical change on the road to socialism.

Now, we were not supported by the Soviet Union at that point. For diplomatic reasons, they wanted to support Nasser, and did not want to have an independent communist party. So, they pressured, they exercised their pressure, that we should accept the theory of the non-capitalist road and support Nasser. Now the communist party at that point in time was divided. Probably the majority, a small majority, accepted the Soviet view of the non-capitalist road, but I was one of those who did not; so a strong minority, perhaps 40%, did not accept it and, of course, I moved to Mali as of this time. That is my history as a communist debutant.

And I continue to consider myself a communist.

If I can ask you a question about this period from the 1950s when you returned to Cairo in 1957, through the 1960s and even longer than that, you saw your role as an intellectual but was also, someone, if I’m correct, who needed to support projects of radical transformation on the continent, where possible?

Yes.

Where there was space? And you worked as a Research Officer in Cairo in 1957?

To 1960.

Working specifically on questions of how this sort of change came about?

I was working with a state organisation, which was created for the purpose of managing the whole, enormous public sector, but we had to look at the entire edifice of state enterprises and companies, and to see if their policy was consistent, was radical enough etc, etc. For that reason, this institution was full of communists! The director was a communist, Ismail Sabri Abdullah, and I was second to him. But, Ismail got arrested precisely for that. What I learned there was very important for me. I saw how a new class was emerging. I had to represent the state in the boards of companies, of public companies, and I saw how the public companies were being captured by a small tiny class, a kind of bourgeois caste, a corrupt class, including financing indirectly through their private enterprises. That is what I learnt later in Russian, was called the Matryoshka pattern, Matryoshka, as you know is the Russian dolls, yes?

Samir Amin speaking at ‘Economic Saturday’ on Marx’s Capital (Leo Zeilig, Dakar, 4 February, 2017)

That is you have the state, the big doll, but inside you have smaller private interests. That was exactly what was happening, so I learnt a lot about that process, and I became even more radicalised. This is why, when in 1966, there was the Cultural Revolution in China I supported it. The slogan of Mao was ’fire on the party headquarters’, which means the leadership of the communist party itself. Mao said at that time, you are – which meant ‘we’, the communist party – was building a bourgeoisie, but remember, he said, the bourgeoisie doesn’t want socialism; they want capitalism. Restitution.

Can I ask you now to look at ROAPE and some of the issues that were discussed in the first issues from 1974? You wrote in the first issue on accumulation and development and you were part of that project along with Ruth First and others. Can you recall the spirit of that first issue, what you were trying to do, as an intellectual and as a communist with the journal? What was the project of ROAPE?

You see, I had a problem, at that time. I discussed with it with some of the early members of the Review. First, why use of this word, ‘radical’? Why not ‘socialist’? Since the only meaning that we can give to radicalism is to be anti-capitalist and socialist. However, my starting point was that we cannot entertain this illusion of the big revolution at a global level, or even a big revolution in the advanced capitalist centres as Trotsky had it.

Revolutionary change will necessarily start, I argued, in the peripheries, and it is not pure chance that it started in Russia, a periphery or semi-peripheral country, call it as you want, but certainly not the most advanced centre of capital at the time. It moved to a more or less peripheral country in China, and it succeeded in other peripheries as well, in Vietnam and Cuba. And this was not by pure chance because really existing capitalism is highly polarising and uneven and has been from the very start, and continues to be extremely polarising. Therefore, out of all the contradictions within capitalist societies, these contradictions are more acute, more violent in the peripheries of the system, and therefore there is less legitimacy or impossible legitimacy for any capitalist system. Capitalism is therefore not only weak, subordinate, dependent, but also not really legitimate in the eyes of the majority in the third world. However I also argued in those early days that the majorities in these countries, in Africa, are not the proletariat of advanced industries but a mass of peasants, poor peasants, working in very small units of productions and so on…

So, we asked the question how to construct a positive block, for such transformation and we looked to Russia and then China, and then Vietnam and Cuba, which we believed were succeeding to do it. This was the intellectual and socialist environment we were operating in when ROAPE was formed.

Did you see ROAPE – and its first editorial board – as a militant publication that could help build the movements and politics that were necessary on the continent?

Some of them were, but not all, and even those who were militants, they consider themselves more academics than militants. A socialist review should call upon other people, not necessarily academics, who are directly involved in politics, in leadership of movements, social movements and parties and so on.

So let us accept that ‘radical’ meant at the time being open to a critique of capitalism, and that was accepted at that point by everybody. But to what extent? A vision that capitalism is there forever, or is there for still a long, long time, and that therefore what has to be done is to criticise it in order to compel it to adjust to social demands. I was not interested in that; let the leaders of the Social Democratic Party do that, if they want [laughs]. We may support some of their demands but we have no illusions in the capacity of the system to be reformed. Therefore there was always this tension in ROAPE and with the changes that have taken place in the world, this academic vision has been reinforced within the journal.

What was exciting about that period was that the journal was conceived as a contribution to the projects of radical transformation that were taking place on the continent, so it was no coincidence that it was founded at about the time that Mozambique and Angola are reaching towards independence. And this second wave of radical independence that wasn’t going to make the mistakes of the first wave, but that was going to infuse into national liberation, socialist transformation, gave that project a new energy and initiative and the journal was certainly part of that hopeful project. Did you see things in that way? Did you see the shift on the continent?

Yes, you see, my whole life I would say, in Egypt, after having finished my university studies, and then in Mali, and then, at the head of IDEP [Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification], and then as director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, I have maintained a radical critique of society, otherwise none of those institutions which have been able to survive, succeed even, in doing many things.. We have not changed the world but we have kept the flag flying, which is important also.

Like some others at the time I saw a long historical transition from capitalism to socialism, and that this is a process that starts in the peripheries, in Africa, and it will continue probably to be so. But in the peripheries, there are phases. The first phase was the struggle for reconquering political independence – a process that extended from the 1950s to the 1970s and which had to be successful everywhere. But there was unevenness between weak and strong independence. These movements for independence were variously associated with social change, progressive social change, more radical in the case of Nasser in Egypt, similarly in Algeria; in the case of Angola and Mozambique, Cape Verde, Portugal’s ex-colonies, yet alongside these radical projects there were others far less radical in countries like, Mali, Uganda, Tanzania, Congo-Brazzaville, and almost nothing elsewhere, including South Africa, which has seen no real social change.

But the challenge for all of us, at that time and now, is how do we find the practical policies and strategies for progressive social change? And what are the changes which are needed and possible at each stage? It was here that I came to the idea of a ‘long road’; if the transition to socialism is a long road we should not be surprised that it is full of ‘thermidors’ [since the French revolution the word ‘Thermidor’ has come to mean retreat from the radical goals in a revolution]] and even restorations. This is clear when you look at the apparent victory of monopoly capital, with the breakdown of the Soviet Union, in China after the death of Mao, and of Deng Xiaoping – because Deng Xiaoping was a transitional figure who moved China towards participating in capitalist globalisation etc, – we have entered a new stage of contradictions, so we have been always dealing and discussing those problems.

What does social progressive change mean today? Does it mean the possibility of ‘moving up’ within capitalism, or do we orientate in the opposite direction, and intensify the contradictions between an anti-capitalist alternative and what capitalism can offer – in a word are we able to strengthen socialist consciousness?

Can I go back a little bit to something that you said yesterday when you were talking about Marx and Marxism, because it seemed to be that you were describing Marxism as a developing and growing theoretical approach and that it’s something that you’ve contributed to in your writing and in your activism…?

Do you smoke?

No. Your own contributions to develop Marxism are very considerable across a whole range of different areas.

Perhaps the greatest moment in human history was the Russian Revolution 100 years ago, as an extraordinary demonstration of the self-emancipation of ordinary people. I wonder whether you could talk a little bit about the significance of 1917 and the revolution, its victories and defeats in the decades afterwards for the continent?

The Cold War started in 1917 and never ended. After the hot wars of intervention to crush the revolution, then from the 1920s to WWII, we saw different processes. When, after Munich, Stalin wanted an alliance with the democratic countries of the West, Britain and France, against Hitlerism, it was the democratic countries which preferred concession to Hitler, even encouraging Hitler to start the war against the Soviet Union. We should never forget that.

The post war world, with the formation of NATO and other anti-Soviet institutions which came out of this period, was targeted at the Soviet Union and sought to maintain the colonial system, which was only defeated by internal anti-colonial forces in the countries of Asia and Africa. Despite the propaganda it was always a polycentric system because it had at least four participants: the Imperialist West, more or less united behind the US with NATO, and the alliance with the Japan, that is the US, at that time Western and Central Europe, capitalist Europe, Japan, plus Australia and Canada, the external provinces of US, one close and the other far geographically. Then you had the Soviet Union, with its dependent countries of Eastern Europe, just as Western Europe was dependant on the US. This was important and a direct legacy of the 1917 revolution.

Then there was the Chinese revolution in 1949. So you also had the non-aligned movement, which means all the countries of Asia and Africa achieved their independence under the leadership of the most advanced amongst them. All of this means that we had in that time, not a dual power, but a polycentric system, unequal but with margin of manoeuvres.

It has been the strategy of imperialists from 1991 or so to make it impossible to rebuild such a multi-polar, polycentric system, not only by newly globalisation and so on, but more important, through the tool of military interventions. But US imperialism has proven to be unable to achieve its targets, because it has created even more chaos. And it has been unable to establish reliable allies…

So what I am saying is that the system, which had been in its short triumphant phase from 1990-1995, say five years, labelled, you’ll remember, as ‘the end of history’, blah, blah, with commentators arguing that capitalism was a permanent, stable feature of the modern world and associated with democracy and peace. But what we have actually seen is the opposite, collapse, chaos, crisis generalising and extending across the world at an increasing rate

Samir Amin speaks to roape.net in this short interview (Leo Zeilig, Dakar, 5 February, 2017)

What were the abiding lessons or experiences of that successful revolution for the continent?

There are many lessons. The major one is that we have moved into a long transition where it is possible to start moving towards socialism in many places in the world. That is one. That is fundamental. Second, it has to be, ‘a strategy of stages’, one after the other. Instead of calling it ‘revolution’, I call it revolutionary advances, which means that we achieve revolutionary changes but which only create the possibility of later, further revolutionary advances. Yet it means that the revolution can be stopped and decline in one place, and this is what has happened in the Soviet Union.

Another lesson is that revolutionary changes were successful in October 1917, precisely because the Soviet Union was able to construct an alternative united block, which was the workers-peasants alliance.

My one worry is that the effect of the failure of the Russian Revolution was to set back in ways that perhaps we didn’t expect in the early 1990s, the language of socialist transformation, of revolution, of social revolt.

Yes, and we should learn that the forms of struggle, which were probably correct in their time, last century, almost 100 years ago now, are no longer blueprints for us. There are organisation forms that no longer respond to our questions today, so there is a question today, terribly difficult to answer, of how to organise, in what type of organisations. However, my friend, Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, used to say that, “You organise or agonise”.

[Laughs]. You don’t agonise about organising.

Yeah, but simultaneously I reject completely the naïve view that we can change the world without seizing political power; that is changing state power. On that point I remain intransigent, I would not say dogmatic, but I would say this principle is the evidence of all history – so the problem is now how to conceive of the organisation of the movements, which could crystallise into a political force, able to challenge and ultimately change political power.

There’s the wonderful metaphor in Trotsky’s, ‘History of the Russian Revolution’, where he talks about the Piston Box. The Piston Box is the revolutionary organisation, but without the steam of mass participation, the Piston Box is an inanimate lump of metal.

Very good image.

It’s a powerful image, so what are the forms of organisation for today?

This is what we are discussing continuously. I have no blueprint or easy answer. There are a good number of leaders and activists within the social movements, who are drawing lessons from their relative failure.

Can I talk just briefly, about two of your – what I consider – very significant contributions, ones that made a big impact on me. You referenced this yesterday, where you talk about Marxism as a living theory, a living philosophy. You contributed to the understanding of Marxism and history very significantly in Eurocentrism a book that was written in the 1990s, which challenged a Stalinist notion of stages of historical development. What were you trying to do in that book and what were you trying to say? It seemed to me that one of the things you were saying is that the transition from what had been understood as feudalism to capitalism was actually a far more complex process, which you described as the tributary system that took various forms across the world. Could you just mention something about your argument and what you were doing?

We see in the transition to capitalism, to European capitalism, and the transition from capitalism to socialism in the revolutions of the Soviet Union, China and others, a consciousness and a political strategy. This was the case very clearly in the French Revolution, much more than in the English revolution for example…

So, I said there had been three great revolutions of modern time: the French, the Russian, the Chinese and these three big revolutions are big precisely because they have given to themselves targets which go far ahead of the objective problems and needs of their societies at the time of the revolution. That is the definition. So I was – in part – arguing that we are at a time of big revolutions, in that sense, even for smaller countries.

Your argument in the book was that it was a weakness of state formation – a sort of underdevelopment – in Western Europe that allowed the transition to capitalism to take place to a certain extent. So, you were reversing an argument, a Eurocentric argument that’s often made?

Yes, I dared even to write that the most advanced parts of the pre-capitalist world, were not where change starts. It is rather at the peripheries. Now, the most advanced system before capitalism spread across the world was not in Europe; it was in China and that has been recognised again today – though it had been recognised in the 18^th Century. China, was the model for the Europeans. They were aware that not only had China, if we use the economistic language of today, higher levels of productivity of labour than Europe at that time, but it had better organisations – across all layers of society.

Democracy was not on the agenda, but China had invented, ten centuries before the Europeans, a civil service. You have to wait until late in the 19^th Century to have a civil service in Europe, the idea of recruiting bureaucrats and civil servants of the state by examinations and so on, which was invented a thousand years ago in China was unheard of.

I would argue that there are the same type of contradictions today. The power of the most advanced, the US today for example, also cripples the developments of a new society…. The US is the most advanced capitalist country but it is the country where socialist consciousness is at its weakest globally. The ideas of socialism are close to zero even as compared to European countries today, where it is not far from zero, but it is not quite zero.

Can I ask you now about a second, very important book that you wrote in the mid-1980s, I think in 1986, Delinking? In the book you argued for the need to escape from the constraints of a global capitalist system and therefore countries in the periphery had to break those connections which had strangled any hope for economic development.

Delinking, is a principle of strategy. It is not a blueprint. So it means that instead of adjusting to the needs of capitalist, global expansion – which involves deepening underdevelopment, polarising the world more and more – that the pattern has to be broken. Instead of what I called in my PhD dissertation in 1956, ‘permanent adjustments of the peripheries to the needs of capital accumulation in the centres’. I used this phrase, these exact words – underdevelopment is a way of describing what is in fact permanent adjustment. What do all banks says today, structural adjustment or change, this is now a permanent state.

With the World Bank I put it in a slightly polemical way: I said it is requested that the Congo adjust to the needs of the US, not for the US to adjust to the needs of Congo. So, it’s that adjustment, which is simply one side adjusting. Now, delinking means you reject that logic, and therefore you try to, and succeed, as far as you can, to have your own strategy, independent of the trends of the unequal global system.

You were, in the 1970s, perhaps unfairly criticised by some on the left as promoting a national bourgeoisie. Yet it seemed to me that you were saying that the project of delinking needs to be one powered by popular forces.

If it is led by bourgeois forces it will never go beyond a small class, however, if it is a process powered by popular forces, it will lead to other questions, namely industrialisation and reviving peasant agriculture, as a means of having, ensuring food…

Security?

More than security, sovereignty, and having policies, economic policies including control of foreign capital. This might not mean that you reject completely foreign capital, but you control it… Now this is the programme that I call today a sovereign popular national project for African countries…

So, in that case, can I ask you to speak directly as an activist, Samir, what is the agenda and project for radical or socialist transformation on the continent today?

The people, all the peoples of Africa are today facing a big challenge. So their societies are integrated in a pattern of so-called globalisation, that we have to qualify, because this is not globalisation, it is capitalist, imperialist globalisation. This is control by financial monopoly capital by a set of imperialist countries – principally the triad: the United States, Western Europe and Japan, which are strong enough to control the processes of economic life and production and therefore also political life at a global level, and we are invited by the World Bank and others, simply to accept it and to adjust to it.

Now, we must move out of this pattern of globalisation. That is the meaning that I am giving to the word, ‘delinking’. It means rejecting the logic of unilateral adjustment to the needs of further capitalist and imperialist expansion, and trying to reverse the relation and focus on projects of development ourselves. I think if we start, we will succeed, that we will compel imperialists to accept it and that would create a logic, a possibility of further advances.

This is what I am calling a sovereign popular national project for Africa. National, not in the sense of nationalist, but with the meaning that political power must be changed, and political power can only be changed in the frame of the countries and states as they exist today. It cannot be changed at global level or even at a regional level before being changed at national country level. It will be popular in the sense that this is not a bourgeois, capitalist project, yet these steps cannot be achieved while accepting the pattern of globalisation and capitalism.

‘Samedi de l’economie’ organised by ARCADE and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Leo Zeilig, Dakar, 4 February, 2017)

Finally can I ask you how you have been able to maintain your own phenomenal positivity and energy over the years, in the face of the failure of progressive movements?

Well, one reason is that I was condemned not to survive my first years and that compelled me to develop a terrific will of struggle in the 15 first years of life. I think it was turned to an advantage of having been weak, physically weak.

But since then I have had good health. I have been smoking now for 65 years and I had a recent examination. One doctor who did not know how long I had been smoking, said you are a beautiful example of somebody who has never smoked. I said, ‘Thank you for the result of the examination, but you are mistaken doctor, I am a long-time smoker.’

Okay, but then there are some political reasons. My struggle in the Egyptian Communist Party between the Soviet line and the Maoist line, also compelled me to try to be rigorous and continuously on the frontline, politically and ideologically.

I also continue to be active in different places: in the Third World Forum, and the World Forum of Alternatives, living in both Dakar and Cairo. I happen to also be the chairperson of the Egyptian – so-called Arab – Centre of Research which is radical in the sense of being a socialist centre, not only in Egypt but in the whole Arab region. I am active – action is key.

Moving between Dakar and Cairo. I also remember yesterday about how, as Marx does in ‘Capital’ and in one preface to ‘Capital’, when he hears that later editions were being read by workers, that nothing could make him happier. And you said yesterday Capital required considerable work and there’s no greater evidence or need for that than the constant study necessary to understand and change the world.

And this is not making something vulgar, or simple. Vulgarisation is a very dangerous thing. It is…trying to translate a complex problem into a simple one, and that’s dangerous because the people have to understand that a complex problem is a complex problem, but they have to understand it, that’s the whole difficulty – but one that can be achieved.

Yes, exactly.

Samir Amin is a long-standing activist, writer and communist. Many of his articles on African development, capitalism, imperialism and accumulation are available to roape.net readers who log-in/register here.

The West and the Narrative of ‘African corruption’

ROAPE

March 8, 2017

In the third in a series of blogs for roape.net, writer and activist Lee Wengraf exposes some of the myths about corruption in Africa. The notion of “African corruption” persists despite the reality of widespread and established practices of illicit activity in the West, and, crucially, the contribution and culpability of Western corporations and governments to ‘African’ corruption.

By Lee Wengraf

“The corruption and cronyism and tribalism that sometimes confront young nations — that’s recent history.” – U.S. President Barack Obama, address in Kenya, 2015

On February 13, newly-elected U.S. President Donald Trump signed a legislative order repealing a section of the Dodd-Frank Act that required disclosure of any funds received from foreign governments for deals in the extractive sector. Widely condemned as undermining transparency and anti-corruption efforts, Trump’s move facilitates corporate accumulation in oil, gas and mining; as the Economist notes, “[t]he major beneficiaries of the rollback” are oil majors like Exxon and Mobil. At the same time, however, the Dodd-Frank disclosure rules assume “African corruption” is the source of the problem, a phenomenon, as Obama implies peculiar to these “young nations.”

The U.S. and other Western countries readily condemn the supposed “lack of transparency” of African regimes. In reality, multinational corporations operating in Africa benefit from the weak regulatory infrastructure inherited from colonialism and reinforced by neoliberalism alike. Corruption on the part of local elites rationalizes international policies and regulations imposed on African states but camouflage ongoing exploitation and the legacy of those weak states.

“African corruption” rooted in siphoned oil wealth, for instance, has generated incessant handwringing by Western public officials and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Human Rights Watch, for example, launched a campaign in 2011 demanding the Angolan government provide an explanation for $32 billion suspected “missing” from the state oil company, Sonangol. Certainly Angolan government spending priorities have been dismal: its 2013 budget allocated 1.4 times more to defense than to health and schools combined. And undoubtedly African rulers and officials in oil-rich countries have accumulated vast amounts of wealth.

Yet the emphasis of international campaigns on “African corruption” and “transparency” initiatives have distorted possibilities for social change for ordinary Africans. Development economist Paul Collier, for example, offers a host of organizational and policy “solutions” such as reforming the tax system and building institutional capacity to manage the process.[1] However, the narrow focus of such policy approaches paper over the impact of historical forces such as the ability of African states to build that “capacity” and how that past has produced the conditions of “corruption.”

Inherited laws and policies have facilitated the theft of tax revenues and outward capital flows, illicit and otherwise. Grieve Chelwa of Africa Is a Country, for example, describes, “Malawi has a 60-year old Colonial-era Tax Treaty with the U.K. that makes it easy for U.K. companies to limit their tax obligations in Malawi. The treaty was ‘negotiated’ in 1955 when Malawi was not even Malawi yet. Malawi (or Nyasaland, as it was known then) was represented in the negotiations, not by a Malawian, but by Geoffrey Francis Taylor Colby, a U.K. appointed Governor of Nyasaland.”[2] Other historical examples include the longstanding case of U.S. oil companies in Nigeria whose “anti-tax campaign contributed to the regional and ethnic tensions that led to the outbreak of [civil] war.”[3] And African states – with legacy of colonial-era development patterns – tend to have weak infrastructure to enforce compliance.

Nicholas Shaxson argues that the year 1996 marked a “turning point” inside the World Bank, when its president, James Wolfensohn, put the issue of corruption on the “development agenda.”[4] Major organizations such as Global Witness established a transparency framework with early reports on human rights and blood diamonds, as well as the oil industry, and in 2002, they joined with George Soros to launch Publish What You Pay, a program to introduce legislation in Western nations compelling oil companies to disclose payments to host governments.

More recently, official circles have offered a broader understanding of “corruption” and its roots. A U.N. report from 2016 on governance and corruption in Africa argues, “Accounting for the external and transnational dimension of corruption in Africa facilitates strategic decision-making that is holistic and helps to tackle the problem of corruption at its root. Foreign multinational corporations often capitalize on weak institutional mechanisms in order to bribe State officials and gain unwarranted advantage to pay little or no taxes, exploit unfair sharing of rents, and to secure political privileges in State policies.”[5] They continue, “anti-corruption projects and initiatives all focus on cleaning up corruption in the public sector, which is often regarded as incompetent, inefficient and corrupt, while the private sector is portrayed as efficient, reliable and less corrupt. This view has been influenced by neo-liberal economic perspectives, which argue that the private sector is the main engine of economic growth and perceive Governments as being obtrusive.”[6]

This narrative shift is likely a response to the staggeringly high levels of corruption and criminality by Western and other non-African firms. In a high-profile example, the oil-services company Halliburton was convicted by a Nigerian court for corruption carried out while none other than former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney was at the helm.[7] In a report on “cross-border corruption in Africa” between 1995 and 2014, virtually all cases (99.5 percent) involved non-African firms.[8]

The economic and historical weight of the “weak institutional mechanisms” – from privatization and the disinvestment of state power — is extraordinarily high. For one, budget cuts undermine the ability of states to collect taxes and enforce compliance. As the Tax Justice Network-Africa writes:

[T]he Kenyan Revenue Authority (KRA), employs approximately 3,000 tax and customs officers, to serve a population of 32 million. Meanwhile Nigeria, with its 5,000 tax officials, cannot engage in a meaningful tax dialogue with its 140 million citizens. The Netherlands, as an example of an [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] OECD country, employs 30,000 tax and customs officials for a population of 10 million. … This extraordinary lack of personnel is a product of decades of failed tax policy in Africa, where the role of tax administrations was squeezed as part of austerity programs prescribed by the international finance institutions including the [International Monetary Fund].[9]

Khadija Sharife’s investigative reporting describes the range of tactics built into extraction contracts as incentives to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), from tax dodges to “trade mispricing,” that is, the manipulation of prices to avoid payment of taxes. In Africa’s largest copper producer, Zambia, “[the] copper industry is largely privatized, previously hosting one of the world’s lowest royalty rates (0.6 per cent) with a corporate tax rate of ‘effectively zero’ according to the World Bank…. Despite Zambia since increasing copper royalty rates to 3 per cent, after missing out on the five-year commodity boom, Zambian [former] president Rupiah Banda has ruled out windfall taxes and generally opposed measures designed to prevent mispricing and other forms of revenue leakages.”[10]

In 2012 Charles Abugre writes in Pambazuka News that approximately 65-70 percent of the upwards of one trillion dollars that have exited the continent in illicit capital flows are due to trade mispricing and other “commercial activities.”[11] The Tax Justice Network-Africa has also noted that structural adjustment-dictated changes to African tax codes have facilitated corporate accumulation, eased tax rates for the export of primary commodities and set favorable tax rates for African elites.[12] As a result, the average tax revenues in African states, at approximately 15 percent of GDP, are significantly lower than in the world’s wealthiest nations (OECD; average 35 percent) and the European Union in particular (39 percent of GDP).[13]

Some multinationals adopt “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) measures enabling them to secure what Padraig Carmody has called a “social license to operate”: a minimum level of consensus to pursue the extraction of profits.[14] “Today most western institutions are preaching the values of good governance and democracy,” the Financial Times describes. “Turning a blind eye to corruption and the abuse of political power is a recipe for political instability.”[15] Yet despite such “best practices,” corporations routinely ignore any obligations, often without repercussions.

The distortions and hypocrisy of Western leaders is stunning with regards to the issue of “corruption.” As Sharife and her co-authors describe in Tax Us If You Can:

Business concerns tend to dominate thinking about corruption. For example, Transparency international’s Corruption Perceptions index (CPI) draws heavily on opinion within the international business community, who first raised the alarm about the perils of corruption. While the CPI provides an invaluable ranking for investors trying to assess country risk, it is of little use to the citizens of oil-rich states such as Chad, Equatorial Guinea or Angola, to know their country ranks low.[16]

Meanwhile, as Tom Burgis’ account of Africa’s “looting machine” shows, “blue-chip multinationals” such as KBR, Shell and Willbros are blatantly corrupt, for example, attempting to leverage the Nigerian oil industry through multimillion dollar bribes.[17]

“Good governance” regulations are notoriously weak in their enforcement capabilities, and may in fact smooth over any reputational problems for multinational corporations. For example, in 2008, the Ugandan government approved the National Oil and Gas Policy outlining objectives on environmental regulation and investment of revenue derived from extraction. Yet as Jason Hickel points out in 2011 in Foreign Policy in Focus,

the National Oil and Gas Policy is dangerously vague and absolutely toothless. The framework does not bear the authority of law, and includes no mechanisms that would make its proposed regulations mandatory. Even if the framework’s proposals were to end up as actual legislation, it includes nothing that oil companies would not ordinarily promote in their attempts to erect a façade of legitimacy and burnish the image of an industry beleaguered by PR nightmares. In fact, the framework pays far more attention to creating a favorable investment climate for foreign companies than it does to ensuring the welfare of Ugandans…[18]

African neoliberal leaders have also embraced this emphasis. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD’s) – the African Union’s “development” arm – focuses on “governance” for the implementation of “NEPAD priorities,” to include, among other practices, “handling of misuse of resources” and for “public officials to commit themselves to codes of conduct that negates corruption.”[19] Ironically, some studies have found an inverse relationship between governance measures and FDI.[20] Others have pointed out that there is no consistent relationship between such measures and actual growth. Yet the notion of “African corruption” persists despite the reality of widespread and established practices of illicit activity in the West, and, crucially, the contribution and culpability of Western corporations and governments to ‘African’ corruption. Understanding this reality begins the process of challenging the “corruption” narrative… and its hypocrisy.

Lee Wengraf writes on Africa for the International Socialist Review, Counterpunch, Pambazuka News and AllAfrica.com. Her new book Extracting Profit: Neoliberalism, Imperialism and the New Scramble for Africa will be published by Haymarket later in 2017.

Featured photograph: workers in the Niger Delta (Ed Kashi from his book Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Brooklyn: PowerHouse books, 2008)

[1] Magnus Taylor, “Paul Collier: Can Africa harness its resources for development?” African Arguments, November 1, 2011

[2] Grieve Chelwa, “It’s the economy stupid, N°2,” Africa Is a Country, February 21, 2016

[3] Kairn A. Klieman, “U.S. Oil Companies, The Nigerian Civil War, and the Origins of Opacity in the Nigerian Oil Industry, 1964-1971,” Journal of American History, vol. 99, no. 1, June 2012, pp. 155-165.

[4] Nicholas Shaxson. 2008. Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

[5] United Nations Economic Commission on Africa. 2016. African Governance Report IV. Measuring corruption in Africa: The international dimension matters, p. ix

[6] Ibid, p. 20

[7] Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Nigeria Hurtles into a Tense Crossroad,” The New York Times, January 10, 2012

[8] United Nations Economic Commission on Africa. 2016. African Governance Report IV. Measuring corruption in Africa: The international dimension matters, p. 69

[9] Tax Justice Network-Africa, Tax Us If You Can: Why Africa Should Stand up for Tax Justice, p. 25

[10] Khadija Sharife, “All Roads Lead Back to China,” Pambazuka News, June 7, 2011

[11] Charles Abugre, “Could abolishing tax havens solve Africa’s financing needs?” Pambazuka News, Issue 579, March 29, 2012

[12] Tax Justice Network-Africa, Tax Us If You Can: Why Africa Should Stand up for Tax Justice, p. 41

[13] Tax Justice Network-Africa, Tax Us If You Can: Why Africa Should Stand up for Tax Justice, pp. 16-17

[14] Padraig Carmody. 2011. The New Scramble for Africa. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, p. 79

[15] “Chinese model is no panacea for Africa,” Financial Times, February 6, 2007

[16] Tax Justice Network-Africa, Tax Us If You Can: Why Africa Should Stand up for Tax Justice, p. 8

[17] Tom Burgis. 2015. The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth. New York: PubicAffairs, p. 190

[18] Jason Hickel, “Saving Uganda from Its Oil,” Foreign Policy in Focus, June 16, 2011

[19] United Nations Economic Commission on Africa. 2016. African Governance Report IV. Measuring corruption in Africa: The international dimension matters, p. 14

[20] Roger Southall and Henning Melber, “Conclusion: Towards a Response,” in Roger Southall and Henning Melber, eds. 2009. A New Scramble for Africa?: Imperialism, Investment and Development. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, p. 411

Looking Back to Move Forward: Abiodun Olamosu

ROAPE

March 1, 2017

In the latest interview for roape.net, Nigerian socialist Abiodun Olamosu talks about his early activism, the challenges for the radical left, Marxism and politics in contemporary Nigeria. As he explains, ‘reforms of capitalism are not a new phenomenon in our political economic history. What differentiates revolutionary socialists from reformists is that the latter believe in reform as an end in itself, and in order to avoid revolution from below. In contrast, revolutionaries see reforms as a means to an end. We believe that the only lasting reform will be achieved with socialist revolution – all other reforms are eventually clawed back.’

Can you please tell roape.net something about yourself? Your early politicisation and activism in Nigeria.

I was born in Ikere Ekiti in the Western part of Nigeria into a middle class, polygamous family. My father was a cocoa farmer and produce buyer. He was also a politician by vocation. I started my schooling aged six and attended the Local Authority Primary School and African Church Comprehensive High School, Ikere Ekiti. I worked after leaving school, in 1977, with the then Ondo State Military Governor’s Office and the newly established Federal Government agency, the Public Complaints Commission which fulfilled the role of an ombudsman.

It was at this time that I became politically conscious. I had the advantage of being able to read almost all the daily papers as I stayed with an uncle who headed the Ondo State Ministry of Justice (and was later a high court judge). He usually brought home all the day’s newspapers. As the result of the delay to my high school examination – West Africa School Certificate (WASC) – due to examination malpractices, I was very curious for any news related to the scam and the proceedings of the judicial commission that was instituted to investigate it. The period was also characterized by the political transition to the civilian second republic in 1979. All these events I followed through my readings of the papers. I hardly missed any of the political campaigns taking place at the time.

I later received admission to the Polytechnic Ibadan for a two-year diploma course in Insurance from 1980 to 1982. Apart from the reputation of the school for producing professionals in various fields, the Polytechnic was also notable for its political inclination. I joined the student Marxist-Socialist Youth Movement (MSYM) immediately when I enrolled.

The organisation was an affiliate of the Comrade Ola Oni-led Socialist Working Peoples Party (SWP) based in the town. The group had sought for registration in 1979 in order to participate in the elections, but was not registered despite its mass following. Ola Oni was instrumental in my ridding myself of illusions in Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his welfarist oriented party. Ola Oni was very critical of this leading politician as a hurdle on the path to building a revolutionary movement.

Can you speak more broadly about the Nigerian radical left in the 1970s and your political involvement?

On finishing at the Polytechnic, I got a job in an insurance company in Ibadan and this gave me the opportunity to participate in the activities of Socialist Working Peoples Party (SWP) beyond the campus. After three years at the company, I was sacked for unionising the company. When the SWP got to know about my plight a discussion was held with me to persuade me to serve as the administrative officer of the organisation. I worked directly under the supervision of Comrade Ola Oni for the next two years.

I then proceeded to the University of Jos to study sociology in 1988. My decision to go as far as Jos, was due to information I received from a friend that it was one of the two departments of sociology where Marxist sociology was predominant, the other was Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Once I arrived in Jos I found this was true as most of the lecturers were socialist inclined.

Before I left Ibadan, there had been a robust debate within the SWP that ultimately led to the break of the organisation along two trends of Trotskyism and non-Trotskyism. In fact it was on an earlier visit to Jos that I made my mind ultimately for Trotskyism based on my readings in the Jos City library. I worked throughout my student days at the University of Jos on the side of the Trotskyites. I therefore brought the SWP to Jos and to the entire north while working within Movement for the Advancement of African Society (MAAS).

I met the MAAS on the ground when I started as a student at the University of Jos. Jos had no revolutionary tradition of note compared to Ibadan, but MAAS later became one of the most vibrant student groups.

The organization organized public programmes such as workshops and public lectures to raise the political consciousness of the mass of the students. Youth-Students Solidarity Against Apartheid South Africa was to serve as the public front of the organization addressing such issues as apartheid in South Africa and other contemporary issues in Africa. Both organizations became mass organizations. The school also hosted the National Association of Nigerian Students national secretariat in 1991.

Abiodun Olamosu speaking at a launch of a socialist organisation in the early 1990s

The campaign for Academic Reform was led successfully by the Marxist students on campus. I became a victim of the struggle, like other Marxist students, except that I was the only final year student expelled at the time and my project was marked as a resit. The leaders of the movement in Jos, including myself, were also charged by a Miscellaneous Offence Tribunal for allegedly committing arson.

The Lagos Branch of the SWP had transformed in to an organization referred to by the paper’s name – Labour Militant – which was linked to the British organisation of the same name. After graduation, and on finishing a compulsory national youth service programme in May 1993, I became the full-time organizer of the organisation for the North of Nigeria for the whole of 1990s.

At another time, the workers I was organizing in Coca-Cola were caught with campaign materials against the Ibrahim Babangida military junta. This regime did not want to leave office and shifted the transition timetable three times. The workers, including the union chairperson, Comrade Tukura, were taken to the Airforce headquarters in Makurdi, Benue State, where they were detained for weeks.

The June 12 Movement in 1993 arose from the annulment of the presidential elections on that date. This struggle was to last for seven years, during which time, I worked on the platform of both Labour Militant and the National Conscience Party – including United Action for Democracy and Joint Action Committee of Nigeria (JACON) – fighting to put an end to military rule. I was arrested and detained on three occasions with some other activists and friends at different times in Kano and Ibadan.

Press conference held against military rule in the early 1990s

I eventually resigned from the Executive Council of Labour Militant in 2000 and left the organisation. I became the National Administrative Secretary of the mass based National Conscience Party in 2001 and formed the Socialist League together with Comrade Femi Aborisade in the same year.

JACON was a collective of pro-democracy groups – including the NCP- to maximize pressure on the ruling class and international community. The left faction of this organization refused to participate in Abdulsallam Abubakar’s transition after the death of the military dictator Sani Abacha. We only participated in electoral politics four years later when civilian rule was already in place. I was the national administrative secretary of the NCP during the process of registration of the party with the Independent National Electoral Commission in 2003. I also contested as the deputy governorship candidate on the platform of the party in Oyo State in the same year.

What did you do after 2003 and your campaign for the NCP?

From 2003 to 2011 I worked as an organizer, researcher and administrator in the distributive and banking unions. I ultimately held the position of deputy secretary general. I also led the Socialist League until its merger to form the Socialist Workers League and served as the editor of its paper, Socialist Worker.

My present work is in the area of research as I serve as the senior researcher and coordinator of the Centre for Social Policy and Labour Research. This organisation is developing a database on labour related matters and conducts research, education and training on labour rights and other labour related developmental policies.

Political education is central in the work of the organization and we organize study groups with workers and other working people in the factories, communities and schools. We have been able to carry out many research works that remain to be published.

Historically how would you chart the development of the Nigeria labour movement?

The origin of the organised labour movement in Nigeria can be traced back to 1897 when the first reported workers’ strike took place in Lagos. Trade unions did not emerge officially until the formation of Civil Service Workers’ Union in 1912. The left in the Nigerian labour movement first developed in the 1930s. This corresponded with the period of global economic crisis which was noted for appalling working conditions with real wages lagging behind inflation. On top of this was the racial discrimination by the colonial ruling class against black workers. Austerity measures were imposed by the government. The 1945 workers’ agitation demanding a cost of living allowance (COLA) was to wake up the government over the increase in inflation. Even when the home government in Britain acceded to this demand, blacks in the employment were excluded while their white counterparts were paid. Their demand was only met later after the strike. Such events as this further radicalised the movement and ultimately caused a break from the existing conservative union and labour centres and this resulted in militant workers forming their own unions.

Also the Second World War was another factor in the radicalization of politics and the labour movement. Many black soldiers were recruited from Nigeria and this exposed them to the politics overseas. This included the nationalist struggle for self-determination and socialism in other parts of the world. Some were also influenced by the socialist ideology of left oriented soldiers from Europe.

Mokwugo Okoye was a typical example. He became a moving force of the Zikist Movement on returning from the war and took the nationalist struggle to greater heights. Left politics led the decolonization struggle in Nigeria. The way and manner in which this force subsumed itself into the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) led by the educated elite and nationalist politicians, cannot be dissociated from the politics of international diplomacy played by the former Soviet Union in negotiations with Britain in the course of the war.

Many labour activists in Nigeria looked up to the Soviet Union as a country to emulate. So its leaders had great influence and persuaded their supporters in Nigeria to follow the path of nationalism rather than a more revolutionary path. The tragedy of the movement could be seen later when the Socialist Party of Workers and Farmers was formed in 1963 and a split came a year later with the emergence of a Labour Party.

The 1964 general strike for an increase in the minimum wage was led by the Joint Action Committee (JAC). This was an expression of the vibrancy of the Nigerian labour movement as the various factions of the movement came together when it mattered most to fight a common enemy. However, the military came to divide the movement along ethnic lines supporting the warring factions of the Civil War of 1967-1970.

University students became the heroes of radical politics in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1981, labour opened the decade with a general strike demanding a 120 naira per month minimum wage. Other mass protests included anti-SAP protests – from 1986 – and the rage against the hike in the price of oil. Political movements for regime change and an end to military rule pervaded the 1990s. Over the last decade and a half since the end of military rule, the labour movement has been involved in trying to address the devastating effects of neoliberal policies on the working people.

Abiodun Olamosu during the June 12 struggle when the pro-democracy movement organised a two million strong march in Lagos within days of hearing that the pro-Abacha groups would hold a one million rally in Abuja (published in the newspaper Punch).

The current challenges facing the labour movement and the leftists in Nigeria include the policy of privatization and commercialization that make it difficult to fight against retrenchment, restructuring and the downsizing of workers. This raises the issue of the proper role for working class organisations in challenging the ruling class politically, as well as through the trade union ‘economic’ struggles. The labour bureaucrats are resisting playing a leading role as they see this as a threat to their privileged positions. The era of globalization is also noted for de-unionisation and weakening of working class solidarity.

In 2015 a new government was elected to much international fanfare. The previous military leader, now president, Muhammadu Buhari promised reforms and an anti-corruption drive. Can you describe the period?

The changes taking place in Nigeria can be understood from the perspective of the absence of working class alternatives, but those previously in power also failed and therefore totally lost out in the reckoning of the people. This explains why a new group of the ruling class was given the opportunity to rule. Muhammadu Buhari fits perfectly well into such a vacuum, as there was an illusion in him, by certain sections of the Nigerian populace, for his character and anti-corruption stand. How he will be able to meet up with his promise of reforming capitalism in the face of challenges facing the people is yet to be seen. His anti-imperialist posturing is now being questioned due to his withdrawal of the oil subsidy, devaluation and support for privatisation and liberalization of the economy.

If I can speak a little more generally and theoretically; reforms of capitalism are not a new phenomenon in our political economic history. What differentiates socialists from reformists is that the latter believe in reform as an end in itself especially in order to avoid revolution from below. In contrast, socialists see reforms as a means to an end. We believe that the only lasting reform will be achieved with socialist revolution – all other reforms are eventually clawed back. Reforms are usually only available during periods of economic boom when enough wealth is available to carry out welfare programmes. So it might be difficult for the present government to achieve its promised reforms in a period of recession, whatever might be its intention. In a situation where the economy is in a shambles and has been handed over to market forces, it would be a fantasy to expect that any kind of reform could be carried out successfully.

How would you characterise the challenges in Nigeria today for a radical political and economic alternative?

In the course of Nigeria’s political and economic history, its people have been subject to exploitation and oppression by various elites. This brought many problems including corruption by the ruling elites, social inequality, debt burden, capital flight, cases of poor health and diseases including HIV/AIDS and air pollution, over-dependence on a mono-culture of commodity production – oil – huge imports of unnecessary goods and services for the elite. While the government has continued the policy of neoliberalism that emphasises cutting spending on education, health, electricity, water, transportation, agriculture, and so on

The blows of neo-liberalism weakened the labour movement in the course of rationalising the workforce. Trade unions was made voluntary by law, so workers were no longer automatically made members of a union with compulsory check-off dues. Also we saw state interference in the affairs of the union. This reached its climax when the state dissolved the Nigerian Labour Congress, and affiliated unions, NUPENG, PENGASSAN, NUNS, NANS, and terminated the appointment of Academic Staff Union of Universities presidents and other leaders for their role in their union activities. Generally, neoliberalism wildly increased poverty of working people, for this reason many turned to forms of corruption as a coping strategy rather than the revolutionary path.

Until 1999, the military dominated the political space. The failure of the system is responsible for the growth of ethnic-religious nationalism such as militant groups in the oil producing Niger Delta and Islamic groups like Boko Haram insurgents in the North East.

Solidarity demonstration in London during the Abacha military junta in the early 1990s, when Abiodun Olamosu was being detained in Nigeria.

The way the country is structured and organised by capitalism is largely responsible for the attendant perennial problems that seem to defy solution – politically this has been described as ‘pipeline politics’ by the American scholar Michael Watts. The poor are the victims of the problems highlighted above as the ruling elites are not affected, but beneficiaries, despite their rhetoric of trying to associate with the poor. This is the very reason that the working class alternative is the solution to the ruling agenda that has failed us over the years.

There is, therefore, the need to develop a real pro-poor alternative in the arena of mainstream electoral politics, and for the working class to mobilise even if only to measure their numerical strength. A well-organised party of the popular classes has ample chances of winning an election, as the ruling parties have shown over time their incapability to rule.

The cause of struggle and solidarity with others will go a long way to foster unity among the working people. The ongoing economic recession resulting from overproduction of oil poses a clear case of the problem of international capitalism. So the solution should be sought from this premise. This explains why we are canvassing for a system of common ownership of the means of production that will be democratically controlled and managed from below.

The history of the Nigerian left and Marxist scholarship in the country has recently been the focus of a new book. Adam Mayer’s Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria which was reviewed by roape.net last year, is an important volume in this discussion of the left. What’s your assessment of the book and the history it describes?

The book is a welcome contribution on the Nigerian left and its contribution to Marxism. It can best be described as a compendium. Nevertheless, I would have expected the author to look at the contributions of Marxists in Nigeria from the point of view of the various Marxist organisations that existed. So, for example, we have great Marxists contributions coming various organisations, across different traditions. It is only by doing this can we avoid lionising the “legal Marxists” as representing all Nigerian Marxists. For instance the author singled out Nkenna Nzimiro as the only Marxist anthropologist in the country while referring to Nzimiro’s PhD thesis which was devoid of class analysis. So the question to ask is: where does he place Omafume Onoge, an activist and social-anthropologist, whose PhD thesis was on Aiyetoro “communist” community in the present Ondo State. As important as the book is, there are gaps that have to noted and acknowledged.

Letter signed by NCP leader Chief Gani Fawehinmi, asking Abiodun Olamosu to oversee the affairs of the party at the HQ, Abuja.

The book also gets it wrong in putting the blame for not being ‘revolutionary enough’ on some of the independent African countries that held allegiance to former Soviet Union. Yet the reason for this was the Stalinist stronghold on the policies of these independent left-leaning states and its leaders. In reality they worked as a break on the emergence of independent working class politics in these countries – as these movements were blocked, or suppressed in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

The degeneration of the former Soviet Union in the years after 1917 meant that the country did not tolerate independent socialist and revolutionary movements that would not be subservient to its dictates and could not be controlled. And this was also the very reason they tolerated both the state and labour movement, including bureaucratic Nigerian labour leaders, who betrayed the working class as long as ‘diplomatic interests’ were being served. However, Mayer’s book is a valuable and important volume that will serve to educate people on the rich and varied tradition of Nigerian Marxism.

How would you describe the weaknesses of the revolutionary and radical left in Nigeria, despite a militant working class, and a rich tradition of Marxist politics? Also can you say something about the influence of the region and the continent on left politics in Nigeria?

The reasons are complex. A great number of the revolutionary left were drawn from the universities across the country as students and teachers, some of them embraced the ideas of Marxism in their scholarship for career purposes rather than for its revolutionary politics. This was partly because Marxist scholarship had been made popular by its pioneers such as Ola Oni. Another factor was the influence of the various ‘camps’, Stalinist Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, etc, with groups and activists receiving financial assistance from these sources and seeking their patronage.

In addition the opportunism in the leadership of the left which did not allow for internal democracy in the conduct of the affairs of the movements and parties. Also the tendency of trade union leaders to look to themselves, rather than the rank and file, caused serious harm to the movement. Union leaders are petty-bourgeois in orientation, their connection to the state and authorities cripples our struggles, and their privileged position within the labour movement distances them from the realities of working class life and struggles.

Turning specifically to Africa, during the Nkrumah-era in Africa, despite the fact that his arch enemies were the Nigerian ruling class, he garnered substantial following among the revolutionary left for his pan-Africanist ideas. This had an influence on us. Also, in respect of South Africa, where the support and solidarity for their struggles came from the revolutionary movement here, as I have already indicated.

Returning to the weaknesses of the left, we have to step back more than two decades. Despite the limitation of Stalinist Russia and other state-capitalist countries in the East, they were still a source of hope to many working people. So this accounts, in large part, for the collapse of left movements in Nigeria and internationally when these regimes crumbled – you’ll remember that most socialists thought an end had come to the left internationally in the early 1990s. One can also mention the orientation of left parties who saw building movement from above as a solution, rather than the ones that would involve the rank and file fighting from below. From these weakness comes the challenges for the Nigerian left today.

Abiodun Olamosu is a leading Marxist activist in Nigeria and the Senior Researcher and Coordinator of the Centre for Social Policy and Labour Research.

Only One Way to Anchor Yourself: Barbara Harlow

ROAPE

February 23, 2017

By Christopher J. Lee

Barbara Harlow (1948-2017), a professor of literature and scholar of Third Worldism, passed away on January 28 from cancer in Austin, Texas. Based at the University of Texas for over thirty years, she also taught at the American University in Cairo, once serving as acting chair in the English and comparative literature department (2006-2007), and twice held visiting appointments at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg (1998) and Durban (2002). She was a longtime member of the editorial working committee for the journal Race & Class as well as a member of the editorial board for Current Writing (South Africa), Humanity, and other publications. A committed critic, she published a series of books and articles that addressed pressing questions of political concern: the theme of political resistance in world literature (Resistance Literature, 1987), the voices of political prisoners (Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention, 1992), the legacies of revolutionary thought (After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing, 1996), and, more recently, the practice of detention and torture by the US government (“‘Extraordinary Renditions’: Tales of Guantánamo, a Review Article,” Race & Class 52, no. 4, 2011). An internationalist in spirit and practice, her work remained consistently dissatisfied with the parameters of national boundaries and their official histories. Her work treated geographically dispersed locales such as Palestine, El Salvador, Northern Ireland, and South Africa within a single framework, due to each facing similar conditions of political injustice. In addition to addressing the effects of the global “war on terror,” Harlow’s most recent book project concerned Ruth First, whose life she previously examined in her book After Lives and whom she wrote about in a special issue of ROAPE (“‘Today is human rights day’: Ruth First, Human Rights and the United Nations,” Review of African Political Economy 41, no. 139, 2014). She was involved with the Ruth First Papers project, serving on its advisory board along with members of the Slovo family, Albie Sachs, Shula Marks, and others.

I should mention at this point that I knew Barbara personally, and, though not formally a student hers, she was a cherished mentor. With Bernth Lindfors, Toyin Falola, Neville Hoad, and other UT faculty, she trained numerous students in literature and African studies, including such highly regarded scholars as David Attwell, Joseph Slaughter, and Jennifer Wenzel. My friendship with her was more circumstantial, but nonetheless of great value and influence. As with most intellectuals of her caliber, Barbara was able to blend seamlessly the tasks of teaching, scholarship, and political engagement. These connections can be found throughout her published work. In a 1991 interview with Edward Said, undertaken within the context of the first Gulf War, Barbara asked Said about the tasks of the intellectual today, in which he replied, “One would have to pretty much scuttle all the jaw-shattering jargonistic post-modernisms that now dot the landscape. They are worse than useless. They are neither capable of understanding and analyzing the power structure of this country, nor are they capable of understanding the particular aesthetic merit of an individual work of art…Reengagement with intellectual process means a return to an old-fashioned historical, literary and, above all, intellectual scholarship based upon the premise that human beings, men and women, make their own history…. There’s only one way to anchor oneself, and that is by affiliation with a cause, with a political movement.” (“The Intellectuals and the War: An Interview with Edward Said,” MERIP 171, vol. 21, July-August 1991) These qualities of criticism grounded in historicism and through political commitment apply to Barbara. They distinguished her approach apart from a number of her peers.

Her first two books were works of translation. The first was Spurs (1979) by Jacques Derrida—an ambitious assignment and, in retrospect, an effort that paralleled Gayatri Spivak’s translation of Of Grammatology (1976). Spurs is a minor, though characteristically playful, work by Derrida, in which he, prompted by Nietzsche, dwells and digresses on the question of style and how it can act in the manner of a spur (éperon), at once cleaving forward, protecting, and provoking. Though a work of high theory of the kind that Said critiqued (and Barbara would later depart from), these characteristics of provocation can be found in her subsequent books. Her second translated book, for example, took a different direction, but marked another step forward in her emerging political agenda: Palestine’s Children (1984), a collection of short fiction by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972). Kanafani was a member of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and assassinated by the Mossad in 1972 at the age of thirty-six. Her experience teaching at AUC during the late 1970s and early 1980s stimulated this new focus on Palestinian literature and her lifelong commitment to the Palestinian cause. Kanafani would remain an enduring influence. In her first monograph, Resistance Literature (1987), Barbara cites Kanafani’s study Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine: 1948-1966 (1966) and its use of “resistance” (muqāwamah) as a central reference point for her book’s approach. This choice was undertaken at a time when other “postcolonial” critics were employing European thinkers, whether Derrida or Lacan, without consideration for what we now call theory from the South. Furthermore, she viewed “resistance literature” as a genre that critically transcended the “‘national’ criteria” of most literature departments, which had often excluded African, Caribbean, Asian, and Middle Eastern literatures in favor of those from “the more northern parts of the globe.” Following the Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, she asked if it was merely coincidence that “deconstruction” emerged during the same time period as “decolonization”?

These interrogations found in her scholarship of the 1980s have since become commonplace. Her second monograph, Barred (1992), similarly fills a gap between the early critical work of activist-intellectuals like Angela Davis and the present proliferation of studies on the US prison industrial complex by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Michelle Alexander, and others. Barred possesses a geographically unbounded ambition similar to her first book, examining cases of political detention in Northern Ireland, Israel, Egypt, South Africa, El Salvador, and the US. State injustice and the human rights of those imprisoned brought these disparate places together. Moreover, prison writing as a censored discourse provided a means of addressing once more the apolitical nature of mainstream literary criticism. “Literature, that is, when abstracted from the historical and institutional conditions that inform its production—and its distribution—can serve in the end to underwrite the same repressive bureaucratic structures designed to maintain national borders and to police dissent within those borders,” she writes. “The literature of prison, composed in prison and from out of the prison experience, is by contrast necessarily partisan, polemical, written as it is against those very structures of a dominant arbitration and a literary historical tradition that have served to legislate the political neutrality of the litterateur and the literary critic alike. Reading prison writing must in turn demand a correspondingly activist counterapproach to that of passivity, aesthetic gratification, and the pleasures of consumption that are traditionally sanctioned by the academic disciplining of literature.”

After Lives (1996) continues this trajectory of questioning the boundaries and function of literature and literary criticism. In this text, she returns to three figures from Resistance Literature—Kanafani, Roque Dalton, and Ruth First—to ask what comes after a politics of resistance. The book is a sequel to her first. All three writers were assassinated, a theme that prompts a secondary set of questions about the relationship between writing and political violence, the state versus the individual, and, from the critic’s standpoint, the differences and challenges between “exhuming the corpse and examining the corpus.” To say that writers and activists have been killed for their beliefs is not enough. Rather, Barbara pushed further to address the reciprocal effects of this fact, how the power of the word could invite violence, and why post-revolutionary societies frequently obscure and deny this reciprocity, instead choosing reconciliation over the truth of past trauma. As she writes in the concluding paragraphs to After Lives, revisiting these political and literary lives is not “in order to recuperate conventions of authorship or subjectivity as it has been to allow for an inquiry into the complex, often conflicted, position of the intellectual within the structures of a political party or organized resistance movement and to question their function as historical agents in actively challenging dominant, even oppressive, orders.” “Can truth be committed in the telling? In exhuming corpses or in examining corpuses?” she further asks, answering, “Their struggle, for popular liberation and truth in the telling, engages new political commitments, other cultural concerns, and new territories of critical inquiry.”

These passages are but a brief sample of her body of work that also includes several edited volumes, numerous articles, chapters, and book reviews. I quote at length because her words are what we have left, and we need to remind ourselves and know what those words were, and still are. Her last project—a biography of Ruth First—continued in these directions and is reportedly still forthcoming. Indeed, a sense of affinity can be seen between Barbara and First, considering their mutual concerns for political issues that stretched across the continent. Given her unassuming and often quiet manner, Barbara would have quickly demurred at such a comparison. Nonetheless, a connection can be drawn. The role of the individual, as indicated, is a defining feature of Barbara’s work, being the grounds for politics itself—whether through activism or through incarceration, the practice of writing or the practice of torture. The individual is the starting point for politics and, often times, its most palpable end. I had the good fortune to see Barbara on a number of occasions when visiting Austin, most recently last spring. While a visiting fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at UT in 2012, she generously introduced me to a number of faculty and graduate students. Before that, she provided early inspiration for a book I did on the 1955 Bandung Conference, through a talk she gave at Stanford University in 2003 when I was still a student myself. A close listener and unafraid to offer a sharp counterpoint when needed, she became a valued reader and friend since that first meeting, one of a small handful of people in the acknowledgments of all three of my books. In sum, she marked the beginning and now end of an important period of my own political and intellectual development. In these ways, I feel this loss.

Christopher J. Lee is an associate professor of history at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. His books include Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010), Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (2014), Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015), and A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition (forthcoming, 2017) with Alex La Guma.

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