Youth in Africa: Resistance and Transformation

June 7, 2017

By Laura Mann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROAPE

June 2, 2017

By John Pilger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rwandan Poverty Statistics: Exposing the ‘Donor Darling’

ROAPE

May 31, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tables

Table 1: Summary of poverty lines and poverty rates

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

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

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

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

Table 3: Food baskets used to compute poverty lines

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

The authors of this article have asked for anonymity.

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

ROAPE

May 25, 2017

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

By Munyaradzi Gwisai

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revisiting Zimbabwe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radical Economic Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marching with the Democratic Alliance and Big Capital

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dangerous to Underestimate Zuma and the Black Capitalists

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Trust Zuma and the Black Capitalists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

[5] Moyo S”, Three decades of agrarian reform in Zimbabwe,” Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3, July 2011, 491.

[6] Gwisai M, “Revolutionaries, resistance and crisis in Zimbabwe” in L. Zeilig, (ed) Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa, (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2009) 219.

The CFA Franc: French Monetary Imperialism in Africa

ROAPE

May 18, 2017

By Ndongo Samba Sylla

On 11 August 2015, speaking at the celebrations marking the 55th anniversary of the independence of Chad, President Idriss Deby declared, ‘we must have the courage to say there is a cord preventing development in Africa that must be severed.’ The ‘cord’ he was referring to is now over 71 years old. It is known by the acronym ‘CFA franc’.

The pillars of the CFA franc

Like other colonial empires – the UK, with its sterling zone; or Portugal, with its escudo zone, France had its franc zone. The CFA franc – orginally the French African Colonial franc – was officially created on 26 December 1945 by a decree of General de Gaulle. It is a colonial currency, born of France’s need to foster economic integration among the colonies under its administration, and thus control their resources, economic structures and political systems.

Post-independence the CFA franc was redesignated: for the eight members of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) – Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo – it became the African Financial Community franc; for the six members of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CAEMC) – Cameroon, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Chad – the Central African Financial Cooperation franc. The two zones possess economies of equal size (each representing 11% of GDP in sub-Saharan Africa). The two currencies, however, are not inter-convertible.

As established by the monetary accords between African nations and France, the CFA franc has four main pillars:

Firstly, a fixed rate of exchange with the euro (and previously the French franc) set at 1 euro = 655.957 CFA francs. Secondly, a French guarantee of the unlimited convertibility of CFA francs into euros. Thirdly, a centralisation of foreign exchange reserves. Since 2005, the two central banks – the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) and the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) – have been required to deposit 50% of their foreign exchange reserves in a special French Treasury ‘operating account’. Immediately following independence, this figure stood at 100% (and from 1973 to 2005, at 65%).

This arrangement is a quid pro quo for the French ‘guarantee’ of convertibility. The accords stipulate that foreign exchange reserves must exceed money in circulation by a margin of 20%. Before the fall in oil prices, the money supply coverage rate (the ratio of foreign exchange reserves to money in circulation) consistently approached 100%, implying in theory that Africans could dispense with the French ‘guarantee’. The final pillar of the CFA franc, is the principle of free capital transfer within the franc zone.

The CFA franc: for and against

Despite its exceptional longevity, the CFA franc by no means enjoys unanimous support among African economists and intellectuals. Its critics base their analysis on three separate arguments. Firstly, they condemn the absence of monetary sovereignty. France holds a de facto veto on the boards of the two central banks within the CFA franc zone. Since the reform of the BCEAO in 2010, the conduct of monetary policy has been assigned to a monetary policy committee. The French representative is a voting member of this committee, while the president of the WAEMU Commission attends only in an advisory capacity. Given the fixed rate of exchange between the CFA franc and the euro, the monetary and exchange rate policies of the franc zone nations are also dictated by the European Central Bank, whose monetary orthodoxy entails an anti-inflation bias detrimental to growth.

Secondly, they focus on the economic impact of the CFA franc, construed as a neocolonial device that continues to destroy any prospect of economic development in user nations. According to this perspective, the CFA franc is a barrier to industrialisation and structural transformation, serving neither to stimulate trade integration between user nations, nor boost bank lending to their economies. The credit-to-GDP ratio stands around 25% for the WAEMU zone, and 13% for the CAEMC zone, but averages 60%+ for sub-Saharan Africa, and 100%+ for South Africa etc. The CFA franc also encourages massive capital outflows. In brief, membership of the franc zone is synonymous with poverty and under-employment, as evidenced by the fact that 11 of its 15 adherents are classed as Least Developed Countries (LDCs), while the remainder (Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Congo, Gabon) have all experienced real-term economic decline.

Finally, they maintain that membership of the franc zone is inimical to the advance of democracy. To uphold the CFA franc, it is argued, France has never hesitated to jettison heads of state tempted to withdraw from the system. Most were removed from office or killed in favour of more compliant leaders who cling to power come hell or high water, as shown by the CAEMC nations and Togo. Economic development is impossible in such circumstances, as is the creation of a political system that meets the preoccupations of the majority of citizens.

For its partisans, in contrast, the underlying logic of the CFA franc lies not in neocolonialism, but in monetary cooperation. The under-development of the franc zone nations is attributed to factors independent of their monetary and exchange policies, in particular to their political instability and the poor economic policies of their leaders.

The CFA franc is characterised as a credible and stable currency, a significant virtue given the experience of most currency-issuing African nations. This counter-argument is, however, flawed: experience shows that nations like Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, which post independence withdrew from the franc zone and mint their own currency, are stronger economically than any user of the CFA franc.

It is also claimed that the CFA franc has allowed inflation to be pegged at a rate considerably lower than the African average. For its critics, however, the counterpart of this low inflation rate is weak economic growth and the creation of fewer jobs. Not to mention that this low average inflation rate does not prevent cities like Dakar from ranking among the most ‘expensive’ in the world.

In fact, the terms of the debate are quite simple. The CFA franc is a good currency for those who benefit from it: the major French and overseas corporations, the executives of the zone’s central banks, the elites wishing to repatriate wealth acquired legally or otherwise, heads of state unwilling to upset France etc. But for those hoping to export competitive products, obtain affordable credit, find work, work for the integration of continental trade, or fight for an Africa free from colonial relics, the CFA franc is an anachronism demanding orderly and methodical elimination.

From forbidden topic to emerging social movement

In October 2016, a group of African and European economists published a book entitled [in translation] Liberate Africa from Monetary Slavery: Who Profits from the CFA Franc? The date was not selected at random; it coincided with a meeting of the franc zone’s finance ministers, central bank governors and regional institutions. In the wake of the public debate sparked by the book, people are beginning to speak out.

France maintains the position that the CFA franc is an ‘African currency’, existing only as a support to Africans, who retain their ‘sovereignty’. Some heads of state, like Alassane Ouattara in Côte d’Ivoire et Macky Sall in Senegal take the same line. Unlike Idriss Déby, Macky Sall describes the CFA franc as ‘a currency worth keeping’. Ouattara goes further, insisting that the currency is a matter for experts and thus not a subject for democratic debate. From this standpoint, any critic of the CFA franc must by definition know nothing about it.

Yet, alongside radical economists and intellectuals, the critics of the CFA franc also include former international officials like Togo’s Kako Nubukpo (ex-BCEAO), Senegal’s Sanou Mbaye (ex-African Development Bank, and Guinea-Bissau’s Carlos Lopez (ex-UN Economic Commission for Africa), as well as African bankers like Henri-Claude Oyima (President-Director General of BGFI Bank).

From a taboo subject raised only by a handful of African intellectuals and politicians, the CFA franc debate is starting to enter day-to-day conversation and to attract the attention of activists. A social movement is developing to demand the joint withdrawal of African nations from the CFA franc. On 7 January 2017, on the initiative of ‘SOS Pan-Africa’ (‘Urgences Panafricanistes’), an NGO set up and run by the activist Kemi Séba, anti-CFA demonstrations were organised in several African and European cities, and in Haïti. The mobilisations varied in size according to country, bringing together intellectuals, pan-Africanist and anti-globalisation activists and others. SOS Pan-Africa has since issued a symbolic appeal for Africans to boycott French products.

The current alternative to the CFA franc in West Africa is the joint currency planned for members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The new currency was due to enter circulation in 2015, but this has since been deferred until 2020. The new deadline may or may not be met, but one thing seems increasingly clear: the CFA franc no longer has a future.

Ndongo Samba Sylla is Research and Programme Manager for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He is the editor and author of a number of books including The Fair Trade Scandal.

Featured Photograph: Front Anti-CFA organise protests against the currency

The Struggle for the Congo

ROAPE

May 15, 2017

Jointly published by Jacobin and ROAPE, David Seddon writes about Joseph Kabila’s second term as president which was supposed to end last November, but he’s still clinging to power, despite massive resistance.

By David Seddon

In 1997, Laurent Kabila successfully led a rebellion against President Mobutu Sese Soko and named himself president of the vast country then called Zaire. In 2001, when Kabila was assassinated, his son Joseph came to power. He has dominated what is now officially named the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for the past fifteen years, but has never established effective control, let alone presided over significant economic and social development.

Virtually limitless water from the world’s second-largest river, a moderate climate, and rich soil grant the DRC excellent agricultural potential. Abundant deposits of copper, gold, diamonds, cobalt, uranium, coltan, and oil should make it one of the world’s richest countries. But annual per capita GDP is only about $450, and income per capita sits below $1 a day. Furthermore, Kabila’s rule has been marked by almost continual conflict, especially in the eastern region, which MONUSCO, a small UN peacekeeping force first deployed in 1999, has failed to contain. Millions have died, either as a direct result of conflict or as a consequence of the disruptions to normal life and basic services.

Rival militias, often supported by neighboring African states, local groups unwilling to accept Kabila’s legitimacy, and intertribal struggles over land have all contributed to the chaos. Private mining corporations from around the world have taken advantage of this state of affairs and exploited the DRC’s rich mineral deposits. Protected by private security companies and mercenaries, these multinationals effectively exist beyond the reach of government regulation or taxation.

For the past two years, the political opposition has struggled against Kabila, worried that he will try to extend his term by any means necessary.

Kabila, who succeeded his father less than two weeks after the latter was assassinated, has won two questionable presidential elections. In 2006, the results were disputed; five years later, the main opposition boycotted the vote. While it’s clear he could manipulate the elections and win again, Congo’s constitution bars Kabila from seeking a third term. He’s had to devise new strategies to hold on to power.

In January 2015, the opposition began organizing protests against a draft law they feared would allow Kabila to remain in power beyond his current mandate. The proposed legislation called for a new census to revise the voting rolls, as approximately seven million new citizens between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two needed to be registered. The opposition saw this as Kabila’s attempt to postpone the elections and allow him to run for a third term.

The census provision was eventually removed from the legislation, but the opposition argued it was only ever one of numerous methods available to delay the elections. The most effective method, some say, has been to compromise the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI).

Lambert Mende, the communications minister, denied that the government could block the electoral process, reiterating that CENI, not the government, organizes elections. But the opposition claims elections commission is independent in name only. According to Jason Stearns, the director of the Congo Research Group at New York University, these accusations are justified: “the political influence on the electoral commission has been clear,” he explains. “While, in theory, the political opposition can nominate members to the body, almost none of those are still recognised by the opposition.”

On October 9, 2015, Kris Berwouts commented that “President Kabila faces challenges on a number of fronts, from the opposition to the grassroots to members of his own inner circle” and asked, “How much longer can he hold on?” While we still can’t answer that question, there have been significant developments in the DRC since Berwouts posed it.

Citizen Front

In November and December 2015, various opposition forces united to form Citizen Front 2016 — a coalition of political parties and civil society organizations all demanding elections. At its formal launch, the front gave the government an ultimatum: it must “unblock the electoral process” before the end of January 2016 and allow CENI to publish an electoral calendar. Should Kabila fail to meet this fast-approaching deadline, the coalition promised to launch a program of nonviolent resistance. The BBC reported in December 2015 that “activists believe violence would escalate if the election deadline is missed.”

The date set was clearly optimistic, and few seriously expected a meaningful organization of elections to get underway before February. Even the Citizen Front leaders doubted that much would change.

“The government won’t unblock the electoral process,” said Martin Fayulu. He thought Kabila might nominate “a weak successor” if he encounters a strong and united opposition, but believed that the president’s “first choice is to violate the constitution and carry on as president without elections.” Albert Moleka suggested that “Kabila’s logic is that it’s him or chaos and civil war.” According to Vital Kamerhe, an opposition heavyweight who came in third in the 2011 presidential race, “Elections will not be held because of lack of political will. If President Kabila could run, then elections would take place.”

Despite this pessimism, Citizen Front managed to achieve significant momentum. At the beginning of January 2016, Moïse Katumbi, former governor of Katanga and Kabila’s old ally, announced that he had joined the front. He explained, “The purpose of the Citizen Front is first to insist on the provincial elections of 2016 and the 2016 presidential election by respecting the constitutional deadlines and have the electoral calendar, as soon as possible.”

The front planned numerous “conferences” followed by church services at an estimated forty-four locations across the capital city of Kinshasa. The events were scheduled to commemorate the killing of some forty or so opposition demonstrators by security forces in January 2015. Some conferences went ahead on the anniversary of the protests (January 19) while others were blocked.

Many of the organizers and activists associated with these events were arrested — some sources put the number at around forty; others at above one hundred. According to Al Jazeera:

“Early in the morning, the government sent soldiers and policemen to the site allotted to me and my party where they blocked our access and arrested five of my activists,” said Martin Fayulu, a leading figure within the Citizen Front. “They told the priest to stop the mass, not only here but at all the other sites too.” Albert Moleka — a founding member of the Citizen Front and a veteran of Congolese politics — was supposed to attend the conference in Ngiri Ngiri, but says: “The regime wants no opposition demonstrations in Kinshasa at all.”

Both Moleka and Kamerhe claimed that “machete-wielding thugs loyal to President Kabila” harangued and intimidated opposition activists. While MONUSCO has not gathered any evidence to substantiate these allegations, Jose Maria Aranaz, director of the UN’s Joint Human Rights Office, told Al Jazeera that “there was a concerted effort by the police and the ANR [the intelligence agency] to impede the opposition’s demonstrations from taking place”.

Pierrot Mwanamputu, spokesperson for the Congolese National Police, however, justified the crackdown, claiming that organizers had published leaflets of “a seditious character calling on the population to rebel against the government” and had not secured proper authorization — something opposition leaders insist was not required.

Growing Discontent

In mid-January 2016, CENI prepared and distributed an electoral timetable to embassies in Kinshasa, showing that the commission expected it would take between thirteen and sixteen months just to update the DRC’s electoral roll. In February 2016, Carol Jean Gallo, writing from Bukavu in eastern Congo, suggested that although elections were months away, there were already “signs that this volatile and conflict prone country may be headed toward a deep political crisis.”

She reported:

Here in Bukavu, South Kivu, in DRC, murmurs of discontent can be heard with regard to upcoming DRC elections. People understand that the DRC, like other countries in the region, are being watched — and international support depends in large part on respecting constitutional mandates. But opposition parties and activists in DRC think that Kabila is trying to be more clever and surreptitious about staying in power by coming up with ways of delaying the elections scheduled for November — a strategy known as glissement (“slippage” in French).

At this point, CENI had not even started to revise the voting register, causing delays in the local and provincial elections that had been scheduled for October 2015. According to Gallo:

[T]he two main glissement strategies people have been talking . . . are the claim that the government does not have enough money or resources to hold elections in November and the government’s assertion that the DRC must complete a “national dialogue” before elections are held. Kabila called for such a dialogue about three months ago, and CENI estimates it will cost over $1 billion.

Government officials denied that the president was trying to remain in power. They argued that major logistical shortcomings needed to be overcome and a “secure environment” established across the nation before the elections could be held. “This may take up to four years,” they warned.

They had a point. The DRC is nearly two-thirds the size of Western Europe and has a population of more than seventy-nine million. Registering new voters has always been a problem, and, given DRC’s rate of population growth — about 2.7 percent annually — it is likely that the current registry seriously underestimates eligible voters.

Meanwhile, Western nations, including the United States, continued to warn the president to stick to the election calendar, and diplomats from the African Union to the UN expressed concern about postponing the November elections.

On March 10, 2016, the European Parliament, in an emergency plenary session, called on the DRC government and Kabila to respect the nation’s laws. It noted that the Congolese constitution clearly gave the president the right to run for only two consecutive terms, commenting that “if President Joseph Kabila, who was elected in 2006 and re-elected in 2011, deeply respects the constitution, he cannot be a candidate to be his own successor.”

It also called on the African Union to act as a mediator in the interests of regional stability and on the United Nations to extend MONUSCO’s mandate to provide civil protection during the elections. It further resolved that the European Union should “commit to use all instruments at its disposal, be they political, diplomatic or economic, to lobby for the respect of the Constitution and the protection of local populations.” It stated that it would favor a comprehensive political dialogue but indicated that targeted sanctions remained on the table. The European politicians demanded an end to arbitrary arrests and intimidation and prosecution for human rights violations.

However, Gallo explained that, according to DRC citizens, even this resolution doesn’t go far enough:

[O]rdinary people — bartenders, taxi drivers, and even ex-rebels — have told me in no uncertain terms that, whether knowingly or inadvertently, these international actors are simply buying into Kabila’s shenanigans and that a comprehensive dialogue will only result in a delay in the elections, which will cause those fed up with the status quo to react with political violence.

Dealing with the Opposition

At the beginning of May 2016, the Constitutional Court ruled, in an idiosyncratic interpretation of Article 70 of the constitution, that Kabila could stay in power until voters choose a new president. Shortly afterwards, protesters took to the streets, clashing with police. The opposition feared that its predictions were coming true: the elections would be postponed, and the president would remain in office.

At least one protester died and two more were wounded by gunfire during running battles in Goma, the largest city in the east. Security forces in Kinshasa fired tear gas at a march consisting of several thousand citizens. Unverified reports began circulating that protesters had stoned a police officer to death. At least fifty-nine people were arrested. Local authorities banned demonstrations in some cities.

A particularly heavy deployment of riot police appeared on the streets of the southern mining hub Lubumbashi, where supporters of Katumbi — who had emerged as a real threat to Kabila — repeatedly clashed with police.

On May 13, 2016, the attorney general issued an arrest warrant for Katumbi, claiming he “threaten[ed] the internal and external security of the country by recruiting mercenaries to support his cause.” Police once again used tear gas to disperse protesters who had gathered outside the courtroom to support him. Katumbi fled the next day, ostensibly to receive medical treatment in South Africa for injuries sustained during a demonstration earlier that month.

His supporters in the Citizen Front continued to defy a ban on protests in North Kivu and Lubumbashi, and opposition parties and civil society groups called for nationwide demonstrations to protest the Constitutional Court’s ruling.

In late July, tens of thousands gathered in Kinshasa to greet Étienne Tshisekedi, the veteran leader of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) who had spent the previous two years in exile. Tshisekedi’s supporters accompanied him to the party’s headquarters in the Limete municipality of Kinshasa. That same day, two people were injured and seven others arrested as police violently dispersed opposition gatherings in Lubumbashi and Tshikapa (Kasai District).

Both pro- and anti-government groups planned protests in major urban areas at the end of July and into August. The ruling coalition scheduled a large demonstration to support the president and his proposed national dialogue on the electoral process for July 29 at the Stade Tata Raphael in Kinshasa.

The Rally of Forces for Change planned large opposition actions for two days later at the Stade des Martyrs in Kinshasa, where Tshisekedi would speak, and at the Grande Place Tshombe in Lubumbashi. They also organized a large meeting on August 7 at the Esplanade du Palais du Peuple in Kinshasa. Protesters insisted that the presidential elections take place in November.

Many feared escalating violence. Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes, Muthoni Wanyeki, demanded that:

The authorities . . . facilitate the right to peaceful assembly for all, including opposition supporters protesting election delays that they regard as a tactic to prolong President Joseph Kabila’s stay in power. Police and other security forces must refrain from using force against peaceful protesters.

Tobias Ellwood, the United Kingdom’s minister for the Middle East and Africa visited the DRC in early August and pressed the government to make progress toward timely elections. He also met with opposition figures and emphasized the importance of elections to the DRC’s continuing development. The Foreign Office advice website now warns British travelers that “the political situation in DRC . . . remains uncertain.”

The Crunch

On August 20, 2016, CENI announced that the presidential election would be delayed until at least July 2017. The commission’s president, Cornielle Nangaa, explained that the process of registering more than thirty million voters would take an estimated sixteen months to complete. “The issue before us today in Congo is how to reconcile the electoral cycle . . . with the technical constraints we face,” he added, referring to the logistical challenge of updating voter rolls in a large country with poor infrastructure and communications.

The government then decided that it preferred to hold local and provincial elections before the presidential campaign, suggesting that Congolese voters would have to wait until 2018 or 2019 to choose a new leader. Many anticipated this outcome, but it nevertheless fuelled further protests.

The main opposition alliance rejected further dialogue and called on its supporters to hold a general strike, creating a ‘dead city’ (ville morte) on Tuesday August 23. Tshisekedi declared that the government had not met the “necessary requirements for holding a dialogue” and lent his support to the strike. Katumbi, still in exile, urged people to stay at home in protest of what he termed a “constitutional breach” and a “false and non-inclusive dialogue in the country.”

The opposition chose August 23 because African Union mediator and former prime minister of Togo, Edem Kodjo, had planned to open talks with all domestic political parties that day. Opposition politicans had criticized Kodjo in the past, portraying him as a Kabila apologist, and called for his resignation. Fayulu, leader of the new Citizenship and Development Party, which had evolved out of the Citizen Front, vocally disapproved of the mediator and asked him to step down: “[W]e want to demonstrate to Mr Kabila that the people of Congo don’t want . . . Mr Kodjo. We want the talks to take place in accordance with UN Resolution 2277,” which calls for dialogue in accordance with the constitution. “We are saying that Mr Kodjo is becoming a bottleneck and has to go,” he finished.

The strike proved to have less impact than anticipated. It had the greatest effect in Kinshasa and slowed business activities in Goma, the east’s main trading center, but the opposition in Lubumbashi found the results disappointing. A government spokesman dismissed the strike as the work of “some radicals . . . having some old-fashioned fun,” and the opposition vowed to hold large scale actions across the country before September 19 — the date when the president was constitutionally required to call for elections to choose his successor.

On the day of the deadline, thousands of Congolese marched against President Kabila. Interior Minister Evariste Boshab reported that only seventeen people, including three policemen, had died in clashes. But, significantly, he also referred to the protests as “an uprising.”

Other sources printed much higher casualty figures, and close to two hundred people are believed to have been arrested. Human Rights Watch reported that security forces had killed fifty-six people.

Robert Coville, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, held a news briefing in Geneva the same day, saying that the UN was “deeply worried” by the latest round of violence.

We have received reports of excessive use of force by some elements of the security forces as well as reports that some demonstrators resorted to violence yesterday. We call on all sides to show restraint and we urge the authorities to ensure that existing national and international standards on the appropriate use of force are fully respected by all security personnel. We call for a credible and impartial investigation to bring those responsible of human rights violations and criminal acts to justice, and we stand ready to support such an inquiry.

He added that the violence underlined the urgent need for dialogue on the nation’s electoral process.

Despite strong internal and external pressure, the deadline passed with no announcement. All signs now indicated that Kabila intended to cling to power until 2018 or even 2019. Between the Constitutional Court decision allowing him to remain president until elections are held, the ongoing revision of the national voter registry, and the government’s decision to hold local and provincial elections first, Kabila seemed to have effectively extended his term by two or three years.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

The government did agree to talks with the smaller opposition parties; these produced a provisional agreement in October 2016. The deal announced that Kabila would remain in power until presidential elections, now scheduled for 2018. Following the vote, he would step down.

The main opposition coalition objected strenuously to this agreement, claiming it had been excluded from the talks, and called for another general strike. The so-called dialogue continued without these major players, and pressure on Kabila grew after an opinion poll revealed that he had approval ratings under 8 percent and that the majority of Congolese voters preferred either Tshisekedi or Katumbi for president.

In November 2016, Kabila nominated Samy Badibanga, leader of the main opposition bloc in Parliament, to replace Augustin Matata as prime minister. This decision signified a major development. Mounting popular resistance, poor polling, and international pressure pushed Kabila to sign a “global and inclusive agreement,” brokered by the Congolese Catholic Church, on December 31, 2016.

The agreement called on the Kabila administration and the opposition parties to create a transitional government that would take control in March 2017. Elections would take place before the end of the year, and Kabila would not run for reelection.

While Tshisekedi’s poor health precluded him from participating in the talks, his symbolic importance was underlined when he was appointed as the president of the critical transitional council — the National Council for the Monitoring of the Agreement and the Electoral Process (CNSA).

Kabila himself promised that elections “would be organised in the coming months” but warned against foreign “interference,” apparently referring to remarks by some UN Security Council diplomats who had visited the DRC to push for a peaceful transition of power.

Negotiations over the agreement’s implementation — which were supposed to be completed by the end of January — stalled over several issues, including the procedure for appointing a new prime minister and the division of ministerial positions. The lack of progress, combined with deepening economic malaise and insecurity in several provinces, increased citizens’ frustration.

Meanwhile Tshisekedi’s health declined further, and he died, at the age of 84, on February 1. His death came at a critical moment. He was set to lead the transitional council and, with negotiations faltering, had left no obvious successor.

His party, the UDPS, had played a major role in the opposition coalition. Party leadership suggested that Tshisekedi’s son Felix be named prime minister in the power-sharing government. But Jason Stearns, director of the Congo Research Group at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, explained:

There is no heir apparent, either within [his UPDS party] or the broader opposition. Even before his death, opposition leaders were vying for the prime ministry and cabinet jobs; there is little doubt that President Kabila will seek to capitalise on this moment to sow discord among his rivals. At the same time, the political elite and the broad population are still relatively united on their objectives: Kabila must step down and elections must be held as soon as possible. The question is whether they can overcome their internal division to make those goals a reality.

Opposition politicians pledged to maintain the coalition’s unity, but Hans Hoebeke, DRC analyst with the International Crisis Group, warned, “We are entering murky waters. No one has the popular legitimacy to take over.” He feared “an outbreak of violence.”

Two weeks after the Tshisekedi’s death, Kabila’s budget minister, Pierre Kangudia, claimed yet again that it would be difficult to collect the funds required to undertake a new census in time for a 2017 vote. Close aides to the president continued to insist that it would be impossible hold elections with an updated registry before 2018.

A report in the Guardian concluded:

Analysts suggest two possibilities if opposition factions and the government cannot agree on a process with a minimum of legitimacy: a bloody, popular, urban uprising that ousts the president, or the slow collapse of the government as economic weakness, meddling by regional powers and international isolation undermine its authority.

Until either of those scenarios played out, Joseph Kabila would remain president.

Over the next month, the opposition claimed that Kabila, still intent on staying in power, was purposefully blocking the deal’s implementation and promised to continue to organize actions until he stood down.

In early April, the Catholic bishops who had been mediating the talks announced that they were done: neither side, they claimed, was willing to compromise. Soon after, Kabila announced that he would replace opposition leader Sami Badibanga as prime minister and asked the opposition parties to name his successor.

Many expected Felix Tshisekedi to become the new prime minister. A candidate from the opposition coalition party, The Rally, Tshisekedi enjoys support across the country as well as among diplomatic circles in Kinshasa – something his father could not claim. Surprisingly, on April 8, Kabila appointed Bruno Tshibala as the prime minister of the power-sharing government.

The UDPS had expelled Tshibala in March for contesting the designation of Felix Tshisekedi as his father’s successor. His appointment as prime minister will likely further divide Kabila’s opponents. In the meantime, Kabila has promised that the dialogue will continue.

While Kabila’s willingness to negotiate with the opposition last December seemed to offer hope that the nation would soon elect a new president, he has proven himself to be a wily and resilient strategist. The nation has not experienced a peaceful transfer of power since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960. Unfortunately, this election looks like more of the same.

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.

Featured Photograph: Congolese activists in Toronto protesting election results in Congo-Kinshasa, in which President Joseph Kabila was named the winner.

The Corporate Swamp: a New G20 Strategy for Africa

ROAPE

May 9, 2017

By Patrick Bond

The World Economic Forum (WEF) – Africa conference in Durban just hosted some of the world’s most controversial politicians: not just Jacob Zuma and his finance minister Malusi Gigaba plus regional dictators Robert Mugabe, Yoweri Museveni, King Mswati and Edgar Lungu, but also the most powerful man in Europe, the notoriously-corrupt neoliberal German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble.

At a public lecture on 4 May hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Schäuble undiplomatically threatened Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May, in the midst of her election campaign: “The [Brexit] negotiations will become terribly difficult for the UK. They will see it.”

The next day at the WEF-Africa summit, Schäuble sold his plan for reviving multinational corporate investment in Africa. It is a priority, he said, because “In Europe, we have come to understand that Africa represents one of the most important issues for the growth and stability of the global economy.”

Africa as an ‘issue’ for global economic ‘growth’ – managed by imperialist elites – dates to an earlier Berlin project: the infamous “Scramble for Africa” in 1884-85. The continent’s dysfunctional borders were drawn then in order to facilitate property rights for colonial extractive industries, all the better to ensure infrastructure investment. Roads, railways, bridges and ports needed to withdraw resources have been cemented into place ever since, and now require refurbishing and expansion.

In addition to imperialist aspirations, another explanation arises: Germany’s national election is in September. Schäuble’s boss Angela Merkel needs a rhetorical device to explain to voters how the million African refugees who entered Germany over the last dozen years can be kept at bay in future. Hence the ‘Compact’ with African elites.

Schäuble was speaking on behalf of a G20 bloc that will hold its annual meeting in Hamburg in two months’ time. Amongst the world’s largest economies plus multilateral financial institutions, South Africa – with only the 3^rd largest African economy and sixth most populous society – represents a continent glaringly absent from view.

The ‘C20’ group of civil society critics has expressed concern not only about Schäuble’s top-down process, but about “higher costs for the citizens, worse service, secrecy, loss of democratic influence and financial risks for the public… … and the multinational corporations involved demand that their profits be repatriated in hard currency – even though the typical services contract entails local-currency expenditures and revenues – and that often raises African foreign debt levels, which are now at all-time highs again in many countries.”

In contrast to Berlin, Donald Trump’s Washington regime has proposed cutting the USAID budget dramatically and diverting $54 billion in state funding to the military. But while once preaching isolationism, Trump has already expanded ‘low-profile’ “Africa Command” interventions from the Maghreb across the Sahel to the Horn, according to researcher Nick Turse who last week analysed newly-declassified Pentagon data.

On June 12-13, more Compact details will be shared with G20 finance ministers at a Berlin meeting reportedly to be co-chaired by Schäuble and Gigaba. In spite of the latter’s occasional leftist rhetoric and widespread praise for his WEF-Africa diplomacy, Gigaba’s record of white-elephant infrastructure promotion when he was State Enterprises minister suggests how prone Pretoria remains to offering massive public subsidies to construction and mining corporations. That tendency overlaps precisely with Schäuble’s aims.

In addition to South Africa, five countries have initially signed up to the Compact with Africa – Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia – with many more anticipated to join, so as to maintain aid and political favour with the European Union.

Schäuble’s Compact was released in March in the German resort of Baden-Baden without substantive African input (in contrast to Tony Blair’s 2004-05 Commission for Africa which co-opted a comprador elite including Finance Minister Trevor Manuel). Schäuble not only side-lined the more generous ‘Marshall Plan’ strategy advanced by Merkel’s development ministry, he also insisted that African governments provide more public subsidies – and take on much more risk – for ‘Public Private Partnership’ infrastructure. This typically amounts to profits, pilfering and – for consumers of commercialised infrastructure – pain.

In his new autobiography and a Guardian article, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis described Schäuble as a hypocritical financial dictator who privately confessed that his ongoing squeeze of the Syriza government and Greek people – on behalf of the Euro – should really have been rejected by Athens. The very day Schäuble spoke in Durban, he was also busy imposing more austerity on Greece and rejecting a previously promised bail-out.

Varoufakis regrets trusting Europe’s “Deep Establishment” in 2015, and indeed he should have known better. Fifteen years earlier Schäuble had been expelled as leader of the Conservative Party for accepting and then publicly denying a cash bribe – the equivalent of US$56 000 – from arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber (whose generosity also wrecked the once-invincible Helmut Kohl’s reputation.) A comeback thanks to Angela Merkel’s generosity gave Schäuble first the German Home Affairs and then Finance portfolios.

Likewise, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde is a close Schäuble collaborator and endorser of the Compact with Africa. Less than six months ago, she too was convicted in French courts for a €403 million payout to a major conservative party contributor, Adidas owner Bernard Tapie, when she was finance minister. Her comeback was far faster than Schäuble’s: she continues in her present job, even gaining a re-endorsement on the day of her Paris conviction by IMF directors including those representing the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa bloc.

Meanwhile African infrastructure has failed to attract anywhere near the investment in the manner envisaged in the African Development Bank 2010 Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa and the wildly overoptimistic 2012 Southern Africa Development Community regional master plan.

But this is not only a function of weak local systems – including widespread corruption in Africa’s construction sector – but another factor for which Schäuble, Lagarde and other elite financial managers are partly responsible: an utterly unreformed, chaotic world economic system. Africa faced commodity price hikes of 380% from 2002-11 and then crashes by more than 50% in 2014-15, to unprofitable levels. And no Compact with Africa aiming to incentivise multinational corporate investment merely with state supply-side subsidies can reverse those inherent crisis conditions within global capitalism.

Patrick Bond teaches political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society in Durban. Bond is on the International Advisory Board of ROAPE. A version of this blog was published in the South African paper Mail and Guardian.

Featured Photograph: Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa, at World Economic Forum on Africa 2009 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Popular Protest & Class Struggle in Africa – Part 8

ROAPE

May 3, 2017

By David Seddon

In this issue of the project, I review the most recent developments in four countries we have recently discussed – Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe and the DRC – in all of which long-standing leaders have refused to stand down, in some cases against growing internal opposition and external pressure, but with significantly differing outcomes.

Gambia

In our last issue (no. 7), we focused on the situation in Gambia, where President Jammeh, after losing to Adama Barrow in the presidential election held on 1 December 2016, decided not to accept the official results, appearing on state television to say so on 9 December and following this announcement up with the deployment of troops in key locations in Banjul, the capital, and in Serekunda, the largest city.

On 12 December, the bar association called Jammeh’s rejection of the outcome of the elections as ‘tantamount to treason’, on 14 December the UN stated that Jammeh’s response to his defeat was ‘an outrageous act of disrespect of the will of the Gambian people’, and on 16 December, ECOWAS issued a statement saying that ‘Barrow should be sworn in’ in order to ‘respect the will of the Gambian people’. On 17 December, the heads of state of Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone arrived in Serekunda to remonstrate with the recalcitrant ‘ex-president’; but were obliged to go home without success.

Jammeh announced, on 20 December, that a new election was necessary: ‘I will not cheat’, he said, ‘but I will not be cheated. Justice must be done and the only way justice can be done is to re-organise the election so that every Gambian votes. That’s the only way we can resolve the matter peacefully and fairly’. Striking a defiant tone, he rejected any foreign interference and declared that he was prepared to fight, and would not leave office at the end of his term in January unless the Supreme Court upheld the results. On 23 December, the president of ECOWAS, Marcel Alain de Souza, announced that troops would be ‘sent in’ if Jammeh failed to step down by 19 January 2017. The military intervention would be led by Senegal. De Souza said: ‘if he doesn’t go, we have a force that is already on alert, and this force will intervene to restore the will of the people’. On 27 December, Adama Barrow called on Jammeh to give up power peacefully, and said that he had no wish to lead a country that was not ‘at peace with itself’, but he also promised that he would declare himself president on 19 January 2017.

As the New Year arrived, Jammeh remained reluctant, and imposed a state of emergency. It seemed for a couple of weeks as though he would make a fight of it. But when it came to the crunch, Jammeh finally agreed to step down, after 22 years as president. On 19 January 2017, Adama Barrow declared on Twitter ‘this is a victory of the Gambian nation. Our national flag will fly high among those of the most democratic nations of the world’. A key factor in this final decision was undoubtedly the threat of military intervention by ECOWAS troops, who actually entered Gambian territory on 19 January, led by the Senegalese army, and remained on stand-by (with UN Security Council support) as Adama Barrow took the oath of office at the Gambian Embassy in Dakar, Senegal.

On Saturday 21 January 2017, Jammeh flew out of Banjul airport together with his family, and headed into political exile, landing in Guinea an hour later. President Alpha Conde of Guinea had served as mediator during the crisis, and appears to have played a crucial role in the last few days before Jammeh’s term of office expired; he left Gambia together with Jammeh and accompanied him on this first short flight. The departure of the ex-president from Gambia came just 24 hours after he announced on state television that he was ceding power to Adama Barrow.

As he left, three of his 13-strong fleet of Bentleys and Rolls Royces, were seen being driven onto a much larger cargo aircraft; and it was initially suggested, by the in-coming president, that he had stripped the central bank of its cash reserves to the tune of nearly £9 million over the previous fortnight. It was thought that he was heading eventually for Equatorial Guinea, which has not signed up to the International Criminal Court, and whose President Teodoro Obiang would presumably not be too discomfited by the presence of Jammeh, given his own son’s collection of Ferraris and Bugattis.

Equatorial Guinea

Obiang, who first assumed office in 1979 as Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council after a coup, before becoming president in 1982, has himself been in power for 37 years, making Jammeh’s record of 22 years in office seem relatively short-lived. Furthermore, as we remarked, in issue no 4 of this series, ‘the constitution grants Obiang sweeping powers, including the power to rule by decree. Most domestic and international observers consider his regime to be one of the most corrupt, ethnocentric, oppressive and undemocratic in the world.

In an interview on CNN, Christiane Amanpour asked Obiang in October 2012 whether he would step down at the end of the then-current term (2009–2016), since he had been re-elected at least four times in his reign of over thirty years. In his response, Obiang said he categorically refused to step down at the end of the term. After the 2011 constitutional referendum, presidents were limited to two terms of seven years (from then on) and the age limit for candidates was removed. In addition, the post of Vice President was established, allowing the vice president to automatically assume power if the president died in office.

During 2016, as the presidential elections approached, the authorities persistently harassed and arguably persecuted various civil society organisations considered to be a threat to the government and Obiang’s regime. On 28 February, plain clothes security personnel disrupted a meeting of Citizens for Information (CI) in Bata. CI members Leopoldo Obama Ndong, Manuel Esono Mia, Federico Nguema, Santiago Mangue Ndong and Jesús Nze Ndong were arrested and remained in detention without charge at the end of the year. Over 40 others were arrested over the following days in Bata, and at least 10 others in other towns.

On 20 April, four days before the elections, some 140 people were arrested at Bata airport as they welcomed CI’s Secretary-General. Others were arrested later in their homes; they included Gabriel Nze’s sister and elder brother. Some detainees were held at Bata police station and others in Bata prison. All were released without charge over a week later. Several were tortured and otherwise ill-treated, including a man who was made to lie on the floor while soldiers jumped on his hands. On 22 April, police used excessive force against CI members who had gathered peacefully in the party’s headquarters in Malabo. At about 4am, police in helicopters and armed vehicles surrounded the headquarters and used tear gas and live ammunition to force the approximately 200 party members out of the building. Four people were injured by bullets and taken to hospital over 24 hours later, following the intervention of the US Ambassador. At least 23 people were arrested and taken to Black Beach prison where they were beaten. All were released without charge on 30 April.

Elections were held in Equatorial Guinea on 24 April 2016. The opposition consisted of individuals with little political recognition and none of their parties were represented in Parliament. There were also three independent candidates, whom critics claimed were dummy candidates to provide legitimacy for the elections. The Democratic Opposition Front, which is a coalition of dissident parties, boycotted the election, citing that the election would be ‘anti-constitutional’ and that Obiang would win ‘with a big score as a result of fraud’. Opposition candidate, Gabriel Nse Obiang Obono, was prevented from running for not meeting residency requirements.

Amnesty International reported that ‘the rights to freedom of expression and of peaceful assembly were severely curtailed ahead of presidential elections in April. Police used excessive force including firearms against members of opposition parties. Hundreds of political opponents and others, including foreign nationals, were arbitrarily arrested and held without charge or trial for varying periods; several were tortured’. In January 2016, police in Bata arbitrarily arrested Convergence for Social Democracy members Anselmo Santos Ekoo and Urbano Elo Ntutum, for ‘disturbing the peace’, as they distributed leaflets and announced a meeting of their opposition party. They were released without charge 10 days later.

It was announced on 28 April 2016 that Obiang had won the election by an overwhelming margin, as expected. Provisional results showed him with 93.7 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 92.9 per cent. He was sworn in for another term at a ceremony in Malabo on 20 May. He then appointed his son, Teodorin, as vice president. Between February and May 2016, over 250 people were arrested for attending opposition parties’ meetings. All but four of those arrested were released without charge after being held for over a week. Members and sympathizers of the opposition party Citizens for Innovation (CI) were particularly targeted, as were relatives of the party’s Secretary-General, Gabriel Nze. Taxi drivers taking people to meetings were also arrested.

In December 2016, Obiang’s son’s lawyers failed to convince the International Court of Justice that he had diplomatic immunity and at the beginning of January 2017 it was announced that Teodorin Obiang was to go on trial in absentia for corruption and money laundering. He had already agreed with US officials to forfeit property worth more than US$30 million (including a dozen luxury cars) but still faces an array of legal cases across Europe. In the meanwhile, his father, the president of Equatorial Guinea, is estimated to have a net worth of some US$600 million, making him one of the world’s wealthiest heads of state.

The country over which he has ruled as an elected dictator for nearly 40 years is the second richest in Africa, with the highest average per capita on the continent but (as we reported in issue no. 4) the majority of the population lives under the poverty line. The African Economic Outlook describes the situation succinctly, stating that ‘the country falls short of its economic and financial potential with high levels of poverty (more than 60 per cent), limited access to drinking water and sewerage, and the prevalence of contagious diseases’.

Zimbabwe

In Zimbabwe, which we last discussed in issue 6, popular protest increased significantly during the period June to August 2016 to peak in September (Fig 1).

This spike in violence against civilians came after months of upheaval against the Mugabe regime by protesters from various pressure groups. Protesting against the regime involves a mixture of organised political opposition, unions and seemingly spontaneous social movements.

The Tajamuka and ThisFlag campaign represent examples of popular movements which have protested repeatedly against the government on the street and online. ThisFlag seems to function as an avenue by which ordinary Zimbabweans can demonstrate their grievances against the government, with the group’s leader, Pastor Evan Mawarire, calling for Zimbabweans to engage in passive strikes and stay-aways to make their voices heard (ACLED Conflict Trends, September 2016). In contrast, the Tajamuka campaign is focused on forcing Mugabe to step down before the 2018 elections and has been engaged in active protests and riots in Harare and Bulawayo (Tajamuka, 2016). Protesting with these social movements is the National Vendors Union of Zimbabwe (NAVUZ) which is also demanding an end to Mugabe’s administration.

In the face of these civil society developments, the conventional opposition parties have become increasingly concerned about losing relevance as the mouthpiece of anti-Mugabe sentiment. They have formed an alliance and also engaged in widespread protest against the government. The alliance includes notable former regime insiders and opposition politicians including Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai (MDC-T), Welshman Ncube, former Vice-President Joice Mujuru’s Zimbabwe People First (PF) party, Tendai Biti’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Elton Mangoma’s Renewal Democrats of Zimbabwe (RDZ).

With President Mugabe and the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) facing internal coalition competition and popular discontent, the regime has relied heavily on violence to cow the opposition into submission. The spokesperson of the Tajamuka campaign and the leader of the NAVUZ have both been abducted and tortured by unidentified men suspected to be security agents (according to Dewa, 14 September 2016 and Ncube, 29 September 2016). The manner in which these individuals were targeted echoes the disappearance of Itai Dzamara, who led a protest against the Mugabe regime. This gives a clear message to those orchestrating the anti-Mugabe protests that they can also be made to disappear altogether if necessary.

ZANU-PF is also continuing its campaign of violence against the street-level machinery of the opposition with ward councilors from both the MDC and PF assaulted by ruling party cadres. While the regime is seeking to decapitate the unions and social movements by intimidating their leaders, it is aiming to cripple the political opposition by removing its supporters and lower level functionaries.

In the meanwhile, the economic situation continues to deteriorate. In October 2016, the World Bank issued a report on Zimbabwe in which it stated that the country had been severely affected by a financial crisis and drought; the economy is estimated to have grown by only 0.4 per cent in 2016, with agriculture having shrunk by 4.2 per cent in 2016, due to drought. Going forward, external payment arrears may lead to a further contraction in imports and a decline in GDP. The financial crisis continues to have a significant impact on incomes, while the drought has disproportionately affected the rural poor (the number of extremely poor people is expected to have increased to 3.28 million in 2016, up from 3.16 million in 2015). Moreover, the number of food insecure people was considered likely to increase to over 4.4 million people by end 2016/early 2017.

In response to the crisis, the Government announced a fiscal adjustment programme in the Mid-Year Fiscal Statement presented on 8 September, 2016. This programme included measures to limit the wage bill; but some of these were subsequently reversed. The Bank considered that the economic situation is likely to continue to deteriorate and stated that ‘fiscal adjustment in the form of a reduction in the public sector wage bill is needed to prevent further accumulation of government borrowing from the banking system. Without a fiscal adjustment and/or access to external credit through arrears clearance, the government will have to borrow from banks. This is likely to result in an accumulation of public debt, diminishing investor confidence and limiting Zimbabwe’s growth prospects’.

Such a ‘fiscal adjustment’ would, however, cut – or at the very least freeze – public sector wages, hitting civil servants whose pay is already widely considered to be inadequate and increasing the scale and extent of urban poverty. Already, the rate of inflation – which had remained negative throughout much of 2016 – had begun to increase as the price of food, cooking oil and non-alcoholic beverages rose. In the meanwhile, the opposition has continued to agitate for ‘meaningful change’, and has even fallen out with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission over their demand for electoral reforms – under the banner of a National Electoral reform Agenda – before the ‘make-or-break’ national elections planned for 2018, while the Zimbabwean authorities have continued to control any significant form of collective action. In the most recent confrontation over a ‘mega march’ in Harare – planned for 22 March 2017 and to be led by MDC president Morgan Tsvangirai – the authorities effectively went back on their previous decision to allow this protest demonstration to take place by confining it to the central business district and not permitting a march to take place through the city. The police stated that they had concerns that there was a risk that the proposed march would turn violent.

DRC

On Monday 19 September 2016, thousands of opposition supporters marched in Kinshasa against President Kabila and his bid to extend his term; there were demonstrations also in Goma in the east of the country. The next day, Human Rights Watch reported that security forces had killed more than three dozen people in the latest bout of protests (other sources reported higher figures), and close to 200 people are believed to have been arrested. Interior Minister Evariste Boshab referred to the protests as ‘an uprising’.

The protests, combined with external pressure, had the effect of persuading the ruling coalition to enter into ‘a dialogue’ with the smaller opposition parties, which led to a provisional agreement, announced in October, that President Kabila would stay on until presidential elections to be held in 2018, but would then stand down. The main opposition coalition objected strenuously to this ‘deal’, arising out of talks from which it claimed it had been excluded, and called for another general strike in protest. The ‘dialogue’ continued, however, and pressure on Kabila grew after an opinion poll revealed that his popularity had collapsed to less than 8 per cent. In November, Samy Badibanga, leader of the main opposition bloc in parliament, was nominated by Kabila to take over from Augustin Matata, marking a significant political development. Towards the end of December 2016, a combination of mounting popular tension, poor polling for the president, and pressure by the international community led to the signing on 31 December 2016 of a ‘global and inclusive agreement’ mediated by the Congolese Catholic Church. This involved a transitional government, to be in place by March 2017, a promise that President Kabila would not run for another term, and elections to be held in 2017.

Kabila himself promised that elections ‘would be organised in the coming months’, but warned against foreign ‘interference’, apparently reacting to remarks by some UN Security Council diplomats who had come to visit the DRC to push for a peaceful transition of power. Tshisekedi left Kinshasa for Brussels on 24 January 2017 as negotiations on the implementation of the 31 December agreement – which were to be completed by the end of January – stalled over several issues, including the procedure to appoint a new prime minister and the division of ministerial positions. The lack of progress, in the context of deepening economic malaise and insecurity in several provinces, including Tshisekedi’s native Kasai Central, increased popular frustration and tension. On 1 February 2017, Etienne Tshisekedi died, at the age of 84.

His death came at a critical moment, as talks between opposition parties and representatives of President Joseph Kabila faltered. He was set to lead a transitional council, as part of an agreement put together in December intended to pave the way for Kabila to leave power in 2017 and refrain from running for a third term as president. Some have suggested that Tshisekedi’s son, Felix, is likely to be named prime minister in a forthcoming power-sharing government, if the agreement holds.

On 16 February 2017, the budget minister, Pierre Kangudia, claimed that it would be difficult to collect the funds required to undertake a new census prior to elections in 2017. This claim came only two weeks after the death of Etienne Tshisekedi, believed by many to be the only man with the moral and political authority to unify the fragmented opposition to President Kabila. Close aides of the president continue to insist that it would be impossible hold elections with an up-dated registered electorate before 2018. A report in The Guardian on-line by Jason Burke the same day commented that ‘analysts suggest two possibilities if opposition factions and the government cannot agree on a process with a minimum of legitimacy: a bloody, popular, urban uprising that ousts the president, or the slow collapse of the government as economic weakness, meddling by regional powers and international isolation undermine its authority’.

A good deal will depend on the ability of Felix Tshisekedi or Moise Katumbi to orchestrate a coherent and credible opposition. In the meanwhile, Joseph Kabila remains President.

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

Featured Photograph: September 16, 2016 protesting non-organisation of the elections in Kinshasa.

Are Developmental States Accidents of History?

ROAPE

May 2, 2017

By Fadekemi Abiru

When a conversation about developmental states takes place, the growth miracle of the East Asian Tigers is always posited as a prime example. Failure to identify developmental states in other regions – such as Sub-Saharan Africa – has caused many to fear that these Asian instances may never be replicated again. Therefore, the questions put forward are: Can African states be trusted to gather enough intent to play a more central role in development? Or was the concept of the ‘developmental state’ in the East Asian region shaped by a set of circumstances that came about by chance?

Arguably, a fundamental requirement of a developmental state is a leadership that intentionally seeks to place the state at the centre of collective action. The state does this by mobilising both the market and civil society to structurally transform the economy. This involves developing technological capabilities or creating new rents, in order to secure a gainful position on global value chains.

The existing good governance literature has been very critical of the central role of the state in achieving growth and development. Such a sceptical view is not unfounded, as opaque business environments in African countries show that state intervention may actually hinder development. This strand of the developmental debate therefore argues that developing countries need to engage primarily in market friendly policies as part of their policy menu for economic development.

This characterisation is misleading for two reasons. First, the promotion of market-led strategies feeds into the false dichotomy of states and markets in driving growth and development. This misrepresentation neglects the reality that the market and state often come together to form a mutually reinforcing mix. Secondly, strong state institutions alone cannot help a country achieve developmental state status. External factors such as trade dynamics also matter. African countries today are constrained in a different way to the East Asian countries during their developmental state journey in the 1950s and 1960s. The choiceless democracies African countries experience as a result of so-called developmental aid limits their autonomy over their own policy space. The danger in this is that the pressure to appease donors may force African countries to implement open-market policies that are harmful to their economy.

Mauritius is usually presented as the poster image for successful neoliberal ideas in an African context. By the 1990s, the small African island was dubbed the “Mauritius miracle” after successfully modelling its economic planning after the East Asian models. Growth policies included generous tax incentives, economic diversification and export led growth based on manufacturing. But using this as evidence that ‘openness’ is unambiguously beneficial is false. Mauritius has enjoyed preferential access to U.S. and European markets in a way other African countries have not. Since independence in 1968, the European Union has had a set quote of sugar exports from Mauritius. This favourable arrangement has been set at a guaranteed price that is about 90% above the average market price. Consequently, Mauritian taxpayers and producers have been able to enjoy the rents generated from this.

Offering the East Asian developmental state model to African states may yield disappointing results. For starters, it is possible that while countries like Japan and Malaysia had states that successfully took on the leadership role in development, external circumstances had as much say in how internal decisions played out. Take the diverse outcomes of the Cold War relations as an example. For geo-political reasons, the U.S. supplied its Asian allies with preferential access to its domestic market, a critical element in the “take-off” growth phase for the region. African states in contrast, received no such assistance. Where the Republic of Korea alone received $6 billion between 1946-1978, African states had to share $6.89 billion over the same period. This supports the idea that the threat of communism played out differently in both regions. While the Asian states had internal and external support to generate a leadership geared towards developmental ideas, the African continent became the battleground where Cold War tensions played out.

The developmental state idea is still one that is disputed in the academic literature. As Thandika Mkandawire pointed out in 2001, “trial and error” is as much a part of the success story of developed countries. African rulers can be proven to possess strong political will for the developmental state concept. During the post-colonial years when development and nation building were taken seriously, significant strides in capital accumulation and investment in infrastructure were made. Between 1967-1980, more than a third of the 27 countries in the world that grew at over 6% annually for more than a decade were African. This group included resource-rich countries such as Nigeria and Angola. Others such as Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire were also seen to outperform the likes of Malaysia and Indonesia.

The African experience therefore shows that intent is not enough, but spaces in which states operate also matter. On the very short list of “successful” African countries is Botswana, a country that has received and deserves attention for its development achievements. The country has been impressive in its use of diamond revenues to invest in social and infrastructural services such as education, health facilities, roads and so on. It is therefore interesting to understand how Botswana managed to escape the “Dutch Disease” that many resource rich countries like Nigeria suffer from.

When Botswana started out as a newly decolonised country, it was a member of the Rand Monetary Area and had no independent currency. In this way, even after the first diamond mine was opened in Orapa, no sharp currency appreciation was observed. Even in 1971, Botswana introduced its own currency, yet exchange rate stability reigned. This could have been down to the broad political coalition that was formed to support the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). Unlike other African countries with diverse ethno-religious groups, the ruling elites were able to exploit conflicting differences to bolster support for one political party. This was due to the systemic vulnerability the country faced at the time as a result of its exposure to South Africa, particularly during the apartheid era. As a result, unity was seen as a source of security and this assured a relatively stable political and economic horizon, which in turn encouraged the adoption of sustainable economic policies.

Overall, what makes the developmental state so ill-suited to other parts of the world is how specific it is to a region whose development experience was aided by internal as well as exogenous factors. Even African countries like Botswana and Mauritius who have been relatively successful in sustaining long periods of economic development would find their economic and political landscapes transformed. Yet to then argue that developmental states are accidents of history neglects the idea that circumstances change, and the political will driving development policies must adjust accordingly. African states looking to take on a more central role in economic planning must pay attention to both domestic and international spaces. Understanding the specific history of the developmental state is a vital task for those seeking real development for the continent.

Fadekemi holds a BSc in Economics and is currently completing her MSc at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She worked as a research analyst for Agusto&Co, and her research interests are in public policy and development in Africa.

Featured Photograph: What are the development lessons from Botswana? High-security administration building and transportation machinery below, Jwaneng Diamond Mine, Botswana.

Domestic Resource Mobilisation in Africa: A Need for Intervention

ROAPE

April 26, 2017

By Gretta Digbeu

The question of domestic resource mobilization, which was a major preoccupation for early development economists in the period before the neoliberal counter-revolution, has become an increasingly pressing issue for African countries in the context of financial liberalization, rising external debt and capital flight. We saw how rapid liberalization has hurt state revenue generation across the continent, and how massive outflows of private funds have fueled external borrowing, which in turn has driven further capital flight. The negative gap between saving and investment in sub-Saharan Africa has been growing since the 1960’s, and the region’s heavy reliance on aid to finance this gap has only exacerbated capital flight. Not only is sub-Saharan Africa a net creditor, but it also has a larger share of private wealth held abroad than any other developing region. Moreover, it is well known that much of the external debt contracted by African governments ends up being illegally exported as private assets into western financial markets, prompting more and more ordinary citizens to keep their wealth outside their domestic economies. Foreign aid has actually been detrimental to African development; is has provided public agents with funds to funnel out of their administrations and dis-incentivized private agents from investing in their home countries, instead of helping to reverse the decried cycle of dependency between Africa and the West. There is hope however. The experiences of Botswana and Kenya provide useful lessons for leaders in the region seeking to boost savings and capital formation. The old Kenyan Postal Savings Bank might seem like a detail in the institutional landscape of the continent, but it serves an essential function that feeds its state and citizenry with vital resources.

One of the most prominent features of the East Asian miracle was the state’s reliance on domestic resources. The East Asian development experience highlights how taxation, and therefore domestic savings, is closely related to processes of state formation and the political settlements formed by the elite. The East Asian tigers’ high dependence on the domestic economy for state revenue encouraged leaders to adopt policies that promoted economic growth and long-term structural transformation. The fact that these countries had superior saving performance – rates 10% higher than those of sub-Saharan Africa from the 1970’s to 1990’s, with savings exceeding investment for most of that time – largely accounts for their developmental success. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, we have seen how in these countries superior saving performance was achieved through the coercive power of the state, as it mobilized revenue through various forms of forced savings (e.g. restrictions on consumer credit, financial restraint, mandatory pension contributions, and the promotion of postal savings). State coercion is central to domestic resource mobilization, and such coercion is only achieved through strong political coalitions. For instance, in Singapore the People’s Action Party has been in power since 1959. The PAP’s uninterrupted rule allowed the state to institute the famous Central Provident Fund, a compulsory national savings plan that has been an important form of funding for development projects, like the public housing in which most of the country’s residents now live.

Political coalitions lay the foundations for the development of the state and other institutions that are indispensable for its economy to function. They drive policy responses to resources booms, external threats, paradigm shifts in development practice, and crises in commodity prices. They help us understand divergent development trajectories across regions and countries with similar economic indicators and colonial experiences, as leaders choose whether to consume surpluses or invest them in long-term development goals. They drive and sustain certain levels of economic performance according to the depth of leaders’ commitment to common goals, and the breadth of their inclusiveness of political rivals.

Botswana and Kenya are two cases in point. As a general trend, Southern African countries – South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia – and Kenya have always had higher tax takes than we would expect from their income per capita figures. Their superior tax collection performance is due to the institutional and infrastructural legacy they inherited from the labour reserve organization of the colonial order. In these countries indigenous populations were integrated into labour markets so as to uphold the social and political supremacy of the white population, leading to more elaborate state structures, repressive state capacity, higher levels of regulatory reach, lower levels of informalization and severe socioeconomic inequality. Botswana and Kenya owe their governments’ administrative strength to the emergence of a developmental racist welfare state, whereby cross class solidarity among whites buttressed large bureaucracies that closely managed native Africans and white businesses alike, extracting revenue from them through poll taxes and income taxes respectively. We can partly accredit the institutions of labour reserve economies with both countries’ remarkable performance in harnessing domestic resources for developmental purposes. However, we must ultimately attribute the fact that these institutions survived political restructuring after independence to the rise and sustained dominance of strong and resilient political coalitions in each of these countries.

Botswana’s successful transition from a poor agrarian economy, to the fastest growing economy in the world until 2004, was made possible by the Botswana Democratic Party’s stable and enduring monopoly on power. The BDP rests on a broad electoral coalition that formed in the early years of independence and has endured the strains of economic inequalities among certain segments of the population, ethnic competition, and tensions over the role of traditional leaders. At independence in 1966 the country’s economy relied mainly on cattle exports, remittances from migrant labor in South African mines, and foreign aid. When diamond mining began in the 1970’s, the BDP made sure to strategically use the country’s mineral wealth to maintain its firm grip on power. The ruling party brought together groups with disparate interests by building on economic interdependencies, defused political competition among rival groups, and most importantly, marginalized radical domestic parties by using apartheid in South Africa as an existential threat to the state that called for strong macroeconomic performance. This reliance on economic growth for survival and stability resulted in laudable, prudent management of the country’s mineral sector, and capital accumulation that far surpassed any other African country that experienced similar periods of sustained growth. Botswana effectively avoided rentier politics and Dutch disease in exploiting the booming diamond industry, legitimizing its monopoly on power over five decades.

The BDP made sure that during the period of astonishing growth driven by the expansion of diamond mining, other traded sectors (e.g. livestock) were not completely sidelined, and that there was growth in non-traded sectors. Moreover, Botswana is one of the few countries to achieve high and sustained growth despite persistently low private saving rates, thanks to its extremely high public savings, which have been made possible by the fact that the government collects 75-82% of diamond industry profits. The BDP has been able to exert its coercive authority so that heavy revenue extraction through corporate taxes (including capital gains, dividends, interest and royalties) more than compensate for the population’s very low personal saving levels. Lastly, the BDP has provided incentives for businesses to keep their capital in the domestic economy through tax exemptions and the creation of the Botswana International Financial Services Center (IFSC). Although things in Botswana are far from perfect – extreme inequality, poverty and unemployment have emerged as pressing social issues – the BDP government has the political, financial and administrative foundations necessary for tackling these problems.

Similarly, Kenya’s longstanding legacy of strong and autonomous executive power has allowed ruling coalitions to pursue sound macroeconomic policies despite shifting alliances and heightened ethnic competition over time. Throughout most of the post-colonial era, patronage and rent distribution among elites helped the executive branch manage ethnic divisions and preserve its monopoly on power. The presidency has remained the central seat of power to this day despite Kenya’s transition to a bicameral parliament in 2010, so much so that the expansion of political parties has remained stunted even after the return to multi-party politics in the early 1990’s. The Kenyan leadership ensured stable periods of accumulation and growth throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s; moreover, the country owes its general economic recovery from the 2007-2008 post electoral violence to the strength of its ruling coalitions, which have dominated the political scene despite frequent party realignments in an increasingly polarized environment. While extreme poverty remains a crucial development challenge for Kenya, overall trends have been positive in recent years: the middle class continues to grow and public service provision has improved.

Since the early days of independence the Kenyan government has instituted forced savings through strict import and foreign exchange controls, and regulations that appropriate private savings to finance fiscal expenditure. Kenya effectively protected its domestic industry in the 1990’s despite the onslaught of structural adjustment and liberalization in the previous decades; it also maintained stable saving rates in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s in the face of chronic fiscal deficits that emerged in the 1970’s. Kenya became East Africa’s biggest economy while erecting an extensive and elaborate taxation regime that closely monitors the corporate sector, thereby keeping more private capital at home. Moreover the country developed one of Africa’s most dense and diversified financial sectors, which has contributed to 40% of gross domestic savings since the late 1980’s thanks to heavy regulatory supervision by the state. The Central Bank of Kenya has been the powerhouse behind such supervision, as it closely monitors money supply through restrictions on commercial banking activity. For instance, in 2016 the Bank imposed controversially tight controls on large cash withdrawals and deposits, requiring individuals to state the provenance or destination of the funds, and specify how they had been obtained or to what use they would be put.

A key component of Kenyan domestic resource mobilization, which is reminiscent of the success of East Asian development, is the government owned Kenya Post Office Savings Bank. Established in 1910, the bank provides tax exempt interest income to key segments of the population, as well as linkages with the corporate sector and commercial banking institutions that streamline and facilitate private savings. Moreover, the bank now has an extensive geographical reach (over 100 branches nationwide) that enhances the opportunities of financial inclusion for rural populations, whereby they can contribute to state revenue generation.

The experiences of Botswana and Kenya illustrate the imperative of domestically generated national savings as a vehicle for capital accumulation and broader resource mobilization. Before African states can even hope to mobilize revenue through taxation, pension funds and other forced savings schemes however, they must impose capital controls to curb capital flight. Highly indebted nations with low levels of GDP per capita, large informal markets and narrow tax bases cannot leap to enacting reforms like mandatory pension contributions, higher import tariffs, or higher direct and progressive income taxes if they do not first keep capital in the domestic economy. These states must defy the so-called logic of free capital markets, and impose strict barriers to the movement of funds outside of their countries. Despite their growing unpopularity in the international community with the rise of the Washington Consensus, capital controls are an imperative policy tool.

Domestic resource mobilization in Africa requires that states reclaim policy space and appropriate resources through coercion if necessary. While the imposition of capital controls are one way of achieving this, such reforms hinge on the stability and strength of political coalitions. These coalitions are indispensable for legitimizing the institutional arrangements that allow for robust state revenue generation, and buttress long-term macroeconomic stability and growth.

Gretta Digbeu is completing her MA in Development Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, she is a graduate of Georgetown University in Economics and Spanish. A native of Cote d’Ivoire, Gretta’s research focuses on trade policy, structural transformation in Africa, industrialization and food sovereignty.

Featured Photograph: View of Le Plateau in 2010, the central business district of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and the current economic and administrative capital.

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