A Debate on Alternatives: an Interview with Ray Bush

February 21, 2017

In an interview with ROAPE’s Ray Bush, he speaks about his work on the political economy of agricultural modernisation, policy reform and social transformation. Ray discusses family farming in the Near East and North Africa, the work he has done in the context of the FAO year of family farming in 2014. The publication can be found here.

To begin with can you explain what family farming is or which type of production unit can be categorised as such, and more importantly for this discussion what are the problems with this definition?

It is interesting that you begin with a definitional question as it is probably also one of the more difficult questions to respond to. It is significant that the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN put the issue of family farming very firmly on the international agenda in 2014. It declared a year of family farming. One of the issues they tried to interrogate was: just what does a family farmer look like? What became very clear in that year of discussion and engagement with the topic globally, not just in North Africa and the Near East, is that effectively, they argued, there are probably something like 500 million family farmers worldwide. In North Africa and the Near East we can estimate maybe 15-17 million family farmers and we have to add in their family members.

So who are these people? We have to consider that this is an extremely heterogeneous category – categories, plural rather than singular. The FAO were concerned with what we might say are small family farmers. Those with relatively low levels of access to land. In Egypt for example family farmers and especially small family farmers, you are really talking about 80 percent of farmers who own less than a hectare of land. This really puts people into a category of, not farmers, but near landless or landless farmers because the areas of cultivation are very small, often very uneven, not very fertile, with poor access to irrigation, or solely rain-fed, that leaves granaries and communities open to the vagaries of environmental patterns.

Governorate of Dakahlia, Egypt (Ray Bush, 2013).

However, family farmers are seen, normally, to be smallholders, certainly with access to less than five or six acres, but depending on the quality of the land, even if it is larger they are seen to be small and often – usually – to be very poor with a high dependence upon family labour. Family labour within this context usually means women’s labour is particularly drawn upon and exploited, because women usually not only bear the labour burden in the fields and farms, but also in the households in terms of, not just physiological reproduction, but social reproduction.

The family farmers the FAO is talking about here are small holders usually dependent upon family labour. That does not mean to say that some may not also hire in labour, but also very important and crucially having to sell their labour to work for others in the community and outside. So some may become seasonal labourers, not only on farms, but also as labour migrants.

So the category is very heterogeneous, very problematic and needs to be investigated with degrees of openness rather than concretely determining and defining it in any hard and fast terms. In this the FAO made a reasonably good job in its year of family farming because it was very open. It led to an engagement with advocacy groups for family farmers, which was promoted by – as critical as one may be of him – the head of the FAO, Graciano da Silva – who had his term of office renewed from 2015 – 2019. I think, there was concern amongst some critical commentators that his office may not have been renewed.

There seems to have been a shift in terms of what the FAO has been doing, to bring family farming to the public. This seems to deviate from the record of the last 15 years. Do you see a substantial repositioning of FAO in terms of what it advocates in relation to agricultural policy?

I don’t think there is a dramatic shift in what it has declared its aims and objectives. These are, in terms of raising productivity, trying to be increasingly inclusive, but to do it in a way that is more open and transparent. I think, particularly the current head of FAO Graciano de Silva deserves quite a lot of credit. His period in office since 2012 has been a relative breath of fresh air compared with the person he replaced, Diaz, who really filled the organisation hierarchically and very conservatively with rather neoclassical middle and senior managers.

One of the challenges de Silva has had is to actually try and place managers and cadres within FAO who are more open and sympathetic to criticisms that the market in agriculture will create starvation in terms of productivity and raising farmer livelihoods. Remember da Silva is a Brazilian trained economist. He worked with Lula in Brazil on Operation Hunger in 2000 and 2001, and he really tried to change the character of the institution of FAO to make it more open, to drive the idea of partnerships between United Nations organisations and advocacy groups and civil society present on the ground in the Global South. In so doing he tried to advance an idea of a kind of self-help and greater cooperation. It must have been a tremendous challenge to have a year declared by the United Nations for all the family farmers in the world. It goes against the trend of internationalisation of capital in agriculture and the promotion of agribusiness. I mean companies involved in the production and distribution and sale of high value low nutritious food stuffs on the world market. He has merely tried to put a brake on the idea that agribusiness is the salvation for everything.

Governorate of Dakahlia, Egypt (Ray Bush, 2013).

I think the year of family farming in 2014 put small farming on an agenda which wasn’t only focused around production per se, but was also trying to look at the idea of improving and developing rural livelihoods more generally, in pulling civil society groups like Via Campesina into the FAO organisation and development. But in doing this he was also criticised for perhaps bringing in organisations that advocated a kind of radical interpretation of agricultural modernisation into the tent of the United Nations, which might be seen a priori as rather conservative. It was the advocacy groups themselves who made this criticism: what’s the point of being inside the organisation that you are actually being very critical of?

I think a sense of a ‘conservative fort’ is at work within an organisation like the FAO, should not be underestimated, its agenda is very conservative. Remember that since the year of family farming they went immediately into the ‘year of soils’, with a rhetoric of healthy soils for a healthy life. We know that in this discourse on soils that agribusiness and fertilizer companies are very aggressively placed – they pressure the ‘chemicalisation’ of agriculture, which the year of family farming was very critical of. So it is two steps forwards one step backwards, but at least the FAO, under de Silva, tried to tentatively move towards an understanding that we actually need to have on agrarian strategies that involve the producers of food. Those producers of food in the countryside are family farmers, who constitute such a dramatically significant element of the communities in the global south.

In the Near East and North Africa, what are the most important characteristics of agriculture and food provision? What is the place of family farming in the region and how has international aid and government policy taken into account family farming?

When I was asked by FAO to draft a paper on North Africa and the Near East it was a hell of a challenge to think how to do something with a remit which is supposed to look at family farming in such a large and heterogeneous region, but also a region that has many common characteristics. It is clear to me that there are some organising principles, looking at family farming, which depart from the mainstream. And by that I mean the region is characterised by three very big processes that are very conflictual and promote an incredible social differentiation within countries and between countries in the region. So the organising principles I tried to explore are: the role that conflict and war play, what happens to environmental transformation – not just global warming – but other environmental concerns, and also what are the consequences of economic reform and structural adjustment.

Rather than writing blocks of narratives around particular country cases, which has some value of course, what I chose to do instead was to explore the regions through these bigger structural processes. I think what characterises the region most dramatically is the presence of war and conflict – a region that is being confronted by more conflict than probably any other region on the planet – and the consequence of that for agriculture and family farming of course is and has been calamitous and disastrous.

We only need look now at the terrible consequences of the Saudi led invasion in Yemen. We know the consequences. Going back to the first Gulf War in 1990 that Iraq lost, as a result of that first conflict, and there were of course the sanctions, more than 2/3 of its gross domestic product lost and more than 500,000 kids died as result of sanctions and the destruction to subsistence. Remember that Iraq was seen as a bread basket before 1990 and subsequently it was characterised, by this somewhat derisive term, as a basket case for agriculture. This had nothing to do with the frailties of family farming, it had everything to do with imperialist intervention, occupation and terrible attacks on the countryside, which are probably most powerfully expressed by the Israeli occupation in Palestine today.

FAO reports over many years have highlighted that Israel’s occupation of Palestine has dramatically undermined the livelihoods of more than 10,000 family farmers, as occupation, destruction, invasion, bombing, missile attacks destroy livelihoods, lives, communities, as well as the opportunity to grow, and sell, and harvest, and market agricultural produce. I was reading just this morning of a woman family farmer in Southern Gaza who was killed by a shell fired by the Israeli Defence Force. So the idea of conflict and war has to be put centre-stage in an analysis of the life chances and opportunities of family farmers in the region. Of course, the consequence of conflict, has a dramatic impact on environmental assets and environmental transformation, not just the consequence of global warming in a region that is highly dependent on very limited water resources, a characterisation of land that is very hostile to farming because it is incredibly arid.

Sudan and Yemen, for example, depend for more than 50 percent of their agriculture on rain-fed agriculture so the effects of climate change are much more felt, more aggressively felt, in countries that are, to begin with poor and have difficulty managing or organising conservation of necessary nourishment, and of agricultural crop productions.

As a region of course, the Near East and North Africa is one of the lowest emitters of CO2 compared to other areas, but also comparatively uneven. There are some very high emitters, like Saudi Arabia, for example, running its ‘chemicalised’ agricultural system and its air-conditioners. Compare that to a country like Yemen, for example. But I think this is in the area of climate reform, which of course is a man-made intervention.

Governorate of Giza, Egypt (Ray Bush, 2013)

So one can see how strategies for agricultural modernisation are undermined. If you are kind you would say let down, if you are more analytically rigorous you would say, that, actually, a particular type of agricultural modernisation is promoted, i.e. an agricultural strategy without farmers.

The long history of agricultural reforms shows remarkable continuity. Now is as good a time as any to reflect back on what the consequences of it will be and why the actual objectives of economic reform just simply have not been met. On the contrary economic reform, by which I mean liberalisation of agricultural markets, privatisation of land, the revoking of historical patterns of attempts by the states in the region after the WWII to promote land reform, which had a very strong redistributive element, has been significantly undermined by market-led agrarian reform and by quite aggressive liberalisation of not only markets in land, the commodification of land and labour, but also by generational crisis.

Let me take just one example of this, in the country that has the longest period of economic reform, Egypt. Unusually, economic reform pre-dated the 1991 structural adjustment programme that Mubarak agreed with the World Bank and the IMF. A kind of reform began in the countryside as early as 1987. What one is seeing since has been quite a dramatic and regressive acceleration of social differentiation, marginalisation of more than about 80 percent of farmers living on less than two feddan, or acres, and an incredible elevation of poverty levels. Poverty levels that are a direct result of economic reform that has fashioned an idea that social differentiation is a good thing because what it does is accelerate some kind of modernisation based on the market, on the idea that somehow incentivising farmers to grow crops at different price indicators will boost productivity. Well we haven’t seen that! The evidence for that is at best sketchy and at worst simply not evident.

One of the most dramatic consequences of the reform programme was something called Law 96 of 1992 to revoke the national legislation of the 1950s and early 1960s which effectively said – for the first time in Egypt’s history – that small farmers, in particular tenants, would have rights in perpetuity to the land. So it gave a stability to small farmers, including women, which historically under the kind of feudal remnants in the pre-Nasser period just wasn’t evident. So Law 96 of 1992 revoked that right to land in perpetuity, over a seven year period, but within these seven years prices for rental contracts – where there were contracts of course, in many cases there weren’t formal contracts – rose by 300 to 400 percent.

In particular women-headed households were deleteriously impacted because often landlords refused to renew contracts with women because of the whole patriarchal underpinning of society. It was also a fear that landowners would rather try and rent out land to people who are farming from neighbouring communities to try and break any political opposition to the reforms. I think there are harsh consequences to market reforms. These reforms have also been evident in Tunisia, Algeria, and in Morocco with the so called green plan which was meant to incentivise agriculture but led to policies which weren’t based on discussion with small farmers.

So, to summarise, there is an interrelationship between three big things, conflict in the region, environmental transformation and structural adjustment. And I cannot see any state in the region grasping that interconnectedness or involving and engaging with small farmers to try and promote an alternative development strategy to one driven by markets.

So what can or does an alternative look like?

You can’t simply say or make a plan for an alternative. Alternatives have to come out of concrete historical conditions. One thing of which I am certain is that it doesn’t mean giving help to companies like Citadel holdings, which is now being renamed as Qalaa holdings. Qalaa is probably Africa’s largest equity finance company, is a disaster. It is a holding company that now effectively has control over food from Alexandria down to Sudan and Uganda and Kenya. These are countries which are food scarce or vulnerable to food insecurity broadly defined. Allowing single companies to have such large holdings of land, control of water ways – in Sudan for example more than half a million acres in the south – beggars belief, frankly! Food is a strategic asset and it is an asset that has to be viewed as a collective resource rather than a privatised commodity from which companies can derive large amounts of profit.

That leads back to the question, you’ve just asked, of what kind of alternative is possible. To get back to where we began, the FAO now talks very much of ‘trying to increase the share of the value added to farmers.’ How to do that? Well the FAO talks about engaging civil society more and bringing on board the advocacy groups. But I think the problem is: how can the farmers on the ground challenge the internationalisation of food regimes where there is such a high level of social differentiation on the ground and a high level of differential access to agricultural resources and access?

I think the issue is then what alternative vision is possible? Do we stay with the status quo which has had the consequences that I have very briefly outlined above or do we encourage debate and turn it to a discussion about alternatives that tries to understand how it is possible to generate economic growth that creates jobs and employment in the country side?

Yet, famously you could say before the uprising in Egypt that the country was developing but Egyptians were not. There were high levels of per capita growth, but that growth was not, so called, trickling down to the poor. On the contrary, many commentators, if they had enough courage to voice the economic evidence, showed that perhaps as many as 80 percent of Egyptians, prior to the uprising and of course since too, were living on less than two dollars a day. That would have made Egyptians poorer than Zimbabweans and we know that for many, I am afraid – grounded in a racist characterisation of the continent – that this is an analogy which is not palatable.

So we are left with the question, how do we generate economic opportunities for the poor? The first thing you do is to raise local demand by boosting rural income. To do so you need to ensure that the products and commodities that the rural people themselves are producing are commodities which can generate and sustain local demand and local needs, rather than fashion economic strategies persistently on the basis that food security doesn’t mean that you have to be self-sufficient but that you can basically export your crops and try and generate foreign exchange on the international markets.

Well we know that doesn’t work, that is not sustainable. So there has to be an understanding that farmers will then create the possibility and the conditions of not just agrarian transformation but urban income and urban transformation because the foundation of any modern society has to be the basis of generating sufficiently and appropriately priced food stuffs from local markets.

Ray Bush is Professor of African Studies at the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Leeds. He is also a member of the Leeds University Centre for African Studies (LUCAS) advisory board and member of the Review of African Political Economy’s Editorial Working Group.

A version of this interview was originally posted by Thimar. Thimar shares information and analysis, to promote research, and to open debate on the nexus linking agriculture, environment and labour.

Featured Photograph: Ray Bush speaking in Sheffield in 2012.

Capitalist Moral Economy in Africa

ROAPE

February 14, 2017

By Jörg Wiegratz

Regular readers of roape.net may be aware that we run a blog series on the topic of Economic Trickery, Fraud and Crime in Africa. The launch of this series in late 2015 was meant to give the social phenomenon of economic fraud more analytical attention than it usually receives in academic debates on contemporary Africa. As the coordinator of the series I am pleased to let our readers know that another contribution to this discussion on fraud in Africa is now available, this time my own book, titled Neoliberal Moral Economy: Capitalism, Socio-Cultural Change and Fraud in Uganda (the introduction to the book is available for free here). I review here some of the key themes in my book and highlight the analytical importance of the overall topic for debates on contemporary Africa (and beyond).

The book engages with a range of disciplines and fields, especially political economy and International Political Economy, economic sociology, criminology, economic anthropology, moral psychology, and of course, African studies. Regarding the latter, it dialogues directly (and indirectly) with the works on neoliberalism in Africa put forward in particular by Tom Young and David Williams, Graham Harrison, James Ferguson and Jean and John Comaroff. For instance, Harrison’s idea of neoliberalism as extensive global social engineering, of a ‘project’ that aims at advancing capitalist market societies on the continent was a crucial inspiration at the launch of the research; so was the notion of Stephen Gill of neoliberalism as advancing ‘market civilisation’ across the globe. The book tries to follow up and investigate empirically some of the points made in the literature about neoliberalism in general and neoliberal Africa in particular, especially concerning the expected cultural changes brought about by neoliberal reforms (I argue that we can see neoliberalism also as a cultural programme). In other words, it offers a field-work based take on the genesis and operation of a ‘market society’ in an African country, using the case of Uganda and in particular the phenomenon of fraud in agricultural trade there as an entry into some key aspects of the (cultural) political economy of such a market society.

Outside a primary school, Mbale, the major town in Eastern Uganda (Jörg Wiegratz, 2008-09)

In addition, to be able to offer an account of the moral changes brought about by neoliberalism and how this relates to the high levels of fraud in Uganda, I had to overcome the common use of the analytical terms ‘morality’ and ‘moral economy’ (that tends to restricts the analysis to pro-social practices related to solidarity, reciprocity or altruism) and offer a take that allows us to investigate the moral properties of local economies and markets characterised by deception, intimidation, physical violence, and the like, and the moral outlooks of economic actors such as traders, middlemen, brokers and farmers who operate in these markets, engage in fraudulent or hard practice themselves etc.

In other words, I have tried to go beyond the dominant scholarly take on and use of E.P. Thompson’s seminal work on moral economy, re-interpret how Thompson’s work could be used more fruitfully in contemporary moral economy research, and define morality in a way that, again, allows us to capture the broad range of moral dynamics and phenomena in contemporary capitalist society (and their political-economic drivers). These would include the rise of self-interest as the core moral norm and the intensification (and routinisation) of fraud across many economic sectors as a way to make, increase or protect incomes and profits.

A motivational poster on sale in Kampala (Jörg Wiegratz, 2008-09)

In addition I had to construct an analytical understanding that allows to speak of and unpack the moral economy of fraud, or the moral economy of harming others, i.e. a moral economy concept that can analytically capture the entire range of human relationships, interactions and practices in the economy (not just the so-called pro-social). In short, I employ a moral economy concept that can help investigate and analyse the moral compass of the fraudster and the morals of fraudulent practice, and more generally, capture the political character of the dominant moral order (and respective changes) in capitalist society.

I want to finally introduce some of the main arguments that the book makes. First, there is significant research, as we know, on the economic and political but less on the interrelated socio-cultural dimensions of neoliberal changes that swept through many African countries over the last three decades, from SAPs onwards. For years, scholars and debates explored for instance how the reforms affected the economic performance of affected countries and issues such as poverty, employment or state finances, relatively less attention was given to the reforms’ cultural effects, i.e. what sort of new moral orders they brought about. Donors and governments have commissioned countless studies to investigate many aspects of the reforms but hardly any to explore the moral structures and dynamics of the ‘adjusted’ societies, for instance concerning the bundle of norms, values, ideas, beliefs, attitudes and orientations that shape ‘moral economies of earning a living’, i.e. what sort of practice people in neo-liberalised social settings consider to be normal, legitimate, acceptable or plainly necessary to make an income, a profit, to keep the job, beat the competition, survive, raise funds for basic or emergency household expenses, escape poverty, become wealthy etc. The gaps in terms of data and analysis of what took place in this respect across African countries are enormous (where is the oral history of these aspects of neoliberal reform?). Much of the data about the details of moral changes in the early reform periods can (soon) be considered lost for good, as many crucial historical participants who worked in relevant ministries and state enterprises and witnessed neoliberal restructuring in their respective organisations will have passed away (the same applies to post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe).

Second, reform-promoters have underplayed, misconstrued and/or disguised key aspects of the socio-cultural effects of the reforms, especially the fact that the reforms promoted, directly and indirectly, a particular capitalist moral reordering (or what I call neoliberal moral restructuring). This recalibration of the socially dominant norms, values and orientations on all sort of matters of economy, society and politics – from money, wealth, and profit making, the notions of proper life and conduct, to self vs. collective, public vs. private, and so on – has substantial (and often harmful) repercussions for society, as can be read about in daily news about escalating economic fraud and political corruption, to pick just one of many societal phenomena in which neoliberal moral change manifests itself. However, the link between reforms, socio-cultural change and fraud is only minimally explored to-date especially given the empirical prevalence and size of the phenomenon of fraud, across classes and sectors. Donors have of course commissioned researches into causes of corruption (far less into causes of corporate fraud) but these usually shy away from exploring (say via qualitative research) the relevant wider neoliberal-capitalist social transformations of concern.

Books on sale in central Kampala; this was a stationary shop that had books for sale outside (Jörg Wiegratz, 2008-09)

Third, many ‘adjusted’ countries in Africa experience substantial fraud and corruption, and have so for years. To-date, the mainstream development debate, dominated by donors and the like, hardly ever really confronted the question whether and how reforms have advanced a criminogenic culture, i.e. political, economic, and social structures that have turned out to be rather fraud-inducing than -inhibiting. Importantly, fraud and corruption are activities carried out by amongst others the (very) powerful, i.e. members of the ruling class and of course middle-class. Again, much of the mainstream analyses and discourses are typically silent about ‘criminality’ of the middle class and respective aspects of middle class culture, psychology and character types, including prevalent moral outlooks and priorities (i.e. the respective links don’t get directly theorised and explored). And yet, the crimes of the powerful is an established theme in criminology; the history of capitalist development across the world rife with evidence that capitalism and (endemic) fraud are twins, from the colonial to the present period. In other words, the warnings concerning the fraud and corruption (and generally crime and related social harms) that comes with capitalist development has been on the wall for some time and yet those foreign and domestic actors in/with power on matters of social engineering in Africa for years have all too often ‘ignored’ them, probably for good reasons.

Fourth, imperialism has ravaged and restructured African societies for centuries, including their moral-economic structures. Yet, we know relatively little about how exactly contemporary imperialism affects moral orders and milieus in particular societies, including moral structures and subjectivities in the economy (e.g. local markets), including the moral economies of fraud. Relatedly, we know relatively little about the links between political economy and moral economy, between political-economic and moral-economic change, political-economic and cultural domination, or physical, structural and cultural violence of the global, regional, national and local political economy. We have yet to assemble more data and analyses concerning imperialist moral-economic interference and restructuring in African countries and related aspects of moral-economic sovereignty and resistance of the African countries and people concerned.

It is worth quoting the conclusion of the book, which summarises some of the principle arguments: ‘Arguably, Uganda is the country that has seen one of the highest levels of Western intervention (per capita/p.a.) on the African continent in the neoliberal period. It might even be the biggest African case of Western investment into society-change in the post-colonial period. The resulting neoliberal ME [moral economy] is to a significant extent a product of this material and ideational intervention that is always both, a political-economic and socio-cultural including moral-economic interference in the operation of a country. This point applies to Uganda, as it applies to other countries that are in the ‘sphere of influence’ of the top Western powers of the global PE [political economy]: from Kenya, South Africa and Greece, to Poland, Egypt, Iraq, Chile or Indonesia and others. And while full moral-economic sovereignty and autonomy of a country (let alone a people) is non-existent in the neoliberal age, neither in the periphery nor core of the global order, the extent of foreign-induced moral-economic re-ordering is more severe in some regions and countries than others. Neoliberal Africa, and neoliberal Uganda in particular, have been a high intensity zone of moral-economic interference of foreign, especially Western actors. It might thus only be a slight exaggeration to see the cultural interference of the West in this zone of their imperial influence not just as acts of cultural meddling, but attempts of cultural domination on key matters……Uganda’s ME would look different today – that is not to say better or worse – without the interference of the Western power block. The study thus demonstrates that the ME of a country is not just made by domestic but also foreign forces; a local ME always is a function of structures, factors, actors and agendas external to the local setting, or country of concern.’ There remains, however, a final question (and appeal): if IFIs and Western donors have promoted reforms in Africa that have brought about societies characterised by high levels of economic fraud and trickery (and related significant social harm), should there not be a much more extensive and critical debate about donors, culpability and responsibility, reform experts and expertise, the legitimacy of dominant theoretical frames to debate and reform economy, state and society, and of course, market society and capitalism in Africa?

Jörg Wiegratz is a lecturer in the Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds and a member of the editorial board of RoAPE. He is author of Neoliberal Moral Economy (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016) and Uganda’s Human Resource Challenge (Fountain, 2009), and co-editor of Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud (with David Whyte, Routledge, 2016) and Neoliberal Uganda (with Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco, Zed, forthcoming 2018).

Featured Photograph: Taken in Mbale, the major town in Eastern Uganda. It was in Mbale where much of the material for the book was researched (Jörg Wiegratz, 2008-09).

Where did the Dependency Approach Go?

ROAPE

February 9, 2017

By Christopher Hope

Many commentators and academics interested in African development have in recent decades shown a disinclination or disdain towards incorporating ‘global capitalism’ into their analyses of countries of the continent. Capitalism, it seems, had been deemed too messy a concept to provide much use to researchers in explaining phenomena.

Such a perception has been apparent in this blog series, with Elísio Macamo arguing that the concept of capitalism is “ubiquitous in the social scientist’s imagination and prevents him or her from looking for ways of making sense of Africa that may downplay the importance of Capitalism”. Seeing everything in terms of capitalism has left researchers “blinded” and has “made us hostage to a teleological view of human history that does not do justice to Africa”. Stefan Ouma also points to limits in using the framework of capitalism, particularly the tendency towards “universalization” where insights drawn from a certain setting are considered applicable elsewhere due to a pervasive capitalist logic.

A prominent element of this decline of the concept of capitalism has been the disavowal of dependency approaches in writings on Africa (and in general). The dependency school, popularised principally by writers on Latin American from the 1950s through to the 1970s, sought to understand how the structure of global capitalism impacts and often impairs efforts at economic diversification (and growth) within developing countries, due to attempts by developed countries to maintain the global ‘status quo’ as well as a consequence of the location of power within a given developing country’s political structure. Though focused on South America, there were also dependency writings on Africa, such as those of Walter Rodney (1972), Samir Amin (1972), and Patrick McGowan (1976).

Dependency approaches were an exercise in political economy, investigating how global power relations (negatively) affected economic growth in the capitalist periphery. Key to the analysis was this interaction between political power at the centre and at the periphery. Gabriel Palma (1978: 898), in his seminal review of the school, wrote that “Its most important characteristic is its attempt to analyse [development] from the point of view of the interplay between internal and external structures”. Notable dependency writers Cardoso and Faletto (1979: xvi) state that:

We conceive the relationship between external and internal forces as forming a complex whole whose structural links are not based on mere external forms of exploitation and coercion, but are rooted in coincidences of interests between local dominant classes and international ones, and, on the other side, are challenged by local dominated groups and classes.

For a number of decades the school of dependency was perhaps the school of thought leading the critique of mainstream understandings of economic growth in developing countries. Yet from the 1980s onwards the school was increasingly dismissed from both the left and the right as irrelevant to the study of economic development, with the chief criticism being that the school was overly deterministic, assuming that growth in the capitalist periphery was impossible, and that the success of East Asian countries to develop has showed the fallacies of such appraisals. As Colin Leys (1980: 112) stated, “because the dependency school sees the periphery as ‘locked into under-development’, it tends to minimize the development which actually occurs there”. So formulaic is the school of dependency in its analysis that it has hampered thinking on economic development in the peripheries, Leys argued, and as such we need to “finally rid ourselves of the ideological handicap of dependency theory” (Ibid: 109). Nigel Harris, in his critique of dependency approaches, similarly pointed to the rise of newly industrializing countries as indicating that the “new” global economic system “does not lend itself to the simple identification of First and Third, haves and have-nots, rich and poor, industrialized and non-industrialized” (Harris, 1986: 200).

But were such criticisms justified? It seems that the dismissal of dependency writings on the grounds of their being overly deterministic fails to acknowledge the diversity of perceptions within the school. Whilst it is clear that numerous dependency approaches were seeking an overly-deterministic means through which to justify the immediate overthrow of capitalism (for example, Frank: 1966), this is by no means true of the whole school.

Indeed, Palma (1978: 898, 881) emphasises that a large number of the school’s influential writers purposefully did not try to develop a “mechanico-formal theory of dependency” and they instead argued “that it is misleading to look at dependency as a formal theory” that explains development in the capitalist periphery to be an impossibility. Rather, authors such as Cardoso and Faletto argued that dependency insights “can be operationalized into practical development strategy” to help countries to achieve development (Ibid: 881, emphasis in original).

I believe that dependency approaches can help us in our attempts to understand economic growth in African economies today. If we want to understand how economics beyond mainstream accounts of price, efficiency, endowments, human capital, etc., we have to look at the social arrangements of power behind economic practice. But crucially, as the dependency school implored, this analysis is not to take place simply at the national level, but rather must acknowledge this ‘interplay’ of the internal and external, of the way that transnational capitalist relations of power impact development.

But such an appreciation of power relations at a national and global level has tended to be missing from political economy analyses of African economics since the decline of dependency approaches; as if the concept is so taboo that contemporary analyses tread lightly around the issue of international economic influence. A case in point is the recent and illuminating ‘political settlements’ literature popularised by the likes of Mushtaq Khan, and in the case of Africa the likes of Hazel Gray and Lindsay Whitfield. Political settlements theory analyses how the distribution of power within a country’s society shapes its politics and institutions, and consequently its economy. As Whitfield et al. (2015: 13) describe,

Political settlement theory emphasizes how the distribution of power in society shapes the specific form of clientelist politics present in a developing country, and in turn, how variations in the organization of patron-client networks affect ruling elites’ ability to change institutions governing the distribution of economic benefits in society.

The theory is at pains to show the way that economic policies and outcomes are a consequence of national structures of power – who is part of a power base of a regime, what their motivations are (i.e. the country’s political settlement). The literature has most recently been engaged with the increasingly discussed issue of industrial policy (see Pádraig Carmody’s blog), explaining how a given country’s political settlement will determine the effectiveness of its industrial policy. For example, Hazel Gray (2013: 186) states that the effectiveness of industrial policy depends on “the wider distribution of power in society”.

The issue with the political settlements approach is that it largely neglects the international aspect of power, as if power were to stop at a country’s borders. We should not stop our analysis of the effectiveness of industrial policies at the ‘wider distribution of power in society’ – we should also look at the way that regional and international executions of power can impact the effectiveness of efforts at industrial policy. To put it another way, we should try to understand how a country’s position within the global capitalist economic structure impacts on its abilities to increase wealth (in this case through pursuing an active industrial policy).

This intuitively makes sense, and it is possible today to see examples of how dependency school insights are still of relevance. For example, we know that many African countries are constrained in efforts to actively intervene in their economies by the free trade agreements imposed upon them and the infamous structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 1990s. Is this “kicking away of the ladder”, as Ha-Joon Chang referred to the practice of free-trade imperialism, not an example of a global centre fighting, through capitalist logics, to preserve the primacy of its industries? Indeed as part of this effort the centre has, for the past twenty years, successfully waged war against the very idea of the state intervening in the economy, undeniably diminishing, through ideology and regulation, active state involvement from developing countries.

My own research looks at efforts towards industrial policy implementation in Namibia, and again and again I have found the idea of certain dependency writers to offer useful explanations around the difficulties Namibia have faced in diversifying their economy. Namibia, a country that has generally adhered to free-market principles since independence in 1990, has since 2011 seen the government markedly shift its rhetoric to become much more ‘developmental’ – releasing an Industrial Policy White Paper and speaking repeatedly of the need for the government to support local industry through protectionist and interventionist policies.

In spite of this evident shift in rhetoric and certain policies (for example, a number of industries have received infant industry protection, and a recent Retail Charter rewards retailers who purchase locally produced goods), Namibia’s industrial policy has by and large failed to launch. There are a number of constraints that help to explain this failure. Prime amongst these are: a lack of interest (or staunch resistance) from the capitalist elites in transforming the economy; that large sections of the ruling political class who are content with the status quo; and the regional power of South Africa. In this blog entry I will just outline the final issue (though I consider all three to be comprehendible through a dependency approach).

The point to be made is that the regional power of South Africa markedly impacts Namibia’s ability to develop industrially. Namibia and South Africa, along with Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, are members of the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), a free-trade area with a common external tariff (though the members are allowed to disrupt the union’s free trade through infant-industry protection of specific sectors for a maximum of 8 years) set-up in 1910. The union has always been dominated by South Africa, certainly economically but also politically, with South Africa, for example, having historically set SACU’s tariff-rates unilaterally.

The domination of SACU by South Africa has evidently made industrial policy for Namibia much harder through the enormous presence of South African goods in the country, South Africa’s power to unilaterally determine the tariff rates of the union, and the active measures they have taken to resist industrial development in Namibia. For instances, many companies in Namibia have commented on the difficulties of exporting to South Africa, with South Africa, in spite of apparent free trade, willing to impose restrictions on Namibian products entering their market. The successful Namibian pharmaceuticals firm Fabupharm has been unable to export its products to South Africa because South African regulation apparently stipulates that medical goods can only be imported through certain airports and harbours. The Fabupharm trucks have therefore been literally turned around at the South African-Namibian border.

This is but one of many incidences where South African industry has sought to quell industrial development in Namibia, as well as in the other SACU-member states. Richard Gibb counts among these the closure of a television assembly plant in Lesotho, car assembly plants in Lesotho, Botswana and Namibia, and a fertiliser plant in Swaziland. South Africa “found itself unwilling” to allow the other SACU-members to develop industries “that could undermine the competiveness of South Africa industry” and thus “actively pursued policies designed to undermine industrialization” within these countries (Gibb, 2006: 594).

Moreover, Namibia have found their efforts towards infant industry protection (IIP) through tariff-protection thwarted by South African and other foreign corporations, which have challenged it legally over its imposition of protection. Namibia has attempted IIP on four occasions (for milk 2002, pasta 2002, cement 2012 and poultry 2013). For three of these incidences Namibia has been taken to court (the exception being the now highly successful pasta industry). The consequences of these court cases, beyond actively hurting the prospects for the industries in Namibia, has been to diminish government expectations that infant industry protection can be viably used as a tool for fostering growth.

Dependency approaches, more so than other approaches, can incorporate in their analysis the importance of this sub-imperialist execution of power by South Africa on the development processes in Namibia. Indeed the approach is “a framework that focuses on the constraints on capitalist development arising from the economic power of industrialized nations and multinational corporations” (Cooper, 1981: 10). In the Namibian experience their relation to South Africa is of quintessential importance in explaining economic life, and it would be reckless not to include a consideration of this in a political economy analysis of the country. Bringing capitalist relations back into our research, through an appreciation of economic interconnectivity and a nuanced understanding of the tangible economic system at play, can help us to assess developments more acutely.

The case of Namibian industrial policy demonstrates the need to understand economic developments through an appreciation of power relations that do not stop at the border. Beyond the above example of the influence of South Africa, it is also the case in Namibia that efforts towards industrial development are undermined by the lack of interest in economic transformation from the powerful trading and mining elites in the country, and further by the contentedness that the majority of the political elite feel with the system that prevails. All three of these phenomena can be understood through a dependency school approach, suggesting the “interplay” of local and international interests that dependency writers have pointed to.

The aim of this blog entry has been to ask whether the perspective offered by the dependency school is still of relevance to how we should try to understand developmental processes today? It is my view that subtle versions of dependency writing, which do not see dependency as destiny but rather as an acceptance that difficulties associated with economic development are in part a consequence of domestic and global power relations, can be a valuable analytical tool. Whilst plenty of dependency writings had sizeable flaws, it is perhaps the case that the ‘baby’ of an international perspective of economic power was thrown out with the ‘bathwater’ of particular dependency approaches. The dependency school, more than any other approach in economics, tried to understand economic development in a given location through an understanding of global capitalism; and it seems that such an international dimension is often lacking in contemporary economics of Africa today.

Christopher Hope is a PhD student in the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK, researching industrial development in Namibia. His research interests include the political economy of economic growth, Southern African economic history, institutional economics, international trade, and the role of natural resources in economic development.

Bibliography

Amin, S. 1972. “Underdevelopment and dependency in black Africa – origins and contemporary forms.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 10(4): 503-524.

Cardoso, F., & Faletto, E. 1979. Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cooper, F. 1981. “Africa and the World Economy.” African Studies Review 23(2/3): 1-86.

Chang, H-J. 2002. Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective. London: Anthem Press.

Frank, A-G. 1966. “The development of underdevelopment.” Monthly Review 18(4):17-31.

Gibb, R. 2006. “The New Southern African Customs Union Agreement: Dependence with Democracy.” Journal of Southern African Studies, 32(3): 583-603.

Gray, H. 2013. “Industrial policy and the political settlement in Tanzania: aspects of continuity and change since independence.” Review of African Political Economy 40(136): 185-201.

Harris, N. 1986. The End of the Third World: Newly Industrializing Countries and the Decline of an Ideology. London: I.B. Tauris & Co

Leys, C. 1980. “Kenya: What does ‘dependency’ explain?” Review of African Political Economy 17: 108-113.

McGowan, P. 1976. “Economic dependence and economic performance in Black Africa”, The Journal of Modem Afican Studies 14(1):25-40

Palma, G. 1978. “Dependency: A formal theory of underdevelopment or a methodology for the analysis of concrete situations of underdevelopment?” World Development 6: 881-924.

Rodney, W. 1972 How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House.

Whitfield, L., Therkildsen, O., Burr, L., & Metter, A. 2015. The Politics of African Industrial Policy: A Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kenyan Doctors on Strike: the Public Health Crisis

ROAPE

February 7, 2017

By Judy Karagania

Kenyan doctors have been on strike since 5 December 2016. That is more than sixty days. This strike has historical parallels to what is considered the longest strike by medical practitioners in 1994 that lasted 105 days. Three thousand doctors were sacked fighting for the registration of the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists’ Union (KMPDU) and salary increases.^[1] In the last 2 years alone, there have been 42 strikes in various counties, following the hurried devolution of the health sector in January 2014.^[2] However, this strike is different because we are fighting for the enactment of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that was signed between the doctors and the government in June 2013, yet the government has delayed its registration and implementation for the last three and a half years. The CBA captures issues varying from doctors’ remuneration (a 300% pay rise), promotions, transfer and training of doctors; improved working conditions such as functioning medical equipment, increase of number of doctors and support staff; benefits to doctors such as ‘workmen compensation and retirement.’ In October 2016, following an 18 month case the doctors’ union had lodged against the government, the Labour court ordered for the registration of the CBA, but the Ministry of Health remains defiant. Our struggle takes place in a context where various government ministries have been mired in corruption scandals by paying for inflated tenders for services and commodities that are rarely delivered.^[3] It is with this same speed that doctors want the CBA to be paid, hence the hash tag #lipakamatender which means ‘pay it like a government tender.’

‘Daktari unahitajika ward (Doctor you are required in the ward).’ The nurse sounds tired. She is overworked, being one of two nurses there caring for a ward with 80 patients. This is far from the WHO recommended nurse:patient ratio of 1:6/10. I find a patient convulsing, an empty emergency tray and the pharmacist informs me that we have been out of anticonvulsants for more than a month. The patient is dead when her kin returns with the drug from a private pharmacy in town. For years, Kenyan doctors have been reduced to supervisors of patients’ deaths and we see this strike as the beginning of the path to redemption. One could easily trip over several patients lying on the floor because all the beds already are occupied by two patients. On display are archaic blood test machines and x-ray machines which haven’t been working for the last two weeks. The donated ambulance at the parking lot has also been out of service for the last 2 months.

Kenyan doctors’ protests, January 2017 (Brian Maugo).

A mother mourns her deceased new-born because she went into obstructed labour at home, and the only means for her to get to the hospital, 60 km away, was on a bodaboda (motorcycle). It is with an air of irony that doctors noted that the First Lady, Margaret Kenyatta, once again announced her annual Beyond Zero marathon which has been held for the last 3 years to raise funds to improve maternal and child health. Yet her husband heads a government that is constitutionally mandated to address this need and has failed to support its doctors. To add to the irony, the Ministry of Health, using taxpayers’ money, are also large donors to this private campaign. Due to the politicization of the agenda, the First Lady has recently issued a statement cancelling this year’s marathon. The quest to have fully equipped hospitals is constantly hampered by ingrained corruption and government inefficiencies. For example, Kshs 30 Million (US$300,000) worth of medical equipment was returned to its Swedish donors after the donor declined to pay out Ksh 2 million of kickbacks to have the consignment cleared at the port.^[4]

At the beginning of the strike, the Cabinet Secretary of Health, the Deputy President and the President all insisted that there was no money with which to pay doctors. Yet the same government spends Ksh 16 billion (US$160m) in annual salaries for members of parliament and senators, who are the second highest paid lawmakers in the world after Nigeria. They receive 76 times of Kenya’s GDP per capita of Ksh 86,624 (US$867)^[5], and a further Ksh 4 billion ($40m) on their travel allowances. In 2015, the president’s travel cost the taxpayers a whopping Ksh 1.2 Billion ($12m).^[6] Adding insult to injury, whilst doctors have been on strike Kenyan MPs have awarded themselves send-off packages worth Ksh 36 billion ($360m) and are to receive Ksh 11 million ($110,000) as “gratuity.”

Kenyan doctors’ protests, January 2017 (Brian Maugo).

In light of all this extravagance, the doctors’ demands for the new pay structure will set back the government only Ksh 8.1 billion annually for 4,500 doctors in public service. Despite this, the government in the last 6 weeks, has undermined the CBA and repeatedly offered a 40% increase in the emergency call allowance and a “presidential gift” of Ksh 10,000 ($100) as a risk allowance. This is very different from what was pain-painstakingly agreed upon in the CBA that involves special banding of doctors’ remuneration, because of the unique nature of our work as civil servants, working odd hours and repeatedly endangering our own health and lives. Furthermore, there is an ongoing suspended prison sentence for the top seven union officials, which has been used to blackmail them to call off the strike. They however have remained firm and refused to give in.

The integrity with which the government has handled negotiations with doctors has also been called into question. The Telegraph India reported that the Indian government through their Prime Minister Narendra Modi had “sidestepped” a proposal from Kenya to fly doctors from India to fill the gap created by the strike, during a state visit to India by Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta. The other proposed source of doctors was Cuba who have remained silent on the issue. Even though the government has denied these claims, we question the seriousness and commitment that they bring to negotiating with doctors.

Kenyan doctors’ protests, January 2017 (Brian Maugo).

The Minister of Finance recently admitted that the reason why they do not want to pay doctors a decent salary in the public sector is because this would cause an influx of doctors from the private to the public sector, hence private hospitals would collapse. With more than 95% of Kenyans relying on public facilities, it should go without saying that health is a public function. From the approximately Ksh 50 billion (US$500m) our National Health Insurance (NHIF) receives, Ksh 33 billion (US$330 m) goes to private hospitals, Ksh 10 billion (US$100m) goes to India for treatment of Kenyans there and only Ksh 7 billion (US$70m) goes to public hospitals of which only Ksh 4.2 billion (US$42m) goes towards free maternity care.^[7] Government interests are clearly skewed away from catering to the public’s needs. On the other hand, private hospitals are known to exploit doctors, paying them as little as Ksh 55,000 (US$550) a month. While the public provision of health services is thus undermined, international investment companies are flocking in seeking to invest in private healthcare in Kenya, because it is a ’honey pot’ for a rising middle class. Our very own private facilities are also investing billions of shillings in expansions. Does this mean that access to healthcare will become a privilege not a right?

The vultures are indeed circling around the carcass that is public health care, but doctors shall continue fighting for the ordinary citizen to have access to the best attainable health in this country.

Dr. Judy Karagania is a Kenyan medical doctor currently working in the largest referral hospital in the region, Kenyatta National Hospital, while pursuing her postgraduate studies in Ophthalmology. She obtained her medical degree from the University of Nairobi and afterwards went straight into the public health service at the second largest referral hospital in Kenya, Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, in Eldoret, then later worked at a smaller hospital in Naivasha.

For our readers who want to make a contribution to the campaign: The KMPDU welfare account number is 1004347192, Bank Name: NIC Bank LTD, KMA centre Branch, Bank Code: 41, Branch Code: 129, Swift Code: NINCKENA

Featured Photographs: Kenyan doctors’ protests, January 2017 (Brian Maugo).

Notes

^[1] The Star, 8 December, 2016m,Kenyan Doctors’ Fight for Better Pay started in 1994. Doctors were deemed un-unionisable then because the law categorised them as being in managerial positions. The Union was only registered in 2011

^[2] Section 138 of the County Government act and part 187 of the Kenyan constitution. The transition authority had advised that devolution of Health should be done slowly, but it was very quickly executed.

^[3] Two recent examples of major tender issuance corruption scandals in Kenya in 2016 alone can be read at: The Daily Nation, 27 October, 2016, Questions raised as Kshs 5 Billion missing at Health Ministry; AllAfricanews.com, 30 September, 2016, Kenya: Sh1.8bn Lost in NYS Scam, Lawmakers Told

^[4] The Daily Nation, July 9, 2016, Donor takes back Sh30m equipment after refusing to give out kickbacks

^[5] Business Daily, July 23, 2013. Kenyan Legislators emerge second in global pay ranking.

^[6] Business Daily, Oct 12, 2015. Uhuru foreign country visits cost taxpayers Sh1.2bn

^[7] KMPDU Secretary General’s Speech January 31, 2017

Moral Economies, Economic Moralities

ROAPE

February 1, 2017

By Jörg Wiegratz

Workshop Report: Moral Economies, Economic Moralities (SASE 2016, Berkeley)

The SASE (Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics) held its 2016 conference in June at the University of California, Berkeley under the theme Moral Economies, Economic Moralities. Dedicating this big conference with about 1000 participants to matters of moral economy confirms that the interest in the topic of economy and morality is on the rise. Discussions about moral economy aspects have also taken place at panels at the biannual conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (Milan, July, with an expert on moral economy, Didier Fassin, as keynote speaker), and at a workshop on Moral Struggles in and around Markets at the University of Neuchâtel (November, 2016); they are also scheduled for the forthcoming European Conference on African Studies conference in Basel (2017, with a panel on Revisiting “moral economy”: perspectives from African studies).

That said, the Berkeley conference organisers noted in their conference call:

Moral judgments that justify or vilify different economic arrangements on the basis of some final value are extremely common in the social sciences. Since the beginning of political economy, market institutions have elicited strong and rival views across a broad spectrum of positions. Those who marvel at the coordinating power of the invisible hand confront those who revile capitalism’s inherently exploitative nature. The celebration of efficiency faces the condemnation of waste. And democratic interpretations of laissez faire meet the hard reality of growing social inequalities. There is no economy that is not political and moral at the same time. Social scientists, of course, are not the only ones to judge the economy while living in it. E.P. Thompson famously coined the term “moral economy” to denote the inchoate feelings and obligations that orient workers, and make them see certain courses of action (such as riots) as legitimate or illegitimate. To the extent that individuals and institutions act on them, those judgments help constitute economic lines of action, too. Finally, economic instruments and technologies lay down, and perform, moralized rules about what is expected of economic actors. All exchange systems embed implicit or explicit codes of moral worth in their specific designs and rules; all economic institutions make and remake kinds of moral beings by shifting their classificatory schemes or treatment algorithms. These “economic moralities,” typically fashioned by the action of markets and states, interact more or less peacefully with people’s “moral economies.” Indeed many of today’s pressing political conflicts may be understood in terms of the hiatus between these two social forms.

The conference had a range of general theme tracks. Tracks with the words morality/morals/moral economies in the track title included: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Moral Economies for Governing the Firm?; Islam and the Construction of New Economic Moralities: Divergence, Convergence and Competing Futures; Market Morals, Taboo Categories and Redefined Legitimacy; Moral Economies and Markets in the Digital Age; Morality and Materiality in Markets; New Political and Moral Economies of Sovereignty. Other tracks focused on: Communitarian ideals and civil society; globalisation and socio-economic development; gender, work and family; industrial relations and political economy; labour markets, education and human resources; markets, firms and institutions; regulation and governance; finance and society; Global Value Chains; Asian Capitalisms; Platform Economy? A Sharing Economy? A Gig Economy? The changing nature of work, employment, and market competition; Countermovement Revisited: On the Analytical Power and Boundaries of Polanyi’s Concept Today; Domesticizing Financial Economies; Institutional Experimentation and Subnational Economic Governance: Building New Narratives and Capabilities; Re-embedding the Social: New Modes of Production, Critical Consumption and Alternative Lifestyles; Reducing Inequality: Yes We Can?’; The Marketization of Everyday Life.

Furthermore there was a featured panel of ‘The Moral economy of Tech’, presentations by featured speakers on ‘(Un)Stable Work in Chinese Manufacturing’ (Joshua Cohen), ‘The New American Exceptionalism’ (Paul Pierson), and ‘Dispossessive Collectivism: Property, Personhood, and Politics at City’s End’ (Ananya Roy), and the Presidential Address by Marion Fourcade. Author-Meets-Critics sessions included a discussion about highly praised The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (2014), by Gabriel Abend, and Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics (2016), by Jens Beckert. Panels and papers with an Africa focus included for instance a panel on ‘The Political Economy of the Pharmaceutical Sector in India, Brazil, South Africa and Kenya’, and papers on ‘Morality and Economic Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Guinea-Bissau’, ‘The Normative Blocking to the Economical Change in the Post Authoritarian Chile and South Africa’, ‘Political Embeddedness and Structures of Power: Re-Politicising Technology Transfer in the Case of Sino-African Telecommunications’, and ‘The State and the Neoliberalisation of Moral Economy: The Case of Agricultural Produce Trade in Uganda’.

The conference displayed the various uses of the concept of moral economy across the social sciences, and the thematic priorities that scientists set in their investigations of the moral structures and dynamics of the capitalist economies, polities and societies that most of them study. It is notable in this regard that significant gaps continue to exist when it comes to collecting and analysing (large-scale) qualitative and quantitative empirical data on themes such as the morals of the powerful (and especially the criminal, corrupt, fraudulent, violent actors among them), the moral dynamics of contemporary class relations and conflict, the moral order of neoliberal societies (aka market societies), the moral underpinnings and repercussions of contemporary imperialism, exploitation, dispossession, or fraud, the moral milieus in key economic sectors and professions (say, bankers) that reproduce capitalism and its structure of power and inequality and the related social harm, the constitution and use of moral power of TNCs and other large scale accumulators, or the politics of moral economy, in other words, the relation between political economy and moral economy (the track on ‘New Political and Moral Economies of Sovereignty’ was perhaps closest to this particularly important theme). This begs the question: what do these scholarly gaps concerning moral economy tell us about contemporary social science? Importantly, the SASE conference and the other mentioned gatherings that discuss the prospects of moral economy science signal that things are changing (though arguably at a slow pace given also the size of the empirical phenomena of concern), and more scientists take moral economy themes into focus.

In comparison then, African studies has much to offer to this evolving global debate on moral economies, given the influential work by amongst others John Lonsdale, Bruce Berman and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (for the latest by Berman and collaborators see The Moral Economies of Ethnic and Nationalist Claims) and more recent work on for instance Moral Economies of Corruption: State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria (Steven Pierce) and Morality and Economic Growth in Rural West Africa (Paul Clough) or my own Neoliberal Moral Economy: Capitalism, Socio-Cultural Change and Fraud in Uganda. The contemporary state of the world, and the decades-long inattention of critical social science to key empirical aspects of the theme of morality in capitalism, indeed call for a significant increase in scholarly work on the moral dimensions of a global capitalism that ‘orders, interlinks and distributes well-being and harm, wealth and poverty in such a distinct and dynamic way.’ (Wiegratz 2016: 8).

Jörg Wiegratz is a lecturer in the Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds and a member of the editorial board of ROAPE. His new book Neoliberal Moral Economy: Capitalism, Socio-Cultural Change and Fraud in Uganda is launched on Tuesday 28 February, 4.30pm–6pm, Michael Sadler Building, University of Leeds.

Featured Photograph: Catholic Mass for Soldiers deployed in support of Operation United Assistance in Monrovia, Liberia, 16 November, 2014.

Pan-Africanism and Communism: an Interview with Hakim Adi

ROAPE

January 26, 2017

In a major interview for roape.net Hakim Adi discusses his research, activism and politics. Adi has spent years researching the African diaspora, Pan-Africanism and communism in the 20^th century. On the anniversary of the 1917 revolution he explains that the significance of 1917 is not so much how it helps us understand the past, or as a way of understanding Africa’s history, but rather that it shows that the alternative can be created in the present and future.

Can you tell us about your earlier involvement with activism and history? Can you speak a little about these experiences? What have your experiences been as a researcher and activist in UK Higher Education?

I suppose it could be said that it’s impossible to be concerned with the history of Africa and Africans without also having to struggle against the prevailing Eurocentrism not just in Higher Education but throughout the education system and beyond, especially in this country. I have certainly found that struggle to be necessary and as Fredrick Douglass said without struggle there is no progress.

When I finally embarked on my own research on the history of African anti-colonial activism in Britain it soon became obvious that there was very limited academic interest in such history. It was certainly not considered British history but then again it was not considered ‘proper’ African history either. It remains almost totally marginalised and of course barely taught at the university level anywhere in Britain. What is also evident is that someone has decided that there should be a divide between the history of Africa and that of the African diaspora. That is the way that matters are presented in my experience, so African history is considered rather unimportant but the history of the African diaspora, especially in Britain, is not considered at all. As the history of Africans is marginalised in higher education it is, or was, almost totally neglected at the school level too. In other words, young people in Britain are being mis-educated about the history of the world in which they live and the lessons to be learned from that history. This has a profound impact on all young people but perhaps most of all on those of African and Caribbean heritage, who see themselves, or people who look like them, totally removed from history. The statistics show the consequences, as today only agriculture and veterinary science are less popular than history as a subject choice for black undergraduates.

So our ‘activism,’ starting in the 1980s, was to attempt to change this situation, to change the national curriculum, to encourage more research, to work with museums, archives, libraries, teachers, as well as in universities, so that the history of Africans (as well as those of Caribbean and Asian origin in Britain) assumed its rightful prominence. It has its own history but this is not the place to elaborate on it in detail. Suffice to say that there have been some advances and I think we have seen some significant changes in the last thirty years, the recent BBC TV series for example, but there is still a very long way to go. There are, for instance, still very few historians of African or Caribbean heritage in Britain and, at the moment, only one professor.

There has been a well-documented political retreat of the left in the UK and US academy, how would you see this? Has it affected the field of historical research you have worked in?

I’m not sure about such a retreat of the left. I think there is a general global retreat of revolution, if that is what is meant, and therefore the powers that be have been on the offensive in the recent period, especially in the Anglo-American world. This period has now been in existence for some time, it is certainly not the same now as it was in the 1960s and 1970s. It has certainly made a difference to academia in general, to job insecurity for example, but I’m not sure how much difference it has made to the field, in the sense that there are still so few people working in the field in Britain. It would be easy to say that perhaps historians approach the field from different perspectives today than they did 30 years ago, but I’m not sure that much has changed, perhaps it is about to change as more young scholars enter the field but time will tell.

You started writing years ago about the history of the African diaspora particularly in the twentieth century. Can you talk a little about what you have written and how it has deepened our understanding of militant, left history outside (and inside) the continent?

My research has been mainly concerned with how those in Africa and the diaspora organised anti-colonial and anti-imperialist action in the twentieth century. I see history as the study of change and of people as the agents of that change and I’m interested in what approaches have been adopted by Africans to solve problems connected with liberation and empowerment in the past. My earliest work looked at how mainly West African students organised themselves politically in Britain during the colonial period in the early twentieth century. I found that that some of the most significant anti-colonial activists Kwame Nkrumah and Wallace-Johnson, for example, were as politically active in Britain as they were in the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone. It was therefore impossible to fully understand the anti-colonial movement in West Africa without some understanding of its connection with the British anti-colonial movement. At the same time Nkrumah and Wallace-Johnson were Pan-Africanists, part of networks and in touch with other activists based in other parts of Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, as well as other parts of the world. They would have considered themselves internationalists too, concerned with the global human struggle for progress and of course both were strongly connected with the international communist movement. Wallace-Johnson like Kenyatta and others during the 1930s was partly educated in Moscow. So my research interests broadened to include the history of Pan-Africanism and the relationship between the communist movement and the anti-colonial struggle in Africa, as well as elsewhere.

There are several points that can be made about all of this. One is the important and often leading role played by Africans in the history of radicalism and the working class movement in Britain. This was the case long before the 20^th century. The earliest African political organisations, such as the Sons of Africa formed in the 18^th century, played a key role in the abolitionist movement, one of the first and largest working class movements in Britain’s history. The other is the importance of what used to be referred to as scientific socialism as a weapon in the liberation struggle in Africa even before 1917 but certainly after, and the impact this has had on anti-colonialism, Pan-Africanism, national liberation and the struggles for empowerment and for an alternative today.

Recently you have written on Communism and Pan–Africanism on anti-colonial activism in Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939. Can you speak about the major thrust of this history and what new light it sheds on the period? One of arguments you make is that pan-Africanism and Communism were not such completely separate currents in the inter-war period but became briefly, to some extent, connected in the struggle for black and colonial liberation. Is this correct?

As I indicated above, if we look at the struggle for African liberation and advancement in the twentieth century at every stage the role of the communists, of the communist movement, of Marxism, assumes some importance. To some extent the same can be said about Pan-Africanism. With many, although not all, of the key Pan-Africanists, Padmore, Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Wallace-Johnson, Césaire, for example, one finds a connection with the communist movement, even if seemingly by accident as in the case of Kenyatta. Then there are other major personalities, Fanon, Cabral, Mandela, Sisulu who were influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Marxism. It can now be said that the latter two were communists but almost nobody presents them in this way. It could also be said that their adherence to Marxism did not prevent them adopting a Pan-African orientation at times if this served to advance things. Sisulu is an interesting example, since he planned to hold a major Pan-African congress in Africa in the 1950s around the same time that he visited the Soviet Union and China.

In 1956 the Pan-Africanist and former Communist George Padmore, wrote a book entitled Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa in which he argued that Pan-Africanism was a kind of third way, and in complete opposition to Communism. He was and still is an influential figure so his views still enjoy some credibility, even if the facts seem to suggest something rather different. The other thesis that Padmore advances is that communist activity in Africa was simply in the service of Soviet Foreign policy, even though he had been one of the leading communist activists. Of course, Padmore’s book was written at the height of the Cold War and he had his own agenda for writing it, in Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939, I aimed to establish the facts, as best I could, in addition to reviewing Padmore’s own communist career.

The main point that the book makes is that for a period the Communist International itself adopted a Pan-Africanist approach towards the question of how those in Africa and the African diaspora would liberate themselves. This was the so-called Negro Question and from its earliest days the Comintern developed an approach to the Negro Question which recognised that Africans and those of African descent faced common problems and a common enemy and that in some ways their struggles were interrelated. It established special bodies to investigate and analyse this question and established an International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, at one time led by Padmore, with its own publication, designed to work with the various communist parties to address this question. The Comintern’s orientation was particularly important in South Africa, where the only communist party in Africa was situated at the time, but it also made important interventions in West Africa, especially in the British colonies, amongst the African diaspora in Britain and France, as well as amongst African Americans and in the Caribbean etc.

In South Africa, as is well known the Comintern demanded that the Communist Party must be a mainly African party including its leadership and that the mobilisation of the masses of the people for liberation and ‘majority rule’ was more important that the struggle of white workers for socialism. The perspective of the communists, that the masses of the people had to be organised and play a leading role in the anti-colonial or anti-imperialist struggle gradually became the accepted view not just in South Africa but throughout the continent. Similarly many anti-colonial activists and Pan-Africanists recognised the need for the alternative to a capital-centred economy and a Eurocentric political system, issues also raised by the Communists, although as we have seen since, recognition is one thing and implementation another.

What does your book tell us about the early days of the communist movement and its relationship to Africa/anti-colonial struggle? How might this help us today?

One of the important questions analysed by the early communist movement, and in particular by Lenin, was the relationship between the liberation struggle in the colonies and that waged by the working class in the most developed imperialist countries. Lenin’s analysis of imperialism led him to stress the important role that the struggle of oppressed nations played in the anti-imperialist struggle, not just those oppressed nations in Europe such as the Irish but also the millions oppressed by colonialism in Africa, as well as elsewhere. Lenin called for an alliance between the revolutionary movement of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries and the anti-colonial movements and oppressed people in the colonies, including Africa, to undermine and destroy the imperialist system of states, pointing out that this system could be breached at its weakest link. In other words, there were no first and second class revolutionary struggles, it was not up to the those in Europe or the US to liberate Africa and Africans but one humanity and one struggle, we are all our own liberators. I think that even today there is perhaps not enough discussion about this issue and the relationship between the struggles for empowerment in Africa and in Britain for example.

The analysis of the Comintern was very important, one could say that it elevated the importance of the anti-colonial struggle for every communist party. One of the 21 conditions for admission to the Comintern stressed that a communist party in a country possessing colonies, such as Britain, must demand an end to colonial rule, support every anti-colonial movement in words and deeds and cultivate a truly fraternal relationship between the workers and those in the colonies. To what extent this was implemented is perhaps another matter but the Comintern was the only international organisation to act in this way and adopt such a position. In the inter-war period it had a very significant impact on those Africans who came in to contact with the communist movement and pointed to a way forward, exposing the widely promoted view that colonialism was a ‘civilizing mission’ that at most merely needed reform.

Of course, the communism of 1917 or the 1930s is not the communism of today. That communism was addressing the particular problems of the time and attempting to find solutions to them. The situation in the world is rather different today but not completely so, since in most African countries the anti-colonial struggle was not carried through to the end, it is the capital-centred economic system which predominates and Eurocentric political institutions. What was also emphasised at the time of the old communism was the great need for theory, that is for the summation of experience and I’m not sure how much of that goes on today. In some ways, it could be said that there is a need for a summation of the entire 20^th century, or certainly the period since 1945. Of particular importance are the national liberation struggles where new people-centred states have been established, sometimes in partially liberated areas, in Guinea for example, or more recently in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Very little of this work seems to have been done. In Ethiopia, to mention one example the experience of the TPLF is only just being thoroughly analysed and presented. But if this is not done where is the guide for the future not only in individual countries but as a contribution to modern African political theory?

This year is the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution. What is the significance of this anniversary for our understanding of 20th century African history?

As everyone knows the Russian Revolution was the most significant event of the 20^th century. It divided the world into two, a division between the old and the new. Most importantly perhaps it showed that those who produced the wealth, who added value, could empower themselves, create their own political institutions and a people-centred economy which was the most advanced the world had ever seen. These revolutionary changes were of particular interest to Africans since they showed that even in relatively economically undeveloped parts of the world great strides forward could be made. There were also indicators of a new approach to what was referred to as the ‘national question,’ how to guarantee the rights of nations and minorities in a multi-national state. In this regard, even those who were critics of the Soviet Union at the time, such as Padmore and Clement Atlee recognised that significant advances had been made which further exposed the oppressive nature of the British empire. Yet in Africa few of these changes have been possible with the exception of the right of nations to self-determination which is enshrined in the constitution of Ethiopia.

As mentioned above the success of the Russian Revolution ushered in the prospect of a new world that had a great attraction for many in Africa. It also served to further highlight the oppressive nature of colonial rule and exposed the secret treaties made by the colonial powers for the further division of Africa. The Soviet Union, which emerged from that revolution, especially in the first half of the 20^th century, was the most steadfast opponent of colonial rule in Africa and was also a champion of anti-colonialism in the early years of the UN. The revolution also gave rise to the Comintern and its approach, as mentioned above, which had its own impact on Africa’s history. So one can look at the role of all those forces connected with the Comintern in regard to the anti-colonial struggle, or the fascist invasion of Ethiopia, for example, and evaluate the positive role they played. Then there is also the period of the defeat of fascism during the Second World War and the prospects that opened up for Africa and Africans. All of these things are very important.

Having said that, Africa’s history has to be understood in its own terms, of course. In the twentieth century that history is mainly concerned with the struggle against colonial rule and its legacy, with the ways in which Africans have acted to empower themselves to bring about political change and create new societies which are people-centred. So we can then ask ourselves how the revolutionary transformations in the world have impinged on those struggles for empowerment and change. Such a question would compel us to consider not just the first 50 year of the century but also the bi-polar division of the world, the role of Cuba and Cuito Cunavale, as well as the current role of China, also consequences, to some extent and in various ways, of the 1917 revolution.

To my mind 1917 reminds us all that another world is possible and that world includes Africa. I think of some of my own family in Africa and what life holds for them – the prospect of selling second-hand clothes in order to survive, pay medical fees and try put a son through university. Or returning from a job that has been without pay since the start of the year to a darkened dwelling that has not seen a regular power and water supply for an even longer period. There is no doubt that the existing capital centred system offers next to nothing in compensation and is accompanied with the almost total disempowerment that is referred to as representative democracy. This is the fate of those in one of Africa’s richest economy and largest democracies. So, I think that the significance of 1917 is not so much as how it helps us understand the past, or as a way of understanding Africa’s history, but rather that it shows that the alternative can be created in the present and future. Revolutionary change is not just a hope or a theoretical possibility but, it could be argued, an inevitability in certain circumstances, as has been demonstrated many times since 1917. Those circumstances and conditions, 1917 continues to show us, can be created by the actions of the wretched of the earth themselves, if they can organise themselves appropriately, and find ways to deprive those who currently deprive them of power of the means to do so.

What is the challenge of a journal like ROAPE today and how can it contribute to the debates and research in radical African studies?

I would say that the challenge is how to make a difference, or to put it another way the question might be posed as to how to do more than just interpret the world but rather to seek ways to contribute more effectively to changing it. I suppose many of us struggle with this question and what it means to those of us in academia. It is particularly important at the present time, I think, when there is so much disinformation about everything. So even the struggle against disinformation, making a contribution to the dissemination and discussion of enlightened views about Africa, upholding academic rigour, etc., etc., all this can be considered very important and therefore a challenge. It may not be the stated aim of ROAPE to change anything but it’s certainly an inferred concern. Perhaps it’s a question that should be raised and discussed more often.

Professor Hakim Adi teaches African history and the history of the African diaspora at the University of Chichester in the UK. He is widely regarded as the international expert on Pan-Africanism and communism and the history of the African diaspora. Adi’s recent book Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939 was published by Africa World Press in 2013.

The Pillage Continues: Debunking the Resource Curse

ROAPE

January 24, 2017

By Lee Wengraf

A tidal wave of change has been unleashed on African economies and worldwide: a sharp dive in primary commodity prices globally, including oil, and a decline in the strength of the Chinese economy have produced major budget crises in oil-producing nations. African governments have imposed devastating budget cuts: Nigeria reported a N3 trillion (US$15 billion) budget shortfall in early 2016, in the face of the weakest GDP growth – 2.8 percent – since 1999. Angola cut its budget for 2016 by approximately US$15 billion, with a 2016 GDP forecast of 3.3 percent, its lowest since 2009, prompting job cuts and postponing of government projects. Despite promises in early 2017 of a rebound, a crisis of over-production plagues the global system, fueled by a glut in the capacity of raw materials, particularly in the world’s largest economy, China. [1]

Ample evidence substantiates this crisis of overproduction, yet other theories abound to “explain” the propensity for crisis and the failures of development. A dominant explanation among policy-makers, think tanks, and community development advocates for the relationship between poverty and natural resources is a theory called the “resource curse.” The “resource curse” intends to describe the phenomenon where a massive inflow of foreign currency from natural resources creates a distorting impact on other sectors of those nation’s economies and, more broadly, social conditions as a whole. The economic mechanism explaining this distortion is sometimes referred to as the “Dutch disease” – coined by the Economist magazine in 1977 and defined by the Financial Times as “the negative impact on an economy of anything that gives rise to a sharp inflow of foreign currency, such as the discovery of large oil reserves. The currency inflows lead to currency appreciation making the country’s other products less price competitive on the export impact.” Nigeria’s currency, for example, leaped in price from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s in the context of a jump in oil prices.[2]

The “resource curse” theory is often associated with the works of development economists and policymakers such as Paul Collier, Michael Rodd and Humphreys et al. to explain low levels of industrialization and development overall, alongside persistent poverty, in nations with high levels of natural resources. Nicholas Shaxson, writing in 2009, outlines the idea’s origins:

[T]he so-called ‘resource curse’ thesis is relatively new: the notion that mineral resources, like oil, can actually harm countries that produce them (or, at the very least, contribute to their failure to reach their apparent potential) only started to emerge into mainstream academic forums in the mid-1990s, and into the popular mainstream about five years later. Early landmark studies such as Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth, a paper by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, or Terry Lynn Karl’s The Paradox of Plenty, emerged in 1995 and 1997 respectively; Global Witness’ December 1999 report A Crude Awakening, focusing on Angola, was also a landmark in terms of popularizing the problem, although specialist publications such as Africa Confidential had been pursuing these issues for some time.[3]

The concept is common in literature on oil and Africa, corresponding to a boom in the “good governance” and “transparency” efforts, despite much evidence questioning their efficacy. Roger Southall and Alex Comninos root this approach to African economies in the post-independence period, characterizing the framework where “The emergent bourgeoisie, managerial rather than capitalist, was therefore from this perspective pursuing rent rather than profit, so the key intercontinental relationships were not just those of aid and trade, but even more between multinational corporations and politicians and bureaucrats.”[4]

According to the “resource curse” theory, a key characteristic of these lopsided economies are states that disproportionately rely on “rents,” that is, revenues accruing through licensing of drilling and mining rights. This dynamic ostensibly produces what Shaxson has described as “misplaced lines of accountability,” where the state is overly-reliant on a centralized source of income from multinationals in the extractive and related industries over which it exercises disproportionate control over, rather than its own citizenry. “When a country’s wealth arises from an endowment of natural resources, however, investment in a skilled workforce is not necessary for the realization current income.” Thus, the “resource industry is hardwired for corruption.” [5] Macartan Humphreys et al describe the “enclave” characteristics of natural resources: because resource extraction does not require high labour participation, and can proceed without political agreement, so the argument goes, there are few limits to “rent-seeking behavior,” meaning the hijacking of the process by corrupt elites.[6]

Padraig Carmody also discusses the “paradox of plenty” concept, essentially another angle on the resource curse idea that disproportionately emphasizes the benefits to African elites of the extractive industries. The notion that there is a “curse,” however “counter-intuitive” such a concept may be, finds some material basis in the overall economic picture, he argues, writing that “studies suggest that real GDP and the population’s standard of living nearly always decline where oil is discovered. Between 1970 and 1993, for example, countries without oil saw their economies grow four times faster than those of countries with oil.”[7]

Advocates of the resource curse explanation cite national budgets disproportionately allocated to the military at the expense of social spending along with indicators of “poor governance”: corruption, authoritarianism, rigged elections, resource-based violence and conflicts, and the like. So according to this theory, over-reliance on natural resources not only leads to weaker-than-expected economic development but also to what is sometimes termed a “democracy deficit.” According to the resource curse literature, at its most extreme, the resource curse and democracy deficits engender “failed states,” where many functions of governance and civil society have been dwarfed by the disproportionate role of the rentier system so that other sectors cease to adequately function. So Humphreys et al. argue that “the resource curse results not only in militarization but also in civil war.”[8] Collier uses a term called the “survival of the fattest” to describe how resources thwart democratic functioning: that states based on resource rents will inevitably facilitate patronage politics and the undermining of democratic “checks and balances,” or “restraints,” in Collier’s terminology. In a nutshell, “voters are bribed with public money.”[9] For Collier, natural resources are one of several “traps,” along with conflict and geography that function to limit economic growth and democratic participation. Advocates of this narrow perspective cite correlations such as World Bank figures on West Africa stating that the region experiences 70 per cent of the continent’s military coups.[10]

Yet a correlation is not the same as causation, and in fact this distinction is critical for understanding the actual roots of inequality. The Tax Justice Network-Africa has written: “Though some say a resource curse is innate to Africa, this is simply false. The continent’s creativity and adaptability are not doomed to be ‘cursed’; the root cause is elsewhere, in structures of ‘maldevelopment’…. Maldevelopment has been packaged as behavioral, rooted in the abuse of political power chiefly located at the state level in developing countries rich in resources.”[11] Carmody makes a similar point that the prospects for explaining development lie in historical accounts, not behavioral ones. He writes: “[C]olonialism opened markets around the world enabling economies of scale to be realized in the colonizing countries. Can (under)developing countries now compete, particularly under a liberal economic regime which institutionalizes the advantages of first movers over late comers…? The implication is that they can, but the reason they have not done so to date is because these countries have poor politics and policies…. But this neglects the fact that most of the countries of the ‘bottom billion’ (Collier 2007) have been implementing the policies of unmediated integration promoted the Washington-based international financial institutions for the last few decades.”[12]

A chief underlying premise of the “resource curse” framework is the assumption that natural resources, especially oil, have intrinsic properties capable of impacting economic and social development. Glaringly absent from many of these approaches is a systemic analysis of the root causes of economic inequality and underdevelopment in Africa and elsewhere in the so-called Third World: the historical impact of colonialism, imperialism and neoliberal policy. In fact, the resource curse approach is plagued by a dehistoricized method and what Marx termed commodity fetishism, that is, ascribing oil and other natural resources independent and unique attributes as an unmediated entity that simply emerges out of the soil. Shaxson’s account, for example, claims that “[O]il and gas companies are different. Oil provides rents …money not earned by innovation and hard work but that comes out of the ground as if a gift from God.”[13] Geographer Michael Watts, who has written extensively on Nigeria and “petro-states,” has offered a sustained critique of the “resource curse” thesis:

Oil comes to mark a particular epoch (like the age of coal or steam) and to this extent is not only a bearer of particular relations of production but it is equally a source of enormous political and economic power and therefore it carriers a set of ideological and cultural valences as is implied in the moniker of ‘black gold’ or ‘petro-dollars’ (it is both a commodity and a commodity fetish). In this account oil (and other key resources) has causal powers: it is a purveyor of corruption, it undermines democracy, promotes civil and inter-state wars (‘blood for oil’), is the mother forms of corporate power (‘Big Oil’) and condemns oil-rich states to devastating economic, political and social pathologies (oil is the ‘devil’s excrement’ as a former head of OPEC once put it).[14]

In his review of Collier’s widely-read The Bottom Billions, Watts extends this analysis with a critique of how this approach obfuscates an analysis of the roots of conflict and inequality:

Collier’s book speaks to a wider interest taken by economists (and political scientists) in what seems like a challenge to economic orthodoxy: namely that resources wealth (as a source of comparative advantage) turns out to be a ‘curse’:… whether emphasizing poor economic performance, state failure (oil breeds corruption) or “resource rents make democracy malfunction” … or the onset of civil violence (blood diamonds, oil succession and so on). In this account oil has been invested with almost Olympian transformative powers. Oil distorts the organic, natural course of development. Oil wealth ushers in an economy of hyper-consumption and spectacular excess. Others like Michael Ross (1999, 2003, 2004) argue that “oil hinders democracy” (as if copper might promote constitutionalism) and hampers gender equality; oil revenues permit low taxes and encourage patronage (thereby dampening pressures for democracy); it endorses despotic rule through bloated militaries, and it creates a class of state dependents employed in modern industrial and service sector who are less likely to push for democracy.[15]

Cyril Obi also offers an important critique of the resource curse thesis and its limited explanatory power, stating that the framework is unable to explain conflicts in resource-poor countries, and that its assumptions ignore structural and historical explanations for how scarcity and inequity are produced. Ignoring international forces outside local states.[16] To counter an exclusive focus in the literature on “African corruption” historian Kairn A. Klieman likewise argues that “resource curse theory has become deterministic, failing to take into account specific historical eras, cultures, and locales.” Her account of the relationship between U.S. oil firms and the Nigerian oil economy reveals the actual historical production of their “non-public” proceedings in the conjuncture of the 1960s oil boom, and the maneuvering by and heightened competition between African elites, exploding in the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970. Thus, “opacity was a characteristic of both Nigerian and independent oil company (IOC) practices, shaping the way they interacted over time.” [17]

Much of this focus on governance, however, is profoundly hypocritical in overlooking the distortions of structural adjustment that created lopsided economies in the first place and the corporate contracts that maintain them through bloated signing bonuses and provisions that allow them to sidestep even minimal social accountability. As Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey has put it, “the so-called resource curse can be traced not only to the corrupt, despicable dictators, whose spirited-abroad wealth often exceeded their countries’ national external debt, but also to neo-colonial relations. Blaming a resource curse purely on dictators, as do some Western politicians, is a refusal to admit that the colonial pillage of Africa continues, driven on the same tracks that were set in those dark days by transnational corporations, trade rules, bilateral and multilateral arrangements, powerful international agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.”[18]

Herein lies key insights into the relentless chiding from the West about African corruption: a narrative that reinforces the refusal that Bassey cites, in which resource wars are transformed into “curses” for which African economies and policy are solely responsible. Yet as the insights of Bassey, Obi, Watts and others have shown, another perspective – grounded in a systemic and historical analysis – is possible.

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

Featured Photograph: Gabon – oil workers assembling drill pipes for Societe des Petroles d ‘Afrique Equatoriale Francaise, taken between 1948 and 1955.

Notes

[1] Shawn Donnan, “Rebound in commodity-exporting nations set to boost global growth,” Financial Times, January 11, 2017

[2] Tom Burgis. 2015. The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth. New York: PubicAffairs, p. 76

[3] Nicholas Shaxson, “Nigeria’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative: Just a Glorious Audit? Chatham House report, November 2009. https://eiti.org/files/NEITI%20Chatham%20house_0.pdf

[4] Roger Southall and Alex Comninos, “The Scramble for Africa and the Marginalisation of African Capital,” in Roger Southall and Henning Melber, eds. 2009. A New Scramble for Africa?: Imperialism, Investment and Development. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, p. 363

[5] Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Joseph E. Stiglitz (eds.). 2007. Escaping the Resource Curse. New York Columbia University Press, p. 10

[6] Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Joseph E. Stiglitz (eds.). 2007. Escaping the Resource Curse. New York Columbia University Press, p. 4

[7] Padraig Carmody. 2011. The New Scramble for Africa. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, p. 95

[8] Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Joseph E. Stiglitz (eds.). 2007. Escaping the Resource Curse. New York Columbia University Press, p. 14

[9] Paul Collier. 2008. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 42-46

[10] Cited in Tax Justice Network-Africa, Tax Us If You Can: Why Africa Should Stand up for Tax Justice, p. 20

[11] Tax Justice Network-Africa, Tax Us If You Can: Why Africa Should Stand up for Tax Justice, p. 18-19

[12] Padraig Carmody. 2011. The New Scramble for Africa. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, p. 24.

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

[14]Michael Watts, “Crude Politics: Life and Death on the Nigerian Oil Fields,” Niger Delta Economies of Violence, Working Paper No. 18, http://geog.berkeley.edu/ProjectsResources/ND%20Website/NigerDelta/WP/Watts_25.pdf

[15]Michael Watts, “Oil, Development, and the Politics of the Bottom Billion,” Macalester International Vol. 24, Summer 2009

[16]Cyril I. Obi, “Scrambling for Oil in West Africa,” in Roger Southall and Henning Melber, eds. 2009. A New Scramble for Africa?: Imperialism, Investment and Development. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, p. 199

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

[18] Nnimmo Bassey. 2012. To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa. Nairobi and Oxford: Fahamu Books & Pambazuka Press, p. 12

Knowledge Production in Africa: Inequality and Capitalism

ROAPE

January 20, 2017

By Faisal Garba

Rosa Hartmut, Lessenich Stephan and Klaus Dörre. 2014. Sociology, Capitalism, Critique Verso and Manuela Boatcă. 2015. Global Inequalities beyond Occidentalism. Routledge.

In a world where the logic of capitalism forces the unemployed into precarious employment, yet insists that we all constantly ‘improve’ ourselves, Faisal Garba reviews two books that ask what is the role of knowledge production.

Sociologists Klaus Dörre, Stephan Lessenich and Hartmut Rosa’s answer is to unpick the myriad ways capitalism disposes, coerces and habituates people in the service of a system reliant on exploitation and inequality. While Manuela Boatcă’s answer to the question is bound-up in an approach that sees inequality as the product of a historical and ongoing relationship of exploitative domination between the West and its many peripheries. Boatcă offers us a reading of inequality as a product of globally unequal capitalist accumulation built on enslavement, forced and cheap labour and gendered exploitation. In a time of radical reforms – and movements – in higher education in Africa these books help us to understand history and the challenges we face.

With the receding of serious and critical research it is refreshing to come across high-quality scholarly works that critique society with a view to facilitating fundamental social transformation at a global level. Although not grounded in the Africa’s experience, the two books reviewed here challenge the justification of market dogma on the continent as the necessary path of all societies. Both books offer insightful analysis of contemporary global capitalism: Dörre, Rosa and Lessenich analyse contemporary modes of accumulation; the creation of accompanying subjectivity; and the desecration of the human and social fabric. While Boatcă’s book tackles the theoretical and methodological limitations of the rampant eurocentrism that underpins even seemingly progressive strands of inequality studies. By highlighting Europe’s intricate relationship with the production and maintenance of grotesque inequalities – inequalities that have historically been cordoned off within Europe’s internal frontiers and its colonial periphery – but which has now broken their barriers.

Sociology, Capitalism and Critique was first published in German in 2009 as an attempt to come to terms with the sources, meanings and implications of the capitalist financial crisis that began in 2008. The English edition published in 2014 includes a postscript that updates the original arguments. Divided into three parts, the three Jena-based sociologists began by putting forward their individual positions on contemporary capitalist society [1]. They then engaged in a robust and collegial debate on what they see as the weaknesses of each other’s approach, and conclude by attempting a synthesis of their positions, without ceding grounds on what they hold to be core differences in their approaches.

Klaus Dorre’s key theoretical concept is Landnähme which he develops from Rosa Luxemburg’s explanation of imperialist accumulation [2]. The basic thesis is as follows. By dint of excessive competition and hampered by the natural limit of available (natural) resources in a regular sphere of operations, capitalists conquer territory across the globe in search of inputs, investments and markets. Luxemburg, in this way, anticipated the new conquest of Africa via the recolonization of land in the wave of ongoing land grabs carried out by Western, Chinese, Brazilian, Indian and South African capital. Dörre takes the theoretical base of Luxembourg’s landnähme – the commodification/privatization of the communal/non-commodity – and extends it to capture internal and external forms of capitalist accumulation today. The dismembering of embedded liberalism in the West, the decimation of the welfare state, the increase in and normalisation of precarious employment, and the conversion of hitherto de-commodified social goods into trade-able commodities all count for the extension of the realm of capitalist accumulation and therefore constitute landnähme. In Dörre’s argument land is a synonym for what is ‘accumulated’ or to use David Harvey’s term, disposed, from the worker who is forced to take a pay cut and work under temporary contract.

Dörre’s political-economy starting point contradicts with Hartmut Rosa’s cultural theoretical perspective. Rosa sees the economic as part of the broad cultural structure of a society. For him the defining feature of contemporary capitalism is the search and maintenance of constant movement or what he refers to as ‘dynamisation’. The modern to him is defined by the search for ‘increase, growth and pace’. The effect is that everything including the (liberal to social democratic) state is subsumed under the ever-mobile force of capital given the slow pace at which democratic processes unfold.

Lessenich deploys a Foucauldian and neo-Marxist perspective to come up with what he calls ‘activation’ as the defining feature of what all three authors call late capitalism. Lessenich sees the state as co-creating subjects well-adjusted for market participation. The state does this in particular through the welfare system where the unemployed are made to take up low-paying jobs or risk losing unemployment benefits. ‘Activation’ refers to how structures of domination create a market subjectivity that relies on an ethos of work to induce conducive behaviour.

The obvious continuities aside, there are marked differences among the three collaborators. This is the focus of the debate section of the book. Dörre the political-economist labels Rosa, the cultural theoretician, an exponent of a ‘detached conservative outlook’ that posits a generalized human carnage without attention to the social differentiation that has brought the world to the edge of environmental disaster. Dörre sees Lessenich as engaging in a sort of ‘miserablism’ through his Foucauldian ‘governmentality approach’ that minimizes market relations in favour of purely political processes.

Rosa, however, sees in Dörre an economic reductionism that is unable to appreciate extra-economic social relations. While Lessenich is doing the impossible by attempting to weave together an incompatible neo-Marxist and Foucauldian approach. Lessenich believes that Dörre is unable to see the balancing-act and contestation inside and over the state: between the state a that can respond to democratic pressures from below with the market facilitating pressures from above. Like Dörre, Lessenich counts Rosa’s approach as ‘detached scholarship’ with little social roots.

Operating from a World Systems and decolonial approach, Manuela Boatcă, a sociologist based at the University of Freiburg, addresses herself to the present manifestation of longstanding inequality wrought by capitalism as a global system. Her 2015 book provides a close reading of both Marxist and Weberian approaches to inequality with a view to mapping the outlines of a theory of inequality that is not tied to a particular locale while making universal claims. Her work offers a useful critique of Dörre, Rosa and Lesenich. Whereas they discuss the question of migration and the exploitation or objectification of migrants in very nuanced terms their varied approaches contain a familiar tinge of the ‘outsiders’. Not so with Boatcă’s approach to global interconnections, she points towards a different way of thinking about societies – as political communities that are made and remade by the in-and-out-movement of people instead of a coherent historical base that receives ‘outsiders’ over time.

Locating the arguments of all fours authors in Africa’s historical experiences and contemporary trajectory, can we envisage research questions that could form the basis of a project? Here the works of two authors, Dörre and Boatcă, are of more direct relevance to us. The Africa Rising rhetoric that seemed to herald another neoliberal blitzkrieg in the name of economic rationality, private sector development and the financial market as a motor of poverty alleviation, is creating a new form of class configuration in Africa. It will be useful to investigate exactly how the new economic model disposes people of collective goods that provide the basis for informal welfare in a setting where the state is largely absent as a source of welfare of any kind to the poor. How does the privatization of public enterprises, the introduction of user fees for basic necessities, de-industrialization and the entrenchment of anti-welfare social policy create avenues of accumulation for local and international capital? Taking Boatcă’s methodological admonition not to provide case studies to prove theories whose conception is sired by historical amnesia, the task I have in mind would contend with how we can reconstruct the landnähme theory from a broader geographical frame. In the case of Africa we could do this in order to understand how imperialist interests, local accumulating classes and struggles waged from below by ordinary people offer us a more grounded understanding of capitalism today. Equally important, to locate some spaces of (struggle) hope within the continent from where lessons could be drawn on resisting capitalism as a global system whose centre is now unevenly spread to every corner of the globe.

Faisal Garba is affiliated to the Universities of Cape Town and the University of Freiburg. He is also a Post-Doctoral fellow in the Post-Growth Society at the University of Jena, Germany.

Featured Photograph: Pyramid of the capitalist system (Industrial Workers of the World, 1911).

Notes

[1] The 16^th Century Philosopher Wilhelm Anton Amoo was based at the University of Jena for some time before finally leaving Germany to return to Ghana from where he was taken to Europe aged around 7.

[2] Landnähme is the literal German equivalent of taking over land.

Popular Protest & Class Struggle in Africa – Part 7

ROAPE

January 18, 2017

Gambia

At one point late last year it seemed that Gambia would see a peaceful transfer of power after President Yahya Jammeh conceded defeat in the election held on 1 December. He accepted that Adama Barrow, for the Coalition 2016, had won the election and that he would step down on 19 January. However on 9 December he had a change of mind. In the latest part of David Seddon’s project on political transitions and democratic elections on the continent, he looks at the election, the defeat of Jammeh and the dramatic about-turn in the days and weeks after the poll.

By David Seddon

President Yahya Jammeh seized power in a military coup in 1994, ousting Dawda Jawara, who had led Gambia as President since independence in 1965. Jammeh remained President through successive elections held in 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011. The two decades of Jammeh’s presidency were characterised by the systematic suppression of dissent, restrictions of freedom of the press, and many allegations of human rights violations. Jammeh also expressed idiosyncratic views and took corresponding actions, such as claiming to cure various diseases such as HIV/AIDS and cancer with herbs, conducting literal witch hunts, and persecuting homosexuality. In 2011, he said that, God willing, he could ‘rule for a billion years’. He was therefore confident that the presidential elections of December 2016 would prove little different in their outcome than the previous four.

The Electoral System

Uniquely in Africa, the President of the Gambia is elected in one round by plurality vote for a five-year term. Instead of using paper ballots, elections in the Gambia are conducted using marbles. Each voter receives a marble and places it in a tube on top of a sealed drum that corresponds to that voter’s favoured candidate. The drums for different candidates are painted in different colours, corresponding to the party affiliation of the candidate, and a picture of the candidate is affixed to their corresponding drum. The system has the advantages of low cost and simplicity, both for understanding how to vote and for counting the results. The method is reported to have an extremely low error rate for miscast ballots.

The Parties Involved

In November 2016, the Independent Electoral Commission of Gambia registered three political organisations and three candidates, each nominated by their party: Mama Kandeh, for the Gambia Democratic Congress (GDC), Adama Barrow, for the Coalition 2016 – a grouping of seven opposition parties – and Yahya Jammeh, representing the Alliance for Patriotic Re-Orientation and Reconstruction (APRC). Two other political parties – the National Democratic Action Movement (NDAM) and the Gambia Democratic Party (GDP) – were disqualified by the Commission under the rules established for the election, which included residency requirements for party officials, the establishment of offices in the seven administrative regions of Gambia, and the submission of audited accounting records.

Adama Barrow, a real estate businessman, had never held any political office – although he had been a member of the United Democratic Party (UDP) and had previously served as its treasurer, but had resigned his party membership to enable him to run as an independent in the presidential election. The coalition that he represented included, in addition to the UDP, the People’s Democratic Organisation for Independence and Socialism (PDOIS), the National Reconciliation Party (NRP), the Gambia Moral Congress (GMC), the National Convention Party (NCP), the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and the Gambia Party for Democracy and Progress (GPDP).

French Map of Gambia (2006)

Barrow referred to Jammeh as ‘a soul-less dictator’ and said that, if elected, he would reverse some of Jammeh’s key actions and policies, including withdrawing from the Commonwealth and from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). He said that he would introduce a two-term limit for the office of the presidency and conduct a judicial reform, ensuring an independent judiciary. He also stated that he intended to ‘put aside all party, tribal, religious, gender and other differences’ to ‘unify a divided nation’ and to ‘promote and consolidate democracy, the rule of law, good governance and respect for human rights’.

The only recognised opposition party not in the Coalition, the Gambia Democratic Congress (GDC), fielded its own candidate – Mamma Kandeh, a former deputy of the ruling party who had been expelled by the APRC. The GDC was Gambia’s youngest political party, having been formed in the summer of 2016 by Kandeh along with some other former key members and supporters of the APRC. It had gained some popular support and was involved in some of the early discussions that led to the formation of the Coalition, but the negotiations broke down about its position in the alliance and the attitude of some members of the other parties toward the GDC, so it did not join. Some members of other opposition groups accused the GDC and its backers of trying to divide the opposition so that Jammeh would win.

The Elections

The two week campaigning period prior to the elections was largely peaceful, despite large rallies held for both government and opposition parties. However, social media – including mobile messaging applications, like WhatsApp and Viber, were blocked by the Gambian authorities before the election and internet and international telephone access was also blocked. International observers were banned but a few observers from the African Union were allowed to follow the voting. President Jammeh made it clear also that protests after the election would not be tolerated, saying: ‘in this country we do not allow demonstrations’.

The elections were held on 1 December 2016, and turnout was reasonably high at 59.3 per cent. On 2 December, even before the final results were announced, Jammeh conceded defeat, shocking a populace that had expected him to retain power. BBC News called it ‘one of the biggest election upsets West Africa has ever seen’. The final official results showed Barrow winning a 43.3 per cent plurality, achieving a 3.7 per cent margin of victory over Jammeh’s 39.6 per cent– with the third candidate, Mamma Kandeh, receiving 17.1 per cent of the votes. Immediately following the election, 19 opposition prisoners were released, including Ousainou Darboe, the leader of Barrow’s original United Democratic Party (UDP). If the outcome of the election had been followed by a transfer of power, it would have marked the first change of presidency in Gambia since Jammeh’s military coup in 1994, and the first transfer of power by popular election since independence from the UK in 1965.

Thousands took to the streets of Banjul, the capital city, to celebrate the surprise victory, although they were stunned by Jammeh’s concession of defeat. As we have stated above, a few days after the election, 19 opposition prisoners were released, including Ousainou Darboe, the leader of the UDP. Darboe had been arrested in April 2016 and sentenced to three years in prison, and it was his arrest that had led to Barrow’s candidacy. However, some expressed caution about what Jammeh might do next – suggesting that he could still try to retain power despite what had happened. One businessman said: ‘I will only believe it when I see him leaving state house. He still controls the army, and his family is the top brass’.

Interviewed shortly after the election, Barrow thanked the Gambian people, including those in the diaspora, and appealed to them to put aside their differences and work together for the development of their country. He said: ‘I know Gambians are in a hurry but not everything is going to be achieved in one day. I would therefore appeal to all Gambians and friends of the Gambia to join us and help move this great country forward. I don’t want this change of regime to be a mere change. I want it to be felt and seen in the well-being of the country and all Gambians. So we are calling on all Gambians and friends of the Gambia to help us make the Gambia great again’.

Barrow stated that his early priorities include helping the agriculture sector. He said: ‘we don’t have minerals here. The backbone of this country is agriculture. … Under President Yahya’s government, all those farming centres collapsed completely, and they no longer exist’. Asked about his plans for judicial reform, he said: ‘we want a free and independent judiciary whereby nobody can influence the judiciary. We will put laws in place to protect those people running the judiciary. They will have that job security, they will have that independence. We will reduce the powers of the president’.

A Change of Mind

The sceptics, who had worried that Jammeh would seek to retain power, were, however, proved correct. For, on 9 December, he appeared on Gambian state television and announced that he had ‘decided to reject the outcome of the recent election due to what he referred to as ‘serious and unacceptable abnormalities … during the electoral process’. He said that a new election should be held under ‘a god-fearing and independent electoral commission’. This announcement came shortly after Fatoumata Jallow-Tambajang, the chair of the opposition Coalition, called for Jammeh’s prosecution within a year of the handing over of power in January 2017 and said ‘We are going to have a national commission for asset recovery’ to obtain the return of money and property from Jammeh and his family. The UK’s Guardian African correspondent speculated at the time that the prospect of prosecution under a new government might have led security and military leaders to back Jammeh.

By 10 December the army was deployed in key locations in Banjul, the capital, and sandbagged positions set up with machine guns, although people were generally waved through at the checkpoints; troops were also deployed in Serekunda, the Gambia’s largest city. Jammeh’s rejection of the results and mobilisation of the army was condemned by Barrow, who said that Jammeh did not have the constitutional authority to nullify the vote and call for new elections, arguing that only the Independent Electoral Commission could do that. The third candidate in the election, Mamma Kandeh, also called on Jammeh to step down, saying ‘your swift decision earlier to concede defeat and your subsequent move to call Adama Barrow to congratulate him was lauded throughout the world. We therefore prevail on you to reconsider your decision’. Alieu Momarr Njai, the head of the elections commission, said that if it went to court, they would be able to show that the final tally was correct.

Several professional organisations within Gambia condemned the rejection by Jammeh of the election results. The Gambia teachers’ union called Jammeh’s action ‘a recipe for chaos and disorder which undoubtedly endangers the lives of all Gambians ’. The Gambia Press Union, the University of the Gambia, the country’s medical association and the Supreme Islamic Council also supported the view that Jammeh should step aside and allow Barrow to assume the presidency.

In the meanwhile, however, the APRC said it would follow up Jammeh’s statement by petitioning the Supreme Court to invalidate the election results, meeting a 10-day deadline established by law for contesting an election. According to human rights groups interviewed by Reuters, Jammeh continued to wield considerable influence over the courts. Of the three Chief Justices between 2013 and 2015, one was jailed, another was dismissed, while the third fled the country after acquitting someone that Jammeh wanted convicted. There is currently a Chief Justice in post, but there has not been an active Supreme Court in the country for a year and a half (since May 2015), and it was thought that at least four additional judges would have to be hired in order for the Supreme Court to convene to hear the case. On 12 December, the Gambia bar association held an emergency meeting. They called Jammeh’s rejection of the election results ‘tantamount to treason’. The bar association also passed a unanimous resolution calling for the resignation of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Nigerian judge Emmanuel Oluwasegun Fagbenle, for gross misconduct – saying he had become politicized. They said he had shown a lack of independence and impartiality by participating in active campaigning for the APRC as the election approached and inappropriately interfering with decisions made by judicial officials.

It was announced that a delegation of four West African heads of state would go to Gambia on 13 December to persuade Jammeh to accept the results of the election and step down. These included the President of Liberia and chair of ECOWAS Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari, the (outgoing) President of Ghana John Mahama, and the President of Sierra Leone Ernest Bai Koroma. The African Union said it also planned to send a negotiating delegation to Gambia, led by President of Chad and chair of the AU Idriss Déby. Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, issued a statement saying that the European Union requested Jammeh to respect the outcome of the election and step down, and that ‘any attempt to reverse carries the risk of serious consequences’. The four regional leaders sent by ECOWAS met with Jammeh, but left without an agreement.

Banjul, The Gambia (2007)

In the meanwhile, on 13 December, security forces took over the offices of the election commission and prevented the chief of the commission and its staff entering the building. The APRC also submitted its appeal seeking the invalidation of the results. Barrow said he had moved to a safe house for protection. According to supporters protecting Barrow’s residence, the police and military of the Gambia had declined to protect the president-elect.

On 14 December, United Nations officials said that Jammeh would not be allowed to remain head of state and would face strong sanctions if he continues to try to do so after his current term expires. Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, said the refusal to accept the election result was an ‘outrageous act of disrespect of the will of the Gambian people’. Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the United Nations Special Representative for West Africa and the Sahel said: ‘for Mr. Jammeh, the end is here and under no circumstances can he continue to be president. By that time (18 January), his mandate is up and he will be required to hand over to Mr. Barrow’. When asked whether the UN would consider military action to force Jammeh’s departure, Chambas did not rule out the possibility – saying only ‘it may not be necessary. Let’s cross that bridge when we get there’.

On 16 December, ECOWAS issued a statement saying that Barrow ‘must be sworn in’ in order to ‘respect the will of the Gambian people’, and that it would ‘undertake all necessary actions to enforce the result of the election’. ECOWAS appointed Muhammadu Buhari as its chief mediator for the dispute and appointed John Mahama as co-mediator. On 19 December, the AU expressed its full support of the position taken by ECOWAS. Idriss Déby, chair of the AU, called ECOWAS’s position a ‘principled stand with regards to the situation in The Gambia’. Despite pressure from regional leaders, however, Jammeh, speaking on television on the evening of 20 December, said that a new election was necessary: ‘I will not cheat, 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. He stated that he would not leave office at the end of his term in January unless the Supreme Court upheld the results.

Six additional appointments to the Supreme Court (five from Nigeria – Habeeb A.O. Abiru, Abubakar Datti Yahaya, Abubakar Tijani, Obande Festus and Akomaye Angim – and one from Sierra Leone – Nicholas Colin Brown) were reported to have been made in secret, starting in October 2016, with the cooperation of Chief Justice Fagbenle. One of the newly appointed justices, Akomaye Angim, is a former Chief Justice of The Gambia. However, it was not clear whether the new justices had all accepted their appointments – especially in the case of Abiru, who was reported to be planning to reject his appointment and to meet with other appointees who may do the same.

On 23 December, ECOWAS announced that it would send in troops if Jammeh failed to step down. The president of ECOWAS, Marcel Alain de Souza, said that the deadline was 19 January, when the mandate of Jammeh ends. 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’. Barrow has said he will declare himself president on 19 January 2017. In a message posted on social media, he urged ‘all peace-loving Gambians to advocate, pray and work for a peaceful transfer of executive power for the first time in our history since independence’, adding that ‘if the colonialists could peacefully hand over executive powers in accordance with the dictates of the people of The Gambia, we, the citizens, should be able to show a better example to our children’.

Hours before the deadline Senegal still maintains its troops are ready to intervene if Jammeh refuses to hand over power. Jammeh has replied that he would not be intimidated, and ECOWAS had no right to interfere in The Gambia’s affairs. In the morning of 18 January, following high-level resignations of senior ministers, Gambia’s parliament extended by 90 days Jammeh’s term in office and granted a state of emergency for the same period.

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: Ex-President of The Gambia Yahya Jammeh

Capitalism in Africa: The Old and the New Lyrics

ROAPE

January 12, 2017

Blade Runner's Johannesburg — View from the Carlton Centre - Johannesburg's inner city went into decline when the ‘Money’ relocated to Sandton and the destitute moved in. Certain parts are still ‘no-go’ areas, such as Hillbrow, but Bramfontein and the city centre are clawing their way back to respectability. Seen from the panorama deck of Johannesburg’s tallest building the city does remind me of the dystopia portrayed in the movie Blade Runner (1982).

By Horman Chitonge

The Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) hosted a Round Table discussion at the 2016 African Studies Association UK (ASAUK) conference held at Cambridge University and the topic for discussion centred on whether African societies are capitalist or not, and also on the status of political economy scholarship on Africa. In this blog post, I focus on the question of whether African societies can be classified as capitalist or not. I argue that the answer one gives, depends, largely, on the meaning of capitalism that one adopts; and there have been different meanings which scholars have espoused. For this reason, it is crucial to clarify the question of what constitutes a capitalist society. Can African societies (and I would like to use the plural and not the singular here to emphasise the heterogeneity of societies in Africa) of yesterday and today, be classified in the same way?

Stating ones understanding of what constitutes a capitalist society is crucial for the simple reason that not all people have the same understanding of what a capitalist society (or capitalism for that matter) is. As Laclau wrote in 1971, given the “extended debates that have occurred over the concept of capitalism” the term, should, “by no means be term for granted”. Some scholars think of a capitalist society as one where free enterprise and private property dominate, while others take a capitalist society to be one in which the profit drive overrides any other motives in society. Other scholars see the taking root of capitalist relations and structures of productions as the definitive feature of a capitalist society. For many people a capitalist society is simply one characterised by exploitation of one section of society by another, while for other people it is defined by the existence of free market enterprise, the freedom to sell and buy goods and services. For example, Bartlett characterised capitalism in Africa in 1990:

Throughout Africa today, capitalism is staging a comeback. After a century of colonialism and 30 years of “African Socialism,” the continent is at last returning to its capitalist roots. It is often asserted that Africa has no capitalist tradition, but this is not so. Africans are natural traders with a long history of barter, exchange, and entrepreneurship that was stifled by government control (emphasis added).

Though Bartlett does not explicitly define capitalism, it is apparent that free exchange and enterprise seem to be central to his understanding of capitalism and what constitutes a capitalist society. From this understanding of capitalism, Bartlett is convinced beyond doubt that African societies are capitalist; he even thinks that capitalism is ‘natural’ in Africa. However, few analysts would agree with Bartlett. In fact, during the 1960s, there was a widely held view that capitalist relations were ‘unnatural’ to African societies (unAfrican), and therefore unacceptable on social, cultural and ethical grounds.

Broadly, there are two sides to the discussion. On one side of the debate it has been maintained that most of African societies are pre-capitalist, perhaps still on the ‘long road’ to become capitalist. On the other side of the debate it has been asserted that capitalism is the dominant social and economic system in Africa, and therefore African societies are capitalist. Those who support the pre-capitalist thesis argue that although African societies have for a long time been interacting with the capitalist world, they are not yet capitalist societies; that the “predominant social relations are still not capitalist, nor is the prevailing logic of production” as Saul and Leys argued in 1995 and that, according to Hyden, “Africa is only at the first gate on the road to capitalism”. Several arguments are provided to support this view, including that African peasants have not been “captured” into capitalist relations and structures of production; that the capitalist mode of production in Africa has not yet completely subsumed pre-capitalist modes of production, giving rise to what some analysts have referred to as “a stunted form” of capitalism as Cox and Negi wrote in 2010. On this side of the debate, it has been asserted that the disarticulated nature of class formation in Africa has prevented the emergence of a pure capitalist class that can exploit Africans sufficiently to unleash the productive forces of capitalism.

Critics of this view, notably Amin and Wallerstein writing in the 1970s and 1980s, have long argued that from the time Africa came into contact with the capitalist world, African societies have been irreversibly drawn deeper and deeper into capitalist relations, and as a result these societies have been radically transformed by capitalist relations. Those who support this view argue that restrictive meaning given to the term capitalism, as a system defined primarily by a particular mode of production, amounts to reducing society to a mode of production. They argue that society is much more than a mode of production, and therefore one has to take into account the broader social, cultural, economic and political context to appreciate the forces at play. While analysts on this side of the debate do not agree on when exactly capitalism spread to the continent, there is general agreement that from the time Africa came into contact with the capitalist system, it became part of this system as the “periphery of the periphery”.

My task in this blog post is not to go into detailed debates about how capitalist relations manifest in different places and times; what I want to do here is to try and isolate fundamental features of capitalist relations, and then proceed to see if we can identify similar features in African societies. I argue that while capitalism should not be expected to be monochromic in its concrete expressions, its effects are essentially the same. If capitalist formations can in fact differ according to the material conditions on which they act, then it might be useful to focus on the basic effects rather than take a rigid single path approach.

If we focus on the basic features of capitalism, it is possible to isolate common elements, regardless of time and place. Looking at capitalist relations across different spheres of time and place, there are three fundamental features which I would like here to focus on here: i) exploitation of the majority by a capitalist class (whatever form this may take), ii) concentration of power and control in a few hands (this might be corporations and a political elite) and, as a result, iii) highly unequal distribution of resources and wealth in society. If we apply these three fundamental elements of what constitute a capitalist society, it would be hard to deny that African societies have for a long time been and are still capitalist. However, as Laclau observes in 1971, exploitation can be found in many societies including non-capitalist, and as such it is not unique to capitalist societies. It is rather the specific form of exploitation which sets capitalist societies apart; particularly the systematic exploitative relationships involving ‘economic surplus’ extracted through wage labour and unequal exchange. In other words, exploitation in a capitalist system is through economic means mediated through specific relations and structures.

Restricting capitalist exploitative relations to wage labour dynamics yields an incomplete story of how capitalism has unfolded in the continent, and this has often led to some serious misunderstanding of capitalist dynamics in Africa. For instance, the extraction of economic surplus has not only been restricted to wage labour relations (which affect only a tiny section of Africans), but through a complex network of capitalist operations raging from multi-national companies engaged in extractive industry to service oriented capitalist firms such as Banks, shipping companies and insurance firms which have been operating in Africa for centuries now. Thus, restricting the existence of capitalism to the dominance of wage labour relations has offered little insight into capitalist dynamics in Africa. For this reason, it is essential to pay attention to the unique forms of economic surplus extraction through direct and well as indirect means. The key issue is that capitalism has fundamentally affected the way African societies operate and are structured.

In the debates on capitalism in Africa, there is little disagreement on the view that African societies have been in contact with the capitalist world for a long time. Although the nature of this relationship has always been one of crude exploitation of African peoples, the mechanisms and rules of engagement have been changing overtime, as African societies are transformed through these engagements. For example, the nature of engagement during the mercantilist period when merchant capitalism was dominant is quite different from later forms of engagements and the attendant mechanics of exploitation. While in earlier engagements through the slave trade, imperial (civilising) missions and colonial rule, the nature of exploitation was largely through naked, brute force, driven by the imperatives of primitive accumulation, later forms of engagements have become more sophisticated, so they may appear as beneficial to the centres of capital and African societies. Today, the circulation of capital has become so complex, interweaving foreign and local capital into a colossal network of financial capillaries, penetrating every corner of the globe including the most remote villages. This sophistication has in turn affected the way capitalism manifests itself and shapes African societies. To appreciate capitalist dynamics in Africa, one cannot ignore its changing nature and outward expressions.

Scholarly debates on capitalism in Africa, particularly, have been, and I guess are still, heavily contested. One of the reasons for this is that capitalist formations in Africa have often been analysed based on some ideal model of a capitalist “path”; and since this prophesied path has not materialised in Africa, there is a strong temptation to see African societies as non-capitalist, often implying that they are pre-capitalist. Such views are often supported by appealing to a very restrictive idealised conceptualisation of capitalism as a system defined by the prevalence of wage labour. Societies, like most in Africa, where wage labour only accounts for a tenth of the population are summarily bracketed as non-capitalist societies (perhaps a good thing, but it ignores the reality on the ground). If we critically examine the social relations and the dominant forms of engagement (exchange), it becomes apparent that wage labour alone may not be an adequate concept for analysing capitalist manifestations; it then becomes apparent that we need a much more sophisticated understanding of the system to unmask its basic features and the complex ways in which it restructures and transforms social relations and entire societies. Indeed, as we move into an era where wage labour, in the traditional sense, is rapidly shrinking, globally, it becomes imperative to find new tools for analysing capitalism so as to yield new insight into its intricate operations and how these shape society, in specific contexts. In the African context, a strictly wage labour analysis offers limited insights into the nature and mechanisms of capitalism.

Horman Chitonge is Associate Professor and Head of African Studies Section at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town (UCT). His research interests include agrarian political economy, and alternative strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction in Africa. His most recent books include: Economic Growth and Development in Africa: Understanding Trends and Prospects and Beyond Parliament: Human Rights and the Politics of Social Change in the Global South.

Featured Photograph: Johannesburg viewed from the Carlton Centre (Andrew Moore, 2015)

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