ROAPE’s Ray Bush looks at the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East six years ago which demanded ‘bread, freedom, social justice’ (Aish, horreya, ‘adala igtema’yyia), but instead of focusing on urban struggles he shifts our focus to small farmers. While most attention focused on urban rebellions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, it was protests by small farmers across the Near East North Africa (NENA) since the food price hikes of 2008 that had intensified rural malnutrition, poverty and inequality. Though the causes of protest had been long in the making and can be traced back to the onset of economic liberalisation in the mid-1980s, if not earlier. NENA is the world’s largest food importer, relying on world markets for more than 50 per cent of its food. Price rises, particularly for wheat and rice, have given a stronger rationale to the strategic importance of boosting local production. The need to reduce the impact of volatile international markets for grain is—rhetorically at least— central to all countries in the region. Yet the strategy to reduce that dependence is shaped by intense local and international political pressures. The largely non-food-producing countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have intensified their search for land to purchase outside their national boundaries, while others, such as Egypt, have suggested the need to reinvigorate historical practices of land reclamation. Bush introduces his arguments for readers of roape.net, while the link to the full working paper is below.
By Ray Bush
This review of family farming in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) explores the role of farming and agriculture in the broader political economy of the region. It highlights a preoccupation among policy makers with a very restrictive definition of food security and promotes instead a view that requires a new politics and social policy that listens to the needs of farmers and their struggles for food sovereignty.
In the paper I try to establish the distinctive features of the region, what might be generalised and what might not be so common between countries with contrasting patterns of development. The paper explores the role and impact that farmers have had on the social relations of production in a range of countries and the position that agriculture has played in national and regional development. It draws on the responses of farmers to recent upheavals and sets out a series of recommendations that might bolster rural development broadly defined, including the life chances and contributions made to national development by farmers in the region.
Governorate of Dakahlia, Egypt (Ray Bush, 2013).
The paper argues that it might be useful if recommendations could be divided between on the one hand, those that seem already to be part of the government strategy and analysis of local farming problems and on the other a more idealised set of prescriptive reforms that would put farmers at the heart of policy. Farmers at the centre of rural development policy might help to ensure that their voices were heard and opinions acted upon in the promotion of their farming and livelihood interests. Whether that is at all possible is a political issue and one that at the moment seems a long way away. In addition the paper locates the changing position of family farmers in the framework of agrarian questions. Empirically it looks at the range of country experiences in the context of the broad themes of conflict and war, economic reform and environmental crises.
The paper concludes with the need to promote a research agenda that tries to think beyond the immediate issue of dealing with host governments to address the reasons why family farming has been so underdeveloped. This will involve understanding the relationships of class and power that have emerged historically to enmesh family farming in patterns of uneven and deleterious incorporation of agrarian policy. While many common patterns in NENA are identified and there are also many country specificities particularly linked to overarching patterns of conflict, economic reform and climate change. Analysis and research that may address persistent agrarian underdevelopment will need to identify inter alia where the production and distribution shortfalls occur and why and with what kinds of social consequences? In other words research and policy intervention will need to be dynamic and differentiated seeking to understand who is affected by shortfalls in production for example and how particular households with varied resource endowments and age and gender compositions and with different relationships with owners and so on, are impacted.
Governorate of Giza, Egypt (Ray Bush, 2013)
This will require analysis of specific units of food production and patterns of self-provisioning. At the level of the village and the community further specification is needed of differentiation and supportive or exploitative relations between different household units. Here an analysis of mechanisms of mutual support, survival, storing and for tackling emergencies is important alongside the environmental balance and challenges, fragility of ecology and so on. These dynamic, actual and potential fault-lines need exploring in detail and by case investigation rather than generalised policy invective that tends to emerge from the African Union and other international organisations. It will require a view of policy that is inclusive, that must be part of the debates of the relationship between industry and agriculture, and be based upon informed ethnographic investigation rather than by urban based agricultural extension. And there is a need to identify what might be ‘normal’ relationships and what might be sources of cyclical crisis, drought, pest, economic, political. These cyclical crises can then be set alongside trends of encroachment, dispossession and water scarcity. Only by doing this will it be possible to identify which family farmers have inadequate access to the means of production cyclically or permanently.
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.
Featured Photograph: Governorate of Dakahlia, Egypt (Ray Bush, 2013).
As late as October 2003 then German Foreign Minister Joseph ‘Joschka’ Fischer stated during a visit to the Namibian capital Windhoek that there would be no apology for the first genocide of the 20th century, which was committed by German colonial troops in Namibia in 1904-1908. Only in 2015, official Germany finally acknowledged that the demise of eighty per cent of the Herero and fifty per cent of the Nama of central and southern Namibia indeed constituted a genocide when the speaker of the German parliament, Norbert Lammert, penned an article in the influential weekly Die Zeit. Lammert acknowledged that the war crimes committed by the colonial command in Namibia were not merely an unfortunate series of events but that the German command had intentionally aimed at annihilating the local population groups that had risen up against colonial conquest and dispossession. Shortly afterwards the Foreign Ministry acknowledged the genocide during a press conference of 10 July 2015: “The war of extermination in Namibia from 1904 to 1908 was a war crime and a genocide”.
This acknowledgment set a process into motion. Now official Namibian and German envoys are talking about the way ahead; the programme involves three steps: acknowledgment, apology, reparations. These negotiations are complicated and contested. Thus far, the envisaged formal apology is still due. On the German side, voices have already ruled out reparations. In Namibia, members of the affected communities have claimed that they be part of a more inclusive process. In October 2016, an international civil society congress, “Restorative Justice after Genocide”, brought together over 50 Herero and Nama delegates from around the world with German solidarity activists in Berlin to discuss the way forward. Prior to the congress, a press conference with the Herero and Nama delegates, organised by Niema Movassat, (Die LINKE) Mitglied des Deutschen Bundestages (Member of Parliament) was held on October 14, 2016 in the German Bundestag (see the clip below).
The Die LINKE group invited to the Bundestag on 14 October 2016, representatives of the Herero und Nama. Niema Movassat, for Die LINKE, Chairman in the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development, introduced the topic and presented the left critique of the current position of the German Federal Government (please note that this press conference is in English and German).
On 5 January 2017, Ovaherero Chief Advocate Vekuii Rukoro and Head of the Nama traditional authorities David Fredericks filed a class act legal claim in New York, invoking the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 United States law often used in human rights cases. They are suing Germany for damages directly to be paid to the descendants of the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama. Significantly, the plaintiffs are also seeking an order from the US court requesting that they, as the lawful representatives of the peoples directly affected, be included in any negotiations and settlements between Germany and Namibia.
The Ovaherero and Nama chiefs invoke the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007. This legal reference and comments by the Rukoro, Fredericks and their lawyer, Ken McCallion, indicate that the law suit is directed at transnational restorative justice, but also at Namibian nationalist politics. The chiefs stated that the Namibian government could not adequately and completely represent the interests of the Ovaherero and Nama as “indigenous and minority” communities in Namibia, and even less so those of Ovaherero and Nama peoples living in Botswana, Souith Africa, the US, and elsewhere. Their legal representative further expressed suspicion that reparations, if paid in the form of foreign aid by Germany to official Namibia, might not reach the “indigenous communities directly affected.”
Heike Becker has written extensively about memory politics and nationalism in Namibia. Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape, Heike directs research and teaching on multiculturalism and diversity. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net and has her own website and blog.
Featured Photograph: Lieutenant von Durling at the death camp at Shark Island, German South West Africa (now Namibia) in 1905.
There have been extensive debates over the years about the nature, potential, impacts and future of capitalism in Africa. However as Stephan Ouma notes in his blog piece in this series there is a need to engage in more finely grained analysis, rather than talking about a monolithic capitalism in Africa, while recognizing its global nature. In his well-known 1981 book Alain de Janvry (1981) developed his theory of what he called articulated versus disarticulated forms of capitalism. Samir Amin has also written about the more autocentric development that has characterised European and North American economies as compared to more dependent development in other parts of the world. However globalisation has ‘hollowed out’ the manufacturing base of many European and North American economies, resulting in a backlash against globalisation and the rise of Trumpism in the United States. Productive articulation under globalisation is partly about connecting into global production networks on relatively more favourable terms, in manufacturing and services in particular.
Much of Africa has failed/not been allowed to do this and the continent as a whole continues to deindustrialize. Zambian production of textile, clothing and leather in 2014 was only 2.9% of what it had been in 1985. However Ethiopia is currently rapidly industrialising, with manufacturing output reported to be growing at roughly 15% a year over the last five years (see Tomkinson 2016). How do we explain this seeming anomaly? In a forthcoming debate piece on ‘Assembling Effective Industrial Policy in Africa’ for the print issue of ROAPE I argue that assemblage theory can be helpful in thinking about this.
There has been a revival in both mainstream and more heterodox literatures in recent years on the topic of industrial policy (For example Stiglitz, Lin, and Patel 2013; Noman and Stiglitz 2015; Clark, Lima, and Sawyer 2016). However the context for industrial policy making has changed somewhat with the increasing importance and extension of global value chains and production networks. An effective industrial policy network, as in Ethiopia, is comprised of multiple axes of ‘strategic coupling’ between different actors to achieve win-win outcomes. However the strategic guidance and direction for the construction of these assemblages is provided by the state. By way of example, foreign investment may bring, jobs, technology and exports. However, it may also overwhelm local business, result in capital extraction and other negative consequences such as environmental degradation. Strategically coupling foreign investment with regional assets so that developmental benefits are maximised, by ensuring productive linkages with the domestic private sector which enable capability development, is an important role of the state. The construction of incentives and links to put together these productive assemblages is still vital.
The point here is that the type of “national capitalism” in Africa is largely a function of the state type, of which there are many variations and hybrids, despite a tendency to sometimes overgeneralise “the” African state as ‘neo-patrimonial’. Capitalism as a global system is characterised by the extension of the law of value geographically and across different social spaces and fields. However the way in which the law of value is expressed varies geographically depends on the nature of institutions and state types. It is possible to construct more articulated types of capitalism which deliver jobs, incomes and improvements in livelihoods and human development through time. However this may also involve strategic non-coupling. It is not coincidental, perhaps, that Ethiopia is still not a member of the World Trade Organization, which allows it to engage in more strategic trade and industrial policy innovation. Is Ethiopia then a “developmental state”?
The terminology of the developmental state may be misplaced. The states which have been most successful in promoting late development, such as South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan or China have in reality been security states which have sought to develop their economies to achieve this objective. This is also the case in Ethiopia. Security states are highly authoritarian by their nature, as often demonstrated through labour repression and the ability to discipline what is frequently the most powerful social force in many societies – private capital. This is not to excuse authoritarianism but to be clear-eyed about the nature of the states which have most effectively promoted economic transformation in recent decades.
Whether a repressive disarticulated state and “variety” of capitalism is preferable to a more developmentally beneficial one is partly a question of values. Capitalist industrialization is often a brutal process. However through the development of the productive and social forces (particularly the working and middle classes) it offers the prospect of higher living standards and new forms of social compact and accountability. Consequently I would argue assembling effective industrial policy is a goal worth pursuing, and a debate worth having about how this is to be achieved.
Pádraig Carmody teaches geography at Trinity College Dublin and is a Research Associate in the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He has written extensively on the political economy of Africa.
Clark, D., L. Lima, and C. Sawyer. 2016. “Stages of Diversification in Africa.” Economics Letters 144:68-70.
De Janvry, A. 1981. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Noman, A., and J. Stiglitz. 2015. Industrial Policy and Economic Transformation in Africa.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Stiglitz, J., J. Lin, and E. Patel. 2013. The Industrial Policy Revolution II: Africa in the 21st Century. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Tomkinson, J. (2016) “Beyond Faith and Fatalism in Development Discourse: Global Conditions and National Development Prospects in Ethiopia.” Paper presented at the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy Conference. Lisbon, September.
Yeung, H. 2016. Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
By Nic Cheeseman, Gabrielle Lynch and Justin Willis
After a tense campaign, on 9 December 2016 the Electoral Commission of Ghana announced that Nana Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) had won the presidency in the first round of voting. His victory represents an embarrassing defeat for the incumbent, John Mahama of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), who recorded one of lowest vote shares ever secured by a Ghanaian ruling party since the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1992. Not only did Akufo-Addo beat Mahama with 54 to 44 percent of the popular vote, but the NPP also won a clear majority in parliament.
This is the third time that there has been a peaceful alternation of power in the country. However, it is the first time that an incumbent has stood and lost. Previously, changes of government have always come when a president was forced to stand down by presidential term limits: in 2000, when Jerry Rawlings stood down at the end of a second term, his successor, John Atta Mills, was beaten by Kufour and the NPP. Two elections later, power passed back to the NDC after Kufour’s successor, Nana Akufo-Addo, lost to Mills in 2008. So why did Mahama perform so badly?
It is a rare thing for an incumbent president to lose an election on the sub-continent. Research conducted by Nic Cheeseman has found that incumbents win 88 per cent of the elections they contest. Akufo-Addo’s success defies this pattern, as did last month’s shock election in the Gambia, where Adama Barrow beat President Yahya Jammeh with 45.5 percent of the vote – only for Jammeh to later reject the results and announce that he would seek to have the election overturned in court. We identify four factors that enabled the NPP to wrest power from a sitting president.
First, the Electoral Commission has relatively strong legal foundations and has developed a reputation for independence (see Nelson Oppong’s blog). During his time as Chair, Kwadwo Afari-Gyan presided over a number of improvements including the use of biometric registration and verification of voters, and the introduction of greater checks and balances. Although Afari-Gyan stood down in 2015 – and his replacement Charlotte Osei, has been accused of being partial to the government – the system was further strengthened in 2016 by the introduction of electronic vote transmission from the constituency level to the EC’s headquarters in Accra, which made it harder to manipulate the result during the collation process.
Second, the police and the security forces are largely impartial, enabling opposition activists to campaign throughout the country – even in the government’s strongholds. This did not mean that the campaign was conducted on a completely level playing field – the government continued to enjoy the benefits of incumbency and had much more money to spend. But combined with the considerable degree of tolerance between rival supporters at the local level, it did create the opportunity for the NPP to spread its own message – encouraging NDC loyalists unprepared to vote for any other party to stay at home in order to allow “change” to occur.
It was not always this way. In 1992, NPP posters were torn down, and activists were forced to work in hiding. But the political landscape has become considerably more open over time, and opposition activists were willing to publicly state their affiliation, even in areas in which they were a tiny minority. Combined with the ability of the NPP – whose supporters include many of the country’s educated elite – to fund the activities of its agents and activists, this made for a closely contested poll. In many areas, NDC and NPP flags hung side by side, and both parties received considerable coverage in the media.
Third, the country’s economic difficulties, combined with the perception that the NDC has lost touch with its own supporters, undermined the party’s ability to mobilize its own supporters. While the NPP managed to repeat or improve the number of votes it won in 2012, the NDC saw its numbers fall dramatically. This is best demonstrated by the difficulties that the ruling party faced in the Volta Region, which is known locally as the NDC’s “World Bank” because of its consistent and overwhelming support for the party. In Ho Central, the regional capital, turnout fell from 78 percent in 2012 to 63 percent this time around due to a widespread sense that the people most loyal to the NDC had not benefited enough from its time in office.
Voting in Juaso, Asante Akim South, Ashanti (Gabrielle Lynch)
Local frustrations were evident, for example, during meetings for the incumbent MP, where some asked why the road adjacent to the rally had not been fixed. During the exchange, NDC party members pointed to potholes as direct evidence of the lack of development that their community had experienced in the past four years. In some parts of the region, this dissatisfaction appears to have translated into an informal boycott of the elections, as many who could not bring themselves to vote for the NPP, simply failed to turnout – with turnout of less than 50 percent in some constituencies.
Fourth, the NPP’s call for people to “look at your living conditions and vote” clearly resonated with many Ghanaians and especially with the young who have gone to school and college but struggle to find jobs – with many left living at home “sitting on their parents”. In NDC strongholds, it was younger voters that were most likely to break with their parents and either vote for the NPP, or to stay away from the polls – and persuade their friends to do the same. At the same time, the NPP dismissed the NDC’s emphasis on various government projects – from almost 200 new secondary schools across the country, together with numerous clinics, markets and roads – as the work of any government, and as something that was relatively easy to achieve when you borrow money from the international community.
To put this another way, Mahama’s defeat is made up of equal parts: economic decline undermined the credibility of the ruling party, the NDC’s failure to connect to its own supporters opened the door to the opposition, and the country’s open electoral environment enabled the NPP to spread its message and secure a commanding first round victory. It was this combination that condemned Mahama to defeat, and enabled Akufo Addo to make history.
Taken together, these developments bode well for Ghanaian democracy. The fact that both parties can campaign throughout the country and that political leaders and the electoral commission once again demonstrated their willingness to play by the rules of the game, represents further progress towards the consolidation of democratic norms and values. The challenge now facing the NPP is whether the party can deliver on its many promises – from jobs to one factory per district – in a way that meets a popular desire for change. If not, Ghanaian voters have made it very clear what is likely to happen at the next elections.
Nic Cheeseman is Professor in the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, Gabrielle Lynch is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Warwick and Chair of ROAPE and Justin Willis is Professor of History at the University of Durham.
Featured Photograph: A young NPP supporter celebrates in Konongo, Asante Akim Central, Ashanti (Gabrielle Lynch)
After two major setbacks in 2008 and 2012, Ghana’s main opposition party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) led by Nana Akuffo Addo, secured a resounding electoral victory in the 7 December election against the incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC), led by President John Mahama. Results from 271 (out of 275 constituencies) declared by the Electoral Commission (EC) gave Akuffo Addo 53.85% of valid votes cast, against President Mahama’s 44.40%. The NPP is also set to take over the Ghanaian parliament after increasing its share of the 275 parliamentary seats by a significant margin with more than 160 seats, having won 123 seats in 2012.
The results represent a comfortable win for a party that looked set for another devastating loss just over a year ago, with internal bickering leading to the suspension of several notable party executives. During the campaign, the party’s dire financial strain became a major talking point, especially when contrasted with the incumbent’s resources, demonstrated by mega billboards of the President across the country. This is the first time that a sitting President has lost an election in Ghana’s electoral history. Against the backdrop of recent victories by opposition parties in Nigeria and the Gambia, the stranglehold of incumbents over elections appears to be waning across Africa.
Having won four elections in the past, the NDC went into the 2016 election with a widely-held perception that it is the most formidable election-winning machine in Ghana, despite its weaknesses in managing the economy. On the contrary, while the NPP is often presented as comparably better at economic management, the party elitist posturing is considered less suited for grassroots mobilization that could secure frequent electoral victory. Among its wider political economy dynamics, the 2012 election did not only challenge this long-held perception, but most significantly it signalled shifting preferences among Ghanaian voters for candidates with a demonstrable capacity and programme to “put money in peoples’ pockets.”
Post-mortem analysis has identified several reasons for the NPP’s decisive victory, foremost among them the severe drain in the country’s economic fortunes and the lacklustre anti-corruption climate under the Mahama administration. One of the main events that significantly tipped the scales against the NDC is the high-profile election petition that was filed by the NPP contesting the results of the 2012 Presidential election.
While the eight-month long hearing of the petition led to an affirmation of President Mahama, it placed the courts at the epicentre of elections in Ghana, opened the electoral process to wider public scrutiny, gave an added boost to the standing of Akuffo Addo and his running mate, Mahamadu Bawumia, and energized the NPP’s base into action over areas that required vigilance for the party’s victory. In many African elections, where the tenor of reform is largely oriented towards capacity building of election management bodies, political parties, and civil society organisations, the 2016 election adds another layer to the role of judicial adjudication in building trust and promoting the credibility of elections.
When the NPP took the EC to Court
Ghana’s democracy came under the spotlight in 2012 when three members of the NPP, namely Akuffo Addo, his running mate, Mahamadu Bawumia, and the party chairperson, Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, filed a petition at the Supreme Court challenging the declaration of Mahama as winner of the presidential polls. In the petition, the party alleged gross irregularities in over 11,000 polling stations with a call for annulments that would ostensibly lead to Akuffo Addo’s victory.
The NPP presidential candidate – who came under sharp criticism from his political opponents and some high profile NPP members for being a sore loser and putting the country on the brink of collapse – argued that the NPP’s case was premised on “mind blowing” evidence that would deepen Ghana’s democracy and strengthen the institutions that are mandated to oversee the electoral process. After months of hearing and deliberation, which were broadcast live on national television, a nine-member Supreme Court returned a verdict rejecting the NPP’s petition that affirmed the EC’s earlier declaration. In what was celebrated as a hallmark of statesmanship, the NPP presidential candidate accepted the court’s decision and conceded to Mahama.
The count at a polling station in Nkwanta, Asante Akim South, Ashanti (Gabrielle Lynch)
The petition, albeit less pleasant for the NPP, was instrumentalised successfully by Akuffo Addo to bolster his control of the party and image across the country. Following a concession speech, in which the NPP leader called on Ghanaians to “iron out our differences, ease the tensions among us, and come together to build our country,” his residence in Nima-Accra, assumed a newfound symbolism with well-publicized congratulatory visits by diplomats, leading party activists, religious leaders, and revered statesmen within and outside Ghana. The growing stature of Akuffo Addo, as a statesman and potential president, not only ensured his decisive win in the presidential primary within the NPP, but it also enabled him to effectively deal with the perception of him being a hot-headed, intolerant, and violent person, which has been pushed largely by the NDC in the last two elections.
Since 1998, when Nana Addo lost to John Kufuor in a bitterly fought presidential primary in the NPP, his temperament has always come under question. In the 2008 election, the NDC sustained these attacks against Nana Addo by claiming that his character and demeanour is far from the calmness and modesty of its candidate, John Atta Mills. Nana Addo did not also help assuage this negative perception during the 2012 campaign when he charged NPP supporters to protect themselves against attacks by NDC activists with chants of “All Die Be Die,” which was interpreted as admonition for violence. During the 2016 campaign, the NDC maintained these attacks by pointing to infighting within the NPP as testament to Akuffo Addo’s inability to unify the country. However, this strategy by the NDC failed in 2016 largely because many Ghanaians were exposed to the “soft” Nana Addo, especially after his acceptance of Supreme Court verdict over the petition.
Among the petitioners, the person who perhaps benefitted most was Bawumia, a 53-year-old renowned economist who hails from the Northern Region of Ghana. As the principal witness for the petition, the NPP’s vice presidential candidate, who was hitherto largely known for his economic proficiency, but limited political experience, impressed national television audiences with his calm temperament, sheer brilliance over electoral matters, and commitment to take the bullet for the NPP. Indeed, immediately after the Supreme Court’s verdict, Bawumia was touted as a possible flagbearer of the NPP when Akuffo Addo had not formally announced his intention to contest the 2016 election.
Over the last three years, Bawumia’s stature as a reliable and articulate interlocutor for the NPP has grown in unmeasurable proportion. His presentations on the Ghanaian economy at various lectures across the country, and the faltering responses by government economists and spokesperson, helped sell the NPP as the party which was better placed to address the country’s economic challenges. The prospects of an active and frontline Vice President in the person of Bawumia, which was dramatized forcefully during the petition hearing, also enabled the NPP to manage the “anti-Northern” tag, which the Mahama-led NDC amplified in the heat of the campaign. Direct comparisons were also often made with the less articulate NDC Vice President who often cut a marginal figure in Mahama’s government.
The Courts have changed the contours of electoral politics
While heeding to their flagbearer’s call to respect the verdict of the Supreme Court in the election petition, many NPP activists were left with a strong sense of injustice meted out to them by the EC. Over the last three years, the party has supported a groundswell of activities, ranging from demonstrations to open aspersions at members of the EC, particularly Charlotte Osei, who is the current Chairperson of the Commission. The anti-Osei rhetoric by the NPP reached its most appalling phase when a Member of Parliament for the party, Kennedy Agyapong, attracted the ire of the public for referring to the EC Chairperson as a “wicked woman” who landed her position by giving sexual favours.
This open hostility against the EC persisted alongside soul-searching within the NPP that led the party to embark on a host of activities meant to apply pressure for electoral reform, while building internal capacity and vigilance over the electoral process.
Local media reports after the election have shed light on the role of an engineering service manager from the US space agency, NASA, who was contracted by the NPP campaign team to recruit and train party agents to secure and deliver election results from polling stations into a common database where they could track and collate results more accurately.
Although many party activists criticized different aspects of the Supreme Court’s verdict, it became an important reference point that legitimized different claims for reforms that were advanced in various press briefings. Notably, the pro-NPP Let My Vote Count Alliance staged various demonstrations to apply pressure on the EC to compile a new voter’s register; a point that was emphasized by the Supreme Court’s ruling. In many instances when the NPP failed to secure a concession from the EC, the courts became popular battlegrounds for the party’s agitations. For instance, three members of the Let My Vote Count Alliance, supported by a team of lawyers from the NPP, initiated a series of legal action at the Supreme Court against the EC over the compilation of a new electoral register and the use of National Health Insurance IDs.
The increasing use of the courts by various NPP activists represents a broader trend of political socialization in support of legal litigation over electoral matters that was fuelled by the 2012 petition. Court proceedings against the EC, which yielded notable judgements for the NPP, thrusted Ghana’s superior courts to the hotbed of the 2016 election. Most importantly, the past year witnessed a noticeable increase in the number of litigations through the courts, including internal party matters, disputed primaries, and different aspects of the electoral process by candidates, political parties, civil society organisations and private citizens. Indeed, while the EC disqualified some candidates in the 2012 election over clerical errors without any court action, a similar act in 2016 against 13 political parties led to more than four suits against the EC, which enabled some aggrieved parties ― the National Democratic Party, the People’s National Convention, and the Progressive Peoples Party ― to get back onto the Presidential ballot.
The count continues at a polling station in Nkwanta, Ashanti (Gabrielle Lynch)
Prior to the NPP’s petition in 2012, judicial adjudication of electoral disputes was rare. This was largely due to a generalised perception that the costly and inflexible litigation processes in the courts were, at best, the last option for aggrieved candidates. The transparency of the petition, which was boasted by the live broadcast of court proceedings on national television shattered this myth in two main respects: First, contrary to long-held belief about the independence of the EC, the courts asserted their supervisory jurisdiction over Ghanaian elections. Secondly, the closeness of the nine-member panel, with 3 dissenting judgements in favour of some claims in the petition, apprised the wider public about the disposition of some judges to offer rulings that could lead to a reversal of election results and acts of election management officials.
Mahama and the NDC were confined to the status quo
On the contrary, the NDC left the 2012 election petition with a sense of vindication, which consigned them to the unenviable position of advocates-in-chief for the EC. The foundation of this newfound status quo began during hearing of the petition, when the party joined the EC to defend Mahama’s victory.
However, the NDC’s defence of the EC did not stop after the Supreme Court’s judgement was delivered. During sitting by a five-member committee that was set up by the EC to examine claims for a new register, the NDC refuted the NPP’s claims arguing that the register is credible and must only be re-compiled after ten years given the costs to the taxpayers. Apart from opposing calls by the NPP for a new voters’ register, various NDC activists took on the job of EC spokespersons on radio and TV discussions even in instances where notable indiscretions by the EC.
The cozy relationship between the NDC and the EC reached a boiling point after a ruling of the Supreme Court against the EC’s decision to include names of voters who registered with NHIS cards on the register. In a radio discussion on Montie FM, which is owned by some prominent NDC members, two supporters of the ruling party and a talk-show host issued threats of violence against some of the judges, including the Chief Justice, if they made further judgements against the EC. In July 2016, these NDC sympathizers, who became known as the Montie 3, were sentenced to four months in jail and fined 10, 000 Cedis each for contempt. Barely a month later, the President bowed to pressure from members of the NDC and his cabinet, and remitted the sentences, which led critics to bemoan the abuse of his constitutional powers of pardon to undermine the judiciary.
If the NPP left the petition determined to be more vigilant, the NDC suffered from a great deal of complacency that significantly tipped the election against them. Indeed, when counting and collation of the 2016 results were taking place, the party assumed the NPP’s 2012 posture with criticisms about voter irregularities and threats of legal action to change some of the results. No doubt, the NDC have accepted the results of the election and President Mahama has conceded to Nana Akuffo Addo as the President-elect. Nonetheless, as the party embarks on a rebuilding programme to wrestle power from the NPP, they are likely to incorporate the courts in their overall strategy.
A New Agenda for Electoral Reform.
The role of the 2012 election petition in shaping the contours of electoral reforms, which added a major boost to the NPP’s quest to wrestle power from the Mahama-led NDC, has a much broader resonance. Across many developing countries, including those in sub-Saharan Africa, judicial reform is often treated as delinked from the more specialized field of election management.
In the case of electoral reform, significant weight has been placed on capacity building for political parties, election management bodies, and civil society organizations. Across many African states, in particular, this reform agenda has been shaped by the predominant viewpoint which suggests that despite notable inroads in democratization, the political environment remains largely fragile amid widespread corruption in public institutions, including the judiciary. Consequently, specialists and donors working on electoral reform often prefer alternative dispute resolutions mechanisms – such as committees for inter-party dialogue and peace initiatives by NGOs – to adversarial judicial proceedings.
While Ghana’s 2012 election offered an important test case for the role of “soft” institutions in the pursuit of alternative dispute resolution, with commendable inputs from the Peace Council and other NGO initiatives, the dispute over the results underlined their limits. It may take a while to grasp the full impact of the 2012 petition on Ghana’s political landscape and even why the NPP defied the odds to win the 2016 election. Nonetheless, the interconnections between the petition and the victory are too important to ignore. For donors and policy activists interested in electoral reform, there could not have been any better case to revise the largely cynical script about judicial verdicts.
Nelson Oppong is a member of the Editorial Working Group of ROAPE. He specialises in comparative politics, global governance, and the political economy of institutions in resource-rich countries.
Feature Photograph: Graffiti at polling station in Nkwanta Asante Akim, South Ashante (Gabrielle Lynch).
In the first in a series of blogs for roape.net, writer and activist Lee Wengraf describes Obama’s bloody legacy in Africa. Over eight years the continent has seen an intensification of US aerial campaigns, proxy warfare, and imperial competition. In further blogs in January and February, Wengraf will examine the idea of the ‘resource curse’, Western involvement in corruption and the role of Chinese imperialism in Africa.
By Lee Wengraf
“Part of having a credible American leader again who is unimplicated with the war in Iraq who is very attractive to people around the world, is to somehow use that early wind at his back to try to extract commitments to patrol the commons, to actually deal with these broken people and broken places.” Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2008)
The Barack Obama administration continued, and deepened, U.S. military involvement in Africa signaled by the launch, in 2006, of the U.S. Africa military command AFRICOM by President George W. Bush. Intensified imperial competition with China in Africa, and other powers such as Russia, fueled higher levels of U.S. military deployment on the continent. Awash with a vast network of military bases, covert operations and thousands of Western-funded troops pointed to the unavoidable conclusion that the Obama years produced in essence a U.S. war in Africa.
The scale of military intervention made a decisive jump during Obama’s tenure, with a 200 percent increase in military missions during his tenure, as well as a widening presence of Defense Department staff into State Department realms. For example, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti became host to 2,000 military personnel, while U.S. Department of Defense staff were assigned to U.S. embassies across Africa, reflecting the enlarged scope of anti-terror activities. As Daniel Volman writes:
The continuity with Bush administration policy is especially evident in several key regions. In Somalia, for example, … President Obama has continued the program initiated by the Bush administration to assassinate alleged al-Qaeda leaders in Somalia …. In the Sahel, the Obama administration … sought increased funding for the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Program [and] justified this escalating military involvement in the Trans-Saharan region by arguing that the increasing involvement of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in criminal activity (including kidnapping for ransom and drug-trafficking) constitutes a growing threat to US interests in this resource-rich area.[1]
Concomitant with the programmatic continuity with Bush administration policy, the Obama administration pivoted global imperial strategy away from “boots on the ground” and towards so-called “alliance-building,” that is, cementing U.S. indispensability to African political stability in areas critical to their geo-strategic interests. A Pentagon document in 2012 heralded “working with allies and partners to establish control over ungoverned territories,”[2] but intrinsic to this approach is the understanding that the U.S. can use wide flexibility, operationalize it, with an increasingly active and direct military role under the rubric of “partnership.” As Obama’s Commander for U.S. Army Africa, David R. Hogg, characterized the approach, “We are here to enable, where wanted, the African forces to figure out and solve their own problems.”[3] In this period, increased support for the State Department and programs such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) globally was paired with higher levels of defense spending, even as Obama declared that he would completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, a promise broken well before the end of his tenure.
The U.S. relies on key allies to further its aims as proxies on the ground. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, for example, established even greater importance during the Obama administration as a lynchpin for stability in the East Africa. Oil discoveries – proven but not yet procured – in East Africa and the Great Lakes region elevate its value to imperial interests. Crucially, Uganda has intervened in Somalia under the auspices of African Union troops, deployed to back up the U.S. supported Somali government. As Mahmood Mamdani has commented, “Somalia is Uganda’s claim that we have a solution for your security concerns in the region. It fits very nicely with the American claim that the primary problem of Africa is not development, nor democracy, nor even the lack of human rights, but security.”[4] Likewise, as Angelo Zima describes, “Kampala is the political equivalent of a brokerage firm for rebels, rebellions and peace missions. It has more troops abroad than any other country aside from the US itself. The head of that firm is Mr. Museveni. The West is his biggest client with a resource hungry China waiting anxiously outside.”[5]
The hunt for the vastly-diminished Lords’ Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony served as the auspices under which, in 2011, Obama announced he would send 100 troops to Uganda to “remove [Kony] from the battlefield.” But this announcement papered over the widening military operations in East Africa of $45 million military aid that year alone, a package which included four drones. Kony’s human rights record is undoubtedly a long and sordid one. Yet the record of the U.S.’s chief partner, Museveni, is arguably much worse. The regime has been a long-standing recipient of U.S. military assistance of which the suppression of the LRA is but one component. Museveni’s war against the people of Northern Uganda has been brutal, driving nearly 2 million into essentially concentration camps in the mid-1990s. The Kony campaign provided a humanitarian veneer for wider intervention in the region, a toehold for wider imperial projection into the region more broadly.
Under Obama, aerial campaigns, proxy warfare, and indirect support became increasingly crucial. The Libya bombing campaign by NATO, for example, became a potential model for future interventions and regime change in Africa, as well as an opportunity to gain strategic advantage over its rivals, in this case, China. As David Axe of Wired, a frequent writer on security in Africa, has commented, “Somalia-style, ‘hands-off’ campaigns are the future.”[6] Investigative reporting by Jeremy Scahill uncovered a secret U.S. campaign in Somalia against so-called Islamic terrorists al-Shabab, complete with interrogation chambers, CIA surveillance, drone attacks and Special Forces.[7] Craig Whitlock has likewise documented the rapidly-expanding military footprint in Africa and an increasing reliance on Special Operations forces during Obama’s tenure.
Clandestine as they may be, the size and reach of these projects has been immense. Journalist Nick Turse has amassed documentation on the scope of this “pivot to Africa” and its key operations: an almost 300% jump in the number of operations since AFRICOM’s launch.[8] As Turse describes in Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa (2015), while the military may decry any permanence to its operations, in reality, Obama’s expanded military footprint encompasses virtually every African nation. But with this continuous presence has come a widening blowback, and the scale of terrorism on African soil has only widened in response to U.S. activities: Turse points out that no groups were designated “terrorist organizations” in sub-Saharan Africa prior to 2001, a far cry from conditions a decade and a half later.
Another element of U.S. imperial strategy has been selective efforts at nation-building, or the “repair” of “broken places,” Samantha Power described in the quote above. The secession of South Sudan is a chief example. Turse writes that, “The South Sudanese suffered, bled and died for their independence, but they didn’t win it alone. As John Kerry, then-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put it in 2012, the United States ‘helped midwife the birth’ of South Sudan…. On independence day, President Barack Obama hailed the moment as a ‘time of hope’ and pledged U.S. partnership to the new land, emphasizing security and development.”[9] Secession was enthusiastically championed by business interests who saw in South Sudan hopes for previously-thwarted access to Sudanese oil and as one of the few visible successes of the administration’s policy in Africa. Oil revenues account for 98 percent of South Sudan’s budget, making it arguably one of the most oil-dependent nations in the world.
The U.S. government in fairly short order ‘walked back’ its commitments to the new nation, despite widespread evidence of humanitarian disaster. The two civil wars alone brought 2.5 million deaths, and an additional 4 million displaced. Obama visited a refugee camp in Juba, South Sudan’s capital; Turse, encountered the president walking through the camp:
This is the legacy of America’s nation-building project in Africa, and of the policies of a president born of an African father, a president whose name was once synonymous with hopes for the future. Over the course of the Obama presidency, American efforts on the continent have become ever more militarized in terms of troops and bases, missions and money. And yet from Libya to the Gulf of Guinea, Mali to this camp in South Sudan, the results have been dismal. Countless military exercises, counterterrorism operations, humanitarian projects, and training missions, backed by billions of dollars of taxpayer money, have all evaporated in the face of coups, civil wars, human rights’ abuses, terror attacks and poorly-coordinated aid efforts. The human toll is incalculable. And there appears to be no end in sight.[10]
This is the Obama legacy for Africa, and the urgent need for a true humanitarian alternative by social justice forces calling for an end to this long history of imperialism.
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: President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama greet Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh, President of the Republic of The Gambia, and Mrs. Zineb Jammeh, during an Africa Leaders Summit dinner at the White House, Aug. 5, 2014.
Notes
[1] Daniel Volman, “Obama and US military engagement in Africa,” Pambazuka News, Issue 478, April 22, 2010
[2] Cited in Spencer Ackerman, “Obama’s New Defense Plan: Drones, Spec Ops and Cyber War,” Wired, January 5, 2012
[3] Max Lockie, “The US-Africa relationship by the numbers,” MSNBC, September 13, 2013
[4] Mahmood Mamdani, “Somalia, Museveni and militarising the region,” Pambazuka News, Issue 583, May 3, 2012.
[6] David Axe, “Power struggle threatens outsourced Somalia war,” Wired, June 16, 2011
[7] Jeremy Scahill, “The CIA’s Secret Sites in Somalia, Nation, December 10, 2014
[8] Nick Turse, “The Numbers Racket: AFRICOM Clams Up After Commander Peddles Contradictory Statements to Congress,” TomDispatch June 23, 2016. A fog of secrecy seems to surround AFRICOM’s reporting of the number of operations, so assessing the scale of the U.S.’s military operations is challenging. Turse writes, for example: “A 2013 report by the Department of Defense’s Inspector General on AFRICOM’s Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa found record-keeping so abysmal that its officials ‘did not have an effective system to manage or report community relations and low-cost activities.’ A spreadsheet supposedly tracking such missions during 2012 and 2013 was, for example, so incomplete that 43% of such efforts went unmentioned. New definitions, poor record-keeping, ineffective management, and incompetence aren’t, however, the only possible explanations for the discrepancies. AFRICOM has a history of working to thwart efforts aimed at transparency and accountability and has long been criticized for its atmosphere of secrecy. Beyond spin, the highly selective release of information, the cherry-picking of reporters to cover a tiny fraction of its undertakings, and the issuing of news releases that tell a very limited story about the command, AFRICOM has taken steps to thwart press coverage of its footprint and missions.”
[9] Nick Turse. 2016. Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. Chicago: Haymarket Books, p. 34.
[10] Nick Turse. 2015. Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars an Secret Ops in Africa. Chicago: Haymarket Books, p. 184
Andrea Purdeková, Making Ubumwe. Power, State and Camps in Rwanda’s Unity-Building Project (New York: Berghahn, 2015).
“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives” Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition
For a small African country with no extractive resources of note and without much geopolitical importance, Rwanda has attracted more than its share of media attention and scholarly research in the last twenty years. Much of this is, of course, attributable to the 1994 genocide in which 800,000 Rwandans perished between April and July of that year. An impressive literature has emerged to narrate both the macro-history of the mass killing as well as to explore crucial sub-dimensions, ranging from the involvement of the Church in the massacres to the calamitous roles played by Paris and Washington in enabling the killings to continue to the psychological effects of apocalyptic violence on perpetrators and survivors. But the horrors of 1994 are not the only subject drawing academicians to Rwanda. The vastly ambitious state-building project that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has undertaken since taking power as the genocide drew to a close is a source of as much polemical debate as it is of theoretically consequential inquiry.
Andrea Purdeková offers an overdue anatomy of the policies the RPF has pursued to overcome the seemingly unbridgeable societal cleavages after mass violence. What kind of vision of togetherness did the inheritors of the genocidal state formulate? How have they tried to restructure that very state and its citizens in a bid to overcome social fragmentation? And what instruments were identified by the Front as essential to exorcise the demons of ethnic divisionism and lethal political competition? Organising her book around the central theme of “Ubumwe” (Unity), Purdeková is less interested in answers to these questions as a way of gaging the success of the RPF government for purposes of donor policy evaluation, than because of what they reveal about the nature of politics itself in Rwanda.
Her core argument is that unity, as a discourse “with a political life of its own”, has both aided state transformation and enabled the RPF to tighten its hold on the Rwandan polity. The shrewd deployment of notions like oneness and Rwandanness/Rwandanicity are, Making Ubumwe posits, not just platitudes to which all should subscribe as part of a more harmonious RPF-led nationalism but mask deeply partisan choices about societal transformation and the social and political trajectories open to ordinary Rwandans. Echoing James Ferguson’s famous dissection of the language of development, Purdeková claims that the effectiveness of ubumwe lies precisely in its superficially incontestable appearance: who could possibly be against unifying all Rwandans after the most intimate of genocides? This depoliticisation of fundamental choices about who is to be included and excluded of the ‘unified’ polity, on whose terms and with which options to appeal, resist and/or negotiate, is heavily scrutinised in the book. By deconstructing the unity-building project of the RPF, she attempts to “trace power” and the multifarious ways in which it manifests itself, even in what James Scott referred to as “hidden transcripts” of those on the receiving end of top-down social engineering.
Purdeková’s approach to examining these immaterial dimensions of power in Rwanda is strongly influenced by post-modernism and critical theory; she relies on the growing body of work under the umbrella of the anthropology of the state, which seeks to deconstruct Leviathan and sketch out the multiplicities of interface between state institutions and state officials on the one hand and the state’s subjects on the other hand. Such a perspective can be rewarding in that it helps observers descend from the ethereal realms of idealist theory into the actual lived experiences of ordinary humans. It allows Purdeková to explore the often paradoxical ways in which different population groups and individuals understand and respond to state policies enacted by individual officials, who have their own biases, agendas and subjectivities that refract abstract “RPF” agendas. Such a fine-grained analysis has the potential to decisively move beyond widespread caricatures of Rwanda under RPF supremo Paul Kagame as either a “slowly democratising developmental state” (as infatuated aid officials conveniently assert) or as a “totalitarian” moloch where no resistance is possible.
And indeed, Making Ubumwe is at its best in long sections where Purdeková immerses the reader in the mundane aspects of RPF nation-building. Her discussion of quotidian activities in the RPF’s Ingando re-education camps – the regimented meals of which the composition never changes, the feelings of affinity produced by collective singing and the confused answers of participants when asked what Ingando actually is – in chapter 8 stands out, but she provides valuable detail too on the ironies of umuganda communal work and on how supposedly self-organised RPF student clubs seek to translate the project of societal transformation into everyday reality at the village level. The most trenchant sections of Making Ubumwe thereby highlight both a Rwanda obsessed with public performances and the inevitable Potemkin villages, but also the extraordinary lengths to which the RPF goes to make the state’s presence felt in almost every detail of Rwandan citizens’ lives.
However, if Making Ubumwe embodies some of the major strengths of the theoretical edifice of which it is a child, it unfortunately also falls into some of its traps. At least in the opinion of this reviewer, the book could have benefited from a better balancing between the historical-empirical sections and the analytical-conceptual discussion. While many publications on Rwanda err too much towards the former, Purdeková is prone to launching into sweeping generalisations, without bringing enough concrete evidence or historical illustrations to the table. One or two statements by anonymous informants thus become the subject of several pages of theorising, leaving the reader somewhat miffed as to the confident tone adopted by the author. This is all the more pertinent because, although almost all of the primary evidence in Making Ubumwe was collected in a fascinating (but highly specific) seven month time period between 2008 and 2009, the author applies her labels and impressions to the whole of the RPF state-building and unity-crafting project- i.e. from the nineties to the present day. Despite an excellent methodological section in the book of more than 20 pages, greater self-awareness of the limitations of the material under review would have been helpful.
Moreover, the book’s emphasis on Foucault’s “instrument effects” – looking at the actual effects of power, regardless of stated policy objectives – is a potentially rewarding strategy, but it can also blind the researcher to key dimensions of the subjects and objects of her study. The tendency to see “power” and its effects everywhere but to fail to comprehensively examine the specific causes of those effects and the broader politico-historical and ideological context is a recurrent weakness of research in this tradition. As Marshall Sahlins warned in his classic critique: “Max Weber, criticizing certain utilitarian explanations of religious phenomena, observed that just because an institution may be relevant to the economy does not mean it is economically determined. But following Gramsci and Foucault, the current neo-functionalism of power seems even more complete: as if everything that could be relevant to power were power.” The circular, totalizing logic of power in such an approach allows little space for contingency, actual political change or meaningful historical rupture.
In Making Ubumwe, we do not learn how Ingando, the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission or even the RPF itself and its revolutionary project changed over time and what internal politics produced particular outcomes. Discussion of the colonial state or the Habyarimana regime and the path of dependency they created for contemporary and future statist projects is absent, as are the legacies of actual betrayal by outside forces and the teachings of Marxist-Leninism and Nyerere that heavily influenced the RPF (and its penchant for control, camps and transformation). The odd paragraph here and there about the RPF’s past as a guerrilla movement can hardly count as much needed examination of where its controversial policies originated, let alone represent a nuanced discussion of why some choices, institutions and individuals were prioritized over others.
These weaker points are a pity because throughout the book Purdeková shows herself to be an incisive observer of social dynamics, displaying detailed knowledge of cultural norms and ambiguities, without resorting to the careless essentialism of many other authors’ characterisations of Rwandan culture. The primary evidence put forward by Making Ubumwe is a fascinating reminder of the RPF’s veritable obsession with legitimation and the deep insecurities – “l’équilibre de la peur” as one informant aptly termed it – that surround its outlook on Rwanda and its own hegemony. But rather than pointing to the vacuity of metanarratives (cf. Lyotard), it actually stimulates the appetite for a more cogent linking of micro-level entropy and macro-level theory and struggle.
Professor Harry Verhoeven teaches at the School of Foreign Service in Qatar, Georgetown University. He is also an Associate Member of the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford where he completed his doctorate and was a postdoctoral fellow. He was founder of the the Oxford University China-Africa Network (OUCAN) in 2008-2009 and remains a Co-Convenor of OUCAN. From October 2016 onwards, he is a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University. Outside academia, he has worked in Northern Uganda, Sudan, India and Democratic Republic of Congo.
Featured photograph: Roadside impression, Kigali 2013 (Hansueli Krapf).
In this issue of his project on Popular Protest, Social Movements and Class Struggle in Africa David Seddon continues to provide an analysis of the situation in the two countries considered in no. 5 – Zimbabwe and the DRC – after significant protests against the current regime (or Robert Mugabe and Joseph Kabila) took place over the last two months, albeit with rather different dynamics and rather different implications in the two cases.
By David Seddon
It was reported by Al Jazeera, on Thursday 25 August 2016, that the previous day:
Zimbabwean police (had) used tear gas, water cannons and batons to disperse an opposition rally protesting against police brutality in the capital Harare. More than 200 supporters, mostly youths, of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), took to the streets on Wednesday. Many protesters were reported to have been injured, but police spokeswoman Charity Charamba said she had no information on that. Riot police blocked streets around the MDC headquarters and used water cannon against some youths in downtown Harare. Some protesters threw back tear gas canisters, as well as rocks, towards the police, who fired more tear gas outside the MDC offices. The demonstrators marched through the streets of the capital denouncing the police for beating up protesters and called on President Robert Mugabe to step down, accusing him of running a dictatorship.
The rally came two days before a planned march by all opposition parties to try to force Mugabe to implement electoral reforms before a general election in 2018. Chinoputsa, the MDC Youth Assembly secretary-general, said police had refused to sanction the march, saying that it would degenerate into violence. The police routinely deny charges of brutality and instead accuse the opposition of using “hooligans” during protests to attack officers. A trauma clinic in Harare last month compiled a list of cases of people who had been caught up in a police crackdown during anti-government protests. The MDC’s leader Morgan Tsvangirai and former vice president, Joice Mujuru, were expected to lead Friday’s march.
Home Affairs Minister Ignatious Chombo warned that the government would clamp down heavily on what it termed ‘Western-sponsored’ protests seeking regime change. All was set, however, by the evening of Thursday 25 August for an opposition march the next day in Harare city centre, to press for comprehensive electoral reforms before the 2018 general polls, despite attempts by the police initially to confine the protest to the outskirts of Harare central business district. The police had claimed that the protesters would disrupt human and road traffic.
But chairman of the National Electoral Reform Agenda (NERA) legal team, Douglas Mwonzora, said it was surprising that police were concerned about an expected 150,000 people for the march when Zanu-PF had held its so-called one million man march in the city a few months ago. As a result, Mwonzora said, they had approached the courts to make sure police do not interfere with their march. The move to seek court backing came a day after police violently put down another march by opposition youths, firing tear gas and water cannon and beating them as they staged a protest against police brutality. High Court judge, Hlekani Mwayera, eventually ordered the police and government ‘not to interfere, obstruct or stop the march’ and Chief Superintendent Newbert Saunyama, the police officer commanding Harare Central district, agreed that the parties could go ahead with their demonstration to hand over the petition to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC).
‘We view this as victory for democracy’, said Douglas Mwonzora after the court ruling; ‘the demonstration is going ahead [although] we know the police have already tear-gassed the venue’. Didymus Mutasa of the Zimbabwe People First party, Convener of the 18 political parties involved under the NERA, also told journalists that the march to ZEC would go ahead as planned. Mutasa, who was flanked by some NERA principals, former Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai of MDC-T and Jacob Ngarivhume of Transform Zimbabwe, said the march would culminate with the handing of the petition to ZEC and an address by NERA leaders at the electoral body’s headquarters.
He explained that opposition political parties were worried that the ZEC is failing in its constitutional mandate to register voters and administer elections. They also accuse it of bias in favor of the ruling Zanu-PF. They felt that there was ‘a crisis of legitimacy’ at the centre of the current national problems facing Zimbabwe, hence the demand for electoral reforms and a clear road map to the next election. Mutasa said the parties want the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to support Zimbabweans in their demand for free and fair elections.
On 27 August, the Mail & Guardian Africa reported that:
Zimbabwean police on Friday fired tear gas at opposition leaders and hundreds of demonstrators as a protest against President Robert Mugabe descended into one of the worst outbreaks of violence in two decades. Opposition head Morgan Tsvangirai and former vice president Joice Mujuru fled the rally in their cars while protesters ran for cover as police firing tear gas and water cannons broke up the core of the demonstration. Clashes then spread through the streets of Harare as riot police fought running battles with protesters who hurled rocks at officers, set tyres ablaze and burned a popular market to the ground, in some of the worst unrest since food riots in 1998. ‘Mugabe’s rule must end now, that old man has failed us’, said one protester, before throwing a rock at a taxi.
The stay-away ‘strike’ proved quite effective. Alex Magaisa reported, after the event, that
… the events of the last week, starting with the citizens’ protests in Beit Bridge through to the mass stay-away of Wednesday, are a seminal moment, in the sense that they demonstrate, for the first time in a long period, a re-awakening of the citizens and a demonstration of their capacity to assert themselves in their capacity as ordinary citizens, not as followers of political parties or organised civil society.
For too long, Zimbabweans have appeared to be a docile lot, with an extraordinary capacity to absorb the worst excesses of the Zimbabwean regime without as much as a whimper. Why do Zimbabweans not act? Why are they so comfortable and silent in the face of government excesses and failures? … This week demonstrated that Zimbabwean citizens have the capacity to take expressive action against the excesses of the regime.
On 1 September, recognising the possibility that the demonstrations could get out of hand, the government imposed a ban on protests in the country’s capital Harare. The ban, which was introduced under the Public Order and Security Act and was to last for a period of two weeks, was announced the day before opposition parties were due to hold their second anti-government demonstration (on 2 September 2016) and in the light of an escalation in protests over the previous month over stalled electoral reforms and the declining economy. Less than a week later, on 7 September, the BBC reported that High Court judge Priscilla Chigumba had ruled that the two-week ban on protests was illegal; she also said that the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law was important to democracy.
Stan Zvorwadza, one of the activists who challenged the ban, told the BBC he welcomed the verdict, adding that he and demonstrators wanted to protest peacefully about the mismanagement of the country. He also hailed Chigumba’s ruling as ‘a brave judgement’, coming days after President Mugabe had condemned the previous court ruling allowing the anti-government protest at the end of August, a demonstration that (as we have seen) turned violent when police ignored the Court order and clashed with demonstrators. Mugabe had suggested that, in that case, the judges had showed a reckless disregard for peace, and warned that they should not dare to be negligent when making future decisions. The president has recently warned protesters there would be no Zimbabwean uprising similar to the ‘Arab Spring’.
On 9 September riot police fired tear gas to break up the first anti-government protest in Harare since the courts overturned a ban on street marches. Hardlife Mudzingwa, spokesman for Tajamuka, a youth protest movement, said police blocked about 30 demonstrators, singing and marching peacefully marching towards parliament in the capital. “We refused to back down and when they realised we were not stopping, they fired tear gas”, he said. Several protesters suffered minor injuries, he said.
On 17 September, it was reported by enca.com that:
a planned mass demonstration against Zimbabwe’s veteran President Robert Mugabe failed to kick off in the capital Harare… as riot police patrolled the streets to enforce a protest ban. A coalition of opposition parties under the banner of the National Electoral Reform Agenda (NERA) had planned country-wide demonstrations demanding reform ahead of the 2018 election, when 92-year-old Mugabe plans to stand again. But a month-long protest ban and a heavy police presence saw the event fizzle out before it started, with just small groups of activists demonstrating in the surburbs.
…In the second city of Bulawayo, close to a thousand protesters staged a peaceful march on Saturday after a high court ruling gave them permission to take to the streets. Police stood by with armoured vehicles and water cannons. “All we are demanding is that we want a free, fair and credible election,” MDC deputy president Thokozani Khupe told the crowd. “We are drawing a line in the sand and we are saying never again will we allow an election to be held where elections will be rigged.
Democratic Republic of Congo
In the meanwhile, in the DRC, it was reported on 27 July 2016 by David Hurrell for Opinion.red24.com that travel disruption was reported in Kinshasa, especially along Boulevard Lumumba, as tens of thousands of supporters awaited the arrival at N’Djili airport of Etienne Tshisekedi, veteran leader of the opposition Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), who has spent the past two years in Belgium. On his arrival, supporters accompanied him to the UDPS headquarters in the Limete municipality of Kinshasa. Hurrell remarked that that:
Pro- and anti-government protests are expected in major urban areas throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the coming days. On 29 July, a large demonstration in support of the president, Joseph Kabila, is scheduled at the Stade Tata Raphael in Kinshasa. On 31 July, large rallies are expected at the Stade des Martyrs in Kinshasa, and at the Grande Place Tshombe in Lubumbashi, by the opposition coalition known as the Rally or ‘Rassemblement’.
On 20 August 2016, the DRC’s main opposition alliance rejected talks with the Kabila government regarding the delayed November presidential election, and called for a general strike on 23 August. The political opposition also vowed to conduct other large-scale actions across the country prior to 19 September – the date when the President is constitutionally required to call for elections (90 days before the end of his term). The call to strike represents a significant escalation in opposition action, following the return of UDPS leader, Étienne Tshisekedi, to the DRC. In an e-mailed public statement, Tshisekedi stated that the ‘necessary requirements for holding a dialogue’ had yet to be met by the government, and called on citizens to ‘mobilise as a single man’ and observe a general strike.
The opposition’s decision was a significant blow to the African Union mediator, Edem Kodjo, who had planned to host opening talks with all domestic political parties on 23 August to help reach an agreement on the scheduling of the elections. Kodjo – a former Togolese Prime Minister (1994-1996, 2005-2006) – has drawn considerable criticism from opposition politicians who view him as a Kabila apologist, and there have been numerous calls for his resignation; Martin Fayulu – the leader of the Commitment for Citizenship and Development party and a member of the opposition coalition – has been particularly vocal in his disapproval of Kodjo.
Although Kabila has yet to comment publically on his political future, all signs point to him attempting to cling to power indefinitely. Back in May 2016, the Constitutional Court – in an idiosyncratic interpretation of Article 70 of the 2005 Constitution – ruled that Kabila could stay in power beyond the end of his second and final mandate if the November 2016 elections did not take place. On 20 August 2016, the President of the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), Corneille Nangana, stated that the ongoing revision of the national voter registry – a process that began in March 2016 – would not be likely to be completed before July 2017, providing further confirmation that the election will not take place as scheduled. Kabila himself stated earlier in August that a revised election timetable would only be published once a new voter registry is compiled. Additionally, according to Reuters, the government has also stated its desire to hold local and provincial elections before the presidential poll, and some observers have estimated that the latter will not occur until 2018 or 2019.
In a bid to ease political tensions ahead of a proposed ‘national dialogue’, the Kabila regime announced pardons on 19 August for 24 individuals incarcerated for their criticisms of the President. The detained politicians and democracy activists are viewed as political prisoners by domestic and international observers, and the government clearly hopes that its latest move will soften recent criticisms over its highly suspect human rights record. Opposition leader Joseph Olengankhoy has called on the government to extend a pardon to Moïse Katumbi, the leading presidential candidate who was sentenced in June in absentia (he is in South Africa) to three years in prison for alleged real estate fraud.
This latest attempt by the Kabila government to reconcile their public image follows on the heels of a surprise announcement by the head of state on 22 July, in which the president issued a number of pardons to a number of prisoners. Included amongst this number were six members of the youth activist group Struggle for Change (Lucha) who were arrested in February 2016 and sentenced to six months in prison as they prepared to participate in the ‘Ville Morte’ (Dead City) general strike. Key figures in the struggle for democracy, however – like Jean-Marie Kalonji and Christopher Ngoyi – remain in custody, without access to legal representation.
One motive for the apparent ‘softening’ of the regime’s approach to the political opposition is undoubtedly the hope of creating the impression abroad that it is not an authoritarian state and complies with the demands of international observers for democracy and the rule of law, thereby avoiding further expressions of disapproval and sanctions. While unilateral sanctions imposed by the US will likely have little impact without the support of the EU and the UN, they nonetheless represent a further reputational blow to the increasingly authoritarian Kabila regime. A second motive behind the ‘softened’ approach is to bring the political opposition to the negotiating table. The Kabila government has continuously expressed its desire to engage constructively with political, civil society and religious institutions and, by complying with opposition requests to free ‘political prisoners’, it is indicating its wish to move towards a ‘national dialogue’ in the near future.
Despite these efforts, on the part of the regime, to create a more agreeable political atmosphere, the opposition parties began a nationwide strike on 23 August, as promised, to protest against what they see as President Kabila’s attempts to cling to power past the end of his constitutional term in December 2016. The opposition called on all citizens to remain at home in an attempt to highlight their disapproval of the government’s underhanded tactics to allow Kabila to retain power indefinitely.
Generally, the strike was geographically patchy and seemed unable to translate what is generally believed to be widespread popular support for the opposition into effective action. It certainly failed to live up to expectations set by a similar one-day general strike held a year and a half previously in February 2015. That strike – dubbed ‘Ville Morte’ (Dead City) – was hailed as a success after it shut down most businesses in Kinshasa. On this occasion also, Kinshasa (a traditionally anti-Kabila region) was effectively shut down – according to local sources and photographic evidence, the roads in Kinshasa were conspicuously quiet, while shops were closed in the city’s surrounding districts, particularly in opposition strongholds like Limete, where the police force used tear gas to disperse protestors who had gathered and erected barricades near the UDPS party headquarters.
In some other towns also, elsewhere in the country, like Matadi and Bukavu, the action seemed quite effective, although in Goma, where youths blocked a road in the Katindo district with rocks and burning tyres, businesses appeared to operate as usual. There was little evidence, however, of a strike in DRC’s second city, Lubumbashi; and in the southern mining hubs of Kolwezi (Lualaba Province) and Lubumbashi (Haut-Katanga Province) commercial activity was unaffected by the strike, as was activity in the northeast commercial hub of Beni (North Kivu Province).
The political opposition appeared to have opted to organise mass strikes as they are a safer demonstration tactic than street marches, and this form of protest is more difficult for the government or security forces to repress or counteract. The safety and security of participants and party leaders is paramount in a state where the excessive use of force and arbitrary detentions are commonplace. Yet, a strike is only as effective as the ability of citizens to participate and while the political opposition is garnering considerable popular support, ordinary citizens do not have the financial capacity to maintain a prolonged – or even – it now appears – a one-day strike. Given the much-anticipated return of Étienne Tshisekedi after a two-year absence and the rapturous welcome he received, it was expected that the political opposition’s fight for democracy would receive a considerable boost.
Specifically, it was expected that Tshisekedi’s return would rally people to the streets after opposition protests over the last year failed to attract significant numbers. Such a poor start to the united opposition’s first major campaign against the Kabila regime was undoubtedly disappointing, particularly as the deadline for the end of the President’s mandate is fast approaching. But those who wrote off the capacity of the opposition to mobilise their supporters, were surprised when, less than a month after the ‘Ville Morte’ stay-at-home strike, mass protest broke out again on the streets of Kinshasa, and some other cities.
On 20 September 2016, Human Rights Watch reported that security forces had killed more than three dozen people in the latest bout of protests. According to Ida Sawyer, the Africa researcher for the New York-based human rights group, HRW had ‘credible reports’ that at least 37 people had lost their lives during two days of violent demonstrations.
The fighting broke out in Kinshasa on Monday 19 September as thousands of opposition supporters marched against President Kabila and his bid to extend his term. There were demonstrations also in Goma in the east of the country. Interior Minister Evariste Boshab earlier said a total of 17 people including three policemen had died in the violence. He also referred to the protests as ‘an uprising’. However, other sources reported much higher figures and close to 200 people are believed to have been arrested.
Meanwhile, the UN called for restraint amid deadly clashes between security forces and protesters. Spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, told a news briefing in Geneva on Tuesday 20 September that the international body was ‘deeply worried’ by the latest round of violence. “We have received reports of excessive use of force by some elements of the security forces as well as reports that some demonstrators resorted to violence yesterday. We call on all sides to show restraint and we urge the authorities to ensure that existing national and international standards on the appropriate use of force are fully respected by all security personnel. We call for a credible and impartial investigation to bring those responsible of human rights violations and criminal acts to justice, and we stand ready to support such an inquiry,” Colville said. He added that the violence underlined the urgent need for dialogue on the electoral process in the country.
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.
Words that think (for us) are terms so rich in meaning, so versatile in usage, so widely deployed that their presence in any utterance is enough to give sense to it. And that happens even when such utterances may be devoid of meaning. These words, which in fact are concepts, have precise meanings in the social sciences and help researchers lend descriptive, analytical and interpretive sense to the phenomena they study. However, when these words are used in general public discourse, or uncritically by researchers, they take up the job of thinking for those who use them. Capitalism is one such word. Others are “democracy”, “human rights”, “good governance”, “market economy”, etc. As a matter of fact, any concept in the social sciences that can be used not only to describe phenomena, but also to explain them has the potential to function as a word that thinks (for us).
Now, in response to ROAPE’s invitation to contribute to the debate on “Capitalism in Africa” I would like to suggest one way of taking up the challenge. Instead of discussing whether “Capitalism” as such is a valid concept or a useful description of social phenomena I want to suggest that it might be equally useful to consider the issues entailed by such a debate in terms of a broader challenge faced by researchers of Africa. The challenge consists in sorting out the much larger issue concerning how concepts developed in very specific times and places under very specific circumstances can be usefully deployed in other temporal and spatial settings. “Capitalism in Africa” is not only about whether the economic circumstances of the continent are consistent with the semantic and analytical field implied by “capitalism” as a concept in political economy. It is also about how to make social science concepts work well when they cross borders.
This is not an easy task. This is so because when the vocabulary of the social sciences crosses borders it suffers a black-boxing effect. Here I draw on the work of Bruno Latour who uses the notion of black-boxes to describe how science conceals the processes through which it produces technology. As he writes in the glossary to his 1999 book Pandora’s Hope, “[T]he way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.” This is precisely the aspect of black-boxing that I find useful in thinking about the challenge of making social science concepts work across borders. The black-boxing effect replaces original thinking and lets concepts do the job for us. I suggest that this effect occurs on three levels, all of which bear on the challenge of engaging with Capitalism in Africa. When social scientists do their work, i.e. apply concepts to make sense of social phenomena, they do so against the background of a complex network of economic, ideological and perhaps even cultural givens. The knowledge produced under such circumstances may be better understood as an artefact of a history of academic controversies, hostilities and competition.
The first level is to be seen at the intersection of the claims of the Enlightenment and Europe’s historical relationship with Africa. This is marked by the assumption that scientific knowledge is by definition universally valid because it applies objective concepts. By extension, what we know about Europe is consistent with what we can know about the world. Within the context of the social sciences which rely on empirical generalisations it is easy to assume that the conceptual apparatus developed at this very crucial moment in Europe’s history provides an adequate framework to render other parts of the world intelligible.
Enter capitalism. While the term describes a very specific way of organizing economic life that conferred an advantage to the part of the world where it first came into fruition, capitalism has also come to stand for inexorable and necessary transformation. The existence of the concept withdraws legitimacy to any attempt at account for processes of social transformation that cannot be reduced to a reaction to, or pursuit of capitalism. This is not to say that capitalism may not matter. Rather, the issue is that the existence of the concept makes Capitalism 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. It is not uncommon, in conferences or book reviews, to be rebuked for failing to consider the role of capital in whatever one may be interested in accounting for.
The second level consists in positing the present condition of European society as the purposeful outcome of socially engineered processes of change. This is of course amplified by the teleological nature of Marxism, arguably the best and most coherent account of Capitalism. Just as Capitalism is perceived as a necessary and inevitable stage in the unfolding of history owing to materialist laws of evolution it is also assumed that knowledge of such laws yields useful insights into what hampers the evolution of other societies. In this sense, then, while political economy approaches to the study of Africa have helped researchers produce a very deep and solid understanding of African social phenomena – Walter Rodney’s seminal work on underdevelopment (1983) or Samir Amin’s even more wide ranging work on delinking (1990) are particularly good examples – they may also have led some of us to lose sight of the contingent nature of historical outcomes and made us hostage to a teleological view of human history that does not do justice to Africa. My book on the Taming of Fate (2016) looks at risk and disasters, but my theoretical focus is precisely on the role which uncertainty should play in our accounts of Africa. I argue implicitly against the danger of reproducing the teleology implied by Capitalism on account of the concept’s tendency to be more determinate than the historical processes which produced it in the first place.
The third and final level conflates procedural knowledge with propositional knowledge. In other words, the conceptual apparatus of the social sciences becomes a normative vocabulary setting out how the social world should be by assuming that we know everything there is to be known about that same social world. To put it differently, knowledge production is not guided by the need to discover new facts, which is what propositional knowledge is about. Rather, it is an exercise in finding out how reality can be aligned with our concepts. When this is the case, the ability of researchers to render Africa intelligible is constrained. This is not because Africa is different in any essential way or, for that matter, because the concepts are “European”. Rather, the constraints emerge because the black-boxing effect that produced the vocabularies on the basis of which we seek to render Africa intelligible reduce knowledge production to the level of a mere exercise in procedural ability. To use Noam Chomsky’s helpful terminology, we are confronted with the tension between competence and performance. Procedural ability tests the researcher’s ability to apply and the object’s ability to conform to the normative content of concepts. What makes Capitalism problematic on this score is that it becomes a description of what should be, or of what it should not be. It becomes a word of abuse, or praise, that reduces the pursuit of knowledge to a search for ideological certainty, not conceptual understanding.
There is another way of looking at the same problem. In The Theft of History (2006) Jack Goody addresses pretty much the same problems with reference to the idea that Europe’s copyright claims over certain concepts and institutions amount to stealing history from others. This may overstate the case. Indeed, it is not so much that Europe has stolen history. Rather, it has forced upon the world ways of describing it which render invisible other possible worlds. Words that think (for us) taken particular histories for granted and confer upon the conceptual apparatus of the social sciences the normative legitimacy to conflate European contingent outcomes with historical inevitability. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu has made some useful comments on these issues in connection with his concern with cultural universals (1990). His most basic claim is that the existence of cultural universals is the basic premise upon which the possibility of intercultural communication and understanding rests. As he perceptively argues, “In truth, the ability to perceive the untranslatability of an expression from one language into another is a mark of linguistic understanding more profound than the ability to do routine translation. The second ability involves merely moving from the one language into the other, whereas the first involves stepping above both on to a meta-platform, so to speak, an ability that has not seemed to come easily to some students of ‘other cultures’. Untranslatability, then, can be a problem, but it does not necessarily argue unintelligibility”. Wiredu’s faith in intelligibility rests on his belief that the claim to understand something is equivalent to the ability to grasp “the conditions under which it is true to say that [a] concept holds”.
I guess that I am grappling here with the notion of translation and its implications when researchers try to apply any concept, really. Again, the challenge of development, the emergence of the BRICS, the resource boom and attendant bursts of the babbles which some claim that the boom creates as well as the perennially new aid architectures enveloping the African continent may make it urgent for researchers to ask the big C question. Is it good old Capitalism in new clothes, or an endogenous “African” version? Does it tell us anything new about Capitalism as we know it? These are probably important questions, but I for one would any time of day prefer grappling with the more methodologically challenging question concerning what it means to render Africa intelligible using words that think. To the extent that as I have tried to show such words may make it difficult for us to see beyond them or past their blind spots I would claim we may not yet be ready to engage in the kind of discussion which the debate on Capitalism requires us to undertake. Like I argue in the chapter “Before we Start” (2016), studying Africa is about getting ready to study Africa. The same should apply to debates about Capitalism in Africa: how do we start talking about the big C at all?
Elísio Macamo is Professor of African Studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland) where he is both the Director of the Centre for African Studies and Head of the Social Sciences Department.
Notes
Amin, S. 1990, Delinking – Towards a Polycentric World. Zed Books. London.
Goody, J. 2006, The Theft of History. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
Latour, B. 1999, Pandora’s Hope – Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press. Cambridge.
Macamo, E. 2016, The Taming of Fate – Approaching Risk from a Social Action Perspective – Case Studies from Southern Mozambique. CODESRIA. Dakar.
Macamo, E. 2016, “Before we start: science and power in the constitution of Africa” in Maano Ramutsindela, Giorgio Miescher, Melanie Boehi (eds.), The Politics of Nature and Science in Southern Africa. Basler Afrika Bibliographien. Basel.
Rodney, W. 1983, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications. London.
Wiredu, K. 1990, “Are there Cultural Universals?” in P.H. Coetzee and A.P.J. Roux (eds.), The African Philosophy Reader. Routledge. London.
Ghanaian activist and socialist Explo Nani-Kofi describes his involvement in a period of radicalisation in Ghana in the 1970s and 1980s. The period found its figurehead in the charismatic leadership of Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. In face of widespread discontent Rawlings attempted a coup d’état on 15 May 1979, against the military government led by General Fred Akuffo. The coup failed and Rawlings was arrested and imprisoned. He began to speak in the language of the left and attracted the interest and support of Ghanaian socialists and radicals. On 4 June, Rawlings was broken out of jail by soldiers sympathetic to his politics, he then led a rebellion of the military and civilians against Akuffo. The Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) was established under his leadership, promising to clean-up Ghana of corruption and injustice. The AFRC organized an election in September 1979 which was won by Hilla Limann of the People’s National Party (PNP). The civilian administration quickly ran into difficulties, of its own making. In 1981, after a strike wave paralysed the country, the government declared that in the event of further action all strikers would be arrested. The strike movement helped precipitate the collapse of the Limann administration. It was clear that the new democratic government was unable to fulfil its promises of real change across Ghanaian society. On 31 December 1981 Rawlings, with soldiers and the support of some left parties, launched a second coup and overthrew the Limann government. The Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) was set-up with Rawlings as Chairman. Before long the possibility of radical change in Ghana gave way to repression of his left-wing allies, and a gradual retreat from the promises of pro-poor transformation. After several years, left-wing opponents were imprisoned and at the same time the regime became a test case for structural adjustment. Rawlings oversaw the introduction of the Economic Recovery Programme and called for ‘austerity and sacrifice’. By 1987 Rawlings the revolutionary became the darling of the IMF and the World Bank. In this ROAPE interview Nani-Kofi explains what some of the experiences were for activists on the ground.
Can you first of all tell me briefly who you are and your political background in Ghana?
I am Explo Nani-Kofi and at present the Director of Kilombo Centre for Civil Society and African Self-Determination which is a research, education and advocacy institution, which I have been developing as a social justice practitioner and grass root organiser. Through that I coordinate the International Conference on Africa, Africa and Social Justice every September in Peki, Ghana. I come from Peki and was born in Anfoega, both in the Volta Region of Ghana. When I was a child, relatives, family friends and neighbours were officials in Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) so I grew up in an atmosphere of CPP influence.
In secondary school, I got involved in the Current Affairs Society and came across The Dawn, published by CPP Overseas, and Amanee published by Central Union of Ghana Students in Europe, which were Nkrumahist oriented publications which were being sent discretely into the country. All this was given as orientation when I was starting secondary school in 1975, when my teacher was the Marxist-oriented Mahama Bawa. I then founded and became President of the Students Movement for African Unity (SMAU) in my school, Mawuli Secondary School in Ho.
Having been in SMAU, when I entered university, I looked out for the SMAU branch. Initially there was a SMAU note on the notice board and when I followed it I was introduced to the Pan African Youth Movement (PANYMO) then led by Chris Buakri Atim. [1] Atim was the Acting President of the National Union of Ghana students (NUGS) and I ran errands for him to the other universities often circulating press statements. By the time of 31 December 1981 coup d’etat, I was the 1st National Vice President of NUGS.
Can you describe the atmosphere in Ghana at the time, in the 1970s and 1980s?
On 24 February 1966, the first post-independence government of Ghana was overthrown through a coup d’etat by police and army officers of Ghana with what has been shown now to have been influenced by western intelligence services. Ghana was then ruled by a military junta of the National Liberation Council (NLC). The NLC organised elections in 1969 which were won by Dr. K. A, Busia and Progress party (PP) which was the successor party to the United Party (UP) which was the Right-wing opposition to Kwame Nkrumah’s government. The Nkrumah regime was the 1st Republic so this became the 2nd Republic.
The 1970s started with the devaluation of the currency by 48% on 27 December 1971 after the Pan-African atmosphere created by Kwame Nkrumah’s government was disrupted by the introduction of the Aliens Compliance Order policy which expelled Africans from Nigeria, Mali, Niger and other countries who had been living in Ghana. Radical student movements brought up the question of the declaration of assets by the politicians of the 2nd Republic. In response to this situation the right wing government of Dr. Busia was overthrown by the Ghana Armed Forces. The military government was initially popular with its Operation Feed Yourself programme, a declaration was made that we will not pay imperialist imposed debts and we will support African liberation movements. Gradually, the military regime grew corrupt and institutionalised the bureaucratic structure in 1975 by dissolving the original council and replacing it with a council of military generals. The military regime tried to institutionalise its rule and stop any transfer to civilian constitutional rule with the campaign for the so-called Union Government. As the regime became corrupt, the student movement grew more radical.
Before 1976, the external wing of the Ghana students’ movement was led mostly by those who won scholarships to study outside during Kwame Nkrumah’s regime. In 1976, the external students’ movement (Central Union of Ghanaian Students in Europe) integrated with the students’ movement back home under the umbrella of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) and adopted scientific socialism, which created a crisis as the students’ movement was a mass organisation of all students in a neo-colonial state and such a programme and commitment seemed inappropriate.
The students’ movement together with professional bodies mobilised against the military regime. The students of Ghana had a national demonstration against the military regime and its Union Government campaign on 13 May 1977 resulting in the closure of the universities. Since that day, the week including 13 May each year came to be celebrated as Aluta Week with demonstrations and other activities. The military regime had a referendum on its Union Government in 1978 and rigged the referendum results declaring that the population had endorsed it. Further opposition created a crisis in the military regime leading to a palace coup that year. In 1979, during the Aluta Week, a hitherto unknown Air Force Flight Lieutenant by the name J. J. Rawlings took advantage of Aluta Week and attempted a military uprising on 15 May 1979 which failed; he was arrested and together with others brought to trial.
How do you assess the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah?
Kwame Nkrumah rose to become the main leader of the struggle against classical colonialism since his return to the Gold Coast, as Ghana had been named by the colonial power, in 1947 upon invitation by United Gold Coast Convention. In 1949, he led a breakaway which constituted itself as the Convention People’s Party and became more rooted in the masses of the population and was also more radical in its demands for self-government. Another great plus of his legacy is that the party was national in character and not dominated by a particular ethnic group as has been a weakness of certain political parties and ‘nationalist’ movements in other parts of Africa. As the immediate post-independence government, the Nkrumah administration embarked on the construction of infrastructure, provision of social services to the population, developed an industrialisation programme and provided employment in a way that cannot be compared with any government since. Kwame Nkrumah’s commitment to African unity, liberation and self-determination raised his stature throughout the African continent and the African diaspora triggering a movement for revolutionary Pan-Africanism. He wrote books together that made an enduring contribution to revolutionary Pan-Africanist theory. All together this posed a threat to the efforts by the west to continue the neo-colonial control they had in Africa. As a result of this the CIA influenced his overthrow on 24 February 1966.
After his overthrow, the political class, including some who had worked with him, came to a consensus that lacked his vision, an ‘agreement’ I have referred to as the ‘24 February 1966 Consensus.’ A number of the leadership and activists of his party integrated with others who had fallen out with Kwame Nkrumah to constitute new political parties. Any form of resistance was patchy. Four people were tried for a plot to bring him back to power. There was a counter coup attempt on 17 April 1967 but it is still unclear whether it was linked to Nkrumah. The only political party which departed from this consensus and maintained a genuinely pan-African vision was the People’s Popular Party led by Dr Willie Kofi Lutterodt and Johnny F. S. Hansen. This party brought together CPP elements who refused to accept the 24 February coup as a fait accompli and a group of activists with links to internationalist socialist movement. [2] However, Nkrumah’s influence developed among a younger generation of activists within the youth and students. By 1981, there were so many organisations inspired, in one way or another, by Nkrumah’s legacy and politics.[3]
The conflict between Rawlings and these organisations during his rule from 1982 to 1992 led to a collapse of many of these organisations. In lieu of a movement, the dominant application of Nkrumah’s politics in Ghana today is to use reference to pro-Nkrumah politics to attack one of the main opposition parties as a group responsible for his overthrow. That has not helped in practice but has rather been a distraction that creates confusion about what the emergence of the two main political parties in 1992, despite their struggle for (and against) Nkrumah’s legacy. What determined the political divide in 1992 was the attempt to shore up neo-liberal tyranny of Rawlings regime against the struggle to open the democratic space to enable genuinely civilian rule. Rawlings regime succeeded in infiltrating the pro-Nkrumah movement by taking advantage of contacts they had with the left’s tragic flirting with Rawlings’ fake radicalism in the 1980s. In the process there are a number of people who were in pro-Nkrumah movements but became members or supporters of the neo-liberal New Patriotic Party that was founded in 1992; they saw the NPP as the only effective way to stop the military regime’s structure reorganising itself into a party under the umbrella of the National Democratic Congress also set up in 1992.
You were involved in the left movement in Ghana. How were you engaged?
I was involved in the Kwame Nkrumah Revolutionary Guards (KNRG) which emerged as a result of the People’s National Party, it was perceived as the successor party to Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party. The KNRG was formed by Nkrumahists (adherents Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanist and socialist-oriented vision of politics) who were disappointed in the PNP so decided to organise as Nkrumahists with the guidance of his revolutionary Pan-Africanism vision of socialist transformation. I also organised students and youth under the banner of the Students Movement for Africa Unity (SMAU) which I was a member of since my secondary school days. The KNRG organised events to mark Kwame Nkrumah’s birthday and memorials for his death and on those occasions reflected on and analysed the national and international situation and looked to advance the cause of socialism and Pan-Africanism. One important forum which brought together all left-wing forces was the Progressive Forum of 3 October 1981.
From June 1979 to September 1979, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), under the chairmanship of Flt. Lt. J. J. Rawlings which was a populist regime and reduced prices, executed military officers for supposed corruption and was very popular with the radical forces. This presented a very difficult situation for the successor civilian regime as the shops had been emptied The experience under the AFRC raised the expectations of the Ghanaian population which could not be met under civilian constitutional rule, conditions which were totally different from the populist military. The situation worked to the advantage of the Rawlings regime as people developed a sort of euphoria for the AFRC days and therefore Rawlings became increasingly popular.
There were a number of groups sympathetic to Rawlings – like June 4 Movement, New Democratic Movement, Movement On National Affairs, Pan African Youth Movement, People’s Revolutionary League of Ghana – the majority of these groups became sympathetic with Rawlings with only the Movement On National Affairs (MONAS) coming out openly against Rawlings. MONAS supported a call for a probe of the AFRC and also stressed the anti-communist statements of the AFRC as well as his attacks on Kwame Nkrumah and support for the overthrow of the Kwame Nkrumah regime. I was close with groups on both sides with some of my closest friends were in MONAS.[4]
You were involved in an initiative of setting up workers committees in the Volta region under the June 4 movement before the 31 December 1981 coup d’etat. Can you give us some personal background to these initiatives and explain what happened and what went wrong?
In August 1981, through a meeting involving the June 4 Movement, Pan African Youth Movement and Kwame Nkrumah Revolutionary Guards with the support of Prof Mawuse Dake a programme of Workers’ Committees was launched under my coordination.[5] These were decision-making and mobilisation committees of workers to raise consciousness and also to work as a group on political issues. These committees were political discussion groups, they organised community and work places , were involved in clean-up activities and also holiday classes for students as well as revision classes for those who had failed school certificate examinations and were resitting.
After the 31 December 1981 coup d’etat, the People’s and Workers Defence Committees were established as organs of popular power. Chris Atim, under whom I worked in the students’ movement, became a member of the ruling Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) and national coordinator of defence committees. He appointed me the Regional Coordinator of the defence committees in the Volta Region. A former editor of the NUGS, Zaya Yeebo, was appointed PNDC Secretary for Youth and Sports, I was also appointed the Regional Political Coordinator of the National Youth Organising Commission. Being responsible for the defence committees and the youth movement made me the main contact with mass organisations in the region.
With the help of the committees, we organised the Defence Committees as units of community and workplace decision making. They helped with the distribution of goods and services. They arranged to get implements for work on farms and equipment for fishers. They were also a forum for political discussion where national and international issues could be raised by ordinary people.
As this involved the political activity of a left-wing nature it was mainly based in bigger urban centres like Accra. Yet I made efforts to get experienced organisers from the capital city of Accra, to assist us in the Volta Region. I requested the release or secondment of cadres from the capital. It was in this respect that I worked with Kofi Gafatsi Normanyo and Kwame Adjimah from the National Secretariat of the Defence Committee in Accra, and the secondment of Austin Asamoa Tutu from his workplace, the Architectural and Engineering Services Company (AESC), to work with our regional secretariat of the Defence Committees.
However, the way we did things was different from how the bureaucracy wanted things to be done – our involvement directly radicalised the government. For example, when there was water shortage in the city, we didn’t see why we should have water where we stayed in student accommodation whilst ordinary people didn’t have water in town. So we opened our university accommodation for the ordinary people to come and draw water from the university. We tried to break down the barriers between ordinary people and political leaders.
Contradictions in the regime and with its support base became intolerable. It turned out that the PNDC Chairman, Rawlings, wanted to have a typical military junta and did not want to see genuine popular organs of power but to have them just as supporters to shore up the military junta. This and other issues led to a total breakdown and misunderstanding within the ruling council on 28 October 1982 and Rawlings felt that he and the two members of the council most active in the defence committees, Chris Atim and Alolga Akata Pore, had to go their separate ways but the exact details were not known to the public, including to organisers like me. After that conflict, Chris Atim addressed a public rally in Ho where I was based.
When there was a coup attempt to overthrow the PNDC on 23 November 1982 which failed, Rawlings took advantage of the situation to frame those he considered to be his enemies. In our naivety, many of us didn’t know that we had been declared enemies. So on 24 November, Rawlings descended on the official residence of the PNDC Secretary for Youth and Sports with a helicopter and a fully armed platoon of soldiers. I was there at the time. He insisted that all of us he found there kneel down in public with guns cocked at our heads. After that, he declared two of our colleagues – Nicholas Atampugre and Taata Ofosu – were under arrest and directed the soldiers to take them away to be detained. Later, on 7 December I was invited to a meeting at the barracks and when I got there I was arrested and told that the Army Commander has directed that Kwame Adjimah and I were to be arrested and detained by the military. With the division in the ruling council, things started taking regional and ethnic lines. My closeness with Chris Atim, who is from the North, was interpreted to mean that I was an obstacle to Rawlings being in control of his home region. It was felt that I had to be removed so that it would be easier for Rawlings to control his own region. This was a tragic ethnic turn by the regime.
At the time many saw Jerry Rawlings together with Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, in the north, as figures committed to radical transformation in Ghana. This was never your position. Can you explain why you took such a stance on Rawlings? How did you characterise him (as opposed to Sankara) at that time and now?
There are substantial differences between Rawlings and Sankara. Sankara was a visionary because he took theoretical study very seriously as a sympathiser of communist groups in Burkina Faso. This is why we can quote Sankara today on issues like third world debt, African self-determination etc. Sankara was also very clear about the anti-imperialist struggle. Rawlings didn’t have the discipline or the theoretical mind of Sankara. When Rawlings was recruited into the Free Africa Movement, he saw such study and discussions as a waste of time and rushed recklessly into an attempted uprising on 15 May 1979 which failed woefully and put the lives of all he was associated with in danger. He was a populist who incited the population without any clear vision of a way out. For those outside Ghana, who didn’t see his weaknesses, recent revelations that he received financial gifts from the corrupt Nigerian military tyrant, Sanni Abacha, expose Rawlings’ opportunist character. Facts which are available today show that Rawlings is an opportunist who had other frustrations with the military authorities. These included his financial problems as a result of spending too much money on drinks and his army book shows his difficulties in passing promotion examinations and even the inability to handle his household responsibilities that senior officers had to intervene in all these matters.
In this short interview recorded in September 2016 for roape.net Explo describes his activism in Ghana in the 1970s and 1980s.
After a very difficult period you travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1984 and then to London in 1989. Can you explain your experiences there? What did it teach you about the communist bloc? What were your impressions, experience of racism etc?
Having fallen out with the Rawlings government in 1982 I was in military detention until a military uprising and jail break on 19 June 1983 in which political detainees from three major prisons in Ghana and various military guard rooms managed to escape. I joined the military uprising and jail break. The military instructed that anybody who saw those of us escaping should shoot us on sight. Some of my comrades were caught and killed but I was able to escape to Togo by the end of June that year.
In 1982, I was awarded a scholarship by the International Union of Students (IUS) to study in Czechoslovakia but I didn’t take up the award. But once in exile, I appealed to the IUS to revive the award and they did. As I never wanted to leave Africa I didn’t even have travelling documents. I had to arrange an emergency Safe Conduct document to join the aeroplane to Czechoslovakia. As the Eastern European countries were sympathetic to the Rawlings regime they were unprepared to grant political asylum to opponents of the Rawlings regime. I lived in Czechoslovakia for one year without residence permit. Through the award, I went to Czechoslovakia in 1984 to study and completed my studies in 1989. I was admitted to a PhD programme but as I wasn’t sure of the post-1989 regime’s support for the IUS, I sought asylum in the UK where a number of my comrades were in exile.
Despite the official declarations and documents, the majority of people in Eastern Europe didn’t feel attached to the socialist governments, certainly not by the 1980s. The ruling class was very unpopular and treated with scorn as well as being totally alienated from the population at large. It had a negative effect on many of the foreign students as well. I was, therefore, not surprised when the experiment collapsed in 1989.
Briefly can you talk about your life in the UK, your political involvement and activism?
In the UK, I have been active in the left movement. Initially, we tried to organise the left opposition to Rawlings from London but the pressures of exile made London the centre for divisions in the Ghanaian Left. In 1991, a group editing the Revolutionary Banner published in the paper that Chris Atim and I were agents of the Rawlings’ regime in exile. as a way of trying to destroy us through a smear campaign. With the collapse of the Ghana left, I participated actively in the general left movement in UK. I was a member of the Stop the War Coalition Steering Committees for 5 years. I contested the Greater London Assembly Elections in 2008 on the left platform – Left List.
How have you maintained your involvement in African politics and movements?
In London, I was the Secretary of the Afrika United Action Front which was a coalition of Pan-Africanist organisations. I was also the coordinator of the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lectures, the International Campaign to Un-ban Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, IMF & World Bank Wanted for Fraud Campaign, Campaign Against Proxy War in Africa and the African Liberation Support Campaign Network. I also managed and edited a pan-Africanist journal known as the Kilombo Pan-African Community Journal. Through these roles I networked with others involved in African politics and movements.[6]
What are some of the principle challenges to a radical agenda and politics on the continent? What sort of projects are needed?
Until recently, a lot of the post-colonial world was looking to Latin America as a model to address the issue of neo-colonialism. Recent developments there give us further lessons, the importance of winning over and being rooted in the population at large and knowing that the capitalist class will always be on the offensive to stall efforts at social justice.
In Africa, liberation movements have either not been able to adjust to administering and managing or have been overwhelmed by the reality of the post-colonial state. The left or radical forces seem to have been cast to the margins and even those who were once major forces have become a shadow of their former selves.
I’ll often return to a definition between left and right by Emmanuel Hansen in his analysis of Ghana at the time of the 31 December 1981 coup d’etat where he wrote: “Among progressive groups and individuals there had for some time existed the idea that Ghana’s post-colonial problems were such that only a revolution could change them. What exactly this revolution was to imply has never been precisely articulated. There is, however, a consensus that it involves termination of the control of the local economy by foreign multinational companies, changes in the structure of production and production relations, changes in the class structure of control of the state, creation of political forms which would make the interests of the broad masses of people predominant and realisable and a programme which would initiate a process of improving the material conditions of the mass of the people. Those who broadly shared this position I would identify as belonging to the left. Those who entertained the opposite position that there was nothing basically wrong with the nature of the country’s structure of production or production relations or the nature of economic relations with Western capitalist countries or the structure of power, class relations or the nature of state power, and that only certain aspects of its functioning needed to be reformed. I would identify as the right.” I think Hansen is correct and I have long seen myself as being part of the ‘left’ in this definition.
Can you explain, through the long period of exile and hardships you faced in Ghana, Czechoslovakia and UK – witnessing as you did the murder of comrades – how you managed to survive? What forces in your life keep you going?
My father was imprisoned by the PNDC and my mother had traveled to the Republic of Togo when the PNDC took over with my younger siblings. In these difficulties I put the commitment to the cause above personal pain and I have never lost that internal driving force. When I fled into exile, my mother was with me, and when she was returning to Ghana, she told me that if she was arrested as a tactic of the regime to lure me back to Ghana, that I should never return and that she was prepared to die. My family’s support has strengthened me. My comrades who have been murdered haven’t done anything that I have not done, I was supposed to die with them. I think the only tribute I can pay to them is to continue on the path we were on before they were murdered. The other thing that keeps me going materially and psychologically is the unlimited generosity I have had from a number of compatriots. In addition to this, is the recognition I receive from comrades for my contribution to the development of the broad left In Ghana. All these strengthen my commitment.
Explo Nani-Kofi was born in Ghana where he started his activist as a socialist organizer for popular democracy. He coordinated the Campaign Against Proxy War in Africa and the IMF-World Bank Wanted For Fraud Campaign. He is Director of the Kilombo Centre for Civil Society and African Self-Determination, in Peki, Ghana and London, UK.
Notes
[1] Chris Bukari Atim later became co-plotter with J. J. Rawlings in the 31 December 1981 coup in Ghana and also a leading member of the ruling Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC).
[2] This party was banned and prevented from contesting the General Elections in 1969.
[3] These groups included the African Youth Brigade, African Youth Command, June 4 Movement, Kwame Nkrumah Revolutionary Guards, Kwame Nkrumah Youth League (formerly part of the People’s National Party Youth League), Movement On National Affairs, New Democratic Movement, Pan African Youth Movement, People’s Revolutionary League of Ghana, Socialist Revolutionary League of Ghana, Students Movement for African Unity each had an orientation close to Kwame Nkrumah’s vision.
[4] My closest friend and comrade was Kwasi Agbley and was the International Affairs Spokesman of MONAS and was arrested when the PNDC came into office and was imprisoned in the military detention cells and later the Nsawam Medium Security Prisons, the most notorious prison in Ghana for almost two years. We were both students of Mahama Bawa, who was the Secretary for the State Commission for Economic Cooperation under the PNDC. When the Left came into conflict with Rawlings, our teacher, Bawa, was in the Castle military detention cell and I was in military detention.
[5] Mawuse Dake was a progressive politician who was a Vice Presidential candidate of a political party in general elections in Ghana in 1979 called the Social Democratic Front (SDF) and became a minister in the PNDC regime but like most left-wing activists fell out with Rawlings.
[6] Most literature on the history of the left ignore the 1930s when the trade union movement started and the Communist International sponsored Negro Worker publication. During the period the West African Youth League led by I. T. A. Wallace Johnson emerged linked with the Communist International. Some UK based Ghanaians also joined the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It is difficult to say whether those involved became integrated with the CPP but there is evidence that some of the activists in the trade unions fell out with the CPP between 1952 and 1954.
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