Revolutionary Change in Africa: an Interview with Samir Amin

March 16, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I continue to consider myself a communist.

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

Yes.

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

To 1960.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you smoke?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very good image.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Security?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, exactly.

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

The West and the Narrative of ‘African corruption’

ROAPE

March 8, 2017

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

By Lee Wengraf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[6] Ibid, p. 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Back to Move Forward: Abiodun Olamosu

ROAPE

March 1, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Press conference held against military rule in the early 1990s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only One Way to Anchor Yourself: Barbara Harlow

ROAPE

February 23, 2017

By Christopher J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Debate on Alternatives: an Interview with Ray Bush

ROAPE

February 21, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Governorate of Giza, Egypt (Ray Bush, 2013)

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what can or does an alternative look like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Photograph: Ray Bush speaking in Sheffield in 2012.

Capitalist Moral Economy in Africa

ROAPE

February 14, 2017

By Jörg Wiegratz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where did the Dependency Approach Go?

ROAPE

February 9, 2017

By Christopher Hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kenyan Doctors on Strike: the Public Health Crisis

ROAPE

February 7, 2017

By Judy Karagania

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral Economies, Economic Moralities

ROAPE

February 1, 2017

By Jörg Wiegratz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pan-Africanism and Communism: an Interview with Hakim Adi

ROAPE

January 26, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pan-Africanism and Communism: an Interview with Hakim Adi

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