The Pillage Continues: Debunking the Resource Curse

January 24, 2017

By Lee Wengraf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knowledge Production in Africa: Inequality and Capitalism

ROAPE

January 20, 2017

By Faisal Garba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

Popular Protest & Class Struggle in Africa – Part 7

ROAPE

January 18, 2017

Gambia

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

By David Seddon

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

The Electoral System

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

The Parties Involved

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

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

French Map of Gambia (2006)

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

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

The Elections

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

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

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

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

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

A Change of Mind

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

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

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

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

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

Banjul, The Gambia (2007)

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

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

On 16 December, ECOWAS issued a statement saying that Barrow ‘must be sworn in’ in order to ‘respect the will of the Gambian people’, and that it would ‘undertake all necessary actions to enforce the result of the election’. ECOWAS appointed Muhammadu Buhari as its chief mediator for the dispute and appointed John Mahama as co-mediator. On 19 December, the AU expressed its full support of the position taken by ECOWAS. Idriss Déby, chair of the AU, called ECOWAS’s position a ‘principled stand with regards to the situation in The Gambia’. Despite pressure from regional leaders, however, Jammeh, speaking on television on the evening of 20 December, said that a new election was necessary: ‘I will not cheat, but I will not be cheated. Justice must be done and the only way justice can be done is to re-organise the election so that every Gambian votes. That’s the only way we can resolve the matter peacefully and fairly’. Striking a defiant tone, he rejected any foreign interference and declared that he was prepared to fight. He stated that he would not leave office at the end of his term in January unless the Supreme Court upheld the results.

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

On 23 December, ECOWAS announced that it would send in troops if Jammeh failed to step down. The president of ECOWAS, Marcel Alain de Souza, said that the deadline was 19 January, when the mandate of Jammeh ends. The military intervention would be led by Senegal. De Souza said: ‘if he doesn’t go, we have a force that is already on alert, and this force will intervene to restore the will of the people’. On 27 December, Adama Barrow called on Jammeh to give up power peacefully, and said that he had no wish to lead a country that was not ‘at peace with itself’. Barrow has said he will declare himself president on 19 January 2017. In a message posted on social media, he urged ‘all peace-loving Gambians to advocate, pray and work for a peaceful transfer of executive power for the first time in our history since independence’, adding that ‘if the colonialists could peacefully hand over executive powers in accordance with the dictates of the people of The Gambia, we, the citizens, should be able to show a better example to our children’.

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

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

Featured Photograph: Ex-President of The Gambia Yahya Jammeh

Capitalism in Africa: The Old and the New Lyrics

ROAPE

January 12, 2017

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

By Horman Chitonge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family Farming in the Near East and North Africa

ROAPE

January 11, 2017

ROAPE’s Ray Bush looks at the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East six years ago which demanded ‘bread, freedom, social justice’ (Aish, horreya, ‘adala igtema’yyia), but instead of focusing on urban struggles he shifts our focus to small farmers. While most attention focused on urban rebellions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, it was protests by small farmers across the Near East North Africa (NENA) since the food price hikes of 2008 that had intensified rural malnutrition, poverty and inequality. Though the causes of protest had been long in the making and can be traced back to the onset of economic liberalisation in the mid-1980s, if not earlier. NENA is the world’s largest food importer, relying on world markets for more than 50 per cent of its food. Price rises, particularly for wheat and rice, have given a stronger rationale to the strategic importance of boosting local production. The need to reduce the impact of volatile international markets for grain is—rhetorically at least— central to all countries in the region. Yet the strategy to reduce that dependence is shaped by intense local and international political pressures. The largely non-food-producing countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have intensified their search for land to purchase outside their national boundaries, while others, such as Egypt, have suggested the need to reinvigorate historical practices of land reclamation. Bush introduces his arguments for readers of roape.net, while the link to the full working paper is below.

By Ray Bush

This review of family farming in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) explores the role of farming and agriculture in the broader political economy of the region. It highlights a preoccupation among policy makers with a very restrictive definition of food security and promotes instead a view that requires a new politics and social policy that listens to the needs of farmers and their struggles for food sovereignty.

In the paper I try to establish the distinctive features of the region, what might be generalised and what might not be so common between countries with contrasting patterns of development. The paper explores the role and impact that farmers have had on the social relations of production in a range of countries and the position that agriculture has played in national and regional development. It draws on the responses of farmers to recent upheavals and sets out a series of recommendations that might bolster rural development broadly defined, including the life chances and contributions made to national development by farmers in the region.

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

The paper argues that it might be useful if recommendations could be divided between on the one hand, those that seem already to be part of the government strategy and analysis of local farming problems and on the other a more idealised set of prescriptive reforms that would put farmers at the heart of policy. Farmers at the centre of rural development policy might help to ensure that their voices were heard and opinions acted upon in the promotion of their farming and livelihood interests. Whether that is at all possible is a political issue and one that at the moment seems a long way away. In addition the paper locates the changing position of family farmers in the framework of agrarian questions. Empirically it looks at the range of country experiences in the context of the broad themes of conflict and war, economic reform and environmental crises.

The paper concludes with the need to promote a research agenda that tries to think beyond the immediate issue of dealing with host governments to address the reasons why family farming has been so underdeveloped. This will involve understanding the relationships of class and power that have emerged historically to enmesh family farming in patterns of uneven and deleterious incorporation of agrarian policy. While many common patterns in NENA are identified and there are also many country specificities particularly linked to overarching patterns of conflict, economic reform and climate change. Analysis and research that may address persistent agrarian underdevelopment will need to identify inter alia where the production and distribution shortfalls occur and why and with what kinds of social consequences? In other words research and policy intervention will need to be dynamic and differentiated seeking to understand who is affected by shortfalls in production for example and how particular households with varied resource endowments and age and gender compositions and with different relationships with owners and so on, are impacted.

Governorate of Giza, Egypt (Ray Bush, 2013)

This will require analysis of specific units of food production and patterns of self-provisioning. At the level of the village and the community further specification is needed of differentiation and supportive or exploitative relations between different household units. Here an analysis of mechanisms of mutual support, survival, storing and for tackling emergencies is important alongside the environmental balance and challenges, fragility of ecology and so on. These dynamic, actual and potential fault-lines need exploring in detail and by case investigation rather than generalised policy invective that tends to emerge from the African Union and other international organisations. It will require a view of policy that is inclusive, that must be part of the debates of the relationship between industry and agriculture, and be based upon informed ethnographic investigation rather than by urban based agricultural extension. And there is a need to identify what might be ‘normal’ relationships and what might be sources of cyclical crisis, drought, pest, economic, political. These cyclical crises can then be set alongside trends of encroachment, dispossession and water scarcity. Only by doing this will it be possible to identify which family farmers have inadequate access to the means of production cyclically or permanently.

Download the full paper here

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

Featured Photograph: Governorate of Dakahlia, Egypt (Ray Bush, 2013).

Genocide and Memory: Negotiating German-Namibian History

ROAPE

January 9, 2017

By Heike Becker

As late as October 2003 then German Foreign Minister Joseph ‘Joschka’ Fischer stated during a visit to the Namibian capital Windhoek that there would be no apology for the first genocide of the 20th century, which was committed by German colonial troops in Namibia in 1904-1908. Only in 2015, official Germany finally acknowledged that the demise of eighty per cent of the Herero and fifty per cent of the Nama of central and southern Namibia indeed constituted a genocide when the speaker of the German parliament, Norbert Lammert, penned an article in the influential weekly Die Zeit. Lammert acknowledged that the war crimes committed by the colonial command in Namibia were not merely an unfortunate series of events but that the German command had intentionally aimed at annihilating the local population groups that had risen up against colonial conquest and dispossession. Shortly afterwards the Foreign Ministry acknowledged the genocide during a press conference of 10 July 2015: “The war of extermination in Namibia from 1904 to 1908 was a war crime and a genocide”.

This acknowledgment set a process into motion. Now official Namibian and German envoys are talking about the way ahead; the programme involves three steps: acknowledgment, apology, reparations. These negotiations are complicated and contested. Thus far, the envisaged formal apology is still due. On the German side, voices have already ruled out reparations. In Namibia, members of the affected communities have claimed that they be part of a more inclusive process. In October 2016, an international civil society congress, “Restorative Justice after Genocide”, brought together over 50 Herero and Nama delegates from around the world with German solidarity activists in Berlin to discuss the way forward. Prior to the congress, a press conference with the Herero and Nama delegates, organised by Niema Movassat, (Die LINKE) Mitglied des Deutschen Bundestages (Member of Parliament) was held on October 14, 2016 in the German Bundestag (see the clip below).

The Die LINKE group invited to the Bundestag on 14 October 2016, representatives of the Herero und Nama. Niema Movassat, for Die LINKE, Chairman in the Committee on Economic Cooperation and Development, introduced the topic and presented the left critique of the current position of the German Federal Government (please note that this press conference is in English and German).

On 5 January 2017, Ovaherero Chief Advocate Vekuii Rukoro and Head of the Nama traditional authorities David Fredericks filed a class act legal claim in New York, invoking the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 United States law often used in human rights cases. They are suing Germany for damages directly to be paid to the descendants of the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama. Significantly, the plaintiffs are also seeking an order from the US court requesting that they, as the lawful representatives of the peoples directly affected, be included in any negotiations and settlements between Germany and Namibia.

The Ovaherero and Nama chiefs invoke the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007. This legal reference and comments by the Rukoro, Fredericks and their lawyer, Ken McCallion, indicate that the law suit is directed at transnational restorative justice, but also at Namibian nationalist politics. The chiefs stated that the Namibian government could not adequately and completely represent the interests of the Ovaherero and Nama as “indigenous and minority” communities in Namibia, and even less so those of Ovaherero and Nama peoples living in Botswana, Souith Africa, the US, and elsewhere. Their legal representative further expressed suspicion that reparations, if paid in the form of foreign aid by Germany to official Namibia, might not reach the “indigenous communities directly affected.”

Heike Becker has written extensively about memory politics and nationalism in Namibia. Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape, Heike directs research and teaching on multiculturalism and diversity. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net and has her own website and blog.

Featured Photograph: Lieutenant von Durling at the death camp at Shark Island, German South West Africa (now Namibia) in 1905.

Variegated Capitalism in Africa: The Role of Industrial Policy

ROAPE

January 4, 2017

By Pádraig Carmody

There have been extensive debates over the years about the nature, potential, impacts and future of capitalism in Africa. However as Stephan Ouma notes in his blog piece in this series there is a need to engage in more finely grained analysis, rather than talking about a monolithic capitalism in Africa, while recognizing its global nature. In his well-known 1981 book Alain de Janvry (1981) developed his theory of what he called articulated versus disarticulated forms of capitalism. Samir Amin has also written about the more autocentric development that has characterised European and North American economies as compared to more dependent development in other parts of the world. However globalisation has ‘hollowed out’ the manufacturing base of many European and North American economies, resulting in a backlash against globalisation and the rise of Trumpism in the United States. Productive articulation under globalisation is partly about connecting into global production networks on relatively more favourable terms, in manufacturing and services in particular.

Much of Africa has failed/not been allowed to do this and the continent as a whole continues to deindustrialize. Zambian production of textile, clothing and leather in 2014 was only 2.9% of what it had been in 1985. However Ethiopia is currently rapidly industrialising, with manufacturing output reported to be growing at roughly 15% a year over the last five years (see Tomkinson 2016). How do we explain this seeming anomaly? In a forthcoming debate piece on ‘Assembling Effective Industrial Policy in Africa’ for the print issue of ROAPE I argue that assemblage theory can be helpful in thinking about this.

There has been a revival in both mainstream and more heterodox literatures in recent years on the topic of industrial policy (For example Stiglitz, Lin, and Patel 2013; Noman and Stiglitz 2015; Clark, Lima, and Sawyer 2016). However the context for industrial policy making has changed somewhat with the increasing importance and extension of global value chains and production networks. An effective industrial policy network, as in Ethiopia, is comprised of multiple axes of ‘strategic coupling’ between different actors to achieve win-win outcomes. However the strategic guidance and direction for the construction of these assemblages is provided by the state. By way of example, foreign investment may bring, jobs, technology and exports. However, it may also overwhelm local business, result in capital extraction and other negative consequences such as environmental degradation. Strategically coupling foreign investment with regional assets so that developmental benefits are maximised, by ensuring productive linkages with the domestic private sector which enable capability development, is an important role of the state. The construction of incentives and links to put together these productive assemblages is still vital.

The point here is that the type of “national capitalism” in Africa is largely a function of the state type, of which there are many variations and hybrids, despite a tendency to sometimes overgeneralise “the” African state as ‘neo-patrimonial’. Capitalism as a global system is characterised by the extension of the law of value geographically and across different social spaces and fields. However the way in which the law of value is expressed varies geographically depends on the nature of institutions and state types. It is possible to construct more articulated types of capitalism which deliver jobs, incomes and improvements in livelihoods and human development through time. However this may also involve strategic non-coupling. It is not coincidental, perhaps, that Ethiopia is still not a member of the World Trade Organization, which allows it to engage in more strategic trade and industrial policy innovation. Is Ethiopia then a “developmental state”?

The terminology of the developmental state may be misplaced. The states which have been most successful in promoting late development, such as South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan or China have in reality been security states which have sought to develop their economies to achieve this objective. This is also the case in Ethiopia. Security states are highly authoritarian by their nature, as often demonstrated through labour repression and the ability to discipline what is frequently the most powerful social force in many societies – private capital. This is not to excuse authoritarianism but to be clear-eyed about the nature of the states which have most effectively promoted economic transformation in recent decades.

Whether a repressive disarticulated state and “variety” of capitalism is preferable to a more developmentally beneficial one is partly a question of values. Capitalist industrialization is often a brutal process. However through the development of the productive and social forces (particularly the working and middle classes) it offers the prospect of higher living standards and new forms of social compact and accountability. Consequently I would argue assembling effective industrial policy is a goal worth pursuing, and a debate worth having about how this is to be achieved.

Pádraig Carmody teaches geography at Trinity College Dublin and is a Research Associate in the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He has written extensively on the political economy of Africa.

Featured Photograph: Simon Davis

References

Clark, D., L. Lima, and C. Sawyer. 2016. “Stages of Diversification in Africa.” Economics Letters 144:68-70.

De Janvry, A. 1981. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Noman, A., and J. Stiglitz. 2015. Industrial Policy and Economic Transformation in Africa.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Stiglitz, J., J. Lin, and E. Patel. 2013. The Industrial Policy Revolution II: Africa in the 21st Century. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Tomkinson, J. (2016) “Beyond Faith and Fatalism in Development Discourse: Global Conditions and National Development Prospects in Ethiopia.” Paper presented at the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy Conference. Lisbon, September.

Yeung, H. 2016. Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Making History in Ghana: How the Opposition Won the Election

ROAPE

December 23, 2016

By Nic Cheeseman, Gabrielle Lynch and Justin Willis

After a tense campaign, on 9 December 2016 the Electoral Commission of Ghana announced that Nana Akufo-Addo of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) had won the presidency in the first round of voting. His victory represents an embarrassing defeat for the incumbent, John Mahama of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), who recorded one of lowest vote shares ever secured by a Ghanaian ruling party since the reintroduction of multiparty politics in 1992. Not only did Akufo-Addo beat Mahama with 54 to 44 percent of the popular vote, but the NPP also won a clear majority in parliament.

This is the third time that there has been a peaceful alternation of power in the country. However, it is the first time that an incumbent has stood and lost. Previously, changes of government have always come when a president was forced to stand down by presidential term limits: in 2000, when Jerry Rawlings stood down at the end of a second term, his successor, John Atta Mills, was beaten by Kufour and the NPP. Two elections later, power passed back to the NDC after Kufour’s successor, Nana Akufo-Addo, lost to Mills in 2008. So why did Mahama perform so badly?

It is a rare thing for an incumbent president to lose an election on the sub-continent. Research conducted by Nic Cheeseman has found that incumbents win 88 per cent of the elections they contest. Akufo-Addo’s success defies this pattern, as did last month’s shock election in the Gambia, where Adama Barrow beat President Yahya Jammeh with 45.5 percent of the vote – only for Jammeh to later reject the results and announce that he would seek to have the election overturned in court. We identify four factors that enabled the NPP to wrest power from a sitting president.

NPP supporters celebrate in Konongo, Asante Akim Central, Ashante (Gabrielle Lynch)

First, the Electoral Commission has relatively strong legal foundations and has developed a reputation for independence (see Nelson Oppong’s blog). During his time as Chair, Kwadwo Afari-Gyan presided over a number of improvements including the use of biometric registration and verification of voters, and the introduction of greater checks and balances. Although Afari-Gyan stood down in 2015 – and his replacement Charlotte Osei, has been accused of being partial to the government – the system was further strengthened in 2016 by the introduction of electronic vote transmission from the constituency level to the EC’s headquarters in Accra, which made it harder to manipulate the result during the collation process.

Second, the police and the security forces are largely impartial, enabling opposition activists to campaign throughout the country – even in the government’s strongholds. This did not mean that the campaign was conducted on a completely level playing field – the government continued to enjoy the benefits of incumbency and had much more money to spend. But combined with the considerable degree of tolerance between rival supporters at the local level, it did create the opportunity for the NPP to spread its own message – encouraging NDC loyalists unprepared to vote for any other party to stay at home in order to allow “change” to occur.

It was not always this way. In 1992, NPP posters were torn down, and activists were forced to work in hiding. But the political landscape has become considerably more open over time, and opposition activists were willing to publicly state their affiliation, even in areas in which they were a tiny minority. Combined with the ability of the NPP – whose supporters include many of the country’s educated elite – to fund the activities of its agents and activists, this made for a closely contested poll. In many areas, NDC and NPP flags hung side by side, and both parties received considerable coverage in the media.

Third, the country’s economic difficulties, combined with the perception that the NDC has lost touch with its own supporters, undermined the party’s ability to mobilize its own supporters. While the NPP managed to repeat or improve the number of votes it won in 2012, the NDC saw its numbers fall dramatically. This is best demonstrated by the difficulties that the ruling party faced in the Volta Region, which is known locally as the NDC’s “World Bank” because of its consistent and overwhelming support for the party. In Ho Central, the regional capital, turnout fell from 78 percent in 2012 to 63 percent this time around due to a widespread sense that the people most loyal to the NDC had not benefited enough from its time in office.

Voting in Juaso, Asante Akim South, Ashanti (Gabrielle Lynch)

Local frustrations were evident, for example, during meetings for the incumbent MP, where some asked why the road adjacent to the rally had not been fixed. During the exchange, NDC party members pointed to potholes as direct evidence of the lack of development that their community had experienced in the past four years. In some parts of the region, this dissatisfaction appears to have translated into an informal boycott of the elections, as many who could not bring themselves to vote for the NPP, simply failed to turnout – with turnout of less than 50 percent in some constituencies.

Fourth, the NPP’s call for people to “look at your living conditions and vote” clearly resonated with many Ghanaians and especially with the young who have gone to school and college but struggle to find jobs – with many left living at home “sitting on their parents”. In NDC strongholds, it was younger voters that were most likely to break with their parents and either vote for the NPP, or to stay away from the polls – and persuade their friends to do the same. At the same time, the NPP dismissed the NDC’s emphasis on various government projects – from almost 200 new secondary schools across the country, together with numerous clinics, markets and roads – as the work of any government, and as something that was relatively easy to achieve when you borrow money from the international community.

To put this another way, Mahama’s defeat is made up of equal parts: economic decline undermined the credibility of the ruling party, the NDC’s failure to connect to its own supporters opened the door to the opposition, and the country’s open electoral environment enabled the NPP to spread its message and secure a commanding first round victory. It was this combination that condemned Mahama to defeat, and enabled Akufo Addo to make history.

Taken together, these developments bode well for Ghanaian democracy. The fact that both parties can campaign throughout the country and that political leaders and the electoral commission once again demonstrated their willingness to play by the rules of the game, represents further progress towards the consolidation of democratic norms and values. The challenge now facing the NPP is whether the party can deliver on its many promises – from jobs to one factory per district – in a way that meets a popular desire for change. If not, Ghanaian voters have made it very clear what is likely to happen at the next elections.

Nic Cheeseman is Professor in the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, Gabrielle Lynch is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Warwick and Chair of ROAPE and Justin Willis is Professor of History at the University of Durham.

Featured Photograph: A young NPP supporter celebrates in Konongo, Asante Akim Central, Ashanti (Gabrielle Lynch)

Ghana’s 2016 Election Results: The Story of a Presidential Petition

ROAPE

December 21, 2016

By Nelson Oppong

After two major setbacks in 2008 and 2012, Ghana’s main opposition party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) led by Nana Akuffo Addo, secured a resounding electoral victory in the 7 December election against the incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC), led by President John Mahama. Results from 271 (out of 275 constituencies) declared by the Electoral Commission (EC) gave Akuffo Addo 53.85% of valid votes cast, against President Mahama’s 44.40%. The NPP is also set to take over the Ghanaian parliament after increasing its share of the 275 parliamentary seats by a significant margin with more than 160 seats, having won 123 seats in 2012.

The results represent a comfortable win for a party that looked set for another devastating loss just over a year ago, with internal bickering leading to the suspension of several notable party executives. During the campaign, the party’s dire financial strain became a major talking point, especially when contrasted with the incumbent’s resources, demonstrated by mega billboards of the President across the country. This is the first time that a sitting President has lost an election in Ghana’s electoral history. Against the backdrop of recent victories by opposition parties in Nigeria and the Gambia, the stranglehold of incumbents over elections appears to be waning across Africa.

Having won four elections in the past, the NDC went into the 2016 election with a widely-held perception that it is the most formidable election-winning machine in Ghana, despite its weaknesses in managing the economy. On the contrary, while the NPP is often presented as comparably better at economic management, the party elitist posturing is considered less suited for grassroots mobilization that could secure frequent electoral victory. Among its wider political economy dynamics, the 2012 election did not only challenge this long-held perception, but most significantly it signalled shifting preferences among Ghanaian voters for candidates with a demonstrable capacity and programme to “put money in peoples’ pockets.”

Post-mortem analysis has identified several reasons for the NPP’s decisive victory, foremost among them the severe drain in the country’s economic fortunes and the lacklustre anti-corruption climate under the Mahama administration. One of the main events that significantly tipped the scales against the NDC is the high-profile election petition that was filed by the NPP contesting the results of the 2012 Presidential election.

While the eight-month long hearing of the petition led to an affirmation of President Mahama, it placed the courts at the epicentre of elections in Ghana, opened the electoral process to wider public scrutiny, gave an added boost to the standing of Akuffo Addo and his running mate, Mahamadu Bawumia, and energized the NPP’s base into action over areas that required vigilance for the party’s victory. In many African elections, where the tenor of reform is largely oriented towards capacity building of election management bodies, political parties, and civil society organisations, the 2016 election adds another layer to the role of judicial adjudication in building trust and promoting the credibility of elections.

When the NPP took the EC to Court

Ghana’s democracy came under the spotlight in 2012 when three members of the NPP, namely Akuffo Addo, his running mate, Mahamadu Bawumia, and the party chairperson, Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, filed a petition at the Supreme Court challenging the declaration of Mahama as winner of the presidential polls. In the petition, the party alleged gross irregularities in over 11,000 polling stations with a call for annulments that would ostensibly lead to Akuffo Addo’s victory.

The NPP presidential candidate – who came under sharp criticism from his political opponents and some high profile NPP members for being a sore loser and putting the country on the brink of collapse – argued that the NPP’s case was premised on “mind blowing” evidence that would deepen Ghana’s democracy and strengthen the institutions that are mandated to oversee the electoral process. After months of hearing and deliberation, which were broadcast live on national television, a nine-member Supreme Court returned a verdict rejecting the NPP’s petition that affirmed the EC’s earlier declaration. In what was celebrated as a hallmark of statesmanship, the NPP presidential candidate accepted the court’s decision and conceded to Mahama.

The count at a polling station in Nkwanta, Asante Akim South, Ashanti (Gabrielle Lynch)

The petition, albeit less pleasant for the NPP, was instrumentalised successfully by Akuffo Addo to bolster his control of the party and image across the country. Following a concession speech, in which the NPP leader called on Ghanaians to “iron out our differences, ease the tensions among us, and come together to build our country,” his residence in Nima-Accra, assumed a newfound symbolism with well-publicized congratulatory visits by diplomats, leading party activists, religious leaders, and revered statesmen within and outside Ghana. The growing stature of Akuffo Addo, as a statesman and potential president, not only ensured his decisive win in the presidential primary within the NPP, but it also enabled him to effectively deal with the perception of him being a hot-headed, intolerant, and violent person, which has been pushed largely by the NDC in the last two elections.

Since 1998, when Nana Addo lost to John Kufuor in a bitterly fought presidential primary in the NPP, his temperament has always come under question. In the 2008 election, the NDC sustained these attacks against Nana Addo by claiming that his character and demeanour is far from the calmness and modesty of its candidate, John Atta Mills. Nana Addo did not also help assuage this negative perception during the 2012 campaign when he charged NPP supporters to protect themselves against attacks by NDC activists with chants of “All Die Be Die,” which was interpreted as admonition for violence. During the 2016 campaign, the NDC maintained these attacks by pointing to infighting within the NPP as testament to Akuffo Addo’s inability to unify the country. However, this strategy by the NDC failed in 2016 largely because many Ghanaians were exposed to the “soft” Nana Addo, especially after his acceptance of Supreme Court verdict over the petition.

Among the petitioners, the person who perhaps benefitted most was Bawumia, a 53-year-old renowned economist who hails from the Northern Region of Ghana. As the principal witness for the petition, the NPP’s vice presidential candidate, who was hitherto largely known for his economic proficiency, but limited political experience, impressed national television audiences with his calm temperament, sheer brilliance over electoral matters, and commitment to take the bullet for the NPP. Indeed, immediately after the Supreme Court’s verdict, Bawumia was touted as a possible flagbearer of the NPP when Akuffo Addo had not formally announced his intention to contest the 2016 election.

Over the last three years, Bawumia’s stature as a reliable and articulate interlocutor for the NPP has grown in unmeasurable proportion. His presentations on the Ghanaian economy at various lectures across the country, and the faltering responses by government economists and spokesperson, helped sell the NPP as the party which was better placed to address the country’s economic challenges. The prospects of an active and frontline Vice President in the person of Bawumia, which was dramatized forcefully during the petition hearing, also enabled the NPP to manage the “anti-Northern” tag, which the Mahama-led NDC amplified in the heat of the campaign. Direct comparisons were also often made with the less articulate NDC Vice President who often cut a marginal figure in Mahama’s government.

The Courts have changed the contours of electoral politics

While heeding to their flagbearer’s call to respect the verdict of the Supreme Court in the election petition, many NPP activists were left with a strong sense of injustice meted out to them by the EC. Over the last three years, the party has supported a groundswell of activities, ranging from demonstrations to open aspersions at members of the EC, particularly Charlotte Osei, who is the current Chairperson of the Commission. The anti-Osei rhetoric by the NPP reached its most appalling phase when a Member of Parliament for the party, Kennedy Agyapong, attracted the ire of the public for referring to the EC Chairperson as a “wicked woman” who landed her position by giving sexual favours.

This open hostility against the EC persisted alongside soul-searching within the NPP that led the party to embark on a host of activities meant to apply pressure for electoral reform, while building internal capacity and vigilance over the electoral process.

Local media reports after the election have shed light on the role of an engineering service manager from the US space agency, NASA, who was contracted by the NPP campaign team to recruit and train party agents to secure and deliver election results from polling stations into a common database where they could track and collate results more accurately.

Although many party activists criticized different aspects of the Supreme Court’s verdict, it became an important reference point that legitimized different claims for reforms that were advanced in various press briefings. Notably, the pro-NPP Let My Vote Count Alliance staged various demonstrations to apply pressure on the EC to compile a new voter’s register; a point that was emphasized by the Supreme Court’s ruling. In many instances when the NPP failed to secure a concession from the EC, the courts became popular battlegrounds for the party’s agitations. For instance, three members of the Let My Vote Count Alliance, supported by a team of lawyers from the NPP, initiated a series of legal action at the Supreme Court against the EC over the compilation of a new electoral register and the use of National Health Insurance IDs.

The increasing use of the courts by various NPP activists represents a broader trend of political socialization in support of legal litigation over electoral matters that was fuelled by the 2012 petition. Court proceedings against the EC, which yielded notable judgements for the NPP, thrusted Ghana’s superior courts to the hotbed of the 2016 election. Most importantly, the past year witnessed a noticeable increase in the number of litigations through the courts, including internal party matters, disputed primaries, and different aspects of the electoral process by candidates, political parties, civil society organisations and private citizens. Indeed, while the EC disqualified some candidates in the 2012 election over clerical errors without any court action, a similar act in 2016 against 13 political parties led to more than four suits against the EC, which enabled some aggrieved parties ― the National Democratic Party, the People’s National Convention, and the Progressive Peoples Party ― to get back onto the Presidential ballot.

The count continues at a polling station in Nkwanta, Ashanti (Gabrielle Lynch)

Prior to the NPP’s petition in 2012, judicial adjudication of electoral disputes was rare. This was largely due to a generalised perception that the costly and inflexible litigation processes in the courts were, at best, the last option for aggrieved candidates. The transparency of the petition, which was boasted by the live broadcast of court proceedings on national television shattered this myth in two main respects: First, contrary to long-held belief about the independence of the EC, the courts asserted their supervisory jurisdiction over Ghanaian elections. Secondly, the closeness of the nine-member panel, with 3 dissenting judgements in favour of some claims in the petition, apprised the wider public about the disposition of some judges to offer rulings that could lead to a reversal of election results and acts of election management officials.

Mahama and the NDC were confined to the status quo

On the contrary, the NDC left the 2012 election petition with a sense of vindication, which consigned them to the unenviable position of advocates-in-chief for the EC. The foundation of this newfound status quo began during hearing of the petition, when the party joined the EC to defend Mahama’s victory.

However, the NDC’s defence of the EC did not stop after the Supreme Court’s judgement was delivered. During sitting by a five-member committee that was set up by the EC to examine claims for a new register, the NDC refuted the NPP’s claims arguing that the register is credible and must only be re-compiled after ten years given the costs to the taxpayers. Apart from opposing calls by the NPP for a new voters’ register, various NDC activists took on the job of EC spokespersons on radio and TV discussions even in instances where notable indiscretions by the EC.

The cozy relationship between the NDC and the EC reached a boiling point after a ruling of the Supreme Court against the EC’s decision to include names of voters who registered with NHIS cards on the register. In a radio discussion on Montie FM, which is owned by some prominent NDC members, two supporters of the ruling party and a talk-show host issued threats of violence against some of the judges, including the Chief Justice, if they made further judgements against the EC. In July 2016, these NDC sympathizers, who became known as the Montie 3, were sentenced to four months in jail and fined 10, 000 Cedis each for contempt. Barely a month later, the President bowed to pressure from members of the NDC and his cabinet, and remitted the sentences, which led critics to bemoan the abuse of his constitutional powers of pardon to undermine the judiciary.

If the NPP left the petition determined to be more vigilant, the NDC suffered from a great deal of complacency that significantly tipped the election against them. Indeed, when counting and collation of the 2016 results were taking place, the party assumed the NPP’s 2012 posture with criticisms about voter irregularities and threats of legal action to change some of the results. No doubt, the NDC have accepted the results of the election and President Mahama has conceded to Nana Akuffo Addo as the President-elect. Nonetheless, as the party embarks on a rebuilding programme to wrestle power from the NPP, they are likely to incorporate the courts in their overall strategy.

A New Agenda for Electoral Reform.

The role of the 2012 election petition in shaping the contours of electoral reforms, which added a major boost to the NPP’s quest to wrestle power from the Mahama-led NDC, has a much broader resonance. Across many developing countries, including those in sub-Saharan Africa, judicial reform is often treated as delinked from the more specialized field of election management.

In the case of electoral reform, significant weight has been placed on capacity building for political parties, election management bodies, and civil society organizations. Across many African states, in particular, this reform agenda has been shaped by the predominant viewpoint which suggests that despite notable inroads in democratization, the political environment remains largely fragile amid widespread corruption in public institutions, including the judiciary. Consequently, specialists and donors working on electoral reform often prefer alternative dispute resolutions mechanisms – such as committees for inter-party dialogue and peace initiatives by NGOs – to adversarial judicial proceedings.

While Ghana’s 2012 election offered an important test case for the role of “soft” institutions in the pursuit of alternative dispute resolution, with commendable inputs from the Peace Council and other NGO initiatives, the dispute over the results underlined their limits. It may take a while to grasp the full impact of the 2012 petition on Ghana’s political landscape and even why the NPP defied the odds to win the 2016 election. Nonetheless, the interconnections between the petition and the victory are too important to ignore. For donors and policy activists interested in electoral reform, there could not have been any better case to revise the largely cynical script about judicial verdicts.

Nelson Oppong is a member of the Editorial Working Group of ROAPE. He specialises in comparative politics, global governance, and the political economy of institutions in resource-rich countries.

Feature Photograph: Graffiti at polling station in Nkwanta Asante Akim, South Ashante (Gabrielle Lynch).

Obama in Africa: Secret Bases and Drone Warfare

ROAPE

December 15, 2016

In the first in a series of blogs for roape.net, writer and activist Lee Wengraf describes Obama’s bloody legacy in Africa. Over eight years the continent has seen an intensification of US aerial campaigns, proxy warfare, and imperial competition. In further blogs in January and February, Wengraf will examine the idea of the ‘resource curse’, Western involvement in corruption and the role of Chinese imperialism in Africa.

By Lee Wengraf

“Part of having a credible American leader again who is unimplicated with the war in Iraq who is very attractive to people around the world, is to somehow use that early wind at his back to try to extract commitments to patrol the commons, to actually deal with these broken people and broken places.” Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2008)

The Barack Obama administration continued, and deepened, U.S. military involvement in Africa signaled by the launch, in 2006, of the U.S. Africa military command AFRICOM by President George W. Bush. Intensified imperial competition with China in Africa, and other powers such as Russia, fueled higher levels of U.S. military deployment on the continent. Awash with a vast network of military bases, covert operations and thousands of Western-funded troops pointed to the unavoidable conclusion that the Obama years produced in essence a U.S. war in Africa.

The scale of military intervention made a decisive jump during Obama’s tenure, with a 200 percent increase in military missions during his tenure, as well as a widening presence of Defense Department staff into State Department realms. For example, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti became host to 2,000 military personnel, while U.S. Department of Defense staff were assigned to U.S. embassies across Africa, reflecting the enlarged scope of anti-terror activities. As Daniel Volman writes:

The continuity with Bush administration policy is especially evident in several key regions. In Somalia, for example, … President Obama has continued the program initiated by the Bush administration to assassinate alleged al-Qaeda leaders in Somalia …. In the Sahel, the Obama administration … sought increased funding for the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Program [and] justified this escalating military involvement in the Trans-Saharan region by arguing that the increasing involvement of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in criminal activity (including kidnapping for ransom and drug-trafficking) constitutes a growing threat to US interests in this resource-rich area.[1]

Concomitant with the programmatic continuity with Bush administration policy, the Obama administration pivoted global imperial strategy away from “boots on the ground” and towards so-called “alliance-building,” that is, cementing U.S. indispensability to African political stability in areas critical to their geo-strategic interests. A Pentagon document in 2012 heralded “working with allies and partners to establish control over ungoverned territories,”[2] but intrinsic to this approach is the understanding that the U.S. can use wide flexibility, operationalize it, with an increasingly active and direct military role under the rubric of “partnership.” As Obama’s Commander for U.S. Army Africa, David R. Hogg, characterized the approach, “We are here to enable, where wanted, the African forces to figure out and solve their own problems.”[3] In this period, increased support for the State Department and programs such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) globally was paired with higher levels of defense spending, even as Obama declared that he would completely withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, a promise broken well before the end of his tenure.

The U.S. relies on key allies to further its aims as proxies on the ground. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, for example, established even greater importance during the Obama administration as a lynchpin for stability in the East Africa. Oil discoveries – proven but not yet procured – in East Africa and the Great Lakes region elevate its value to imperial interests. Crucially, Uganda has intervened in Somalia under the auspices of African Union troops, deployed to back up the U.S. supported Somali government. As Mahmood Mamdani has commented, “Somalia is Uganda’s claim that we have a solution for your security concerns in the region. It fits very nicely with the American claim that the primary problem of Africa is not development, nor democracy, nor even the lack of human rights, but security.”[4] Likewise, as Angelo Zima describes, “Kampala is the political equivalent of a brokerage firm for rebels, rebellions and peace missions. It has more troops abroad than any other country aside from the US itself. The head of that firm is Mr. Museveni. The West is his biggest client with a resource hungry China waiting anxiously outside.”[5]

The hunt for the vastly-diminished Lords’ Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony served as the auspices under which, in 2011, Obama announced he would send 100 troops to Uganda to “remove [Kony] from the battlefield.” But this announcement papered over the widening military operations in East Africa of $45 million military aid that year alone, a package which included four drones. Kony’s human rights record is undoubtedly a long and sordid one. Yet the record of the U.S.’s chief partner, Museveni, is arguably much worse. The regime has been a long-standing recipient of U.S. military assistance of which the suppression of the LRA is but one component. Museveni’s war against the people of Northern Uganda has been brutal, driving nearly 2 million into essentially concentration camps in the mid-1990s. The Kony campaign provided a humanitarian veneer for wider intervention in the region, a toehold for wider imperial projection into the region more broadly.

Under Obama, aerial campaigns, proxy warfare, and indirect support became increasingly crucial. The Libya bombing campaign by NATO, for example, became a potential model for future interventions and regime change in Africa, as well as an opportunity to gain strategic advantage over its rivals, in this case, China. As David Axe of Wired, a frequent writer on security in Africa, has commented, “Somalia-style, ‘hands-off’ campaigns are the future.”[6] Investigative reporting by Jeremy Scahill uncovered a secret U.S. campaign in Somalia against so-called Islamic terrorists al-Shabab, complete with interrogation chambers, CIA surveillance, drone attacks and Special Forces.[7] Craig Whitlock has likewise documented the rapidly-expanding military footprint in Africa and an increasing reliance on Special Operations forces during Obama’s tenure.

Clandestine as they may be, the size and reach of these projects has been immense. Journalist Nick Turse has amassed documentation on the scope of this “pivot to Africa” and its key operations: an almost 300% jump in the number of operations since AFRICOM’s launch.[8] As Turse describes in Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa (2015), while the military may decry any permanence to its operations, in reality, Obama’s expanded military footprint encompasses virtually every African nation. But with this continuous presence has come a widening blowback, and the scale of terrorism on African soil has only widened in response to U.S. activities: Turse points out that no groups were designated “terrorist organizations” in sub-Saharan Africa prior to 2001, a far cry from conditions a decade and a half later.

Another element of U.S. imperial strategy has been selective efforts at nation-building, or the “repair” of “broken places,” Samantha Power described in the quote above. The secession of South Sudan is a chief example. Turse writes that, “The South Sudanese suffered, bled and died for their independence, but they didn’t win it alone. As John Kerry, then-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put it in 2012, the United States ‘helped midwife the birth’ of South Sudan…. On independence day, President Barack Obama hailed the moment as a ‘time of hope’ and pledged U.S. partnership to the new land, emphasizing security and development.”[9] Secession was enthusiastically championed by business interests who saw in South Sudan hopes for previously-thwarted access to Sudanese oil and as one of the few visible successes of the administration’s policy in Africa. Oil revenues account for 98 percent of South Sudan’s budget, making it arguably one of the most oil-dependent nations in the world.

The U.S. government in fairly short order ‘walked back’ its commitments to the new nation, despite widespread evidence of humanitarian disaster. The two civil wars alone brought 2.5 million deaths, and an additional 4 million displaced. Obama visited a refugee camp in Juba, South Sudan’s capital; Turse, encountered the president walking through the camp:

This is the legacy of America’s nation-building project in Africa, and of the policies of a president born of an African father, a president whose name was once synonymous with hopes for the future. Over the course of the Obama presidency, American efforts on the continent have become ever more militarized in terms of troops and bases, missions and money. And yet from Libya to the Gulf of Guinea, Mali to this camp in South Sudan, the results have been dismal. Countless military exercises, counterterrorism operations, humanitarian projects, and training missions, backed by billions of dollars of taxpayer money, have all evaporated in the face of coups, civil wars, human rights’ abuses, terror attacks and poorly-coordinated aid efforts. The human toll is incalculable. And there appears to be no end in sight.[10]

This is the Obama legacy for Africa, and the urgent need for a true humanitarian alternative by social justice forces calling for an end to this long history of imperialism.

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

Featured Photograph: President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama greet Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh, President of the Republic of The Gambia, and Mrs. Zineb Jammeh, during an Africa Leaders Summit dinner at the White House, Aug. 5, 2014.

Notes

[1] Daniel Volman, “Obama and US military engagement in Africa,” Pambazuka News, Issue 478, April 22, 2010

[2] Cited in Spencer Ackerman, “Obama’s New Defense Plan: Drones, Spec Ops and Cyber War,” Wired, January 5, 2012

[3] Max Lockie, “The US-Africa relationship by the numbers,” MSNBC, September 13, 2013

[4] Mahmood Mamdani, “Somalia, Museveni and militarising the region,” Pambazuka News, Issue 583, May 3, 2012.

[5] Angelo Zima, “The West’s man in Africa: Partner for life,” March 5, 2014, http://www.angeloizama.com/angelo-opi-aiya-izama/2014/03/04/the-wests-man-in-africa-partner-for-life

[6] David Axe, “Power struggle threatens outsourced Somalia war,” Wired, June 16, 2011

[7] Jeremy Scahill, “The CIA’s Secret Sites in Somalia, Nation, December 10, 2014

[8] Nick Turse, “The Numbers Racket: AFRICOM Clams Up After Commander Peddles Contradictory Statements to Congress,” TomDispatch June 23, 2016. A fog of secrecy seems to surround AFRICOM’s reporting of the number of operations, so assessing the scale of the U.S.’s military operations is challenging. Turse writes, for example: “A 2013 report by the Department of Defense’s Inspector General on AFRICOM’s Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa found record-keeping so abysmal that its officials ‘did not have an effective system to manage or report community relations and low-cost activities.’ A spreadsheet supposedly tracking such missions during 2012 and 2013 was, for example, so incomplete that 43% of such efforts went unmentioned. New definitions, poor record-keeping, ineffective management, and incompetence aren’t, however, the only possible explanations for the discrepancies. AFRICOM has a history of working to thwart efforts aimed at transparency and accountability and has long been criticized for its atmosphere of secrecy. Beyond spin, the highly selective release of information, the cherry-picking of reporters to cover a tiny fraction of its undertakings, and the issuing of news releases that tell a very limited story about the command, AFRICOM has taken steps to thwart press coverage of its footprint and missions.”

[9] Nick Turse. 2016. Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. Chicago: Haymarket Books, p. 34.

[10] Nick Turse. 2015. Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars an Secret Ops in Africa. Chicago: Haymarket Books, p. 184

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Variegated Capitalism in Africa: The Role of Industrial Policy

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Ghana’s 2016 Election Results: The Story of a Presidential Petition

Obama in Africa: Secret Bases and Drone Warfare

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