Popular Protest & Social Movements – Part 5

September 23, 2016

In the latest installment of the Popular Protest and Social Movements project for ROAPE David Seddon profiles the case of Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe is currently facing a new kind of protest movement, and recent developments in the DRC where President Kabila has just been enabled to run for a third term.

By David Seddon

The first piece in this series (no. 1) ended with a comparison of three countries – the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi and Burkina Faso – in which the president had recently tried to extend his period of office and there had been significant popular protest against this move from democracy towards dictatorship. In the second piece (no. 2), we examined more recent events in those three countries – DRC, Burundi and Burkina Faso – in particular and then began to consider the wider implications of the erosion of democracy where elected presidents have extended – or attempted to extend – their term of office beyond the limits defined by the Constitution, while drawing attention to the large number of African heads of state who have remained in power for far longer than anticipated, often by authoritarian and repressive measures.

In the third piece (no. 3) in the series, we returned again to the three countries initially considered, to examine the very different trajectories followed by them over the last six months, and extended the comparison to include two others – Congo (Brazzaville) and Rwanda – also in Central Africa. In the fourth piece (no. 4), we extended the comparison still further to three more of those Africa countries or territories in which the head of state has exceeded two decades, and consider the political dynamics that have allowed this to occur – in The Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon.

I am particularly interested to examine the dynamics of the widespread slide in recent years once again towards de facto one party states and dictatorships in Africa (even if many of them retain the façade – or charade – of a notional multi-party regime), and in particular I am concerned with the role of popular protest in sustaining or opposing these trends and its relationship to class struggle.

In this piece (no. 5), I shall examine the case of Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe is currently facing a new kind of protest movement, and recent developments in the DRC where President Kabila has just been enabled to run for a third term.

Zimbabwe: A Summer of Discontent

Robert Gabriel Mugabe, born on 21 February 1924, is still the president of Zimbabwe at the age of 92, having been in power for nearly 30 years, since 22 December 1987. He has experienced opposition to his regime from various quarters over the years he has been in power, including of course from the Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai, and has generally managed effectively to co-opt and/or suppress those who acted against him and his ruling party, ZANU-PF. But for how much longer can he maintain his dominance over politics in Zimbabwe?

The 30 July 2016 issue of the Economist carried a piece on Zimbabwe in which was discussed ‘a fresh round of challenges to Robert Mugabe’s deadly grip on power’, referring in particular to ‘the sudden rise of a protest movement led by a previously unknown clergyman, Evan Mawarire, whose hashtag #ThisFlag has caught the nation’s imagination’.

What some, like the Economist, have heralded as the start of a new wave of protest against the regime of President Mugabe began in effect in March 2015, with the one-man demonstrations against Mugabe’s regime at African Unity Square in Harare staged by journalist-cum-activist Itai Dzamara – who was subsequently arrested and ‘disappeared’. As Simukai Tinhu (a journalist based on London) suggests, in his piece of 17 June 2016 in the Zimbabwe Independent:

Instead of watching from the sidelines as the country collapses, it appears Zimbabweans are now prepared to try something new to address various problems facing the nation… it would be incontestable to suggest that until recently social activism had become moribund and thus something that was pretty much alien to Zimbabweans. But with a slew of several social protest movements that have sprung up in the last few months, Dzamara’s demonstrations appear to have set the ball rolling.

Though not headline-grabbing as those of his brother, Itai’s younger sibling Patson has since picked up from where he left. In April this year, in an act of considerable bravery, the younger Dzamara also staged a lone demonstration against the regime and its leader during the Independence Day celebrations. Holding a banner emblazoned with “Independent – But Not Free. Where Is My Brother Itai?” his protest was seen as a direct challenge to the nonagenarian who was due, on that day, to address thousands of supporters at the National Sports Stadium in Harare. Patson was roughed up by state security agents and forcibly removed from the event. But Dzamara brothers have not been alone in this new defiance. Tinhu suggests that:

The most interesting mini social protest movement that galvanised the social media has been #This Flag, orchestrated by clergyman Evan Mawarire. The precipitous rise of this energetic pastor’s movement took many by surprise and even prompted threats by establishment figures. Information technology minister, Supa Mandiwanzira, accused the pastor of subverting the state and made unspecified threats. However, despite such threats Mawarire seems not to be giving up. Others have since joined the pro-democracy movement from unlikely quarters. Most notable is former Zanu PF youth leader Acie Lumumba, who recently quit the ruling party alleging corruption and mismanagement by the regime. With his ‘Dig Deeper’ slogan, the youthful politician revved up a contingent of anti-regime dissenters on the social media with threats to unearth corrupt deals by government officials, including his former boss, Indigenisation minister Patrick Zhuwao.

In July 2016, the German Development magazine D+C (Development and Co-operation) carried a piece on the #This Flag movement in Zimbabwe, which remarked that ‘tens of thousands of responses and retweets nationally and internationally show that Mawarire has voiced the pent-up frustration of his fellow citizens with their government.’ The Economist also suggests that the #ThisFlag campaign ‘has caught the nation’s imagination’ and that ‘bolstered by the clever use of social media, has drawn support from churches and the middle class which had hitherto tended to keep clear of street politics. When Mr Mawarire, whose trademark is the Zimbabwean flag wrapped around himself, was arrested earlier this month (July), a large crowd, including many lawyers, converged on the court-house where he was being held, until he was freed amid triumphant cheers the next day’.

It also noted that a general strike organized by #ThisFlag and taking place on 6 July 2016, ‘was heeded by an unusually large number of people’, and that ‘many Zimbabweans, especially the legions who eke out a living by petty trading, have been infuriated by a ban on the import of basic household goods’. This had provoked demonstrations and the torching of a warehouse at the Beit Bridge border with South Africa. This was not all. Minibus drivers, frustrated by the mushrooming of roadblocks where the police demand bribes have also protested violently this month. So, it was not just in the social media that the expressions of dissent were voiced, but in the street and on the ground.

President Mugabe was probably most shaken, however, by the recent growth of highly personal hostility among the ‘war veterans’ (many of whom are in fact too young to have seen action in the civil war of the 1970s), one of whose associations condemned Mugabe’s ‘bankrupt leadership’ publicly on 21 July 2016: ‘we note with concern, shock and dismay’, it declared, ‘the systematic entrenchment of dictatorial tendencies, personified by the president and his cohorts, which have slowly devoured the values of the liberation struggle’. A spokesman for a rival veterans’ group, the Zimbabwe Liberators’ Platform, that has long derided those who have recently turned on President Mugabe as ‘thugs’ who have supported him in the past, commented that ‘they have been benefiting from the system, but now they’ve been kicked off the gravy train, they’re seeing the light’.

The #This Flag Movement

As far as the #ThisFlag movement is concerned, the D+C article wonders ‘whether it will have a real impact on Zimbabwe’s acrimonious politics’ and concludes that ‘it is too early to say’. ‘Real democracy’, it observes, ‘will not magically appear from merely re-tweeting a hashtag. Social media channels are vital to address issues, but on their own, they are not powerful enough to effect political change. Real changes require action on the ground and not mere desk-top or mobile screen political activism’. It is true that while internet access and mobile use has grown rapidly in Zimbabwe (as in other parts of Africa) in the past decade, social media users remain largely urban and middle class, or those in the diaspora, which is largely comprised of expatriates who left because they opposed Mugabe.

The main criticism leveled against such movements of popular protest and dissent by many on the left has been an alleged failure to yield tangible results; in particular, the overnight removal of an entrenched regime (see the recent piece by Firoze Manju to which I have written a Rejoinder – both published on roape.net). A ‘lack of essential ingredients’, said to be required for a successful movement, such as compelling ideas, an ideology and the financial resources, have been cited as the reasons for their ‘failure’. Those who support the regime in Zimbabwe have expressed the view that the whole ‘wave’ of protest is nothing other than a ripple that will soon disappear and fade into oblivion. Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, for example, has colourfully dismissed the #This Flag movement as nothing more than ‘a pastor’s fart in the corridors of power’.

It remains to be seen how far the movement is simply ‘sound and fury signifying nothing’ and how far it serves to mobilise a deeply frustrated population in more ‘grounded’ demonstrations of popular protest and lead to ‘real’ political action. But some, like Tinhu, believe that these small initiatives have already changed the way the opposition, anti-regime dissenters and pro-democracy forces approach the ZANU-PF government’s repression and mismanagement of the nation’s affairs:

a close inspection shows that they might have given birth to the beginning of mass activism in Zimbabwe. In particular these movements have been a success in two respects: firstly, they have gone beyond a threshold that has never been breached before. Whereas in the late 1990s, the main protest movements of labour unions was against International Monetary Fund and the World Bank-instituted economic austerity policies, today, protests are a direct challenge to Mugabe’s rule…

He notes that ‘recently, as Mugabe addressed his supporters from a trip abroad at the Harare International Airport, an unknown elderly woman heckled him. Mugabe only just about managed to contain his anger and asked the woman to put her grievances in writing. This woman represented a different form of social protest, one never seen before from a member of the public — direct attack’. He asks whether these small ripples might, in the fullness of time coalesce or combine to create a genuine wave of social protest. But as he also comments: ‘time will tell’. He argues that these initiatives might, at the very least,

provide the springboard for future protests. With the issues that spawned the social movements, such as unemployment, bond notes, repression and liquidity crunch, not going anywhere soon, the protest movement is here to stay. It might have tapered off as it services its engines, but is likely to return probably with a vengeance. Not only have the protests opened up new paths for successor movements, but they have also provided lessons for activists who have participated and those who continue to participate in these movements.

At the forefront of those whom he sees as becoming restless are the war veterans, a group that has been the backbone of Mugabe’s rule since the 1990s.

The Veterans and Other Discontents[1]

Historically, in return for political muscle in the running of the affairs of the party, the veterans as a whole have campaigned and waged a war of violence on behalf of the regime (and themselves) against both the opposition and the electorate as a whole. But, arguably, that period has ended. The veterans are seeking alternatives. One way in which they may renew themselves is through the anointment of a man who is more likely than any other potential successor to protect their interests. In their attempts to have Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa succeed the frail Mugabe, some of the war veterans have opted for a slash-and-burn approach against anyone who might be perceived as a threat to that ambition. Recently they threatened war against Mugabe’s franchise, the Generation (G40) camp fronted by First Lady Grace Mugabe.

This is not the first time that this group has used such a hostile approach against the president. In 1997 they confronted him over their welfare, a politically marginal issue that the president dealt with by unlocking the safe to the central bank and dishing out huge sums of once-off packages. But what war veterans are demanding this time has inevitably set them on a collision course against Mugabe. Their attempts to influence the direction of the succession race in the former liberation movement have led to counter threats by Mugabe and his supporters. Indeed, recent explicit utterances by veterans endorsing Mnangagwa as heir apparent and criticising Mugabe and ‘his cohorts’ must have been the last straw. Mugabe threatened to carry out another “Gukurahundi”[2] against dissident war veterans.

The other group that seems to have permanently joined the list of anti-Mugabe dissenters within Zanu-PF structures is the Midlands province where Mnangagwa is regarded as the godfather. Having abandoned the president, the Midlands party leadership has become a fair play for Mugabe’s politics of manipulation and oppression. Through his political surrogate, the ruling party’s political commissar and Local Government minister, Saviour Kasukuwere, Mugabe has attempted, on several occasions, to reconstitute the Midlands’ provincial party structures so that its make-up reflects allegiance to his leadership. Kasukuwere even attempted to have Mnangagwa’s close confidant, July Moyo, defenestrated from the party. However, all these strategies have failed dismally. It appears that Mugabe has resigned in his attempts to have this region within his sphere of influence.

On the surface, the Youth League appears firmly in the hands of the nonagenarian. However, its membership shares a different vision to that of its leader. The youths are strongly in defiance of him. Forget about the “million-man march”, which was made up of mostly elderly men, women and children for that matter. The “Save Zanu-PF” group that was disbanded after defying the president, after it had repeatedly lashed out at his wife, represents the position held by most of the youth wing’s membership. Even the current youth leader, Kudzai Chipanga, has a reputation for switching allegiances depending on the direction of the contenders’ political fortunes.

Having been installed as youth leader by the then vice-president Joice Mujuru’s faction, which controlled the commissariat department prior to 2014, Chipanga was a known strong ally of Mujuru’s political group only to chant “Down with Mujuru” when he realised that Mujuru’s political group was losing ground to Mnangagwa and G40 forces in the run-up to the December 2014 congress. Political behaviour is repeatable. Will Chipanga jump overboard when Mugabe’s ship starts sinking? Most likely.

This leaves Mugabe with only the Women’s League reliably in his camp. However, this group is also deeply divided, with some supporting the First Lady and the others resisting Grace’s ascendancy. Though symbolically the First Lady is the leader, there is significant resistance simmering among its rank and file.

It is significant in this regard that Zanu-PF heavies have already been deployed to identify and root out those ‘veterans’ responsible for the declaration of discontent with the president and his cronies. Kasukuwere, a leading backer of the president’s wife, Grace, to succeed the old man, has warned disgruntled war veterans that their farms could be confiscated if they continued to express such sentiments, and newspaper ads summoned all veterans to Zanu-PF headquarters on 27 July to prove their loyalty to Mugabe. After anti-government protests earlier in July thousands of Zanu-PF youth were bused into Harare from the countryside to march in support of Mugabe and his ruling party, with loose promises that they would be given plots of land in Harare and Bulawayo.

But while opposition grows and the regime (and the named heir apparent Mrs Mugabe) adopts its countermeasures, there are voices for a ‘transitional authority’ to take over. Joice Mujuru, for example, who was vice president until she was ejected from Zanu-PF in 2014, is hoping to lead the opposition against whoever takes over her old party. As he nears the end of his regime and his life, President Mugabe must be suffering from sleepless nights, but he is almost certainly unwilling to cede power before he is obliged to do so. ‘We are reaching a tipping point’ commented Eldred Masungungure of the Mass Public Opinion Institute in Harare (according to the Economist), ‘but don’t underestimate the capacity of Zanu-PF to recreate itself’. ‘There could be blood on the floor’ said Pedzisai Ruhanya, described as a pundit, ‘Mugabe is very vindictive. He will not let go’.

How will Mugabe respond?

There are three options for Mugabe. First, he could give in to pressure and offer significant concessions in the form of reforms — another government of national unity on the pretext that the nation wants to solve a national crisis while he is buying time to regroup and consolidate his position within the party. Or, he could opt to resign from the party. But permanently possessed with the spirit of his own political invincibility and immortality, this seems unlikely. The second is to resist the current opposition to his continued rule, until it wears itself out. However, he may feel that these recent small, and seemingly innocuous protests risk assuming a different life form that might result in their getting bigger and more threatening. This is why he is most likely to opt for the tried and tested option — and move to crush anything or anyone threatening his hold on power. Indeed, in recent days he has sharpened his rhetoric against the most vocal and most threatening of these protest movements, the war veterans, threatening them, as we have seen, with a Gukurahundi-style backlash.

For now, he seems safe. The anti-regime dissenters, opposition and indeed anyone outside the ruling party are unlikely to be successful. This is because two ingredients which are almost always crucial in the success of social movements are absent in Zimbabwe. First, the general feeling that the regime is vulnerable and that there is little that it can do to contain social protests without consequences to its existence. Second, a major movement of social protest is not an event that happens suddenly. It is a process that takes months, if not years. The current social movement in Zimbabwe can barely count a few months of existence.

Equally, the resistance movement in the ruling party has little chance of toppling him. The most significant of the constituencies fighting Mugabe within ZANU-PF, the war veterans, are banking on the support of the military. The removal of their ally, army chief General Constantine Chiwenga, would mean that their political stock will immediately crash. Also, the incarceration of its leadership might paralyse it.

Generally, Mugabe’s current handling of social protests and the troubles in his party indicates that he is confident that he can weather the storm. The only real threat will come when the pro-democracy forces on one hand, and the resistance movement within Zanu-PF on the other, realise that their common concern is to see Mugabe depart from the political scene. It is likely that only when these two parallel and currently opposed groups coalesce into one grand alliance will a real threat to President Mugabe emerge. Or, alternatively, he could just die.

The Democratic Republic of Congo

As we have discussed in previous issues of this roape.net series on popular protest, social movements and class struggle, political unrest has affected the DRC for several months over concerns that President Kabila intends to extend his rule beyond the second term, which comes to an end in November 2016. Police and demonstrators clashed again towards the end of May amid growing fears that the presidential elections scheduled for November will be postponed, and that this will be because of Joseph Kabila’s intent to remain in office as president beyond the two-term limit.

At least one protester died and two more were wounded by gun-fire during running battles in Goma, the largest city in the east, while security forces in the capital, Kinshasa, fired teargas at an opposition march consisting of several thousands. There were also reports that a police officer had been killed by protesters throwing stones, but these could not be verified. At least 59 people were arrested.

Demonstrations planned in other cities were banned by the local authorities. A particularly heavy deployment of riot police was visible in the streets of the southern mining hub of Lubumbashi, where supporters of the opposition presidential candidate Moise Katumbi have repeatedly clashed with police in recent months. Katumbi, a former governor of Katanga Province in the south-east of the country and owner of the football team TP Mazembe, has emerged as a major presidential candidate and a potential threat to Kabila. On 13 May, the attorney general issued an arrest warrant for Katumbi, who was accused of ‘threatening the internal and external security of the country’ by recruiting mercenaries to support his cause. Police used tear gas to disperse protesters who had gathered outside the Lubumbashi courtroom to support Katumbi.

Katumbi left the country the next day, ostensibly to receive medical treatment in South Africa for injuries sustained during a demonstration in Lubumbashi earlier in the month. With Kabila’s powerful rival, effectively driven into exile in South Africa, many feel generally disgruntled. Katumbi supporters in the Citizen Front have recently defied the ban on protests in North Kivu and Lubumbashi. Opposition parties and civil society groups had called for nationwide demonstrations to protest against the ruling earlier in the month by Congo’s Constitutional Court that would allow President Joseph Kabila to remain in power if presidential and parliamentary elections due in November are not held. Western nations, including the US, have warned Kabila to stick to the election calendar.

Kabila took office less than two weeks after his father was shot by a bodyguard in the presidential palace in 2001. He was elected president in disputed polls in 2006 and again in 2011. A third term is barred by Congo’s constitution. Though he was given a boost when allies won more than two-thirds of the elections for governors of newly created provinces in March 2016, he has so far not tried to push through constitutional changes to allow him to stand for a third term, in contrast to other leaders in the region; nor has he expressed a desire to continue after his second term of office expires in November. A court ruling, however, has expressed the view that Kabila could remain in power if elections slated for November are not held.

Government officials deny that the president is seeking to remain in power. His supporters argue that major logistic shortcomings need to be overcome and a ‘secure environment’ established across Congo before the scheduled elections can be held. This may take up to four years, they say. They have a point. The DRC is nearly two-thirds the size of Western Europe and has a population of more than 79 million. The registration of voters has always been a problem and, particularly given estimates of the rate of population growth in the DRC – about 2.7 per cent per annum – it is likely that the current registered numbers seriously underestimate those eligible to vote in any forthcoming elections.

But the opposition remains skeptical of such explanations, and is wary of what is widely interpreted simply as a manoeuvre to enable Kabila to hold on to power for another term. Travel disruptions were reported in Kinshasa, including along Boulevard Lumumba, on 27 July 2016, as tens of thousands of supporters awaited the arrival at N’Djili International Airport of Etienne Tshisekedi, the veteran leader of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), who has spent the past two years in exile. On his arrival, his supporters accompanied him to the UDPS headquarters in the Limete municipality of Kinshasa. On the same day, two people were injured and seven others arrested as police used violence to disperse an opposition gathering in Lubumbashi and Tshikapa, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office in DRC.

Both pro- and anti-government protests were planned to take place in major urban areas throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) at the end of July and into August. A large demonstration in support of proposed talks on the electoral process and of the president, Joseph Kabila (called by the ruling coalition, the Majorité Présidentielle), was scheduled for 29 July at the Stade Tata Raphael in Kinshasa. On 31 July, two days later, large opposition rallies were expected at the Stade des Martyrs in Kinshasa, where Tshisekedi was due to speak, and at the Grande Place Tshombe in Lubumbashi, organised by the opposition coalition known as the Rally of Forces for Change (Rassemblement des Forces du Changement), to demand that the presidential elections be held on schedule in November, as required by the Constitution.

There were concerns about the possibility of violence, and Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes, Muthoni Wanyeki, demanded that ‘the authorities … facilitate the right to peaceful assembly for all, including opposition supporters protesting election delays that they regard as a tactic to prolong President Joseph Kabila’s stay in power’ and that ‘police and other security forces …refrain from using force against peaceful protesters’. Opposition parties are likely to call for larger, more frequent demonstrations through the coming months to bolster their support base and to highlight fears of attempts by Kabila and his supporters to extend his period in office into a third term. The cities of Kinshasa, Lubumbashi and Goma are likely to be focal points for anti-government demonstrations.

In the meanwhile, the UK Minister for the Middle East and Africa, Tobias Ellwood, visited the DRC on 8-10 August 2016. In a series of meetings, including with the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice, he pressed the government to make more progress towards holding timely elections. The Minister also met with opposition figures, and emphasised the importance of elections to the DRC’s continuing development. The UK Foreign Office advice to travelers (online) warns that ‘the political situation in DRC in late 2016 remains uncertain. There are calls for a political dialogue ahead of elections due in 2016 under the constitution. A previous electoral calendar scheduled the Presidential election for 27 November 2016, although some national and international organisations have said this will not be possible given delays in electoral preparations. Opposition parties have publicly called for elections to be scheduled by 20 September 2016 for elections to take place before 20 December 2016’.

On 20 August 2016, it was reported that the next presidential election will be delayed until at least July 2017, according to the Election Commission, allowing Joseph Kabila to stay in power beyond the end of his mandate in December. A campaign to register more than 30 million voters that started in March will inevitably take some time – an estimated 16 months – to complete, Election Commission president, Corneille Nangaa, told representatives of political parties in the capital, Kinshasa. Democratic Republic of Congo’s highest court ruled in May that Kabila could remain in office if his government failed to hold an election due in November. “The issue before us today in Congo is how to reconcile the electoral cycle … with the technical constraints we face,” Nangaa said, referring to the logistical challenges of holding elections in a nation roughly the size of Western Europe.

Many anticipated this outcome, but it is likely to fuel further anti-Kabila street protests.

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

Feature photograph: Demonstration against Robert Mugabe’s regime next to the Zimbabwe embassy in London, on August 12, 2006

Notes

[1] This section largely paraphrases Tinhu’s argument.

[2] ‘Gukurahundi’ is a term used to refer to the 1980s atrocities carried out by the predominantly Shona Zanu government and its forces which led to deaths of thousands of civilians, mainly Ndebele, who tended to support ZAPU and Joshua Nkomo, Mugabe’s main political rival and were thus identified as a threat to be eliminated.

Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism

ROAPE

September 21, 2016

By Simukai Chigudu

Francis B Nyamnjoh, #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (Cameroon: Langaa RPCIG, 2016)

In 2015 a wave of student protests erupted across South African universities. They overwhelmingly expressed discontent at the failure to ‘decolonise’ tertiary education 21 years after the dawn of the democratic era. Beginning at the University of Cape Town (UCT) under the moniker Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and then succeeded by cognate movements at different universities, these protests ignited some of the most heated and pertinent public debates in the country about history, race, entitlement and citizenship.

In this account of RMF, Francis B. Nyamnjoh offers an urgent and important analysis of the drivers, logics, historical bases, future prospects and potential pitfalls of student activism premised on the idea of ‘decolonising’ education. As a professor of anthropology at the University of Cape Town and an accomplished writer on the politics of education in Africa, Nyamnjoh is well placed to offer an incisive take on the movement.

He leads with a portrait of Cecil John Rhodes whose dubious legacy is etched in UCT’s history and institutional memory. As he argues, ‘Rhodes took over, ruled, developed and exploited for his personal profit and that of Britain the lands and bodies of those he conquered, turning them into amakwerekwere [a pejorative term for outsiders] on their own native soil, their homeland’ (p28). The comprehensive view Nyamnjoh provides of Rhodes’ imperialism and its attendant history of racialised alienation, exploitation and dispossession offers a powerful context for enduring black pain and trauma that the memorialisation of Rhodes evokes. This is why a statue of Rhodes, at the heart of UCT’s campus, was such a cogent signifier of white privilege and black oppression.

Nyamnjoh thoughtfully makes the case for a movement to decolonise education noting that education in Africa ‘is still the victim of a resilient colonial and colonising epistemology’ (p69). He points out that tertiary education on the continent tends to dismiss local histories as parochial; local struggles as subordinate to global concerns; and local languages, customs, and knowledge systems as backward and unworthy of serious intellectual inquiry. Such an orientation is antithetical to fostering the conviviality – ‘the spirit of togetherness, interpenetration, interdependence and intersubjectivity’ (p69) – so desperately needed to heal and unify South Africa’s wounded and divided society. It is here that the demands of RMF resonate most powerfully.

However, Nyamnjoh does not subscribe to a romanticised view of protest. He is at pains to give attention to the personal and political conflicts that occurred within and as a result of the RMF movement. For instance, he offers an even-handed appraisal of the leadership of Chumani Maxwele. He praises Maxwele for his courage and political acumen, especially in using human faeces to desecrate the Rhodes statue and therefore underscore the depth of poverty, injustice and inequality that the statue belies. In Maxwele’s own words: ‘We want white people to know how we live. We live in poo. I am from a poor family; we are using portaloos. Are you happy with that?’ (p77). At the same time, Nyamnjoh brings forth the charges of rape levelled against Maxwele and gives space to discuss the dynamics of patriarchy and transphobia that permeated RMF.

Importantly, Nyamnjoh argues that movements like RMF risk propagating a zero-sum mentality in which further divisions are created in the battle for decolonisation and in claims to restitution: between black and white, the middle and working classes, South Africans and foreign nationals. The speed and reach of RMF and then Fees Must Fall may have compromised the depth of the movements. For Nyamnjoh this is evident in their relative inattention to a ‘disposition of mutual accommodation’ (p205) for all who inhabit South Africa. Therefore he concludes that ‘for existing colonial statues and monument to signify anything but oppression and dispossession, they would have to be re-articulated, recalibrated and reconfigured into multi-cultural symbols of reconciliation’ (p207). This calls for greater humility and awareness of the sensibilities and concerns of ‘the various shades of the rainbow nation’ (p207).

Nyamnjoh’s book is written with clarity and panache. His account is timely and informative. In an impressively short time, he has assimilated a vast amount of material on RMF and provided a clear chronology and analysis of its emergence and trajectory. His critique is balanced throughout and his claims are, for the most part, substantiated. Nevertheless, aspects of the book will leave the reader craving more. For a work by an anthropologist, the book is thin where it comes to a more ethnographic account of RMF. One wants an insider’s view: a greater understanding of RMF’s participants, their modes of engagement, practices of agenda setting and reflections on the movement. Furthermore, the theoretical observations made by Nymanjoh could have been even more effective if linked to the writing and perspectives of other scholars who have been documenting the RMF movement. The work of Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni comes to mind. His presentation on RMF at the London School of Economics, for example, placed the movement with a genealogy of student protest in South Africa and went further in theorising the politics of decolonisation. These insights would add richly to Nyamnjoh’s account.

In summary, this is a compelling first monograph on RMF. It is highly readable and engaging and will easily be of interest to a wide range of observers interested in RMF and the politics of student protest in South Africa. For scholars, this book will be foundational to further work on RMF and it provides a compendious list of references and sources for deeper research. As a participant in the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford and as a scholar researching African history and politics, I recommend this book without hesitation.

Simukai Chigudu is a DPhil (PhD) candidate in International Development at the University of Oxford where he is a Hoffman-Weidenfeld scholar. Follow him on Twitter @SimuChigudu

Nigerian Marxism: Political Ammunition

ROAPE

September 14, 2016

By Salvador Ousmane

Adam Mayer, Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (London: Pluto Press, 2016)

Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa and around one in five Africans are Nigerian. Despite the oil wealth, most of the people are extremely poor, with around 60% of the population having to exist on a dollar a day or less. This level of poverty and inequality creates a high degree of anger and many Nigerians are searching for alternatives.

Some have turned to nationalism, as with the case of Biafra or ethnic clashes between the Fulani cattle herders and local farmers in the central belt. Others look to religion, for example, the born-again Christian churches, the Shiite supporters of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria or, in the far north east, Boko Haram.

But Marxism is deep within the Nigerian labour movement. The Labour movement unites Northerners and Southerners; Muslim, Christian and traditional workers. When this movement is aroused the whole country stops – as last happened in January 2012. This involves the organised workers, predominantly in the public sector, but also much wider layers of the urban masses: the informal workers, area boys and market mamas. Adam Mayer’s Naija Marxisms – many Nigerians refer to their country as ‘Naija’ – provides a comprehensive historical introduction to the ideas that guide such movements.

The first part of Naija Marxisms provides a potted history of the left and the trade union movement in Nigeria. It considers a range of socialist and Marxist writers that developed within this movement. Since at least the mid 1940s, Marxism has been an important current in the fight against colonialism, within the trade unions, the feminist and the student movements.

In the first half of the 20^th century, the Nigerian economy was dominated by European firms and the colonial government. As such the anti-colonial movement was against both colonialism and the main employers of formal labour. In contrast now, although international firms are still important (especially in the key oil sector), the main employers are the governments (Federal and state) and indigenous companies (the larger ones of which have developed a regional or continental reach).

The first trade union (for civil servants) was established in 1912. An early strike in 1921 successfully prevented an attempt to reduce wages. With this background, the first Marxist inspired party, the African Workers Union of Nigeria was established in 1931.

Mayer describes how, as part of the post-second world war radicalism, the first general strike took place in 1945 and the mass nationalist Zikist Movement started the following year. Zikism relied heavily on trade union leaders. Its field secretary, Nduka Eze went on to lead a major strike at UAC (then the largest European owned company). The first leader of the trade union movement, Michael Imoudou, was also a member of the Movement.

Four years after independence, in 1960, there was another general strike against preventive detention. In the 1970s further restrictions were introduced on trade union activities and in 1978, the military government merged the trade unions to form the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) – which remains the largest trade union centre.

Muhammadu Buhari, the current president of Nigeria, then the military leader introduced anti-labour decrees in the early 1980s. This was followed by the Structural Adjustment programme of the mid-1980s with deindustrialisation, wage cuts and attempts to reduce the fuel subsidy. There were fight backs with the 1981 strike for a minimum wage and a pro-democracy general strike in 1994. The strike wave continued and expanded after the end of military rule in 1999.

Student protests grew with the extension of university education in the 1960s. By the 1970s student action was considered as significant as the trade union movement. These developments gave birth to a layer of Marxist intellectuals including Ola Oni, Eskor Toyo and Eddie Madunagu.

In addition, to providing this historical overview, the book includes a chapter on international relations and the Nigerian left. Mayer explains that whilst the elite of the country clearly looked to the US, socialists looked to other African radicals such as Amilcar Cabral (of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde) or Joe Slovo (South Africa) or to figures such as Angela Davis.

Russia provided arms to the Federal Government during the Biafran war (1967-1970), some aid for capital projects, for example, the Ajaokuta Steel Mill and supported many students studying in Russia and Eastern Europe. Despite this, the Nigerian government turned its back on the East after the civil war and in 1976 three leading trade unionists were indicted for “acting in the interests of a foreign power.”

Despite some criticism of the Soviet Union, many Nigerian socialists lost an important financial and ideological external backer with the collapse of ‘communism’ from 1989. However at least two small Marxist groups, the Democratic Socialist Movement (established in 1987) and the Socialist Workers League (from the 1990s) continue to provide organisational homes for many Marxists in Nigeria.

In the central chapters of his book, Mayer considers the background ideas and key publications of many key Nigerian socialists. Authors covering a wide range of views are included and the reader is left to distinguish between those who were largely uncritical of the Soviet Union, some who were fundamentally nationalists and others of the classical school who clearly support socialism from below. In the chapter on activists and intellectuals Mayer considers a number of important Marxist activists and thinkers. It is worth introducing some of them to roape.net readers.

Niyi Oniororo who died in 2005, was Ola Oni’s brother mentioned above, but much more favourably inclined to the so-called socialist states. He quoted George Bernard Shaw on taxing the rich and criticised other socialists from the late 1970s for their search for money.

Mokwugo Okoye, who died in 1998, was the Secretary General of the Zikist Movement and waxed lyrical about the student revolt in Africa and beyond and was a broadcaster. He was one of the few Nigerian socialists who argued strongly against faith as being a “firm belief in something for which there is no evidence – is, historically, a harmful quality since it invariably leads to fanaticism, narrow-mindedness and cruelty.”

Eskor Toyo who died as the book was being completed in 2015 was educated in Poland and was a professor of economics at the University of Calabar. He wrote a critique of dependency theory (developed by Samir Amin and others) in the early 1980s as being based on contradictions between national economies rather than classes. He was critical of Eastern Europe and supported Trotsky and Mao, he called for support of the Peoples’ Redemption Party (PRP).

Eddie Madunagu is a Trotskyist and was a mathematics professor at the University of Calabar. His wife Bene was also an academic and is a well known feminist. Eddie was a columnist for the Guardian, a Nigerian daily paper, for many years. He established a public library and an NGO to educate boys on feminism.

In a chapter devoted to political economists Mayer considers, amongst others, Bade Onimode – who died in 2001 – who continued to talk about neo-colonialism being the main enemy despite the growth of a class of rich Nigerians with the indigenisation decrees of 1972 and 1976 and the privatisation of the 1980s. Bade advocated structural disengagement from the global economy to ensure the development of the local economy. His 1990s works talk much less of socialism, but he remained a Marxist.

The final main chapter of the book considers feminist ideas. In many parts of Nigeria pre-colonial oppression of women had been less onerous than it was to become. This was shown most clearly with the women’s war of 1929-30 in south eastern Nigeria. Women rose-up against the misguided reforms of the colonialists and the missionaries and the removal of the influential roles for women in their pre-colonial societies. Fifty-eight women died before this revolt was ‘pacified’, although they did gain some important improvements. Mayer writes about radical Marxist inspired feminism. Two of the key early figures of Nigerian Marxist feminism were Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti from the south west and Gambo Sawaba from the North. Ransome-Kuti came from an elite family, but joined the fight for market and other women. She formed the Abeokuta Women’s Union with 20,000 members to fight against taxation and for decolonialism and universal franchise (northern women only gained the vote in 1977). Sawaba was jailed 17 times and charged with prostitution in a show trial where she was banned from Kano. She was an early member of the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) in Zaria and managed to meet-up with Ransome-Kuti.

Current prominent socialist feminists today include Bene Madunagu, Molara Ogundipe (both of Women in Nigeria), Amina Mama. The main trade union centre, the NLC, developed its gender equality policy in 2003 and has continued to develop this area of its activities.

Naija Marxisms describes how Nigerian Marxist theory developed in the second half of the 20^th century and still “provides intellectual ammunition” for the labour movement. Broadly speaking, it considers Nigeria to be a capitalist country, embedded in a global capitalist economy, but affected by traditional feudal structures. As Mayer writes, “Nigerian Marxism has been a coherent intellectual movement that provided important answers to the existential questions troubling Nigeria and West Africa, from the late 1940s up to now.”

With its direct links to the NLC, and the organised working-class, Marxism remains a key force in modern Nigeria. There have been major strikes, for example, in most of the states since the fall of the oil price in 2015. The Marxist inspired labour movement, with its long history, explains some of this militancy. ‘Naija Marxisms’ are buttressed by anti-imperialism, feminism and the anti-feudal northern peasantry. It retains an organised form with a number of Marxist groups still inspired and informed by a sophisticated tradition of home-grown internationalist Marxism. Adam Mayer’s book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to this important school of thought for socialists in Nigeria, West Africa and beyond.

Salvador Ousmane is a Senior Lecturer and writer.

Decolonizing Education: Rhodes Must Fall

ROAPE

September 8, 2016

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By Simukai Chigudu

In 1993, Edward Said – the celebrated Palestinian literary theoretician and professor of comparative literature at Columbia University – gave the Reith lectures for the BBC. A quote from this series of talks, entitled ‘Representations of the Intellectual,’ is enshrined in the MPhil student handbook at the Oxford Department of International Development on the grounds that it captures the department’s philosophy of questioning and criticism. It reads as follows:

The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, a philosophy or opinion… And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by government or corporations and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues who are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.

In many ways, this is what the debate about Rhodes Must Fall (RMF), both in South Africa and in Oxford, is about: whose history is told and whose is swept under the rug; whose issues matter and whose are routinely forgotten.

Born in relation to the RMF movement at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, RMF in Oxford is both an expression of transnational solidarity and a critique of institutional racism and the politics of exclusion at Oxford. While Oxford is certainly strewn with a range of tributes to the ‘great men of Empire’, the figure of Cecil John Rhodes has, at this historical moment, brought together diverse moral communities and has opened up an avenue for the articulation of shared grievances against imperialism and its legacies.

By now the story of Rhodes is a familiar one. The British businessman, mining magnate and Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896 was an ardent believer in British imperialism. Rhodes and his British South Africa Company founded the southern African territory of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), which the company named after him in 1895. South Africa’s Rhodes University is also named after him. Rhodes set up the provisions of the Rhodes Scholarship, which is funded by his estate, and put much effort towards his vision of a Cape to Cairo Railway through British territory.

Let’s make no mistake about it, Rhodes’ imperialist pursuits were egregiously violent and continue to shape the distribution of resources and ideas about race in contemporary southern Africa. The motive of the invading force can be encapsulated by a letter written by an administrator, colleague, and friend of Rhodes – W. A. Jarvis – to his mother about their plans to invade the area north of the Limpopo river: “The last thing to do is to wipe them all out as far as one can – everything black … I hope the natives will be pretty-well exterminated … There are about 5,500 niggers in the district and our plan of campaign will probably be to proceed against this lot and wipe them out then move towards Bulawayo, wiping out every nigger and every kraal [house] we find. And then you may be sure there will be no quarter and everything black will have to die.”

The pattern of settler colonialism that prevailed in the region involved the establishment and maintenance of political, economic, and social structures predicated upon racial domination. As a Zimbabwean, indulge me as I say a few words about my country’s historical experience of colonialism. In Rhodesia, for much of the 20th century, 8 million disenfranchised blacks eked out a living at subsistence level or below it, while 250,000 whites, barely 3 per cent of the population, enjoyed a privileged existence that included, among other things, the highest per-capita number of private swimming pools in the world. The white minority owned more than half of the country’s available land, and virtually all of its business and industry. Education, health care, housing, were all segregated, with whites enjoying levels equivalent to those in Western Europe or the United States. Blacks were confined by law to black urban townships, barren rural ‘tribal trust-lands’ or the workers’ quarters of the white commercial farms – on which the World Bank found more than half of black children were undernourished. There was no minimum wage until 1979, when it was set at $20 per month.

Let us return to Oxford. What does it mean then to celebrate the munificence of the architect of such a system without acknowledging the injustice and suffering meted out to those from whom his wealth was extracted? Over the course of multiple debates at the university, it has been repeatedly stated that Rhodes’ actions should not be judged by today’s standards since Rhodes was a product of his time despite the fact that the peoples of southern Africa vigorously opposed Rhodes and colonialism through numerous protests, wars and insurgencies from the 1890s onwards. Moreover, RMF has been accused of trying re-write or, more ironically, to ‘whitewash’ history. The newly appointed Vice-Chancellor of the university, Louise Richardson, has made this precise claim; while the Chancellor of the University, Chris Patten, went as far as saying that students who don’t like Rhodes should consider ‘being educated elsewhere’. His criticisms went further. He charged that agitation to remove the Rhodes statue was tantamount to suppressing free speech and was a form of self-indulgent victimhood that was too afraid to face up to the historical record. Similarly, the celebrated Classicist and Cambridge Professor Mary Beard suggested that Rhodes Must Fall Students must become empowered enough to face the statue. The principal of Hertford College, Will Hutton – an ostensibly left-wing intellectual – said that if it were not for the legacies of empire such as constitutionalism, rule of law and free speech, then South Africa would descend into unaccountable despotism as embodied by Jacob Zuma. One wonders what history Mr Hutton has been reading that has lead him to think that apartheid embodied any of these values. One more comment that captures much of the establishment’s common sense, Oriel alumnus and conservative MP, Daniel Hennan, wrote an op-ed in the Telegraph in which he charged that RMF is a ‘cretinous mob’ made up of politically correct victims who are ‘too dim to be at university’.

For the writer Teju Cole, such commentary simply represents a white supremacist establishment’s hostility toward ‘post-colonial assertions of self’. For me, the irony of this exchange is that Oxford’s leadership has demonstrated the very Eurocentric thinking that RMF in Oxford is railing against, both in the popular imagination and in scholarly practice. Far from erasing history, RMF is challenging orthodox historical consciousness about the Empire in the British imagination. As social scientists, historians and scholars of material culture have long argued, statues are imbued with power and politics and remain subject to contestation and renegotiation. RMF thus invites us to ask questions on how we memorialise the past and whose narratives we privilege in doing so and why. Indeed, we would do well to ask similar questions about other legacies and statues at the university. These moments are productive and positive ones. They allow us the opportunity to debate the concerns raised by those who have been affected directly by these histories; they allow us to consider the ways in which these legacies continue to affect us all; and they force us to ask how best to publicly mark such histories. The idea that the RMF movement is trying to shut down debate or efface history entirely misses the point. It is the attacks on and threats against individuals involved in RMF (of which there are many), and it is the facile suggestion that RMF activists are born of a culture of victimhood, that has most clearly endangered an open debate about the past and its role in the present.

Ultimately, RMF was unsuccessful in its bid for the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. Experiences at Oxford demonstrate just how fraught student activism is. Limited by a high turnover of students, the short-term horizons of the academic calendar, the intellectual demands of intense programmes of study and the inertia of a centuries-old university, it is a wonder that RMF gained the traction that it did. The statue may not have come down but calling for its removal was and effective strategy for provoking a national debate about how British institutions teach and memorialise the country’s imperial past and deal with racism in the present. Within Oxford University, various faculty members and departments have initiated the complex discussions about curriculum review and possible reform in part because of RMF. Furthermore, other universities in Britain – for example, the University of Edinburgh, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University College London, Queen Mary University of London – have hosted conferences and panel discussions about decolonizing the academy and several have invited RMF activists, myself included, to participate in such discussions.

The notion of decolonisation has proven to be a cogent idiom for the work of RMF. In this context, it serves as a manifold metaphor to mean questioning the hegemony of white, western thought in fields of study as diverse as history, politics, philosophy, modern languages, and literature. Far from erasure, this is about free speech in its truest form: it is about pluralising and complicating the ways in which knowledge is produced, disseminated and granted legitimacy. Following Said, it seems to me that as scholars we all share an intellectual obligation to push this endeavour forward.

Simukai Chigudu is a DPhil candidate in International Development at ODID, at the University of Oxford, where he holds a Hoffman-Weidenfeld scholarship.

Feature photograph: Monument to Cecil Rhodes in Alfred Street, Oxford

Research in Mozambique

ROAPE

September 5, 2016

By Gary Littlejohn

The IESE (Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Economicos) will be holding its fifth annual conference towards the end of 2017. The call for papers for this has already gone out. It is remarkable that the IESE has succeeded in organising nine annual conferences already under what have been at times difficult circumstances, but what is more remarkable is the sheer scale and ambition of such conferences, which are run by a fairly small research institute that is entirely dependent on the funds that it raises through consultancy work and book sales, although at least at times it has also benefitted from some core funding from Scandinavia and elsewhere.

That would be admirable enough, but what is most striking is the quality of work produced. The flow of core and specific research project funding would not have been forthcoming otherwise, but it is a consistent feature of their work. For example, one book in Portuguese edited by Sérgio Chichava and Chris Allen (2012) The Mamba and the Dragon: Mozambique-China Relations in Perspective, 200pp., published jointly by IESE and the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), acknowledges support from the Swiss Agency of Cooperation for Development; the Royal Embassy of Denmark; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland; Irish Cooperation; IBIS Mozambique and the Swedish Embassy; and the Canadian International Development Agency.

I wish that more of it could be translated into English. I myself have only attended two such conferences, in 2010 and 2012. However, I have also visited the IESE on other trips to Maputo, in the hope of bringing home some more of their books and to discuss current issues in Mozambique. Usually one or two new books by IESE are launched at each conference, and they tend to include the annual issue of a series: Desafios Para Moçambique (Challenges for Mozambique). For 2012, the latest edition that I have, Desafios was edited by Luis de Brito, Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco, Sérgio Chichava and António Francisco. It consists of a series of chapters by different authors, running to 426 pages, plus another ten pages listing earlier publications by IESE. In addition to books, this list includes a list of 46 different papers in the series BOLETIM IDeIAS, running from 2008 to 2012; six DISCUSSION PAPERS running from 2008 to 2009; one WORKING PAPER in 2009; and eleven CADERNOS IESE 2010-2011, a series which replaced the Working Papers and the Discussion Papers. Some of these papers are published in both Portuguese and English. The third book published in 2012 was Moçambique: Decentralisar O Centralismo (Mozambique: Decentralising Centralism). It was edited by Bernhard Weimer and runs to 492 pages, and has a wide range of edited chapters, plus the usual list of earlier IESE publications. This is an astonishing output, in terms of both quantity and quality.

Turning to the conferences, I was really surprised by their scale and by the scope of international contributions, even though I have known some of the IESE staff since I first lived in Mozambique in 1982-83. It was not that I doubted their organisational ability, or those of other friends. For example, Teresa Cruz e Silva and colleagues at the CEA (Centro de Estudos Africanos) had organised a huge, successful Conferencia Luso-Afro-Brasileiro in Maputo some years earlier, and this was the first time that this particular conference series had been held in Africa. What surprised me was not only the scale and scope of the IESE conferences, but the extent of national media coverage for a conference that was equal in size to the UK African Studies Association (ASA) conferences, although smaller than the US ASA conferences. The full programme was covered in the main national newspaper, Noticias, and by reports and interviews were broadcast by two Mozambican TV stations. Last minute changes to the programme also received full coverage in Noticias. The conferences included distinguished speakers from Southern Africa, especially South Africa, and from Europe and North America, especially Canada. For example, in 2012 I had not expected to run into Professor Jan Toporowski from SOAS in London, whom I had not seen for several decades. This expert in the work of the Polish economist Kalecki gave a very clear, measured critique of neoliberal economics assumptions in one of the plenary sessions in 2012. I was delighted to learn that he was also writing a biography of Kalecki, whose work deserves more attention in my view.

Other books are also launched at the IESE conferences, and in 2012 these included the English edition of a Japanese history of the war with Renamo. Technical economics books were also on sale, including one in Portuguese on social accounting matrices. To my surprise, even old examples of Não Vamos Esquecer were on sale, from the CEA Oficina de Historia (History Workshop), published in around 1983.

It is good to see that what might be called Briefings, the series BOLETIM IDeIAS, has continued. At least some are published in English as well as Portuguese, and five of them are reproduced with an introduction by Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco and posted on the Resource page of roape.net. The IDeIAS in the title refers to ‘Information on Development, Institutions and Social Analysis’. They were published in June and July 2016.

Finally, I have attached the call for papers (in English and Portuguese) for IESE’s V International Conference, which will take place in Maputo on the 19-21 of September 2017.

Gary Littlejohn is the author of Secret Stockpiles: A review of disarmament efforts in Mozambique, Working Paper 21, Small Arms Survey, Geneva, October 2015. He was also Briefings and Debates editor of the Review of African Political Economy from 2010 to 2015.

Zambian Democracy: All Heat, No Light

ROAPE

September 1, 2016

By Alastair Fraser

After the deaths of two serving Presidents, Levy Mwanawasa in 2008 and Michael Sata in 2014, Zambians have been to the polls five times in the last decade. Their most recent visit, on 11 August, involved a complex series of elections under new constitutional rules including the requirement that the winner secure more than 50% of the vote, even if this necessitated a second round run-off. Voters were offered five separate ballot papers to choose a President, MPs, mayors/council chairpersons, councillors and finally to vote in a referendum on further amendments to the constitution and the introduction of a Bill of Rights. The counting was supposed to take two days. A fortnight later, the Electoral Commission has almost finished posting preliminary results on its website.

The ruling Patriotic Front (PF) won the National Assembly and local government elections comfortably. Turnout was too low for the referendum to pass, even though a majority of those who voted approved. Still, we are no closer to knowing who the next President will be. The incumbent, Edgar Lungu, very narrowly cleared the 50% hurdle in the first round. But the poll has sparked a petition to the (new) Constitutional Court. The opposition United Party for National Development (UPND) claim the results have been rigged and also object to bias in the public media and the ways in which the Public Order Act was deployed throughout the campaign to frustrate their mobilisation.

Previous Zambian election petitions have gone nowhere. A ruling is expected on 1 September on whether the incumbent is allowed to stay in office during the case, or must stand down in favour of the Speaker. Debates on this question, and whether the President elect ought to have been sworn in (he hasn’t been) have been complicated by playing the game under unfamiliar rules, and by the fact that a typo in the numbering of clauses and poor drafting in the new Constitutional text were not picked up before the election. The Court will start hearings on the election petition itself on Friday 2 September. Given that it is supposed to rule within a fourteen days of the petition’s submission (two weeks ago on Friday) arguments might well rumble on beyond, not least on what constitutes fourteen days . Whatever happens, these very tight elections will not generate a government able to command widespread acceptance of its legitimacy.

Both before and since the elections, profound political polarization has generated unusually open ethnic tensions and serious political violence that are not unprecedented, but which Zambians hoped they would not see again. The Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) was forced to suspend campaigning in Lusaka Province for 10 days because of the violence. The most influential private newspaper was closed down (formally by the revenue authority) before the election and the most influential private television station has been closed down (for threatening national security through false reporting) since, armed police walking into the studio in the middle of the 7 pm news to force the channel off the air. Since the election, political retribution has been meted out, including an arson attack on the offices of the opposition party on the Copperbelt, and nine villages in Southern Province being allegedly ‘ethnically cleansed’ by opposition supporters.

It is not obvious how we got to today’s miserable position. Nonetheless, a few preliminary observations can be made.

Understanding democracy as a bundle of institutional arrangements is rather simplistic. This is not a novel thought! In comparison to its neighbours, which include the DRC, Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, Zambia has been seen as a haven of peace and democracy, especially since passing the infamous two turnover test in 2011 (the notoriously unhelpful ‘two turnover test’ assumes that, after an authoritarian government has been voted out of office, and then its replacement also democratically removed, democracy has in some sense been consolidated). It has willingly subjected itself to constant processes of externally-supported institution-building, measuring and monitoring, and has undergone a halting process of constitutional reform. All of which was supposed to make this kind of thing unthinkable. It is not only foreign donors who have obsessed on institutions. The opposition also majored on good governance, to the exclusion of presenting a substantive political programme . Without mobilized social movements making demands on the state, without mass-membership political parties which represent substantive political interests and projects, without citizens excited by a belief in the possibility of transforming the country, gains in formal rights – to free association, to freedom of expression – are easily pushed aside.
Still, Zambian democracy remains a comparatively level playing field. The two ruling parties that controlled the country from independence in 1964 to multi-partyism in 1991 (Kenneth Kaunda’s UNIP), and which then ruled from 1991 to 2011 (the MMD under Frederick Chiluba, Levy Mwanawasa and Rupiah Banda respectively) were consigned to the dustbin of history pretty much as soon as they lost power. In a sense, fairness breeds competitiveness which breeds insecurity. Parties have a sense of their own mortality. While most Zambian politicians have recycled themselves, crossing the floor between parties as their fortunes rise and fall, at least in the short term, there is plenty at stake, since control of the state remains important in elite strategies of accumulation.
The stakes are low for most citizens. In contrast to other parts of the world that have seen increasing political polarization since the global financial crisis, there is little that divides the parties programmatically. Zambia saw a populist/technocratic stand-off in the 2006 elections. However, that populism was so associated with the person of PF founder Michael Sata that it faded and disappeared as he ailed in 2008 and died in 2014. The PF now has very little to do with the personnel or agenda of the party in 2006. Voter turnout fell off a cliff after 2006. Most citizens’ main interest is in avoiding the violence unleashed by cadres hired to give the impression that the parties enjoy energetic popular support.
Identity politics makes partisanship and violence worse. In the absence of contestation over competing political visions, identity politics has come to the fore. This is also partly driven by the structure of the party system. The 2015 Presidential by-election was the first in Zambia’s post-‘91 era to boil competition down to just two main parties, and also divided the country geographically down an uncharacteristically clear line, commonly (if somewhat crudely) read as reflecting a UPND Tonga/Lozi alliance in the South and West, and a PF Bemba/Nyanja alliance in the North and East. The two main competitors were the same this time; the ruling PF, led by an Easterner, President Edgar Lungu, and the opposition UPND led by a Southerner, Hakainde Hichilema. To try to end the run of by-elections caused by Presidential deaths, a constitutional amendment now allows for the Vice-President to complete a deceased President’s term, and Zambians voted for the first time for a President/Vice-Presidential ticket. Both candidates chose running mates they imagined could reach across the divide, characters closely associated with rural regions in which the respective parties had performed poorly in 2015, and with a perceived proximity to traditional authorities. As Sishuwa Sishuwa predicted , this strategy had strikingly little success and the 2015 geographical pattern was closely reproduced, with each party winning super-majorities in ‘their’ rural Provinces and the PF winning overall because it continued to dominate the urban vote where the UPND had hoped to make progress on the back of disappointment with the PF’s failure to generate the jobs that Sata had promised.

Zambia

The political atmosphere has become more and more intemperate since 2006. After the shock of the Patriotic Front’s populist surge in 2006, during which Michal Sata brought the angry, excluded Zambian urban poor onto the political stage and excoriated the country’s political and economic elite, the incumbent MMD became tremendously insecure. When the PF won power in 2011, it delivered none of its promise to overturn elitism but populism and the paranoid response to it has poisoned the political culture. Hyper-partisanship has overwhelmed many once proudly non-partisan civil society organisations, churches, traditional authorities and civil servants . Where once, in a national crisis, these groups, led by the Churches, might have stepped up to mediate or organize processes of reconciliation, almost no organization currently holds any status as a trusted neutral intermediary.
Rumour mongering has become a national pastime. Even when organizations honestly try to take on non-partisan positions, but comment on public issues, a culture of smearing dominates. Intra-elite rivalries generate new conspiracy theories that are joyously reproduced by a tabloid culture in public and private media. Partisans throw stories into the public sphere with little fear that a revelation that they are lying will do more damage to them than their target. Mirroring Stephen Ellis’ argument that a reliance on ‘pavement radio’ in the era of one-party media gave Africans an unusually well attuned bullshit detector, Wendy Willems has suggested that, during the 2016 election, Zambians navigated rumour and counter-rumour effectively through the wide range of available social media and new independent media sources . I am not so sure. Of course it is very difficult to assess whether overwhelming public cynicism is grounded in reality or myth, but it seems clear that there is less and less public trust in any public institution. It might be wise to doubt the neutrality of the judiciary, including a new Constitutional Court, the Electoral Commission, or the security wings of the state but the results also include cynicism about all public life, low voter turnout, and a sense of outrage which lends moral cover to purges and to the violence of gangs of hired party cadres.
Things might get better. As a result of the two-horse race, and the heavy concentration of the opposition vote in three of the country’s ten Provinces, the Patriotic Front has won a commanding majority in Parliament – the first time this has been achieved without an opposition boycott since the re-introduction of multiparty elections in 1991. On that basis, we might expect some reduction in the frequency of elections, and thus political tensions. Apart from three General Elections and two additional Presidential By-elections in the last decade, the difficulties that ruling parties have faced in getting legislation through minority parliaments has led to a never-ending process of bribing opposition legislators to cross the floor, triggering constant by-elections. With fixed parliaments in place, we might now see a five year gap until the next round… Unless the Presidential petition succeeds (surprising), and either the UPND wins the Presidency in a second round (unlikely), or the court bars the PF from running in the run-off (unthinkable), in which case things might get really ugly.
The next administration faces a grim economic context. The difficulties that the PF had delivering on any of their economic promises lie behind some improvement in the UPND’s urban vote. The way in which Zambia’s energy infrastructure has been designed to favour its privatized mines combined soon after the PF took power with a drought that starved the country’s hydro power plants. This led to massive load-shedding and hikes in prices of electricity. Partly as a result of a halving of the global copper price since the party took power, and resulting job losses on the Copperbelt, the PF has overseen an economic crisis during which the Kwacha lost half its value in 2015. President Lungu’s response was to organize a national day of prayer for the currency. Ironically the party then ran its election under the slogan ‘Sontapo’ – ‘We can point to this!’, suggesting that the party had delivered its promises. All the PF could really point to was that they had amended the Constitution and had built a lot of roads (they have built a lot of roads, and this is no mean achievement, opening up huge areas of the vast, land-locked country). However, those roads were largely built by borrowing US$3 billion on bond markets, with the result that, a decade after its massive HIPC debt relief, Zambia is again seriously indebted and the new administration will turn to the IMF for a loan conditioned particularly on agricultural and fuel subsidy cuts. Just as soon as we know who won the election we will know who has the job of explaining that to the voters.

Alastair is a lecturer in African politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and a member of the Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy.

Featured Photograph: Hakainde Hichilema’s UPND election parade in Choma.

Profiting from Poverty in South Africa

ROAPE

August 30, 2016

By Christopher Webb

At a rally during the recent local government elections in South Africa, the Secretary General of the African National Congress told a crowd that the party was ‘relieving men’ who couldn’t take care of their children by providing their families with child support grants. The ANC, he told them, was the only party that raised their children because fathers were failing to do so. Currently the state provides families and primary caregivers with R350 per child, per month provided that household income is below a certain threshold.

Every month around 16.8 million social grants are deposited into the accounts of around 10 million South Africans. Of these 11.9 million receive child support grants, 96% of which are women. These grants reach a large swathe of the population, with some 44% of households receiving at least one grant. Delivered by the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) social grants have been crucial in the government’s fight against extreme poverty. South Africa spends over 4% of its GDP on social welfare, which is higher than countries like Brazil and Egypt but lower than Algeria and Malawi. SASSA is mandated to provide grants to those who are vulnerable to poverty and in need of state support, this includes pensioners, those with disabilities, guardians of foster children and military veterans. Despite warnings that social grants are too costly for government, amounts have been expanded and there is currently discussion of extending the child support grant to 23 due to the high number of child-headed households.

Research has shown that social grants have a great impact on overall levels of household poverty. The child support grant, in particular, has been central to poverty alleviation. Researchers at the University of Stellenbosch have shown that the number of children whose parents reported that their child had gone hungry in the previous year declined from 31% in 2002 to 23% in 2005. Economists at the University of Cape Town have shown that a quarter of those unemployed nationally derive income support exclusively from the grant income of other members of their household. Access to social grants, particularly the child support grant and the old age pension, shift millions of South Africans from the lowest into the lower-middle income deciles.

Social grants have recently been lauded by noted anthropologist James Ferguson as examples of a new distributive politics that provide opportunities for rethinking capitalism and developing new forms of political mobilization. Such an approach, he argues opens up new ways of thinking about labour, unemployment, the family and the meaning of social welfare. For Ferguson, social grants open up intellectual and political space for realizing the redistributive aims of the 1955 Freedom Charter, which states that the ‘people shall share in the country’s wealth.’

What Ferguson misses is that social grants and their delivery have become enmeshed with systems and logics derived from finance capital. While Ferguson hails social grants as a potential chink in the neoliberal edifice allowing citizens to make redistributive claims on the state, the ways in which social grants are delivered and processed has facilitated the emergence of predatory forms of micro-lending that targets the poor.

A woman holds up her Easy Pay card in Gugulethu Square Mall, 1 June 2016

While social grants are administered by SASSA the mechanics of payment and distribution were outsourced in 2012 to a private company called Cash Paymaster Services (CPS), which is a subsidiary of Net 1. In 2012 Net 1 was granted a R10billion tender for the distribution of social grants nationwide, which involves providing the biometric hardware and personnel for the payment of 16.8million social grants each month. The company is listed on the Johannesburg and New York Stock Exchanges, and specializes in “alternative payment systems” using “biometrically secure real-time electronic transaction processing to unbanked and under-banked populations around the world.”

From its inception the tender was dogged with allegations of corruption. At the 11^th hour the tender was changed to include requirements for key biometric security features that only Net 1 could meet. A high court judge ruled that the tender process was invalid but that Net 1 should continue distributing grants as re-issuing the tender would pose a risk to grant holders. Then in 2014 the country’s Constitutional Court ordered SASSA to re-issue the tender after the judge criticized the agency for ‘irregular conduct’. Net 1 still holds the contract until 2017, but has decided not to apply for the new tender, choosing to focus instead on expanding services to “unbanked and under-banked citizens including social grant beneficiaries, but independently and without SASSA’s limitations and constraints.” To this end, Net 1 operates an array of financial entities that specifically target grant holders, including Easy Pay, a company that allows grant holders to access loans, buy airtime and electricity and make store purchases; Moneyline, a company that provides loans to grant recipients; Umoya Manje, a system that allows holders to buy cellphone airtime on credit; and SmartLife Insurance company.

It was not just the tender that was mired in scandal. Shortly after Net 1 got the tender, grant holders began reporting illegal deductions from their monthly payments. SASSA has since received thousands of complaints over illegal deductions for airtime, electricity, funeral plans and loan repayments. In April 2016 alone they received more than 23,000 complaints over illegal deductions. In June 2016 SASSA brought criminal charges against Net 1 and Grindrod Bank, alleging that it was not complying with the amended 2004 Social Assistance Act which makes it illegal to deduct funds from social grant holder’s account. This case has been delayed until October, but in the meantime illegal deductions continue to drain the accounts of the country’s poorest citizens.

Fieldwork conducted in two townships in Cape Town in May and June 2016 reveal some of the dynamics of how these deductions occur. Social grant holders have the choice to go and withdraw their money from a CPS-run (Cash Paymaster Services) pay point or to withdraw their funds directly from an ATM. In the latter case they are charged transaction fees, so many queue in long lines from early in the morning to receive their grants. Shortly after CPS began distributing loans, stories began to emerge of CPS staff offering social grant holders loans at pay points. We confirmed this in a series of workshops conducted with social grant holders from Philippi and Gugulethu, two townships in Cape Town. Social grant holders were told by CPS staff to take their SASSA cards and ID documents to the offices of Moneyline Financial Services were they would be approved for loans. Others had been pre-approved for loans after they received texts from Moneyline asking for their SASSA and ID numbers.

On June 2, 2016 we spoke to people in a hundreds-long line outside the Moneyline offices in Philippi. They were waiting to be approved for short-term loans of anywhere from R410 to R1050 to be paid-off over 3 or 6 months. Technically Moneyline doesn’t charge interest on these loans, just ‘service fees.’ These ‘fees’ are paid back through monthly installments on the principal amount over a six or three-month period. For an unsecured loan of R1050, with a repayment period of six-months, the service fee is R330— a repayment amount of 31%, equivalent to 101% annual interest. On a loan of R410 paid off over three-months the service fee is R100—a repayment amount of 24%, equivalent to 141% annual interest. While Moneyline states they don’t charge interest because their customers are “the poorest of the poor,” high repayment fees often completely drain borrower’s social grant accounts. The justification for high interest rates on micro-loans is that lending to the poor is ‘risky’ because of potential default. Repayment on these loans, however, is guaranteed by borrower’s social grants which are deposited at the beginning of each month.

It is illegal for Moneyline to deduct loan repayments directly from social grants, but they have found ways to get around recent amendments to the Social Assistance Act. Those we spoke to in the Moneyline queue told us that once they were approved for a loan they were given an EasyPay card, which is a ‘financial switch’ card allowing holders to transfer funds between debit and credit accounts and purchase airtime, electricity and retail goods. In their loan agreement, borrowers give Moneyline permission to transfer funds from their SASSA account to their Easy Pay account in order to service their debt—this is easily done because both accounts are controlled by Grindrod Bank. On transaction statements we were shown loan repayment amounts were deducted in advance of social grants being transferred to Easy Pay accounts. The Easy Pay card is effectively a way for Moneyline to circumvent the amendments to the 2004 Social Assistance Act, that prohibits deductions directly from people’s social grants, and indirectly tap into holder’s grant money.

In May 2016 SASSA claimed they had clamped down on illegal deductions through amendments to the 2004 Social Assistance Act, and that only funeral policy payments to registered insurers could be legally deducted in the future. Research we conducted the following month told a different story. We found multiple instances of illegal deductions and little information about how to challenge them. A pensioner told us he had borrowed R1000 from Money Line in November 2015 with a monthly repayment of R220 over 6 months. It was now June, and his pension payout was only R1160 rather than R1500. There was nothing on his transaction statement to indicate where the money had gone. A woman waiting in a queue at a nearby grocery store to collect her grant money showed us that R300 had been deducted for airtime and electricity from her 2 child grants. Unauthorized deductions for cellphone airtime is the most common complaint received by SASSA. Another pensioner showed us that she had R64 deducted from her child grant for an Emerald Life Insurance plan that she had never signed up for, and this had been ongoing for over 6 months. In 2015 Emerald Life Insurance agents in Paarl and Franschoek were arrested and charged after it emerged that they were deducting funds illegally from people’s social grants.

These are just some of the stories we collected, others documented by Black Sash in their Hands Off Our Grants campaign have revealed how pensioners have struggled to stop thousands-of- Rands of deductions. Grant holders we spoke to had little idea of who to contact if they encountered illegal deductions and they felt relatively powerless to control the flow of their grant money between their SASSA and Easy Pay cards. As the case of 89-year-old pensioner Sipho Bani reveals, grant holders are bounced from office to office, sometimes over a period of months, to have deductions reversed.

Rather than social grants being evidence of a new form of welfarism where citizens claim their rights to a share of national wealth, people encounter social grants as potential consumers or borrowers. People’s engagement on the first of each month is rarely with the state, but with bank tellers, CPS agents, ATMs and grocery store clerks, places where the state is, in effect, absent. In these spaces there is no room to dispute illegal deductions or suggest that credit providers are targeting vulnerable pensioners with low levels of financial literacy. On the one hand social grants can be seen as a new form of social welfare quite different from those forms that arose in Europe in the postwar period—grant holders don’t pay into some national insurance scheme and social grants aren’t merely safety nets for moments of income insecurity, but long-term survival tools in a context of high unemployment. On the other hand, the ways in which this system has been implemented has been profoundly alienating and disempowering. The state has facilitated the entrance of finance capital into systems of social welfare delivery. As a result, those 16.8 million social grant recipients are seen as potential customers by a range of financial institutions. In the same way that international banks entered the world of micro-credit in the 1990s, finance capital in South Africa is looking for ways to cash-in on social grants. It appears that they are succeeding.

People queue outside the offices of Moneyline Financial Services in Philippi, 2 June 2016

The growth of micro-lending in South Africa has been underpinned by the rapid expansion of finance capital in the post-apartheid period. As Milford Bateman has noted, post-apartheid policies that were intended as ‘pro-poor,’ such as the expansion of credit to poor borrowers, have given rise to a “venal market driven economic system” that has immensely enriched a few CEOs. Finance has been a critical component perpetuating neoliberalism and since 1994 the role of finance in systems of capital accumulation has expanded rapidly. A major area of growth has been in government tenders secured by various Black Economic Empowerment groups. For example, the R10billion tender secured by Net 1 was conditional on them signing a BEE deal. Just days after Net 1 got the tender it announced that it had finalized a major new BEE deal worth R264million with Mosomo Investment Holdings. Mosomo is headed by Brian Mosehla, who was formerly head of finance at the Mvelaphanda group established by businessman and politician Tokyo Sexwale. Mosomo Investment and Sexwale’s Mvelaphanda group had previously worked together to secure a massive Coal of Africa deal. A 2012 Mail and Guardian story pointed out that if Sexwale had a financial interest in Mosomo investments, this would be a major conflict of interest, because when he was Human Settlements minister his director general Thabane Zulu was a member of the SASSA adjudication committee that awarded Net 1 the tender.

At the same time as the state has expanded social welfare to the poorest South Africans it has facilitated the expansion of a predatory form of finance targeting those same people. If, as Ferguson would have it, social grants provide a new modality of distribution which can prefigure a more radical redistributive politics, then we must pay attention to the actual mechanics of distribution and how grant holders themselves use and understand social grants. The number of people receiving social grants has skyrocketed, at the same time increases in social grant spending have not kept pace with high levels of food inflation. For example, this year the child grant increased by 6%, but in June food inflation was 10.8% and has averaged 6.5% from 2009 until 2016. Add to this increasing levels of unemployment, layoffs in mining and manufacturing sectors, and projected economic growth rates of less than 1%, and it seems unlikely that social grants can stave off a deep crisis of social reproduction in millions of households. As a recent Oxfam South Africa report highlights, households experience high levels of food insecurity in the last weeks of each month when wages and social grants have been exhausted. Those queuing for loans told us that the amount they received from the government was never enough to meet monthly household expenses, so they had little option to get loans from places like Moneyline. These institutions were seen as preferable to the informal system of township loans or mashonisas, who are known for sky-high interest rates and the threat of violence for defaulting on payments.

None of this is to suggest that social grants aren’t necessary or that their expansion isn’t important. But, as Ferguson admits, they “partake in the neoliberal spirit of the age.” The distribution of South Africa’s social grants highlights the ways in which neoliberal logics can undermine redistributive projects, and in the process blur boundaries between state and market disempowering citizens in the process. Social grants have also been, as the election-rally comments by the ANC’s Secretary General indicate, an effective way for the ANC to maintain its hegemony among the poor, particularly in rural areas where social grants are often the only source of household income. In this sense social grants are reminiscent of the broader politics of service delivery across the country. The expansion of services to the poor has been marshalled by the ANC as evidence of its pro-poor developmental policies, while many of these projects have been severely undermined by logics of cost-recovery, privatization and outsourcing that have led to anger and discontent among the poor and the enrichment of old and new elites.

Christopher Webb is a PhD Candidate in Human Geography at the University of Toronto and a Research Associate at the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG) in Cape Town. This research has been carried out in collaboration with Nandi Vanqa-Mgijima, Research and Education Officer at ILRIG.

Featured Photograph: 12 February 2013, Valhalla Park, Cape Town

Mozambique News Reports and Clippings

ROAPE

August 22, 2016

Gary Littlejohn introduces the Mozambique News Reports and Clippings, distributed and collated by Joseph Hanlon. ROAPE will regularly post Hanlon’s reports.

By Gary Littlejohn

The latest issue of Mozambique News Reports and Clippings, No. 335, distributed by Joseph Hanlon, shows that the drought induced by the last El Niño event is by no means Mozambique’s only problem. There are large numbers of food insecure people in Mozambique, as in other parts of Africa.

Firstly, there is the fact (covered in an earlier edition of this newsletter) that negotiations between Frelimo and Renamo are in limbo, with the international mediators having ‘paused’ them owing to apparently irreconcilable positions taken by each side. Neither side was reportedly willing to consider a compromise document drafted by the mediators, who have now left the country. Meanwhile, low level fighting continues between Renamo and government forces, with considerable consequences for movement of traffic in the middle of the country, including rail traffic to export minerals.

Secondly, there is the issue of the various secret loans taken out by state agencies without the knowledge of the National Assembly or the relevant government agencies. These have added to the problem of the already unsustainable public debt. It was known to be over $10 billion, and the secret loans have added roughly another $2 billion. The government takes the view that these can be investigated by the relevant Mozambican authorities, but the IMF and presumably other donors are not satisfied with this. The IMF has suspended its latest financial aid package. It is not at all clear that Mozambique has the forensic auditing skills to trace missing funds through various international tax havens, and without donor funding international auditing experts would be hard to find. The insistence on dealing with the secret debts without cooperating with lenders also raises the suspicion that the underlying causes of the debt problems will be avoided, in a situation where future loans to buy time to find a way of restructuring and servicing such debt will very hard to obtain. This implies that the Mozambican economy will face stagnation for a long period.

Although these secret debts are evidently illegal under Mozambican law, it is probable that the loans organised by Credit Suisse and the Russian VTB bank were incurred under contracts subject to the jurisdiction of English courts. That raises the prospect of a long legal struggle over repayment. It is worth recalling that some years ago large Argentinean debts were contracted under US law. These debts were then bought up by a so-called ‘vulture fund’ that demanded payment in full, as opposed to the deal struck with other creditors who accepted less than the face value of the loans. The result was a legal and political battle lasting for some years. Although the Argentinean government eventually won, it was an expensive battle that restricted access to international financial markets for years, with detrimental effects on economic growth. The Mozambican economy is already in a very weak position for reasons analysed by Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco in ROAPE in 2015.

Thirdly, for reasons already covered in ROAPE No. 128, and corroborated by subsequent reports in Mozambique News Reports and Clippings and elsewhere since then, large-scale agribusiness projects have not worked well in Mozambique, the most notable example being the ProSavana project that attempted to take advantage of infrastructural investment in transport links for various mineral extraction projects. That embarrassing tale continues, with reports in the newsletter indicating that ProSavana is now thinking of trying to contract cultivation out to local farmers and suggesting other changes. Yet Issue No 335 shows that there has been yet another attempt at a land grab, this time in the Lurio valley. One of the investigators, Khadija Sharife, has already contributed to ROAPE. Mozambican land law basically treats land as having been nationalised, and usufruct is allotted to those cultivating the land. There has been a long slow process of registering such rights of use with the Ministry of Agriculture, yet it must be said that over the years there has also been a series of mysterious fires in the Ministry of Agriculture, whereby such registered title to use has at times been lost. Hence when international companies declare blithely that the land is empty or not in use, it is sometimes difficult to challenge that rhetoric.

In this situation, the comment in Issue No. 335 that, ‘We continue to spend lots of money importing products that we could grow locally because domestic producers are not protected and cannot obtain credit, according to the president of the Confederation of Mozambican Business Associations’ clearly illustrates how Mozambique has consistently failed adequately to address the issue of agricultural development. This issue is also addressed in the book Chickens and Beer by Teresa Smart and Joseph Hanlon that is advertised at the beginning of No. 335.

The report from the BBC on the alleged scandal concerning an international NGO known as ADPP strongly suggests that Mozambican oversight of such activities is also sadly lacking. Although in the past some NGOs worked in consultation with Mozambican government agencies, as early as 1983 the Oficina de Historia (History Workshop, part of the Centre of African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University) found that in Cabo Delgado a French NGO was deliberately raising local expectations in attempt to create a political demand for its services there. Its activities were not being properly scrutinised. Failure to scrutinise such activities leaves Mozambique open not only to fraudulent activities, as alleged here, but to external political manipulation. This problem was especially acute after the General Peace Agreement of October 1992, when the number of international NGOs shot up to over 1,000, and Mozambican NGOs tended to be local protégés of their international counterparts. Such failures of routine state administration vitiate the supposed benefits of parliamentary democracy.

Finally the murder of the prosecutor investigating the death of Giles Cistac should resonate with readers of ROAPE, which published a protest about this assassination at the time. Mozambican lawyers, prosecutors and judges have to operate in a situation where assassination is a real threat, and not always publicly known. I am aware of a now retired Supreme Court judge who courageously conducted a trial in the face of direct death threats. Criminals have occasionally succeeded in making spectacular escapes from prison, allegedly with inside help. There have been well-publicised assassinations of non-judicial investigators as well. All of this adds up to a fundamental problem with the rule of law.

Without major changes that the government seems unwilling to make, the future for Mozambique does not look at all bright. It had got away with a failure to reform because the IMF treated it as a development ‘poster boy’ but the high rates of growth were based on poorly conceived mineral projects, and that bubble has now burst. Mozambique News Reports and Clippings has faithfully documented all these failings over the years. Until recently, ‘conventional wisdom’ looked the other way.

Joseph Hanlon’s Mozambique News Reports and Clippings, can be accessed here: No. 338 No.339 No.440 No.342 No.344 (see also the Mozambique Poverty Supplement for No.344 here) No.345 No.346 No.347 No.348

Gary Littlejohn was Briefings and Debates editor of the Review of African Political Economy from 2010 to 2015. He is the author of Secret Stockpiles: A review of disarmament efforts in Mozambique, Working Paper 21, Small Arms Survey, Geneva, October 2015.

Featured Picture: Women, children and plastic tanks at the well of Nivali, Nampula, Mozambique (2007).

A Rejoinder to Firoze Manji

ROAPE

August 16, 2016

By David Seddon

The very title of Firoze’s piece begs a number of questions. It posits a ‘failure’, which intrinsically implies falling short of something that could be identified as a ‘success’, which is an extraordinarily and I think unhelpfully binary approach to the study of class struggle, social movements and political change. It conjures up something he calls ‘left working class movements’, again presumably opposed if only in a rather abstract way to other social and political movements, either not of ‘the left’ (whatever that means) or not of the ‘working class’, and asks why ‘they’ failed to ‘take root’ in ‘most of Africa. The task of the analysis is then to ‘account for’ this ‘failure’.

It is not a good start. It is not even as provocative and ultimately illuminating as the famous reference by Sherlock Holmes, in Conan Doyle’s ‘The Silver Blaze’, to the dog that ‘did nothing in the night-time.’[1] I have elsewhere drawn attention to the shortcomings of criticisms made by leftist analysts of popular protest and class struggle in Africa in terms of the ‘failure’ of these forms of social action, or of particular social groups or classes (i.e. the labour aristocracy’), to bring about the kind of transformation the analysts had hoped for (see Seddon, 2009). But let us not simply dismiss the piece as a misguided exercise in philosophy or teleology and the consideration of the counter-factual.

Manji suggests that ‘the early 1950s witnessed an extraordinary sweep of popular mobilisations across the continent inspired by aspirations for emancipatory freedom – an end to the colonial yoke’ and comments that ‘across the continent, nationalist parties convinced people that the path to freedom was through political independence.’ He does not explore the antecedents of these popular mobilisations in the rising nationalism of the first few decades of the 20^th century or the earlier popular protest of workers and peasants in the late 19^th century; nor does he directly question whether these nationalist movements were misguided or whether they were indeed emancipatory, bringing about at least a formal political independence that allowed nationalist governments to come to office, even if they often proved unable to break their economic and political ties with their former colonial metropoles.

But he does suggest that the political strategy of the various left and communist parties that had existed in a number of countries across the continent over many decades, despite the terror of colonial repression, was to merge with (or accept subordination to) the nationalist parties in the struggle for independence, in line with the prevailing dogma at the time (derived from, but deviating from, the classical Marxist tradition) – the ‘stagist’ view of revolution in which communists were required not only to support the emergence of a national bourgeoisie as part of the ‘national democratic revolution’, but to conceded leadership to the nationalist parties.

The use of the term ‘dogma’ here seems to imply that this strategy was misguided, and a mistake. He gives the example of the South African Communist Party (SACP) yielding to the leadership of the ANC since 1994. He suggests that this strategy effectively allowed the nationalists in most cases not only to take over rather than to transform the colonial – or rather the post-colonial – state, and to embark on a distinctive ‘neo-colonial’ process of capital accumulation and also – although Manji, critically, does not really analyse this aspect of things – to crush the left progressive opposition in the name of national unity. He argues that there were a few who understood the dangers of this collaboration with this form of nationalism – and specifically names Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral and Thomas Sankara – and who sought to build alternatives to the colonial state; but points out that they were assassinated by their nationalist ‘comrades’ in collaboration with the ‘neo-imperialists.’

He does not, unfortunately, explore the extent to which, during the colonial period, there were active and organised left working class movements. I have tried to document and comment on the significance of early working class movements in Africa, as have many others, and it is clear that even from an early stage in the colonial period, a limited working class had developed in a number of African countries, and had demonstrated its willingness to take action as part of the evolving class struggle in those countries. The history of their role in the extraordinary sweep of popular movements that Manji refers to as taking place in the 1950s, began in fact in the late 19^th century and continued apace during the first half of the 20^th, although it was during the late 1950s and the 1960s – and in some cases the 1970s – that these movements (which represented a combination of classes) actually achieved independence across the continent.

The political commanding heights of these newly independent states, however, as Manji rightly remarks, were for the most part organised to ‘modernise’ rather than transform the state, the economy and society. Even the regimes that claimed to be ‘socialist’ (whether African, Arab or Islamic) proved sooner or later to be committed to a form of state capitalism rather than to socialism as understood by the communists and leftists familiar with the Marxist tradition. Arguably, even those states that declared themselves to be adherents of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ – like Mengistu’s Ethiopia – were more akin to ‘national socialism’ than to Marxism-Leninism. Manji quotes Fanon, who says that, under these circumstances, the national bourgeoisie acted, not as an agent of progressive socialist transformation but as an agent of foreign (mainly Western) capitalism.

At the same time, Manji rightly observes, some of those on the left betrayed their comrades and simply abandoned the class struggle to join the ranks of the national bourgeoisie (he cites the example of Cyril Ramaphosa and others in South Africa) or else compromised their principles and allied themselves with the national bourgeoisie in the name of the national democratic revolution (as with the SACP). The result was the systematic repression of progressive elements or radicals (and again Manji cites the assassination of Tom Mboya, Pio Gama Pinto and J M Kariuki in Kenya and that of Chris Hani – and more recently the massacre at Marikani and the assault on NUMSA – in South Africa).

Manji devotes some space to documenting this more recent period and the ways in which nationalist leaders have both collaborated with imperialism and suppressed leftist progressive elements in the name of national development, arguably thereby preventing the independent organisation of left working class organisations. He seems in this whole discussion, however, to ignore the significant development of the working class and of working class movements across Africa over the last few decades. Perhaps this is because the formation of social classes in Africa has not precisely followed the historical precedent of class formation in Europe during the period of early capitalist development. But even in Europe the ‘making of the working class’ was a complex and uneven process as Marxist historians like E P Thompson have showed (in the case of England). It is not surprising if, in Africa, with its very different history, the process of class formation was also somewhat different.

But in reality, I would suggest, the working class has continued to emerge and consolidate itself, and manifest its growing strength in various ways over the long period since those early days of colonial domination, throughout the post-colonial period and up to the present day. The fact that it has not managed yet to seize power in Africa in the manner envisaged by Marx and Engels to form ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ is less a failure of the African working class than an indication of the complexity and uneven-ness of the process of class struggle under capitalism in the longue durée. For, after all, the working class has not managed to seize power for more than brief periods in a few countries anywhere since 1840, even in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries of Europe and North America or in the countries that called themselves ‘socialist’ (from 1917 until the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s).

But Manji also addresses, briefly, the changes that have taken place in the more recent period, suggesting that many of the gains of independence (which he does not in fact identify but presumably relate to the period from the 1950s to the 1970s), were reversed with the rise of neo-liberalism during the 1980s and 1990s. In response to this, he comments, there was a growing discontent across the continent, with spontaneous eruptions and mass uprisings that in some cases resulted in the overthrow of regimes nurtured and nourished by imperialism – selecting as examples, rather strangely, Tunisia, Egypt and Burkina Faso. I have written extensively about these popular protests in various places, including on this website, and shown how they involved a combination of social classes, including usually working class organisations (e.g. trades unions) and movements, and how they were able in many countries to change the political architecture and even overthrow regimes (as Manji admits).

The rise of democracy in the early 1990s, I would argue, was not only a consequence of the ideological and material pressure by external forces for ‘good governance’; it was also a product of class struggle across the African continent. In more recent years, and into the 21^st century, popular protest has become more systematically orchestrated and politically focused, at the same time as the regimes that developed in the 1990s have consolidated themselves yet again, with the support of imperialist forces, as elected dictatorships. This represents a deepening of the class struggle, in my opinion, not ‘the failure of the left’ or of working class movements. The history of capitalist development and political transformation in Africa has not come to an end; it continues to be made by the actions of men and women, but not, unfortunately, under the conditions of their own choosing.

Manji does not seem, however, to believe that these uprisings and forms of popular protest, which occurred systematically in the form of more or less spontaneous popular protests during the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, and have continued and gained even greater momentum through the last two decades, have involved the working class, for he asks: ‘under such circumstances, one would have thought that there would have been fertile grounds for the emergence of strong left working class movements across the continent. But why has this not happened?’ I would respond that his premise is in fact false, for left working class movements have indeed taken root in many parts of Africa, and are manifestly and demonstrably an integral part of the on-going class struggle. The fact that these movements have not yet achieved control of the state in a definitive way, bringing into being a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and socialism, is not a ‘failure’ but rather an indication of the unforeseen complexity and lengthy process of capitalist development on a world scale.

We should remember that, when asked, during Richard Nixon’s visit to Bejing in 1972, about the impact of the French Revolution that took place nearly two centuries earlier, the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, famously commented that it was ‘too early to say.’

David Seddon is a researcher and scholar who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world.

Featured Photograph: Transvaal Protest March organized by Gandhi, October-November 1913.

Notes

[1] When Inspector Gregory asks, “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Holmes responds, “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” But, protests the inspector, “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” To which Holmes delivers the punch line: “That was the curious incident.” This turns out to be the clue that leads to the unravelling by the great fictional detective of the mystery facing them.

The Failure of Left Movements in Africa

ROAPE

August 16, 2016

How do we account for the failure of left working class movements taking root in most of Africa?

By Firoze Manji

The early 1950s witnessed an extraordinary sweep of popular mobilisations across the African continent inspired by aspirations for emancipatory freedom: an end to the colonial yoke. Nationalist parties convinced people that the path to freedom was through political independence. Since then, many of the gains of independence, which cost the blood and lives of millions in Africa, have been reversed with the privatisation of the commons and public utilities, as well as by dispossessions of land, by unemployment, and by the increasing costs of food, rent, and other necessities of life.

In response, discontent has been growing across the continent, with spontaneous eruptions and mass uprisings that have in some cases resulted in the overthrow of regimes nurtured and nourished by imperialism (e.g. in Tunisia, Egypt, and Burkina Faso). In such circumstances, one would have thought that there would have been fertile grounds for the emergence of strong left working class movements across the continent. But why has this not happened?

Left and communist parties of various sizes and influence have arisen in a number of countries across the continent over many decades, despite the terror of colonial repression that they faced. In many cases, the political strategy of these parties was to merge with the nationalist parties in the struggle for independence. This was in line with the prevailing dogma at the time: the ‘stagist’ view of revolution according to which communists were required not only to support the emergence of a national bourgeoisie as part of the ‘national democratic revolution,’ but to concede leadership to the nationalist movements–much as we have seen with the South African Communist Party yielding to the leadership of the ANC since 1994.

On coming to power, most of the nationalist governments, often supported by the left, believed that all that was required to satisfy the demands of the masses was to take control of the state. But what they ignored was that the state was itself a colonial state, and set up to serve, protect and advance the interests of imperial power and its entourage of corporations and banks. That state had a monopoly over the use of violence. It had police forces, armies, and secret police and it used force and, where necessary, violence, to protect the interests of the way in which capitalism operated in the peripheries.

Nkrumah

Russian Stamp: The 80th anniversary of the birth of K. Nkrumah (1909-1972). Source: Soviet Union Stamp Catalogue 1989.

Having occupied the state, independence governments essentially sought to make modest reforms consisting primarily of deracialising the state and modernising it so that the economy could be more fully integrated with the new emerging international order that the US, Europe, and Japan set about creating after the Second World War. The structures of state control, the police, army, and special forces–even the structures and powers of native authority established by colonial powers–all these were left fundamentally intact, albeit dressed up in the colours of the national flag. The structures of the capitalist state were left intact, even where regimes proclaimed an adherence to ‘Marxism-Leninism’, as in Mengistu’s Ethiopia.

Few understood the dangers of occupying, rather than creating alternatives to, the capitalist state. Amongst those must be counted Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau), and Tomas Sankara (Burkina Faso). They had in common their commitment to building alternatives to the colonial state. Cabral was emphatic: “It is our opinion that it is necessary to totally destroy, to break, to reduce to ash all aspects of the colonial state in our country in order to make everything possible for our people.” Tellingly, all three were assassinated by their own comrades, in collaboration with empire.

While the repressive arms of the state may have been dressed in new uniforms, their role–that of protecting the interests of capitalism in the (former) colonies–remained unchanged. And as the emerging middle class and party officials who now occupied the neo-colonial state realised the potential for private accumulation and looting that access to the state provided, so their interest in transforming the state waned.

‘Africanisation’–or in South Africa’s case ‘Black Economic Empowerment’–was the battlecry of the emerging national bourgeoisie that would legitimise their access to sources of private accumulation. The growing presence of transnational corporations and international financial institutions, and the growing interest in ‘investing’ (principally in the extractive industries) provided too many lucrative opportunities for them to even consider making changes to economic power. The state became a honey-pot, and therefore frequently a terrain of conflict between different factions of the emerging class. In some cases, leading members of the left joined the ranks of the national bourgeoisie, just as we have seen in the case of Cyril Ramaphosa and others in South Africa.

As Fanon put it:

The national bourgeoisie discovers its historical mission: that of the intermediary. As we can see, its vocation is not to transform the nation but prosaically serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism. The national bourgeoisie, with no misgivings and with great pride, revels in the role of agent in its dealings with the Western bourgeoisie. This lucrative role, this function as small-time racketeer, this narrow-mindedness and lack of ambition are symptomatic of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to fulfil its historical role as a bourgeoisie.

In fulfilling its function as an agent of the Western bourgeoisie and ‘as a small-time racketeer,’ this class turns upon the left that aided its path to power, and slaughters it, imprisons it, exiles it, or marginalises it. Slaughter was the case with one of the strongest communist parties in Sudan when, in 1971, Gaafar al-Nimiery launched a campaign that resulted in almost the total elimination of the party. Even where the organised left was not strong, the post-independence period witnessed assassinations of radicals: for example in Kenya with the assassinations of Tom Mboya, Pio Gama Pinto, and JM Kariuki, or in South Africa with the assassination of Chris Hani and, more recently, of members of NUMSA and Abahlali base Mjondolo.

2015-02-12 12.07.28

Thomas Sankara was assassinated in 1987 by his comrades in Burkina Faso, after attempting radical pro-poor reform.

‘African Socialism’ was fêted as the answer to the continent’s underdevelopment in the early post -independence years, but in every case, this was combined with the requirement that there be only one legitimate party. Whatever the actual political colour of the regimes, it was not uncommon for nationalists to proclaim an allegiance to socialism, albeit to an ‘African’ version.

Kwame Nkrumah was perhaps the most radical of the nationalists, but even in Ghana, no attempt was made to dismantle the colonial state. As a result, radicalisation spread amongst the population. In 1961, railway workers organised a national strike, but the state became increasingly authoritarian and independent political organisation was repressed, until eventually a one-party state was declared. Nkrumah’s political writings became much more radical after the coup d’état that overthrew him in 1966.

Similarly, Julius Nyerere established his own particular brand of socialism–Ujamaa–in the aftermath of the revolution in Zanzibar, in which he orchestrated the repression of Abdulrahman Babu’s Umma Party. Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration declared a one-party state, preventing the independent organisation of left, working class organisations. A once ardent trade unionist, Ahmed Sékou Touré led Guinea to independence in 1958, and in 1960, declared his party, Parti démocratique de Guinée, the only legitimate party. The combination of repressive one-party states that proclaim themselves ‘socialist,’ the establishment of Stalinism in the Soviet Union with its own form of repression and one-partyism, and its final demise in the collapse of the Berlin Wall; all these have contributed to the discrediting of the idea of ‘socialism’ as a progressive force. In many African countries, the word ‘socialism’ is a dirty word that has been lost in every-day vocabulary.

Another factor that has inhibited the development of the left in Africa needs to be considered. The last thirty years of neoliberal policies have resulted not just in material dispossession, but also in the dispossession of memory. Many people born or raised in the aftermath of the implementation of structural adjustment programmes have lost connection with their own histories in an environment of CNN and MacDonalds culture. As Milan Kundera put it: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history, Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. There remains today the challenge of building strong left, working class movements. Whatever the constraints that we may have inherited from our history, the reality is that after independence our national bourgeoisies have failed to deliver on their promises. Thirty years (or some twenty years in the case of South Africa) of neoliberal policies willingly imposed by this class have resulted in conditions for the majority that are in many ways worse than they were at independence. Today discontent is growing, especially among the youth. But there is also a more widespread disenchantment with postcolonial governments that derives from their loss of credibility and legitimacy. Serious questions are increasingly being raised concerning the ability of this class to lead the way to emancipation.

The objective conditions offer, at least potentially, good conditions for building a left movement. But that cannot be done on the basis of the forty-year-old analysis of the nature of capitalism and imperialism to which much of the left has become accustomed. There is work to be done in deepening our understanding of the changes that have occurred in both the nature of today’s financialised capital and its operation in the ‘peripheries.’ Such an analysis is necessary if we are to appreciate the fact that the workplace is not the only site where accumulation by dispossession occurs: it also occurs through the extraction of income and wealth through rents, the privatisation of health and social welfare, education, land, water, power, etc. All of these are subject to speculation.

Firoze Manji is Director of Pan-African Baraza in Nairobi, Kenya. This article was previously published by International Viewpoint.

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