Playing with Fire: Art in Troubled Times

May 19, 2016

By Mandisa Malinga

In February 2016, during a protest against the lack of accommodation for students from poor backgrounds at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, students and members of the #RhodesMustFall movement set alight paintings considered to be ‘colonial artwork’. Among these paintings removed from the walls of some residences at the university, were also the paintings of black anti-apartheid artist, Richard Baholo. The burning of Baholo’s artwork prompted many critics of the #RhodesMustFall movement to question the thoughtfulness of the student protests during which universities’ property and buildings were also destroyed.

In a conversation with Faith Pienaar, Project Manager at the Transformation Office at Stellenbosch University, anti-apartheid activist and judge Albie Sachs reflects on the meaning of art in troubled post-apartheid South Africa. This conversation, held on 3 March 2016 and hosted by the Studies in Transformation and Historical Trauma department at Stellenbosch University, came at an interesting time, where art has taken on various meanings and has become central to the struggle for transformation among students at universities.

AlbieS

In his conversation with Faith, Sachs discusses the meaning of violence and the destruction of buildings and art during student protests. He particularly makes reference to the ways in which the works of Fanon have been quoted by students engaged in violent protests, pointing to the different contexts in which Fanon wrote his work and that within which the students find themselves. Furthermore, he talks about the different ways in which protesting is approached by the current generation in comparison to previous generations. In talking about the thoughtfulness of protests by earlier generations, Albie Sachs suggests that the ways in which students have approached protesting requires much deeper thinking about not only the ‘how’, but also the implications of acts such as destroying university property.

This is an interesting intergenerational conversation between both Faith and Sachs as it interrogates the nature of the ‘revolutionary struggle’, how it is understood and responded to by students and revolutionaries across generations.

In response to Faith’s question about whether the approach taken in 1994 to building and ‘reconciling’ the country was the right path, whether it validated the hurt and pain and promoted healing, Sachs mentions that the process of negotiations pre-1994 and that of developing the constitution was not as easy as it is often thought to have been. Though challenging, the process of developing the constitution, according to Sachs, gives students the right to protest and speak out against a lack of transformation, however, what it does not give people is the “right to go and destroy the very corridors of learning that students want to be opened.” For more on this conversation please see the video of the conversation below.

Mandisa Malinga is a part-time research assistant in the Studies in Transformation and Historical Trauma department at Stellenbosch University. She recently completed her PhD in Psychology which explored constructions of fatherhood among precariously employed African men in South Africa.

Pan-African Challenges: Radical Political Economy

ROAPE

May 16, 2016

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig talks to Yao Graham about radical political economy in Africa, structural transformation and the legacy of neo-liberalism. In the short video clip we include below Graham speaks about the struggle for social justice and radical change in Ghana. Graham is the co-ordinator of Third World Network in Accra and the Africa Editor of ROAPE.

So could you first tell me briefly about who you are and briefly about your political background and development?

My name is Yao Graham, a Ghanaian by birth. I was in secondary school in St. Augustine’s College the city of Cape Coast the late 1960s and early 1970s at the time when there were a number of very important things taking place globally. Some of my earliest recollections were my involvement around anti-apartheid activism in Ghana, discussions about pan-Africanism, reading books by radical African-Americans. I was profoundly affected reading Malcolm X’s biography. The school allowed us to charge subscriptions for magazines to our bills and I ordered Africa Journal and Newsweek which provided information about many things going on at the time – the Vietnam War, national liberation struggles across Africa; there were things happening around us.

But, in terms of direct political engagement, coming in contact with a friend’s uncle a student at the University of Cape Coast who was president of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) was important. I was around 15 and through him a group of us met the leadership of the National Union of Ghana Students at the time. We took to spending time at the Cape Vars campus. They were beginning to re-establish Kwame Nkrumah’s legitimacy, because around that time the soldiers who had overthrown Nkrumah, and their civilian collaborators who succeeded them sought to erase Nkrumah from history. His works, images were banned. You’d be imprisoned if you were found with Nkrumah’s photo or writings. So we spent a lot of time with these guys. We were fascinated by their activism and their ideas; that was a very profound influence. We brought some of that activism to our school, initially in the students’ representative council. We began to even take part in some NUGs events. I remember three of us going to a National Assembly of Students and demanding that NUGS take on board the concerns of secondary school students. At this time we were prefects in St. Augustine’s, elected by the students. We reached out to prefects in other schools in Cape Coast about the formation of a national association of secondary school students. We did not succeed.

My years at the University of Ghana was in the period of some of the most intense student activism in Ghana’s post-colonial history. The military regime at the time faced a lot of student activism, initially against brutalities by soldiers then demands for it to go as economic conditions this transformed into a broad front movement against its attempts to entrench itself in power. So University led to a deepening of my activist engagements. I studied for a law degree and did not formally study political science or philosophy but I began to read political theory and philosophy. I was very interested in these. I began to read Marx, and radical literature generally, a fairly eclectic wave of books about anti-racism, anti-imperialist volumes on the Middle East, etc. so a fairly eclectic, intellectual formation.

By my late university years, I could say that I’d definitely become oriented towards a kind of Marxist politics. The first Marxist study cells were emerging on the campus. The embryonic foundations of what would emerge as the Marxist influenced political left which came to prominence in Ghana of the 1980s and 1990s were laid founded in the student movement of that period.

And this is the mid-seventies?

Yeah, this is mid to late seventies. This was a very important period in my formation.

Can you talk briefly about what your first involvement in ROAPE was?

I knew about the journal. I’d been reading after I came to England as a student in 1979, but my first direct involvement with ROAPE was in 1984. When I was invited from Ghana to speak at a ROAPE conference at Keele University, a conference on the world crisis and food security in Africa. I had suspended my PhD studies at the Warwick University and was in Ghana working as a full time political activist, in the Rawlings government and the New Democratic Movement (NDM). The upheavals unleashed by the Rawlings led coup of December 31 1981 and the regime’s initial anti-imperialism had attracted intense interest and I was invited to present a paper at the conference. At this time I was a leading member of the NDM also involved in the national leadership of the Defence Committees set-up by the Jerry Rawlings’ government. I presented my paper at the conference and subsequently wrote a piece for the journal on Ghana.

The Keele conference was a very lively experience, let me put it that way. By this time Rawlings relationship with his closest allies on the Ghanaian Left had started fracturing and a number of them who were in exile in the UK came to ROAPE conference and caused an uproar about my presence. This reflected the deepening rifts within the sections of the left who had supported the PNDC regime. These ex-comrades were in the crowd when I spoke in the plenary session and generated a huge uproar. Such was the heat that the organisers put on an emergency side meeting on Ghana. This was packed out and marked by sharp debates.

And the reason for the uproar was because you were being too critical?

No, I was being denounced as a traitor for continuing to work in the Rawlings government by those who were now in exile, who felt that the project of the revolution [as they described the seizure of power by Rawlings on 31 December, 1981 – LZ] had been betrayed. This was an important point of difference within the Ghanaian Left. Some of never thought it was a revolution rather something that offered possibilities for progressive work. So our expectations of the Rawlings regime were a lot less exaggerated. Our analysis of the twist and turns of the new government were different from those who thought it was a revolution. Such analysis is important, if you thought the coup d’état had been or ushered in a revolution then, of course, the revolution had failed. However if you didn’t think it was a revolution, but a coup d’état regime which had created some space for the progressive politics to operate, then you could continue to try and do your best in that space. My paper to the ROAPE conference reflected this standpoint.

The invitation from ROAPE was important for me, also, because it forced me to put down on paper my analysis of the context of Rawlings’ return to power and some of the features of the unfolding situation. In a situation of some fluidity and intensive day and night activism the pause to reflect and write the paper for the ROAPE conference was useful. So that was my first involvement in that way with ROAPE.

Brilliant and you were obviously aware of the journal before that?

Yes, I’d been reading it as part of my work as a student at Warwick and I met some of the editors involved in it at various political events in Britain in that period.

How would you assess the role of the journal? Did you regard it as a companion in some of struggles you were involved in?

I must confess that during the time that I was back in Ghana in the 1980s, during that seven year period, occasionally, you came across ROAPE but during that time I didn’t have much of an engagement with ROAPE, but when I came back to do England in 1989 to my complete PhD thesis it was something I returned to reading.

And, looking back at the history of the journal and your direct involvement in it from 1984 and then afterwards in the UK in the 1990s, how would you assess the contribution that ROAPE has made?

The invitation to me as an activist in Ghana to come to speak at the Keele conference in 1984 points to a recognition of the importance of that kind of dialogue, bringing activists into the space that the journal was creating. For me, as an activist it got me to work through my analysis of the context within in which I was working. Subsequently, I read ROAPE mainly, as a general analysis which offered ideas and, also, information about what was happening across the continent. I wouldn’t say that it occupied a particular place, because I was reading a lot of things and, also, during the period that I was working as an activist, I must confess that I was more in interested in reading about the experiences of people in building organisations; what happens in struggles; what people did to reform economies and so on and so forth, in a way that would help me with the work I was directly involved in. That kind of theoretical and analytical writing was very important to me at the time. Occasionally I read articles that touched on my concerns at the time. So there were those kinds of moments when I saw the value of the journal, but it was one of an array of publications that I looked at; and for a long period of the 1980s, when I was in Ghana, I didn’t have access to it at all.

If you look at the origins of ROAPE from 1974 in that second wave of independence, from the critical…of which, to some extent, your political history is borne. You know, a radical movement that comes about on the back of the failure of the 1960s and 1970s; the hope of that first wave of independence. ROAPE was borne in that period, particularly with the struggles in Angola and Mozambique. It then goes on to analyse and to critique structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s. How successful has that project been, in your mind, in providing, to some extent, radical analysis of the Continent’s political economy through that period?

I think the critique of structural adjustment and the role of those who provided the critique was an extremely important contribution in period. Why? Because, first of all, the discussion of the failures of the immediate post-colonial period to the crisis of the 1970s was presented in the dominant narrative as a zero sum way, that whole period was a kind of blank slate, that it was all a waste of time. And, yet, during that period there was important support for other national liberation movements to grow on the Continent. Within that period, people had some experience of what the state could do, in terms of welfare, education, health and so on.

I think a journal like ROAPE was very important in providing a critique of the World Bank and the IMF, providing a counterpoint to these institutions with their very large machinery of propaganda. Academia in Africa was increasingly was taken over by the politics and machinery of structural adjustment and neo-liberalism, so to have a minority of scholars and intellectuals who continued to offer an alternative perspective was very important indeed, in terms of keeping a view that something else was possible And, for those of us who were engaged in struggling against structural adjustment on the ground, having the sense of that community was quite important.

Tell me how do you see the challenges today for a journal of radical political economy? What are the important issues that need to be tackled? What’s the orientation, the thinking that needs to take place, in a fairly limited way, that the journal could make a contribution? How do you see that taking place?

If you look at the contemporary world and the African situation, ever since the global crisis of 2008-2009, neo-liberalism has been repositioning itself to maintain its dominance, by absorbing critical discourses. The current one, of course, is to reduce everything to inequality, without going to the foundations in the political economy. In the African context this approach is expressed in the strength of the Africa Rising narrative, which also sees a celebration of an African middle class, the rise of a consuming class in Africa and an occasional nod to inequality. Yet it’s also becoming clear that the colonial bequest of raw material export dependence continues to determine the fate of Africa and its people in in the global economy. Today the Continent is more entrenched in that division of labour than it was in 1974, when the global crisis began to take hold.

So, in a certain sense, the political economy of neo-colonialism remains highly active. Africa remains very much locked in that, although the global configuration has changed. Today there’s a new discussion about the fact that the Africa needs to implement structural transformation to escape this dependence. But, within that seeming agreement, there are different ideological positions and I think it is quite important for journals like ROAPE to become part of that debate, because it involves an examination of the legacy and the consequences of more than thirty years of neo-liberal dominance. It’s an analysis of what growth represents in Africa. It’s an analysis critical of the so-called Africa Rising narrative.

But the other dimension that is also really important has to do with the fact that political liberalisation in the early 1990s was significant in opening up space for popular organisation and expression. But there’s a growing realisation that electoral politics, what I call the ‘electoral carrousel’, is not the sum of democratic politics. Increasingly we see protests which are about people’s living conditions, protests about rights, protests around the new frontiers of capital accumulation – whether it’s land grabs or the growing movement to privatise services. These are the new frontier for making money on the continent, whether it’s the so-called public/private partnerships that reach into areas which, historically, everybody would have agreed were the realm of public goods, these have now all become issues of public concern and struggle. And I think, again, these are issues that ROAPE, as a journal, needs to connect itself with, in terms of analysis and engagement.

Because, you see, ROAPE’s project in the 1970s was easier, because the National Liberation Movement in Africa was internationalised, in terms of the support that they had. England was an important staging post for representatives of the National Liberation Movements. It was an important place for such movements to be located in exile. So academics, who were interested in working in Africa, in supporting African struggles, actually had a community here that they could work with and a community through which they could link quite easily with similar communities on the African Continent. So, in a certain sense, there was a community that stretched from inside Africa to outside it around certain kinds of questions. Today, that community doesn’t exist in the same way.

But the point I’m making is that with the shrinking of the historic community of activists from the continent in the North, how the journal builds a community with people, the involvement of activists and scholars in Africa, is vital in ensuring that the ideals that drove the foundation of the journal continue to be pursued in different conditions. The important question is how do we work out that continuity in a new period? If we do not it can become quite easy for the journal to become just another peer-reviewed publication where an Africanist will publish papers on Africa, without really engaging in the continent beyond seeing it as a site where you collect data. But the founders of the journal were involved with the continent as a place where they were reflecting on and supporting struggles to build a certain kind of economy and society; and saw the journal as a place where certain ideals should be pursued. So Africa was a laboratory where they were participating with African people as activists for change – as opposed to a place you can simply write about us, where you interrogate the concepts through which society is analysed. This the danger and the challenge for ROAPE.

Could you talk briefly about the relationship, between academic analysis and activist engagement and how when you came here in 1984 on an invitation from ROAPE you spoke as an activist, but also as an analyst. Please talk today about that relationship between academic analysis and activist engagement. How do we create the spaces where that can take place?

I think the business of interpretation, of course, is fundamental to being able to have a correct appraisal of reality, so as to work effectively for change. If you characterise something as a revolution, as many saw the Rawlings coup in 1981, then you have certain expectations of it and you would engage in a certain kind of political practice. Now, if you are wrong in your characterisation, your political practice is likely to be wrong and the consequences could be pretty appalling. So the analytical function is quite important, but, for me, the key think is how do we continue to create a dynamic where, as much as possible, ROAPE, in terms of its work, continues in analysing society but also creates a community where what is being discussed is influenced by what people are engaged in struggling around. We also need to make sure that the analytical work that is reflected in the pages of ROAPE is more widely available for activists to use. I think that process is quite important.

I say this, also, because on a continent where today some the most influential analysts influencing the orientation of people are religious figures; Christian and Muslim. A progressive, political economy and materialist analysis, which tries to ground people in the here and now, as opposed to the afterlife, is imperative. In a climate of pretty desperate conditions for many religion has mobilised people across the continent, so we must offer analysis and perspectives which help people to engage with their material reality as agents, who can actually make meaningful change, rather than leave human misery to some spiritual force to resolve. In Ghana with the collapse of manufacturing large buildings – warehouses, factories – which have been abandoned in the industrial areas of the capital Accra have been bought up by charismatic Christian and turned them into huge prayer halls. Material production has been replaced by the enterprise of spiritual redemption, you can’t get a more poignant symbolism than that.

Where the working class used to be gathered, where people used to work, organise and discuss as unions and discussed their material conditions, where people earned an income are now prayer halls. Today, people gather in their thousands to listen to sermons about how, if you continue to be a good Christian and pay your tithes to the pastor something good will happen to you.

What an astonishing example. On that question on the role of analysis and political activism the journal in different ways – and it was a mixed bag and a very broad church when it was formed – but did see a pan-African project with socialism as a project for national governments, but also regional and continental transformation. Do you still see that as a feasible project for the continent?

Yes. This morning I got a WhatsApp from my colleague who had gone to a meeting on a continental free trade area organised by the Africa Union Commission and he wrote, “I’m sitting here, feeling like a dinosaur. Everybody here wants liberalisation, liberalisation and more liberalisation.” I think, given the current state of forces, there’s a substantial challenge of defensive action that is required against the still quite strong forces of neo-liberalism on the continent. Because, whilst there are protests, their organisation and the strength of progressive forces, the organisation of alternatives across the continent is not at a state where one can feasibly talk about socialism as a near term objective.

I think, however, in terms of the demands that people are making for an alternative, the agenda remains unchanged. But the near term challenge, the frontline challenge, must be a complete and coherent replacement of neo-liberalism in Africa. I think that also retains important pan-African challenges for us, because the old arguments that were made about the smallness of African countries, as economies, as markets, the need to unite forces behind our common hurdles remains extremely valid. The work that we do in Third World Network-Africa, on trade policy, on the structures and inequities of Africa’s role in the global economy, is important work for everyone across Africa, because the regional and the continental have become key sites of policy making and decision making.. So it is quite important that in the context of global capitalism to see the limits of small national markets, that we accepts the limits of national economies. Policy-makers are also interested in expanded geographies, for investment, for selling goods and services and so on. So there is a dynamic process where the supra-national is becoming a more and more important unit for political economic activity in Africa, we have to respond to this as activists and intellectuals.

So our response, the response of progressives…

Has to engage with the regional and the pan-African, within a global engagement.

As a final question, can you reflect on your work as Coordinator of Third World Network-Africa

Third World Network Africa was created by a group of us, who were previously associated in Ghanaian politics. We set it up as a policy research and advocacy organisation with a pan-African remit. We are very clear about the limits of NGO, as a vehicle for transformative, progressive work. However what we have done over the years is to pick issues which we think pertain to the nature of Africa’s role in the global economy; trade and investment, finance, development issues, which determine the way Africa is inserted in the global economy and then try and work around those issues from the perspective of the defence of popular interests as well as pushing for alternative policies that challenge the dominance of neo-liberalism. Have we been successful? To the extent that the organisation has gained a lot of credibility as contributing to a progressive African alternative perspective, influenced debates and in some cases influenced outcomes of struggles, to that extent I think we’ve been successful.

So in Ghana, where it has been possible to organise and mobilise, for example around mining issues and the interests of mining affected communities, we have at least significantly transformed the debate on mining in the country. On trade policy issues, in about twenty years of working with others across Africa, around the World Trade Organisation, the EU’s Economy Partnership Agreements, we have had an important influence and exerted pressures on the debates and key institutions. An NGO is not a political party, you need to find the methods that optimise the influence that such an organisational form can exert. And we’re fortunate to be based in Ghana, where the laws on NGO activities are pretty liberal. We’ve also been lucky over the years to have been able to raise money, from like-minded organisations and also foundations, who find our work useful. Yet such dependence on other organisations for our funding is also a serious constraint on what you can do.

Brilliant, thank you. I’m going to stop the interview there and then we can decide what we’re going to do…

For more on the issues discussed in this interview please refer to our archive. Yao Graham’s article, referred to above, can be accessed here and Ray Bush’s 1980’s article What Future for Ghana? is also available in our archive.

El Niño and Mozambique

ROAPE

May 12, 2016

By Gary Littlejohn

Last year witnessed one of the strongest El Niño events since the 18th century. It peaked in December 2015 and has now dissipated, although the resultant drought in parts of Africa continues with serious impacts on food security. The end of the El Niño event was unusual, in that it was linked to an apparent split in the warm water then hitting the Pacific coast of Central America. While the southern part then moved away from the coast of South America, the northern part moved up the coast to Alaska, where it produced record warm temperatures that were wrongly attributed to ‘climate change’ (anthropogenic global warming).

Now that it has subsided quite quickly, there are already some early indications of the opposite phenomenon (an incipient La Niña) but one should be cautious about predicting such an outcome at this very early stage. It is important to stress that the effects of the El Niño live on, especially in Africa in the form of serious food shortages. The hardest hit areas seem to be southern Africa and Ethiopia, but East Africa will doubtless be suffering too. Other effects include ‘coral bleaching’, which is a dying off of coral reefs when the temperature in the sea exceeds 26 Celsius, and this has happened on a large scale this year to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

It is not known what triggers such events, and indeed their periodicity varies over time, but a recent academic study published only weeks ago (covering many geographic regions and recording times thousands of years apart, using dendrochronology and ice core samples) has shown that they are not connected to average global temperatures. It is for this reason that it is wrong to link an El Niño to ‘climate change’ although such a link seemed to be very strong for the years 1976-1998.

The name ‘El Niño’ (the Boy Child) was given to it by Peruvian fishermen who noticed that, roughly every six years at around Christmas, warm water hit the Pacific coast of Peru and disrupted the rich fishing grounds that depended on the nutrients carried to the surface by the cold Humboldt current flowing from southern Chile to northern Peru. After the major El Niño event of 1881-82, which caused a huge famine in India and China, as well as in Africa, a British colonial administrator in India noticed that such events seemed to coincide with a reversal of the normal pressure difference recorded by meteorological stations in Tahiti and in Darwin, Australia, and went to find out why. This switching back and forth in the air pressure became known as the ‘Southern Oscillation’ and so sometimes these events are referred to as ENSO events (El Niño Southern Oscillation) because it was eventually realised that they occur together.

An overview of the phenomenon was not achieved until the International Geophysical Year (1957) when satellite and other simultaneous global measurements enabled scientists to see the overall pattern of events. Further study showed that one of its many effects is to form an isotope of oxygen, Oxygen 18, in sea coral in the tropics. So from fossil coral it is now known that ENSO events have been happening for at least the last 250,000 years. That is much longer than anatomically modern humans have been around, and I would argue that the history of East Africa from the Eastern Cape of South Africa to Egypt should be reconsidered in the light of ENSO events. Economic and political changes often seem to be driven by ENSO events.

How an El Niño functions

Basically what happens is that a very warm column of extremely high pressure air develops on the Equator at Indonesia. The air pressure is so high that it actually pushes down the sea level, thereby generating underwater waves known as Kelvin waves. In principle, these Kelvin waves could radiate out in all directions, since high pressure areas (anticyclones), just like cyclones, are circular in shape and spiral in their dynamics. However, the topography of the relatively shallow ocean floor around Indonesia, coupled with the many islands, means that in practice the Kelvin waves travel to the East across the Pacific, drawing a surface wave behind them, so that the sea level rises on average by roughly half a metre at the front of the surface wave.

The Kelvin waves dragging the warm sea surface behind them produce a temperature change at an angle underwater. In other words, some of the warm water is dragged down by the Kelvin waves and this produces an underwater temperature increase, with the boundary between the colder and warmer water behind being at an angle. This ‘thermal incline’ or ‘thermocline’ means that the sea heats up at depths not usually much affected by sunlight, as deep as 1,500 feet. It takes some months for this wave of warm water to hit the Pacific coast of the Americas, but it usually brings rain with it. Thus one tends to get damaging floods in the Americas. At times these rains can cross Central America, travel through the Caribbean and reinforce the Gulf Stream to cross the Atlantic and hit northern Europe. It only takes a comparatively slight modulation of this flow by the jet stream to move it from mainland Europe to the British Isles. That happened in the case of the latest very strong ENSO event, catching the UK government unprepared for the resulting floods.

This movement of warm water and air to the East across the Pacific reverses the normal wind pattern in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Normally such rain-bearing winds flow from East to West, that is, from the Americas past Australia and Indonesia to Africa, bringing the Monsoon to India and parts of China. In Mozambique the rainy season is normally from November to April. The mechanism producing the normal pattern is called the Inter-Tropical Converge Zone (ITCZ). What happens is that high pressure areas north and south of the Equator revolve in opposite directions, owing to the Coriolis Effect. So high pressure systems in the Northern hemisphere rotate in a clockwise direction, and anticlockwise in the Southern hemisphere. The opposite is true for cyclones. The Coriolis Effect also affects water going down the plughole in a sink or bath. (So some enterprising Kenyans probably still make money by showing tourists that water goes down the plughole in the opposite direction in sinks on either side of the Equator. The Coriolis Effect shows that the Equator as a physical phenomenon is about 100 metres wide.)

This Coriolis Effect means that at a certain time of the year, high pressure systems generate winds from opposite rotations that converge in the tropics to drive the rain-bearing winds from East to West: the ITCZ. ENSO events disrupt this normal pattern and drive the winds in the opposite direction, following the flow of warm water. The result in Eastern and Southern Africa is often drought. This basic picture can be complicated if the Indian Ocean is itself hot enough to generate some rain, thereby at times causing floods that paradoxically coincide with the more general drought in some East African countries, as happened in 1997-98 and in 2015.

A La Niña event is the opposite of an El Niño, that is, it is a stronger than normal flow of wet winds from the Pacific through the Indian Ocean, and thus brings rainfall well above normal for eastern Africa. On a couple of occasions that I can recall, there have been major cyclones in Mozambique not long after an El Niño event, in 1984 and in the year 2000.

Research on El Niño in Mozambique

Together with the Mozambican historian João Paulo Borges Coelho, I was a member of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) research team that studied the impacts in Mozambique of the El Niño of 1997-98. We worked together with INAM (Instituto Nacional de Meterologia) as the Mozambican team. The project covered 16 countries, with the African ones being Ethiopia, Kenya and Mozambique. It was funded through Ted Turner’s UNFIP foundation. The operational director was Dr. Michael Glantz of ESIG (Environmental Societal Impact Group) within NCAR (National Centre for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder, Colorado, USA. The team included the Head of Global Climate Change at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) HQ in Geneva, and a specialist who wrote a technical report on the way this particular ENSO event had developed.

It was possible to do this technical report and indeed to predict the 1997-98 El Niño because the US government had funded a series of buoys across the Pacific. It was prompted to do so by the large ENSO event of 1981-82 which had a big impact in the USA. These buoys which are located along the two Tropics (Capricorn and Cancer) are still in place and have sensors going down to a depth of 1,500 feet, with data being transmitted to satellites. The summary results of this UNEP study were published by the United Nations University in Tokyo: M. Glantz (2002) Once Burned, Twice Shy (2002). So because of these buoys spanning both Tropics from Indonesia to the Americas it had been known for months that an El Niño was coming in 2015. Indeed, surprisingly, an ENSO event started in 2014, but for some reason it petered out before it had developed fully. So I wonder if countries were forewarned about the ENSO event of 2015. It is possible that the ‘failure’ of the 2014 ENSO event may have dented confidence in such forecasts. One might charitably guess that this was why the UK government was unprepared, but I personally doubt that.

In the case of Mozambique, the 1997-98 forecast did not turn out as expected. Excellent preparations were made for drought and a resulting famine, but in fact the Indian Ocean was itself unusually hot and generated enough rain on its own to avoid this effect in Mozambique. During the project on the 1997-98 ENSO event, the overall team covering 16 countries included a meteorologist from Cuba because as indicated above it was known that strong El Niño events often cross Central America and affect the Caribbean and South America. One can see that this has also happened in 2015, with floods in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay. Even with a moderate El Niño, Europe can be affected, as was seen with the floods in Germany and Central Europe only about 7 or 8 years ago.

Meanwhile, various meteorologists are saying that the 2015 ENSO event was probably the strongest El Niño for a century. I have been looking closely at the global weather for months. In fact there is a website that I check out almost daily, because it shows ocean temperatures, land temperatures, pressure, winds at cloud level, the various jetstreams and other things. It was this website which showed that this El Niño effectively split into two not long after it peaked in December 2015, which is pretty unusual. So the rain that hit South America came from the southern part of the split in the warm water (El Niño) in the Pacific. Guided by the southern jet stream, the winds had carried the rain straight across the southern Andes into Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil. The northern part of the El Niño, which was smaller and less warm than the southern part, moved slightly north to California and then generated the floods that hit Texas and Lousiana. That all happened before the northern segment of the split El Niño moved on to Alaska, as described above.

Taking up the point that meteorologists in various countries are saying that this is probably the strongest El Niño for about a century, it should be said that accurate records do not go back before 1957, the International Geophysical Year, but for Mozambique there is a five-point classification from Moderate through to Very Strong El Niño events that goes back to 1850. Other research covering southern Africa as a whole goes from 1800 to 1992, and historical evidence for Mozambique shows that there was a strong EL Niño in 1791. From the classification on Mozambique starting in 1850, the two strong ones since 1957 are 1981-82, and 1997-98. The one that occurred in 2015 is definitely comparable to these two. As part of the UNEP research project that I was involved in, in 1999-2000, I obtained a historical description of famines since 1800 in Mozambique from a German historian who still lives there (Gerhard Liesegang). I then checked these against the list of El Niño events since 1850, and I found two things:

Firstly, in two-thirds of the cases where there was a Moderate Plus to a Very Strong El Niño, there was a drought in southern Mozambique.

Secondly, these droughts often correlated strongly with political unrest and dramatic political change, presumably driven by hunger. This included the rise to power of Shaka, such that the Zulu clan within the Nguni people meant that they were all called Zulu from then on (and various groups were sent north to bring back cattle and slaves – hence the District of Angonia in Mozambique’s Tete Province). It also includes the overthrow of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia and other notable historical events. I was unable to persuade my German colleague Liesegang to agree to a joint publication on this. So the details of that research were never published, although they formed part of the unpublished UNEP report on Mozambique.

On the basis of this historical research and the historical classification of ENSO events, it is evident that this 2015 El Niño now counts as one of the big 4 since 1850. They are: 1876-78; 1981-82; 1997-98 and 2015-16. In 1876-78, about 10 million people died of starvation in India, and about 13 million in China. There are no figures for East Africa but it must have been tens or hundreds of thousands. Those of you familiar with Mozambican history may recall the photographs in the book by Peter Vail & Landeg White.

With regard to the ENSO event of 1876-78, it might be argued that this famine was exacerbated by British colonial policies, including the reorganisation of agriculture in order to grow opium in what was then Bengal, as mentioned in an economic history of colonial and post-colonial India by the well-known economist Bhagwati. M. Davies makes a similar point about famines in India in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. Without in any way disputing that (and indeed Bhagwati makes it clear that there have been no such famines in India since the end of colonial rule) one must be careful about the timing of events here, especially with regard to opium. In any case, for East Africa and Mozambique, colonial rule did not at this time have much impact. For example, German colonial rule in Tanganyika did not really take hold until the late 1890s, and the ‘prazos’ in Mozambique (which might be described as small scale copies of the British East India Company, in that they were not formal colonial rule under the Portuguese government) did not have much agricultural impact in large swathes of Mozambique. Nevertheless, the death toll was evidently very high in eastern Africa, despite the difficulties in estimating total numbers.

Moving to the impact of the 2015 event, according to Mozambique News Reports and Clippings No. 315, edited by Joseph Hanlon, and dated 31st March 2016, “315, 366 people were affected by food insecurity as a result of the drought in southern and central Mozambique, the government spokesperson, Deputy Health Minister Mouzinho Saide, said Tuesday 29 Mar. But northern Mozambique faces the opposite problem. Saide said that floods in the north have affected 32,243 people, and have destroyed 4,991 houses and 109 schools. The drought means that Mozambique is facing a serious grain shortage. The country has always had to import most wheat and rice, but it has at least been self-sufficient in maize. This is no longer the case: Saide put this year’s grain deficit at 149,000 tonnes of maize, 267,000 tonnes of rice and 328,000 tonnes of wheat. (AIM 30 Mar).”

A spokesperson for NCAR in Boulder, Colorado, expressed surprised at the lack of serious flooding in Ethiopia, since that normally happens alongside droughts in other areas of Ethiopia during an El Niño event. However, I am less surprised, because that flooding depends on specific conditions in the Indian Ocean, and these do not apply over a wide area. Ethiopia at the moment has very serious food shortages, because despite the investment in agriculture there, the population has grown a great deal since the ENSO-related famines of 1977 and 1985.

There is an additional factor that suggests that Mozambique will often be able to cope better with famine than Ethiopia, other aspects being equal. This is that, as shown in the special issue on Mozambique of the Journal of Southern African Studies published in 1998, people in southern Mozambique are more willing to have recourse to ‘wild foods’ than elsewhere. The World Food Programme had long been slightly mystified by the survival rates during famines in southern Mozambique, as was explained to me when I was on a joint WFP/FAO Food and Crop Assessment Mission in March 1993. The answer came from fieldwork published in the JSAS special issue in 1998. I followed this up while on the 1997-98 EL Niño research project, and I asked an Ethiopian colleague about the range of wild foods eaten in Ethiopia during famines. He confirmed that owing to religious prohibitions from the Coptic Church, there were various wild foods that Ethiopians simply would not eat. This suggests that ceteris paribus, Ethiopians are probably more vulnerable to famines than people in Mozambique. Such an effect is probably dwarfed by the impact of commercial agriculture in Ethiopia, and I suspect that the impact of the latter may be similar to that of colonial agriculture in India.

Given the preoccupation in Europe with the migration from the Middle East and North Africa, the response to the 2015 ENSO event in terms of food aid to Africa has been muted.

A controversial discussion

It is worth recalling that some effects of ENSO events can be positive. For example, California has been suffering years of drought and it would have been a great relief if the 2015-16 event had brought sufficient rain to relieve that very damaging situation. Regrettably, the sudden splitting in two and rapid dissipation of the warm water meant that this did not happen, despite the flooding in Texas and Louisiana. More generally, the disruption to normal weather patterns is very damaging, and involves large numbers of fatalities. At least nowadays the death toll is nothing like that of 1876-78. I suspect that this is partly due to improved infrastructure and well-organised relief efforts. Yet the event of 1997-98, for example, cost at least $50 billion worldwide. Following the success of the US-funded buoys system in the Pacific, the US and EU funded a similar set of buoys along the Tropics in the Atlantic. So the US can ‘see’ what is coming on both sides, and Europe to some extent also benefits from that. Unless there is an adequate system of warning, similar to that with tsunami warnings, this may not be enough to further mitigate the impact of ENSO events.

While national meteorological offices can in principle check up on the ENSO Web pages of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at any time, the very fact that such events do not occur regularly means that this task can easily slip down the agenda of things to be monitored. A formal warning to all WMO-registered national meteorological services would probably serve as a well-timed wake-up call to set the disaster management procedures in motion. At the moment, countries vary considerably in their response capabilities, and this will doubtless continue, but lessons have already been learned from 1997-98 and they may need to be disseminated more effectively than publishing a single report. That dissemination could take place in disaster management training. In 2003 there was a disaster management course for ‘training of trainers’ (cascade training) at Africa University in Eastern Zimbabwe. That example should be more widely adopted.

Although it would be very costly, there should at least be some public debate about installing a set of buoys across the Indian Ocean, so that Africa and Asia could have better data. At the moment, a lot of meteorological data in the Indian Ocean is collected by commercial aviation and ships fitted with sensors, but this is inevitably spasmodic. Such a system of buoys would be of wider benefit in monitoring global weather and climate variability, as well as in providing data on when the Indian Ocean is going to generate floods during an El Niño. That aspect is not well understood. Proposing the installation of a costly system at a time of famine is bound to be controversial, but with improved understanding could come better pre-placement of infrastructure, including rescue equipment and food storage facilities. Since this problem has been around since the dawn of human existence, long-term thinking is probably in order. India and China could surely afford to fund such a system of buoys, and their populations and economies would benefit.

It is not known what triggers ENSO events, but it is known that they are not related to ‘climate change’. As indicated above, the incipient ENSO event of 2014 petered out before developing into a full-blown event. Establishing the causes of this could well be important. The ‘failure’ of this event to develop fully was predicted months ahead by the British physicist Piers Corbyn, and he gave a causal analysis of why he expected this to take place. Regrettably, this type of analysis is not being taken seriously by the meteorological and climatological establishment.

The reason for this is that they are still living in a Newtonian universe. They state explicitly in public interviews that the weather and climate are governed by gravity and thermodynamics. So electricity is relegated to a very minor secondary role, as when ice crystals rubbing against one another in a storm produce static electricity, which gives rise to lightning. While this undoubtedly happens, it is by no means the whole story, but it is the bigger picture that they fail to see. While they have known since 1995 about red sprites and blue jets (and they have known for even longer about noctilucent clouds) they do not seem to consider the implications. They have also known for about 20 years that lightning frequently strikes simultaneously at two different locations, often hundreds of miles apart, yet once again they do not fully consider the implications, and the necessity for studying the interaction between the weather and the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Such an apparent failure is striking when it is widely known that the ‘solar wind’ can at times trigger the Auroras (Borealis and Australis). So electrical phenomena within the magnetosphere evidently do derive from the impact of the ‘solar wind’. The problem here is that the ‘solar wind’ is really an electrical current flowing out from the Sun to the edge of the solar system, but it is not thought of in those terms by mainstream astronomers and meteorologists. A stream of charged particles flowing from one place to another is an electric current. Yet astronomers do not think of it in those terms, because the do not think that electric currents can last for any distance in the vacuum of space. This error is a result of the fragmentation of physics, since astronomers are not taught about plasma physics. Astronomers think that they can explain this ‘solar wind’ flow as a product of the alleged thermonuclear reaction in the Sun, but that argument does not stand up to scrutiny. It cannot explain the acceleration of these particles after they leave the Sun, whereas treating it as an electrical discharge can do so.

So the Sun is not just supplying heat to the Earth: it is also supplying energy in the form of electricity. Among other effects, this affects the behaviour of the jet-streams near both Poles, and it was this phenomenon which Corbyn correctly used to forecast that the 2014 El Niño would not develop fully. It seems reasonable to guess that it is electricity which actually triggers an ENSO event in the first place, but to my knowledge no research has yet been done on this.

Examination of ice cores (covering thousands of years) from Greenland and Lake Vostok in Antarctica show that the Earth’s climate variability has a distinct pattern: it is a fractal pattern and is probably carried as a signal on the electrical current from the Sun. This pattern holds true even for very recent time series data after the year 2000. It is time for debates on ‘climate change’ to take account of the full range of phenomena that influence weather and climate.

Conclusion

It should be evident by now that the effects of an ENSO event can vary geographically even within a single country, and that such events themselves vary considerably over time. Even with a single event, the drought in southern Africa can last longer in some places than others. For example, the drought continued in Angola into 1993 when in the rest of southern Africa it had finished in 1992. That meant that it was difficult to persuade donors to fund famine relief for Angola at that time, although eventually such efforts were successful.

Yet the general pattern is clear and can be used for disaster mitigation. I have already mentioned food storage and other measures to promote food security. It is not at all out of place to mention the biblical story of Joseph in Egypt and the 7 fat years followed by 7 lean years. Whatever its historical basis (and Joseph was a genuine historical figure, as attested by coins in the Cairo Museum, who lived during the reign of the Hiksos, the ‘lords of the desert’) this story sounds like a description of a strong La Niña followed by a strong El Niño. Surely Africa has suffered long enough from this.

The situation is certainly not helped by the policies of the World Bank, especially the abolition of food marketing boards and the consequent loss of grain storage facilities. The disastrous effects of such policies have been well documented for Zimbabwe, which was once the bread basket of Southern Africa. Yet the experience of Zimbabwe is by no means unique. When I was in Mozambique in 1990, DfID was funding a specialist to train people in techniques for using cheap forms of grain storage in a manner that reduced losses to insect depredation. So the common sense of cheap and effective grain storage was well understood by technical experts. Mozambique at that time had a very effective National Directorate for the Prevention and Combat of Natural Disasters, which had coped pretty well with the effects of war as well as ENSO events. Yet such knowledge was discarded in favour of the already discredited neoliberal orthodoxy, a zombie theory that keeps coming back from the dead, with fatal consequences for the poor.

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.

In the Name of the People: Understanding Angola

ROAPE

May 10, 2016

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig talks to Lara Pawson about Angola, the left, writing about Africa from Europe, and the long process of uncovering what happened across newly independent Angola after the vinte-sete de maio (27 May) in 1977. Today at ROAPE we see that our earlier approach to national liberation movements, before and after independence, occasionally meant that the review, its contributors and editors, supported profoundly undemocratic (even dictatorial) regimes as long as they spoke of radical transformation, signaled some sort of loyalty to ‘Marxism’ and were committed to a socialist future. ROAPE’s Graham Harrison has recently written on roape.net how we must move beyond the stultifying formality of cultural relativism and the universalisms of liberalism and social justice.

Firstly, could you please tell ROAPE about your interest, work, research on Africa? How did it start, what were your motivations, inspirations?

It started at the School of Oriental and African Studies, here in London. Other students influenced me greatly, including Harriot Beazley, John Game, Nick Hostettler, Didier Péclard, Miranda Pyne, Paru Raman and James Sanders. I was fortunate to have been taught by Sudipta Kaviraj and also Tom Young, however it was the historian, Shula Marks, who influenced me the most profoundly. Her books on class and race in South Africa were an important part of my education, as were the discussions we had as a class. With her support, I won a student bursary to do research in South Africa in 1992 for my undergraduate dissertation, which was a comparative analysis of ANC and National Party policies towards women and family. I interviewed women such as Mamphela Ramphele, Helen Suzman, Brigitte Mabandla and Frene Ginwala. I was so inexperienced, I dread to think what I actually asked them. In fact, on my way to meet Ginwala in Shell House, I got lost inside the building – I’d entered the high security lift by mistake – and I slammed into Joe Slovo: I wanted to apologise and tell him how great I thought I was, but I was so stunned I couldn’t speak.

As well as interviewing these political figures, I hitchhiked from Cape Town to Durban and back to Johannesburg. I met more extraordinary people – an ambulance driver from Soweto and, among others, a fat old racist from the Cape – who picked me up off the side of the road. We shared long conversations and I think these interactions played an important part in sparking my complete curiosity. Without a doubt, travelling and working alone, in a country in which Britain has behaved so appallingly, brought me up sharp. It made me think about my position as a white European who has gained so much from a miserable history of exploitation and violence. I think this experience was the kickstart to a long process of learning – about colonialism, racism, empire, privilege, eurocentrism and so on – a process which has steadily recalibrated my understanding of the world and my place within it. I came home quite a changed young woman.

You spent a lot of time in Angola, from the late 1990s. It was a moment of celebrated strong economic growth, but also dreadful repression. Can you explain what was taking place in the country at the time?

I arrived in Luanda for the first time in the summer of 1998, and stayed there as the BBC correspondent until December 2000. In fact, the celebrated economic growth you mention didn’t really start until after the war ended in April 2002. From 2003 to 2011, “growth” averaged 11 per cent and peaked at 20 per cent. I put growth into inverted commas because these are macro economic figures: for many Angolans, this so-called growth was not tangible. It was merely something spoken of by the government and the domestic and foreign media, and measured by financial institutions.

But when I first arrived in Angola in 1998, the price of oil was very low, just 9 US$ a barrel if I remember correctly. Prices started to tumble in November 1997 due, in large part I think, to overproduction globally. I remember when the price rose to 12 US$ and, over the months, to 21 US$. Over the years, as is fairly well documented, much of the money from Angola’s vast oil resources has “disappeared” into the pockets of the local elite and their families, into shell companies and offshore accounts often run by British, highly-educated lawyers and economists, as well as the international oil elite and all those ghastly men from Europe and the Middle East selling military hardware to Angola.

Over and above all this, of course, was the war, which had been raging on and off since 1975. Its final phase kicked off towards the end of 1998, within weeks of my arrival. Government airstrikes in the central highlands were ferocious. So was the ground offensive and the retaliatory bombings, ambushes and raids carried out by UNITA. The war alone, in my view, amounted to “dreadful repression”, as you rightly put it: hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, living in dreadful conditions in refugee camps and overcrowded shanty towns, dependent on food aid, medical aid and the generosity of friends and family. On top of that, the government was then, as it is now, intolerant of dissent, peaceful political opposition or even frank criticism. The few Angolans who dared demonstrate peacefully – often Angolans who were, themselves, demonstrating for peace – would be picked up by heavily-armed police in minutes. Those who wrote critically about the ruling MPLA party or the president himself were often locked up, as Rafael Marques found out in 1999 when he was sent to prison without trial for over a month for his piece, ‘The Dictator’s Lipstick’. Across the country, the atmosphere was characterised by oppression, paranoia and self-censorship. That said, it wasn’t all negative: there was also an active and vigorous movement for peace led by civil leaders, political figures, and the church. In the end, that movement failed, but its very existence, the discussions that took place, the debates about how to attain peace – they were valuable.

At a personal level, this initial two and a half year period in Angola was life-changing – and it was during this time that I learned about the vinte-sete de maio (27 May 1977). A small, courageous political party had organised a demonstration, a hunger strike in protest against a huge fuel price increase. A handful of men turned up to participate, and all of them were arrested. Over the following days, two more small protests took place, each one resulting in further arrests. What struck me at the time was not only the rarity of the demonstrations themselves, but the tiny number of people who were willing to be involved, as well as the absence of other journalists. When I asked my Angolan colleagues why this was, I was given a range of explanations, the most striking being that the last time there had been a significant protest, people were not just arrested, they were also killed. This reference to the 27 May, also known as the Nito Alves uprising, was really my introduction to the whole event. I finally began to understand more deeply Angola’s cultura do medo – its culture of fear. It was a defining moment in terms of my knowledge of Angola’s contemporary politics and also of the MPLA.

From your work in Angola you started research for In the Name of the People. How did this work begin?

It started several years after I’d initially left Angola at the end of 2000. I was back in London working at the BBC World Service. I had several conversations with a colleague, an Angolan, then head of the BBC Portuguese for Africa Service, João Van Dúnem. He told me about his brother, José, who had been executed in Luanda for his actions leading up to and on 27 May 1977. In fact, José Van Dúnem had worked alongside Nito Alves to lead the uprising, or attempted coup. João urged me to write a book. ‘But whatever you do,’ he said, ‘don’t write it like a human rights report. Write a book that people will read.’

In fact, the concept of the book – its style and tone – developed very slowly alongside the research. Initially, when I’d simply gone through my own collection of books on Angola, I was not at all sure how real the 27 May was. Where it was mentioned, it was so brief I questioned how much of ‘an event’ it really was. On the other hand, I knew from conversations with several Angolan friends that as far as they were concerned, it was extremely real – not simply the facts of what happened on the day itself, but the killings, detentions and torture over the following weeks and months.

Over time, I spoke to more and more Angolans, who were keen to help me dig up the story because they had lost a relative or close friend during the 27 May. I began to feel more confident after my interview with an Angolan woman living in Portugal, whose Portuguese husband had been escorted from their home in eastern Angola on the 27 May. She never saw him again. Hearing her horrific memories, and reading some of the paperwork concerning her husband’s disappearance – information from Portugal’s foreign ministry – I knew, then, that a book had to be written.

Later, in a London library, when I came across the MPLA Politburo’s 60-odd page published account of the 27 May, I knew I was on to something very important. [1] The silences in that text speak as much as what is there. It is an extraordinary document. In the library, I also came across more texts that covered the events of 1977 but, apart from one 1978 paper by the historian David Birmingham, none of them paid attention to the horrific purges that followed the 27 May. I was determined to correct that silence. I set out to speak to those who had been involved – survivors, perpetrators, political actors and observers. Archives, documents, papers and books can help us understand history to an extent, but what always intrigues me are the memories and lived experiences of individuals themselves.

For me, your book exposes a murderous regime and those who supported it. All of this is terrible, but then one realises that the massacre took place right at the start of Angola’s independence. It seems that there wasn’t a honeymoon, not even a consummation, but rather a bloody start to decades of bloody rule. How would you characterise the period, these heady years of Angola’s independence?

I’m not sure I would go as far as you have and say that “there wasn’t a honeymoon” at all. But even if that were my thinking, it would not be simply because of the 27 May and the increasingly authoritarian nature of the MPLA. We cannot forget that the country was at war in the weeks and months before independence was even declared on 11 November 1975, and it was at war immediately after. In this way, Angolans never enjoyed a honeymoon of independence.

It might be argued, however, that there was a certain honeymoon within the MPLA and among its supporters, especially once the opposition – first the FNLA, then UNITA which was supported by South African troops – had been beaten back thanks to the intervention of tens of thousands of highly trained and highly motivated Cuban troops. On 27 March 1976, the last of South Africa’s soldiers left Angola, defeated and humiliated. The UN Security Council called on Pretoria to reimburse Angola for war damages. This must have been an extraordinary and wonderful moment to have witnessed. Exactly fourteen months later, however, the 27 May uprising took place. This was an extraordinary and dreadful moment. David Birmingham has described it “the day freedom died in Angola”. I’d say that it was the day that the culture of fear – which had been the norm under Portugal’s fascistic dictatorship – now came to characterise MPLA rule as well. This is the great tragedy. I’d also like to borrow from John Saul, who wrote recently in a very generous review of my book, that what was taking place during these heady years was a “counterrevolution within the counterrevolution”.[2] I think this captures the period and what was taking place quite well, certainly in terms of the MPLA anyway.

Your book, controversially for some, challenges European Marxists, who rushed to support the regime, turning a blind-eye to what was actually occurring. The book was in part an expose of this sort of ‘radical’ Western support for third world regimes. Is this correct? How have some of these people reacted to your book?

When I set out with this book, my intention was not to expose anyone. It was to expose the truth, or, as I state at the end of the preface to the book, ‘to try to uncover the unwritten truth’ of the 27 May. Within that broad but ambitious goal, I wanted to do a number of other things: to understand how Angolans themselves, those outside the elite as much as within it, remember the 27 May; to explore the memory and enduring trauma of that event; and to try to understand how and why the massacre, which is such a huge part of the event of the 27 May, had been overlooked by western (especially British) leftists, who had written about this period of contemporary Angolan history and who had inspired my own engagement with the country. I’m talking about people like Basil Davidson, whose books had influenced me when I started out at SOAS, and Victoria Brittain, whose journalism inspired me to become a journalist.

Inevitably, my quest took me into challenging territory, both personally and politically. In my book, as you know, I have chapters with two British Marxists, each known for their work on Angola: Michael Wolfers, who is no longer alive, and Brittain. Each of them responded very differently: Wolfers was fairly open and generous, whereas Brittain was defensive. Before Wolfers passed away, he emailed to say how much he disliked me and my work. I have not heard from Brittain, but I would imagine that she’s not much of a fan either. I think it’s a pity that she wasn’t more open. I empathise with her and others who had written about Angola during the Cold War period. I wanted to try and put myself in their shoes. At the beginning of my chapter with Brittain, I make this abundantly clear: ‘Had I been a journalist then, I probably would have taken the same line, and defended Neto’s leadership above all else.’ Whether I would have carried on doing that, right up to the present: I certainly hope not.

But to answer your question, I’ve had very little personal feedback from this particular generation of western Marxists. There’s been gossip, of course. Certain well-placed individuals have, allegedly, tried their best to stop my book from gaining too much attention. If true, it is a fairly sorry situation: to think there are still people out there – and I’m talking about people in London, Leo, not Luanda – who want to silence a fuller investigation into the 27 May! Who do they think they are?

Of course, more formal reactions from the friends, supporters and networks of this group have also come to my attention. Negative responses include Colin Darch, a librarian based in Cape Town, South Africa – I think he’s British by birth – who wrote a passionate review expressing his loathing for my book.[3] I’m not sure he’s ever been to Angola, but he writes with surly confidence about the country and reveals abundant admiration for Brittain, Paul Fauvet and others, including Basil Davidson, who failed to discuss the appalling depths of violence and the massacre that followed the 27 May. Interestingly, I received a number of emails from people – some friends, some strangers, all of them regular visitors to Angola – who were quite appalled by what Darch had written. It was quite gratifying, therefore, that the same journal chose to publish a lengthy interview between myself and Justin Pearce, who has been working in Angola on and off since 2000.[4]

The London Review of Books recently ran a review of six books on Angola, including In the Name of the People.[5] The author, Jeremy Harding, makes clear his dislike of certain parts of my book, focusing in particular on one of my two chapters with Wolfers, which intrigued me because he doesn’t discuss any of my chapters with Angolans. Despite our differences, Harding and I are making efforts to build a friendship: the way I see it, if Angolans can reach peace after decades of war, a couple of British writers should be able to shake hands, share a beer and engage each other in fair discussion. Another pretty negative review was published on this very website, written by Miles Larmer. He certainly was a Marxist, though I don’t know if he would still describe himself as such. He is not the same generation as this crowd we’ve been discussing, so I honestly don’t know what his connections are with them, if any.

But to be honest, the negative reactions are in the minority. The overwhelming response has been very positive indeed. For example, John Saul, a North American Marxist, who ROAPE readers are familiar with, thinks my book is ‘brilliant’. He has written a very complimentary review in the latest issue of ROAPE.[6] Another writer on the left, Keith Somerville, also wrote a very favourable review of the book for the Royal Africa Society.[7] In fact, In the Name of the People was nominated for the Royal Africa Society Book of the Year 2014. And then there’s you, Leo. You are obviously not of that generation that was in Angola in the 1970s and 1980s, but you are a Marxist with close connections to many of them. Like me, you have looked up to Brittain and, more significantly, Basil Davidson. Alas, Davidson was too unwell to be interviewed by the time my research was under way. But I think he would have had interesting things to say in response to my questions as to why, in his own work, he looked away from the important matter of the massacre.

What I have found very frustrating is that people like Darch have misrepresented my arguments, implying that I state that Davidson, among others, didn’t write at all about the 27 May. This is not what I say. Apart from Brittain – who does not mention this crucial event once in her book, Death of Dignity: Angola’s Civil War, despite the fact it covers the period – Davidson, Wolfson, Paul Fauvet and others did write about it, but only from the perspective of Agostinho Neto’s faction of the MPLA. They produced biased, one-sided accounts which simply reproduced the official state propaganda coming out of Luanda. They failed – or perhaps chose not – to listen to the other factions of the ruling party. And they did not write about the thousands of deaths which followed the uprising. This is the bit I find so hard to swallow. This is the bit that people such as Darch seem content to overlook, which I find very disturbing. Not only me, but many Angolans I know, including some who were raised within the MPLA ‘family’, find it disturbing too.

Perhaps I should mention that, when I was working on the book, there was a period when I considered packing it all in. I was so uneasy and depressed about what I was learning about the MPLA and the British left. In desperation, I rang a friend in Luanda, a widely respected Angolan journalist. I told him that I was really worried about the response of people like Victoria Brittain, among others. My friend erupted into laughter. He couldn’t believe that I could worry so much about those he described as ‘a bunch of has-beens’. ‘They are living in the past, Lara. They don’t matter. No one in Angola cares what they think. Just write your book. Do it for us.’ He carried on laughing.

So as well as uncovering the massacre the book also uncovers the contradictory relationship of a generation of (mostly) white radical intellectuals to apparently progressive and socialist regimes that emerged in the second wave of independence in Africa in the 1970s. What do these conclusions teach us about the continent, the view of it from the west and how we should relate towards its movements and projects?

Well, to start with, it’s taught me the dangers of generalising. I think that one of the mistakes that has been made is to assume that because you are familiar with the politics of, say, Mozambique, that you can assume a certain familiarity with Angola. There are a number of British leftists in particular who know quite a bit about South Africa’s politics of liberation and assume that they can transfer this knowledge onto Angola. This sort of approach is unwise. What I have learned is that the more I increase my knowledge of Angola, the more I realise I have to learn. But perhaps the biggest lesson I have taken away from my research for In the Name of the People is that the politics of left and right that shape so much of political action and discussion in western Europe and North America does not map easily onto Angola.

I think that one of the errors of some of my predecessors was to project their own political hopes and aspirations on to the country. As well as revealing a certain arrogance, this approach fails to account for other ways of being and acting in the world, ways that may not be immediately obvious to outsiders. In the case of Angola, I think that some of these Marxists overlooked more nuanced and complicating factors that fuzzy the water of simplistic notions of left and right. I’m thinking, here, of ideas of racial hierarchy, for example, which have been shaped profoundly by the politics, culture and history of ideas of assimilation introduced by the Portuguese, as well as the regional differences, the complex ideas of ethnicity, history, religion, class, village, nation and kingdom… the list goes on. I would strongly recommend reading Justin Pearce’s recent book, Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola, 1975-2002, which, in my view, shows just how flawed our thinking on Angola has been, in terms of seeing the country as simply MPLA versus UNITA, Left versus Right, and so on and so forth. Pearce shows that this is not how Angolans understand things.

Of course, it is easier to say all of this in hindsight. But it has been disappointing to witness the lack of humility of those on the left, who, even today, refuse to admit that they may have got it wrong.

You were longlisted for The Orwell Prize 2015. What has been the reception of the book in the UK and Portugal? What have been the silences, who has and who has not engaged with the arguments you have made?

In the UK, it’s been pretty good. As well as The Orwell Prize longlisting, it also got shortlisted for the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2015 and also for the Political Book Awards Debut Political Book of the Year 2015. And as I mentioned earlier, it was also nominated for the Royal Africa Society Book of the Year 2014. So I’ve been delighted. It’s also received a pile of extraordinary reviews from all sorts of people, all of which are listed on my website. I was particularly delighted to receive praise from the likes of Didier Péclard in Politique Africaine, Hassan Ghedi Santur in Warscapes, Phillip Rothwell in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cassie Werber in the Wall Street Journal, Delinda Collier in Africa is a Country and, really pleasing, Claudia Gastrow in The Salon, which is produced at the University of the Witwatersrand under Achille Mbembe’s editorial lead. All of this has been very warming indeed. I’ve also received correspondence from people in the UK who have read the book, including those who know nothing about Angola and who now want to know more as a direct result of reading the book. What more could a writer ask for? I’ve made new friends because of the book, as well as the inevitable enemies!

In Portugal, I had an appalling review in the newspaper Público written by a young male social scientist who, at the time of writing, I understand had never visited Angola in his life. He seemed to object to the fact I write in the first person and that – shock, horror! – I talk about my doubts and even my emotions. A true empiricist, he also seemed to be obsessed with the need for certainty and the pretence of the objective, authorial, third person. This is not an approach I admire.

Luckily, there have been many positive reactions from Portugal and other parts of Europe too. I have received numerous emails, Facebook messages, Twitter DMs and direct phone calls from all sorts of strangers, including a number of Angolans. An elderly man who went to school with President Dos Santos, was so overcome by my book, he rang me up and asked if he could travel to London to visit me. In his seventies, he came to stay at my home with his wife. We spent the weekend discussing Angola and the 27 May. He said he had waited all his life for a book to tell the truth about racism in Angola and about the 27 May. I was quite overwhelmed by his reaction. Hearing his stories was also upsetting. People have been through so much.

Others include those whose relatives were killed following the events that day. Many of them have written with their own stories, and to thank me for bringing this information into the public sphere. Young Angolan men, in particular, have written from different parts of the country, as well as from Portugal and elsewhere, to say that their families will still not discuss the 27 May and that my book has helped them to understand their history. Some have written to tell me very personal stories about how their relatives died. This has been a humbling experience. A young Angolan woman stood up at a public event I did in London and said she’d read the book and it captures perfectly the emotion and fear that the 27 May produces. Again, I was pretty overwhelmed – or perhaps reassured – by her response. It’s been very gratifying to meet so many Angolans who are prepared to accept the work of an outsider.

I recall a seminar with John Saul in May 2014 where he made polite criticism of your conclusions, regretting that you had not given an estimate of the numbers killed in the events your describe. Is this a reasonable criticism?

John Saul has been so supportive of my book, he’s the last person I’d want to contradict or criticise. And let’s be honest: he is not alone in making this point. However, there have been many others who believe, as I do, that my refusal to provide a figure for readers to take away with them is a sign of the book’s strength. After all, there is not a single incident of large-scale political violence in Angola whose numbers are not massively disputed. In the case of the 27 May, these numbers range from a few hundred, to a couple of thousand, to 25,000, to 50,000, all the way up to 90,000. I have no concrete evidence that could allow me to claim that I know how many were killed. If you were to force me, I’d probably lean cautiously to the lower end of the scale. As I state clearly at the end of the book, however, I have been inspired by Judith Butler’s work. In Frames of War: When is Life Grievable she observes that knowing how to count is ‘not the same as figuring out how and whether a life counts’.[8] This line of thinking marks my own reflections on the 27 May.

What I learned, while researching this terrible event, is that the ever-inflating estimate of the dead doesn’t actually change anything in real terms. I think our obsession with counting the dead – in Angola, in Northern Ireland, in Columbia, in New York, in Burma, etc – distracts us from the deeper traumas that shape our experiences of the world in which we live. For me, what is so interesting about the 27 May is the extent to which it has shaped the type of political engagement that takes place in the country. I would also like to add a note of caution to those who are so keen to come up with a concrete number: they should only do so if they have absolute proof. Otherwise, they are merely stoking rumour. I don’t see how that could possibly help anyone, least of all those who are still coming to terms with the deaths of their relatives and friends and comrades. To answer your question then: No, I don’t think it is a reasonable criticism. I think it is possibly even a little foolish.

Can you tell us about your continued involvement in Angola and Africa? What work are you doing at the moment? Has the book made it difficult for you to return to Angola?

I’m not keen to generalise about the continent of Africa. I have friends in different countries, but I miss my friends from Angola most of all. I haven’t been back for several years. I’ve been told I won’t get back in by one MPLA guy, a friend of mine. He says the party will never let me back in while Dos Santos is still at the helm. I’m not inclined to buy this idea. I simply haven’t tried to get a visa, less because of the book than money. Luanda is incredibly expensive. Flying to Angola costs a lot. At the moment, I simply don’t have the funds to make a trip. But I am sure, at some point, I will make a trip, to visit the people I know and love. Meanwhile, I am engaging with Angola in a more personal and private capacity. I am currently trying to work out ways to raise money for the families of the 17 young activists who have been sentenced to jail because of their determination to bring democracy to Angola. I want to do what I can to help them.

As for my work, I have a new book coming out this autumn, here in the UK. It is called This Is the Place to Be, and is published with CB editions. I am now working on a third book. More on that when I have worked out where it is going.

Notes

[1] Bureau Político do Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, Angola: A tentativa de golpe de estado de 27 de maio de 77 (Lisbon: Edições Avante!, 1977).

[2] Saul, John, Review of African Political Economy, Volume 43, Issue 147, 2016, pp 163-5

[3] Darch, Colin, South African Historical Journal, Volume 66, Issue 4, October 2014, pages 726-728.

[4] See Pearce, Justin, ‘Interview with Lara Pawson: On Writing In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre‘, South African Historical Journal, Volume 67, Issue 3, 2015; Pearce, Justin, Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola 1975-2002, Cambridge University Press 2015

[5] Harding, Jeremy, ‘Apartheid’s Last Stand’, London Review of Books, Vol 38, No 6, 17 March 2016

[6] Saul, John, ‘In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre’, Review of African Political Economy, Volume 43, Issue 147, 2016

[7] Somerville, Keith, ‘Factions, fear and fighters – the story of Angola’s forgotten massacre’, African Arguments, 20 May 2014. Available online: http://africanarguments.org/2014/05/20/review-factions-fear-and-fighters-the-story-of-angolas-forgotten-massacre-by-keith-somerville/

[8] London: Verso, 87. p.xx

Revisiting ‘Militancy’: Examining the Niger Delta

ROAPE

May 6, 2016

By Ben Tantua and Palash Kamruzzaman

This paper tells stories of the Niger Delta. It reveals the process and structure of the conflict which started from the rights to self-determination and resource control by ‘militant groups’ in that region. We examine narratives of the conflict in the words of dominant elites and ‘militia activists’, and argue that ‘militia actions’ that appear to challenge the legitimacy and authority of the Nigerian state over control of natural resource (Oil), is embedded in complex web and porous boundary of informal and formal interactions with politicians and ‘military’ leaders. This provides the opportunity for the elites to maintain their control over oil and for some ‘militia leaders’ to bargain and negotiate with the authorities often motivated by self-interest.

Introduction

The discovery of oil in the Niger Delta region in 1956 generated hope, expectations and opportunities to improve the welfare of local people. However, the reality is, national elites comprised of politicians and (former) military personnel, have been the principle beneficiaries of oil revenues in contrast to local communities who so far seen little or no benefits. In Nigeria, prior to the discovery of oil, exploration of natural resources was primarily controlled by the regional authorities. This (such as Land Use Act 1978; and Decree 13, 1996) dispossessed local people from the rights to land ownership paving the grounds for petro-capitalism.’[1] This can be seen as one of the key factors for various aspects of grievances (Onuoha, 2005; Oluwanyi, 2010; Obi, 2009), and feelings of marginalisation among the local communities (Tamuno, 1970; Odukoya, 2006), particularly for the ethnic groups such as Ijaws and Ogonis. It is argued that such feelings of grievances and marginalisation have triggered the emergence of protests against the state (Watts, 2007; Omeje, 2005). Initially, the protests were non-violent but later adopted a violent character where the protesting groups engaged in bombing of oil pipelines, kidnapping of oil workers and confrontation with Nigerian military (Cuvelier, et al, 2014; Ukiwo, 2007). Conflicts generated from oil-governance policies, therefore, can be seen from multiple lenses. On the one hand, it may appear as a rebellious action of protesting groups engaged in criminal activities for private gains, often described as ‘militia’ activities in various (un)official narratives.[2] On the other hand, it might appear to be the case where some groups are fighting for their ‘rightful share’ (Ferguson, 2015) expressing their grievances, frustrations, and resistance from a distorted livelihood and lack of participation in the oil/natural resource management.

In this paper, we investigate to what extent is the ‘militia activities’ in the Niger Delta a serious resistance movement that confronts the state power and seek to provide an alternative. We look into the conflict and the process of labelling ‘militia activities’ which started from the control and/or rights over the natural resources.[3] We explore how the Nigerian state (along with petro-capitalist allies) still maintains its monopoly over oil governance, while the activities of these so called ‘militia’ groups, to a large extent, remain unsuccessful in establishing their claim over the share/redistribution of natural resources. In doing so, we analyse the views expressed by some of the members of these groups who proclaim to be fighting for self-determination and rightful share/control over natural resources. The state has however, adopted various strategies to dissuade their activities including co-optation, amnesty and offering some form of political legitimacy where some ‘militia’ leaders are being brought to the negotiating tables in order to minimise the negative effects of conflicts. These strategies point towards the existence and functioning of assorted clientele networks among state, multinational companies (MNCs) and ‘militia’ leaders. Evidence presented here add to the existing scholarship by exploring the process/rationale behind the sustained nature of conflicts and their impacts on Nigeria’s broader political economy with a particular focus on oil governance.

The structure of the paper is as follows: the first section offers a background on conflict; oil governance and ‘militia’ resistance in Niger delta. This also reveals the dissatisfaction and frustrations of ethnic minorities that triggered ‘militia’ activities in the region. The second section offers empirical evidence collected from members of some ‘militia’ groups, key members of the rights groups and academics working on this issue. Empirical evidence was collected in between July 2010 and January 2011. A total of 35 semi-structured interviews was conducted through purposive sampling from seven specific sites across three states (Rivers, Bayelsa, and Cross Rivers States). Informed consents were obtained prior to the interviews and respondents’ pseudonym have been used in presenting their views. The third section makes an analysis of the views represented in the interviews contrasting with the official and unofficial narratives of the state about ‘militia’ groups and the conflict. Through a critical lens, we focus on the complexity of diverse interactions for creating/constructing intersubjective meanings expressed in these interviews where different narratives are being (re)produced for competing interests. We draw a conclusion in the final section.

An overview of Conflict, Oil governance, and Resistance/Militancy in Niger Delta

Oil and politics are inseparable in Nigeria. Oil wealth often influence and shape the structure of Nigeria’s politics and economy. Its significance inform a contest for power and authority, where ethnic minorities who inhabit in oil bearing land continually seek to reassert claim to own land and oil under it. Resource laws such as the Land Use Act of 1978 and Decree 13, 1996, vested legitimate rights and authority over resource ownership in the federal government. Meaning the Nigerian State negotiates the terms and conditions for oil exploration with the multinational companies (MNCs). The dispossession of right to participate by local communities in oil extraction through the above mentioned Acts/Decrees reveal that the power chiefly lies with the state (along with military/political elites and the MNCs) – one key component behind the lingering conflict/‘militia’ activities in Niger Delta.

Historically, minority/ethnic groups have been living with fear of domination and feelings of political oppression in Niger Delta. This is evident from previous quests for regional autonomy and the struggles for political power amongst the minority groups of Nigeria further increasing the tension among majority-minority ethnic groups (Ukiwo, 2011). This had triggered the first ‘militia’ action in 1966 initiated by Isaac Adaka Boro, leader of the Niger Delta Volunteer Force (NDVF), and subsequent Biafra civil war in 1967. Both incidents threatened to secede as the Niger Delta Republic and the Biafra Republic, respectively. They seem to have spurred the forms of contemporary ‘militia actions’ which continues today. Moreover, the discovery of oil created localised perception political oppression, which enabled the NDVF’s ideology of self-determination to start a process for contestation challenging the legitimacy and authority of the Nigerian state over its governance oil. The military regime took no time in describing Adaka Boro/NDVF’s action as ‘militant activities’ and imposed a number of political barriers (e.g. killing and imprisoning a large number of activists including Adaka Boro) to prevent the activities of protesting groups further. Nigeria’s heterogeneous cultural diversity also contributes to the identity politics and plays crucial role in understanding socio-economic and political foundations of the Niger Delta conflict. It informs the unequal distribution of resources within ethnic groups engaged in the struggles for power and access to resource benefits. The history of resistances, therefore, can be traced back to pre-discovery of oil, such as, from the 1895 Akassa raid against British traders (Alagoa, 1960), to perceptions of marginalisation in the 1950’s, Calabar Ogoja Rivers Movement (CORM), the armed rebellion of Adaka Boro in 1966, the Non-violent Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) of Ken-Saro Wiwa, and the contemporary Movement for Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) which morphed from the fallouts of the historical gathering of Ijaw Youths at Kaiama community in the early 1990s. This chronology of resistance/movements in the Niger Delta manifest the ongoing tensions among ethnic groups and the state – against the latter’s monopoly over natural resource governance.

Given this context, the next section offers empirical evidence obtained from the members of so-called ‘militant’ groups in understanding their views on conflict/protest/violence. The significance of these views can be explained by the words of Wasser (2014), where he insists that violent campaigns originates from the nature of state engagements to non-violent processes. Violent conflicts in Niger Delta region are grounded in historical discontent of resource ownership (Ako, 2011). The demand for access to resource control offer a common platform for different ‘militant’ groups, who may share the common perceptions of exploitation and limited spaces for political participation. Thus, the porous boundaries of conflict, violence and politics inform the nature of state response to social mobilisation (Wood, 2015). They also shed new light in understanding the patterns of violence and repertoire of contention by various actors in Niger Delta.

Empirical evidences: Marginalisation, Political Oppression, protest and ‘militancy’ revisited

The feeling of being politically oppressed among the ethnic minorities seem to be a key component of the Niger Delta conflict. This was highlighted in the views offered by several interviewees. For instance Kowa, locates protest/resistance by the ‘militia groups’ in response to political oppression before oil was first discovered in Nigeria. He explains that this set the context for struggles for political power in which minority groups were submerged under the regional authority of Eastern majority Igbos. According to Kowa:

Militancy in the Niger Delta region is a combination of series of struggles, dating back to the Adaka Boro revolt […] because of the injustice and minority status of the inhabitants of the region, we needed to be separated from Eastern region […] These events existed before oil came into prominence.

Before 1956, the constitutional provision stipulated a structure of regional autonomy that allowed 50 percent of resource benefits to regions, based on derivation principle. After Nigeria’s independence in 1960, this was gradually reduced by the state accentuating the protest and resistance from the minority ethnic groups. The centralised structure of oil governance, amongst other features, spurred a struggle for power along the ethnic lines, and became evident in the nature of political party formations in the country.[4] Such structure of political party formations in the early 1960s, along with feeling of deprivation, informed the action of Adaka Boro and created an influence among other protesting groups in Niger Delta. Protest groups have been viewed as platforms of collective actions in which contemporary ‘militias’ appear to hinge on similar ideology of ‘self-determination and resource control’. This was coherent with the views of Timidi who insisted that the lack of basic socio-economic amenities in communities spurred the resistance/conflict in the region.[5] His response, like other ‘militants’, made reference to Adaka Boro and Ken Saro Wiwa as leaders who inspire much of current ‘militia’ actions. This also shows how past experience of exploitation can evoke contemporary collective action.

We have been fighting for the course of the Niger Delta for years. People like Isaac Adaka Boro came on board, he died, and Ken Saro Wiwa came […] you know we are the people that are feeding the whole country, but if you come to my community, there is no electricity, no road, no drinking water, nothing, and nothing.

Military rules, along with political oppression, further increased the tensions and violence in Niger Delta. From 1966 to Nigeria’s first transition from military to democratic rule in 1979, the Delta witnessed series of sustained brutality and killings from Nigeria’s military authorities. Non-violent protest/agitation which began as writing protest letters to oil company management to demonstrations against these companies often ended with the brute force of oil company securities, supported by the military regimes. Such instances eventually gave these protests some violent attributes as was illustrated in the aftermath of Ogele protest. The case of Ogele procession represents a key historical moment of state brutality as well as conscious awakening to resort to arms in defence of making claims for the legitimate rights (perceived by the protesting groups) over oil and other natural resources in Niger Delta. The following was described by Otuan.[6]

…We were protesting in a non-violent way. We carried placards and leaves without weapons or guns. But in all the protests to express our grievances, the federal government would use military might, not police but the military might […] along the hospital road junction, some soldiers led by army Captain opened fire on us. They stood in three lines; the first group kneeled on the floor, other groups a little higher and others standing. They opened fire and four persons were killed. I personally carried a boy from Ogbia whose stomach was torn by bullet in wheelbarrow to a clinic nearby (emphasise original, expressed in interview).

The repercussion of the Ogele procession thus seem to have given a new meaning and understanding of protest amongst these groups, particularly the Ijaws. As Boas (2012) asserts that to stand against the repression of the state and pervasive culture of impunity, the local oil bearing communities engendered a shift from non-violent approach to violence. It induced a belief that to deal with state brutality violence is not only necessary, but also an appropriate tool to carry on with. As Pato described it regarding the demands of Ijaws.[7]

…The picture we gathered from that moment is that government was not open to peaceful negotiation and resolution of the crisis […] it is the introduction of violence by Ijaw youths that got attention from the government. The government does not believe in advocacy, so the process for advocacy have not helped the engagement of communities in the Niger Delta with the federal government.

The repression from state brutality as a response to protest and agitations eventually led to arms confrontation as was also illustrated by Ololo.[8]

We are fighting with the government to let them know about the Niger Delta situation […] we cannot go to Abuja to fight them, so we have to destroy pipelines and embark on illegal bunkering business. The federal government got involved in Ogele and since then we started shooting at them too.

Between 2006 and July 2009, the coordinated attacks by ‘militant groups’ such as the MEND accounted for about 300 deaths and 119 oil workers being held hostage.[9] The daily oil production also drastically reduced during this time, from 2.6 million barrels of oil per day to just 700,000 barrels per day.[10] This was despite $3 billion dollars annual spending by the federal government and oil companies on security to protect oil facilities in the region. No surprise the state and oil companies labelling these protests as ‘militant activities’. Furthermore, there have been efforts to buy-out different factions of these groups, bring them to negotiating table, offering them amnesty and spaces in mainstream politics. One such process is informal payments made by some governors to ‘militant’ leaders in the Niger Delta illustrating another important aspect that has helped the conflict and ‘militancy’ to continue. Payments like this serve a dual purpose. First, this provides state governors an opportunity to use his discretion to spend money from the treasury (generally without much question) to ‘buy peace’ through security votes and capitalise on the tension and insecurity. Second, this also offers political leaders a means to strengthen relations with key ‘militias’ for election times. However, such payments are often unevenly distributed among the ranks of ‘militia’ groups and might raise the question whether these groups are motivated by greed or grievances (Sutcliffe, 2012; Le Billion 2005; Watts, 2007; Cuvelier, et al, 2014). As Kavelli offered an insight about the payments made by the government to ‘militants’[11] :

…Yes, it is the government that is paying our salaries while we are in Camp. These are secrets that I am telling you. It is the government that is paying! I have seen things, I cannot speak about […] for the ordinary soldiers, they pay us 70,000 naira [12] but we are the people taking the risks, we die for nothing. You see, I know the amount because my uncle receives a salary of 1.6 million naira [13] from the government every month.

The introduction of amnesty programme depicts the co-option process by the state and also draws attention to a shift in the ideology among the ‘militia’ groups. Amnesty programmes aim to bring the ‘militants’ into formal and informal structures of resource benefit, by opening up spaces for key ‘militia’ leaders to gain access to mainstream politics. This is elucidated in a media statement of MEND’s spokesperson Jomo Gbomo, who accused the Niger Delta Peace and Conflict Resolution Committee (NDPCRC) for using the health of the late President Yar Adua to delay talks in order to exploit the amnesty process and offer bribes to create factions among the ‘militant’ leaders (The Punch, 2009). [14] This shows a fluid and cohesive clandestine network of patronage that help shaping and sustaining ‘militancy’ in the region. This also reveals a shift in the ideology of various protesting groups as succinctly explained by an interviewee who simply gave his name as Shine ya eye, during an interview:

Can you imagine the MEND war-horse being hinged on an insignificant amnesty programme? I thought MEND fought for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta people. Everything has suddenly narrowed down to the amnesty allocation of agitation.

A shift in the ideology seem to have frustrated some members of these groups, as an ex-militant ’General’ was criticising fellow ‘militias’ for being greedy. His views clearly suggests that there must be some networks among the ‘militias’ and political elites, considering the high cost of establishing and maintaining a camp as well as the tangible and intangible resources needed for ‘militia’ movement to be successful. [15]

Fighting is not a poor man’s business. A man with just 10 million naira [16] cannot go to the creeks because that amount cannot last beyond four days. So any person who wants to return to the creeks—that is the person’s decision; the return to the armed struggle cannot be one man’s decision. It has to be a decision taken by many other stakeholders in the region.

Analysis

As can be seen from the empirical evidence presented above, a number of pertinent features such as minority status, political oppression, the labelling and meanings behind ‘militia’ action can be perceived as main reasons for continued violent conflict in Niger Delta region. These observations add to various narratives of conflict and labelling extending further whether so called ‘militia’ actions are motivated by greed or grievances, and how the claim for ‘rightful share’ are intricately dovetailed in this process. They also offer further insights about shifting ideologies among some ‘militia’ members/leaders. Identifying different mechanisms of co-option, political patronage and material benefits offered by various (in)formal actors also contribute to the political economy of resource governance. From a critical perspective, the Niger Delta region can be described as an arena of contested entitlements, a theatre of struggles where the politics of recognition are being played out. In this particular case, we reveal how the protests of the Ogonis and Ijaws shaped a particular form of resistance and collective action. It partly demonstrates the political opportunities or constraints for the success or failure of movements, and state capacity for repression. Also, the legislative laws of resource extraction have been central to the conflict surrounding the Ogonis and Ijaws, as well as other ethnic minorities of the delta. The narratives and meanings behind ‘militia’ action are socially constructed. Protesting groups were labelled or framed by the state/media in various ways, as oil thieves, criminals, kidnappers, cult gangs or restive youths. While ‘militants’, on the other hand, see themselves as freedom fighters, liberators or resource agitators. These labelling manifest a particular kind of reality with varied meanings and interpretations both at the individual and collective levels. The meaning of ‘militancy’, therefore, is not straightforward. They cannot be conceptualised within a binary framework of true or false, bandits/common criminals or freedom fighters.[17] They are socially constructed within the narratives of the state, powerful elites and various other groups. This must be also noted that, for some ‘militia’, such activities can be an opportunity to make a living. As some members being recruited in ‘militia’ groups in the context of their desperation to survive (often indirectly paid by the state or other political sources), while others drift into ‘militant’ activities having become involved in oil theft, in order for their subsistence. Arguments presented here point towards the process that the labelling of insurgents under broad categorisation such as ‘common criminals’ can be misleading (Ballentine and Sherman, 2003), that ignores how livelihood strategies could intermix with politically motivated actions and can co-exist simultaneously (Watts, 2007). Moreover, some ‘militant’ leaders may appear to be driven by the potential to secure both material and political influence. The prospects for them to access oil benefits are intrinsically linked to the role of political elites and porous boundaries of patronage relationships which underlie the continuity of ‘militancy’ in the Niger Delta (Kew and Phillips, 2013). The rise in the number of militants from 150 in 1966 to 26, 356 by 2014, did not emerge out of spontaneous, frenzied mobilisation, but through a series of historical events within formal and informal structure, socio-political events and shared perceptions. [18]

Conclusion

The Niger Delta conflict is rooted within the history and culture of resource governance in Nigeria. A decentralised structure of the country, prior to its independence in 1960, enabled a regional autonomy over resource ownership. The discovery of oil in 1956, introduced a radical shift from pre-existing regional authority structure to a more centralised resource governance policies which dispossessed the rights of recognition, participation and ownership of local people in the oil governance. This feeling of political oppression, along with a perception of minority status, spurred a number of key protest groups followed by pockets of non-violent protests from communities that faced state brutality and repression under military regimes between 1966 and 2006. The state response to non-violent protest, subsequently led to the emergence of armed ‘militia’ groups, the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) in 2006. This paper has attempted to unpack how the complexities are informed by broader political-economy structure of resource governance in Nigeria through the voices of the ‘militants’. We argue that unless we understand the significance and political dynamics of resource governance, we cannot understand the mobilising process and articulation of ‘militancy’ in the Niger Delta. Particularly, how it evolves within various networks of power relationships and social interactions over access to resource benefits. Whilst, the NDVF and MEND emerged to challenge the legitimacy and authority of the state over oil governance, under an ideological platform of self-determination and resource control, the actions and activities of ‘militant’ groups over the time may have shifted from the framing of self-determination and resource control to personal interest/greed (at least for some). Thus we contend that the cognitive world of ‘militants’ and ‘militancy’ in the Niger Delta is embedded in a complex web of formal and informal interactions with political actors and military elites which give significance and sustenance of the conflict in the Niger Delta. Although contemporary ‘militant groups’ tend to legitimise their actions from previous actions of NDFV, their ambitions/motivation are consistently hidden under the notion of self-determination. As in many ways, this has been compromised because of some leaders’ (or leaders of some factions) personal self-interest both in terms of political benefits or other material interests. The ideology of ‘militants’ that has changed over time is critical for understanding the process of mobilisation that gives conflict a more persisting nature. As illustrated in this paper, there are instances where ideology of ‘militias’ are strongly embedded in its historical origin (Adaka Boro and the Ogele procession). In other instances, the ideology tend to be weakened by negotiations between ‘militia’ leaders and political elites and/or MNCs. This reveals the porous boundaries of social and material transformation (exchange of guns for vote, money for pipeline protection, etc.) that enable some of them to gain status and wealth (Ako, 2011). Altogether these events indicate that ‘militants’ have gained prominence within the mainstream discussion of resource governance in contrast to the narrative that the militants are common criminals and bandits. This marriage between ‘militant’ leaders and politicians, serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, it provides the opportunity for some ‘militias’ to create their own praxis and ‘governable’ spaces in negotiating/bargaining with the state. While on the other hand, the national elites maintain their control over oil by largely ignoring the demand of the local population including ethnic minorities which results in spreading/continuing the violence.

Ben Tantua recently completed his PhD in International Development from the University of Bath (UK) and now teaches Development Economics at the Niger Delta University. Palash Kamruzzaman has degrees in Anthropology and Social Policy and teaches Politics and International Development at the University of Bath, UK.

References

Alagoa, E., J, 1960. The Aksaa Raid 1895. Ibandan: Ibandan Univeristy Press.

Ako, R., 2011. The Struggle for Resource Control and Violence in the Niger Delta. In: C. Obi & S.A. Rustad, eds. Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta: Managing the complex politics of petro-violence. pp. 42-54. London: New York: Zed Books.

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Notes

[1] Petro-capitalism describes a clientele networks of a few state political elites and multinational oil companies exercising monopoly over the exploration, management and resource benefits at the expense of local communities in Niger Delta (Watts, 2004).

[2] The terms militant and militancy may mean different things to different readers/audiences. Interpretations of these terms are highly subjective. One might point to the common saying ‘one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’. Hence, in this work, we have used the related terms such as militants, militancy, and militia within inverted commas (‘…’).

[3] We feel that it is important to understand who label whom and in what capacity. How this labelling gains normalcy as labelling refers to acts of valuation and judgement based on preconceived notions and perceptions of individuals or groups (Wood, 1985).

[4] For example, many ethnic groups in the North were affiliated to Northern People’s Congress (NPC), the West had its Action Group and the Eastern had National Council for Nigeria and Cameroons (NCNC).

[5] An active ‘militia’ in his 30s,unemployed school drop-out who joined a militia group.

[6] An activist of Niger Delta’s human and social rights.

[7] An activist of Niger Delta’s human and social rights.

[8] An active member of one the local ‘militia’ groups.

[9] Niger Delta Technical Committee Report, 2009.

[10] Official records from Nigeria’s special adviser on amnesty for Niger Delta militants (Year of publication?).

[11] An active member of one the local ‘militia’ groups.

[12] About £270 pounds.

[13] About £6,000 pounds.

[14] According to Jomo Gbomo, Abbe (Nigeria’s Defence Minister) and his cohorts, members of the Niger Delta Peace and Conflict Reconciliation Committee (NDPCRC), instead of encouraging the presidency to address core issues as demanded by true agitators for justice in the Niger Delta, was busy inaugurating one dubious committee after another to continue stealing funds allocated for the development of the Niger Delta. He also claimed that the government has been offering bribes to militants who surrendered under the amnesty programme in the form of contracts. In another media comment accredited to a Joint Task Force (JTF) commander in the region it suggested that a close look at the Niger Delta situation today will reveal that some key former militant commanders and a few lucky apprentices are now well-established businessmen. They now live in splendour and affluence. The on-going rumble in the creeks has been orchestrated by former apprentice militants who feel left behind by their superiors (This Day, 2010).

[15] Publish in This Day, newspaper report, 28 November, 2010.

[16] £10,000 pounds.

[17] According to (Sutcliff, 2012), a petro-capitalist lens label these people as common criminals or bandits who significantly threatens Nigeria’s oil economy and fragile democracy.

[18] The number was given by Special Adviser on Government run Amnesty Programme.

Lessons from Latin America

ROAPE

May 5, 2016

By David Seddon

We have now posted three issues in the series on ‘Popular Protest, Social Movements and Class Struggle’. The main objective of this project is to report, describe and analyse on a comparative basis the numerous examples of progressive collective action by ordinary African men, women and youth across the continent, as they occur, and to situate them in their wider context – that of the combined and uneven development of capitalism and class struggle on a world scale.

A central concern is to provide the basis for an appreciation of the extent to which the instances of popular protest and the actions of social movements described and analysed can be seen as part of the long (up-and-down) struggle of workers and peasants world-wide to defend and improve their lives and their livelihoods, to increase the scope for sustainable social, economic and political development, and even, on occasion to contribute to the transformation of the very conditions of their existence – in other words to ‘make history’.

As this project is a part of the new ROAPE website initiative, its emphasis is inevitably and appropriately on what is happening in Africa. But it is implicit in the project approach that the discussion of popular protest, social movements and class struggle in Africa should not be separate or detached from a discussion of popular protest, social movements and class struggle in other continents (for example in Asia, Latin America, North America & Europe) and ultimately, world-wide.

With this in mind, we have obtained permission from a sister medium – The Dawn News: International Newsletter of Popular Struggles – to reproduce (with minor editorial changes) an article that appeared on 19 April 2016 in The Dawn, which examines the rise and apparent fall of what is referred to here as ‘post-liberalism’ under progressivist governments over the last ten years.

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

‘Latin America: the End of a Cycle or the Depletion of Post-Neoliberalism’

By Francois Houtart

Latin America was the only continent in which alternatives to neo-liberalism were adopted by several countries. After a series of military dictatorships, supported by the US and implementers of the neo-liberal project, reactions were quick to emerge. The peak was the rejection, in 2005, of the FTAA, a Free Trade Treaty with the US and Canada, as a result of the joint action of social movements, left-wing political parties, NGOs and Christian groups.

Progressivist governments

The new governments of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay and Bolivia carried out policies that re-established the State in its role of wealth redistribution, reorganization of public services and in particular, providing access to health, education, and investment in public works. A more favorable distribution was negotiated for the entry of raw materials, between the multinational companies and the national state (oil, gas, minerals, and agricultural exports) and the favorable situation, for more than a decade, allowed significant revenue for the mentioned nations

Talking about an ‘end of cycle’ introduces the idea of a certain historical determinism, which suggests the inevitability of alternation of power between the left and the right – an inadequate concept when the aim is to replace the hegemony of the oligarchies with popular and democratic regimes. However, many factors may suggest the depletion of post-neoliberal experiences, assuming the hypothesis that these new governments were post-neoliberal and not post-capitalist in nature.

Of course, it would be delusional to think that in the capitalist world, in the midst of a systemic —and therefore particularly acute — crisis, the immediate establishment of socialism could be possible. There are also historical references on this subject. The NEP (New Economic Policy) in the 1920s in the USSR is an example to study critically. In China and Vietnam, Deng Xio Ping or doi moi (renewal) reforms reveal the impossibility of developing the productive forces without taking into account the law of value, that is, the market (which is supposed to be regulated by the State). Cuba adopted, in a slow yet cautious way, measures that were intended to invigorate the economy, without losing fundamental obligations to social justice and respect towards the environment.

Then, the issue of necessary transitions arises.

A post-neoliberal government

The project of the progressivist governments of Latin America to rebuild an economic and political system capable of repairing the disastrous social effects of neoliberalism was no easy task. Restoring the State’s social functions meant in fact a reconfiguration, and always one under control of a conservative administration quite incapable of building an instrument of radical change. Venezuela’s case involved a parallel state… made possible thanks to the oil rent. In the rest of the cases, new ministries were created and renewed, as were their officials. The State that emerged after this process had, in general, a centralizing and hierarchical nature, with a charismatic leader, with tendencies towards making social movements an instrument of change, and promoting an often paralyzing bureaucracy. There was corruption, in some cases, on a large scale.

The political will to try to escape from neo-liberalism had positive effects: an effective struggle against poverty for dozens of millions of people, better access to health and education, public investment in infrastructure —in short, at least a partial redistribution of the national product, which was significantly increased by the rise in the price of raw materials. This made it possible to ensure benefits for poor people without seriously affecting the income of the rich. In this context, pan-Latin American organizations were created or strengthened, i.e. Mercosur, Celac, Unasur, and finally ALBA – an initiative involving Venezuela and ten other countries.

In the latter case, this was a new and innovative perspective on cooperation, which did not involve competition, but complementarity and solidarity, because, in fact, the internal economy of these progressive states remained under the control of private capital, with its own methods of accumulation, especially in areas connected with mining and oil, finance, telecommunications – even ignoring the ‘externalities’, meaning environmental and social damage. This gave place to reactions from social movements.

The mass media remained almost completely in the hands of big international or national capital, despite the efforts made to correct that virtual monopoly – an example of this effort is that of the national media laws of Telesur.

What kind of development?

The model of development adopted was inspired by the 1960s, the years of ‘developmentalism’, when the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) promoted import substitution and an increase of national production. Its application in the 21st century, in a favourable juncture for raw material prices, combined with an economic plan focused on the growth of production and the distribution of national income without transforming the underlying social structure (for example, without undertaking agrarian reform), culminated in ‘the re-primarisation’ [return to an emphasis on primary products – DS] of Latin American economies and an increase in reliance on monopoly capitalism, leading to a relative de-industrialization across the continent.

The project gradually became an uncritical ‘modernization’ of society, with different emphases, depending on the country concerned, with some, like Venezuela stressing community participation. This gave way to a growth in the ranks of the middle-class consumers of imported goods. Mega-projects were promoted and the traditional rural sector was abandoned in favour of agribusiness, which is very destructive of ecosystems and biodiversity, and even endangers food sovereignty. There was no real agrarian reform. The reduction of poverty, especially through support measures (as in the case of neo-liberal states), hardy reduced social inequality, still the highest in the world.

Could it have been done differently?

One may ask, of course, if it would have been possible to ‘do it differently’. A radical transformation (revolution) tends to result in armed intervention and the United States has all the necessary apparatus for that: military bases, allies in the region, the deployment of the Fifth Fleet around the continent, satellite information and AWACS aircraft, and there is historical proof that interventions are not ruled out: eg in Santo Domingo, “Bay of Pigs” in Cuba, Panamá, Granada. On the other hand, the strength of monopoly capital is such that agreements made in oil fields, mining, farming, etc. quickly give rise to new dependencies. It must be added that there is resistance to the implementation of autonomous monetary policies from international finance institutions, without even mentioning the flight of capital to tax havens, as shown recently by ‘the Panama Papers’.

On the other hand, the orientation of the leaders of those progressivist governments and their advisers was to ‘modernize’ society, regardless of major contemporary achievements, such as the importance of respecting the environment and ensuring the regeneration of nature, a holistic view of reality, based on a critique of ‘modernity’ driven by the logic of the market, and finally the recognition of the importance of the cultural factor. Interestingly, the actual policies were developed in contradiction with, and despite, some pretty innovative Constitutions in these areas (law of nature, “good life”).

The new governments were well received by the masses and their leaders were re-elected on several occasions with quite impressive results. In fact, poverty has declined significantly and the middle classes have doubled in just a few years. There was genuine popular support for these progressive governments. Finally, we must also add that the absence of a credible “socialist” reference after the fall of the Berlin Wall has not encouraged the introduction of another more radical model to replace the post-neoliberal one. All these factors suggest that it was difficult, objectively and subjectively, to expect a different kind of orientation.

New contradictions

However, this explains the rapid evolution of internal and external contradictions. The most dramatic of these were, obviously, the consequences of the crisis of world capitalism and in particular the (partially planned) huge drop of the prices of commodities, especially oil. Brazil and Argentina were the first countries that suffered the effects, immediately followed by Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, which resisted better due to their considerable foreign exchange reserves. This directly affected employment and the potential for middle class consumption. Latent conflict with some social movements and sections of the left intelligentsia now became overt. The concentration of power, which until then had been tolerated as the price of progress, and (especially in some countries) corruption now became an apparently integral part of the political culture, provoking popular protest.

The right obviously took advantage of this situation to begin to recover its power and hegemony. Appealing to democratic values that it has never respected, it managed to regain the support of part of the electorate, taking power in Argentina, overcoming the parliamentary majority in Venezuela, putting into question the system in Brazil and consolidating itself in most cities of Ecuador and Bolivia. It tried to take advantage of the disappointment of some sectors in the performance of the progressive governments, particularly among indigenous peoples and the middle classes; it also relied on help from the United States to overcome the conflicts inside its own bloc, especially between traditional oligarchies and modern sectors.

In response to the crisis, the progressivist governments adopted increasingly market-friendly measures, to the extent that the ‘conservative restoration’ that they frequently denounced, was actually surreptitiously introduced within their own administrations. The ‘transitions’ that took place then became adaptations of capitalism to new ecological and social demands (modern capitalism) rather than steps towards a new post-capitalist paradigm involving agrarian reform, support to peasant agriculture, better taxation, another perspective on development, etc.).

This does not mean that we are facing the end of social struggles —indeed, the opposite is true. The solution lies, on the one hand, in bringing together the forces for more radical change inside and outside of governments to re-define a new project and the forms of the transition, and on the other hand, the reconstruction of autonomous social movements with goals aimed at the medium and long term.

François Houtart is a well-known Belgian Marxist Sociologist who has written extensively on anti-globalisation and social movements.

Popular Protest & Social Movements – Part 3

ROAPE

May 3, 2016

By David Seddon

Our introductory piece in this series 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 our second piece, we examined recent events in those three countries 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, as is the case in all too many African countries.

In this, the third in the series, we return again to the three countries initially considered to examine the very different trajectories followed by them over the last six months, and extend the comparison to include two others – also in Central Africa.

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

On 9 October 2015, Kris Berwouts commented in African Arguments that ‘President Kabila faces challenges on a number of fronts, from the opposition to the grassroots to members of his own inner circle’, and asked: ‘How much longer can he hold on?’ While the final answer to that question cannot yet be given, there have been significant developments in the DRC since the eruption of popular protest and violence clashes in the streets in September 2015 discussed in the last piece.

Citizen Front 2016

Through November and December 2015, various opposition forces were able to come together for the first time to form Citizen Front 2016 – a large coalition of political parties and civil society organisations. In January 2016, Citizen Front plan held numerous ‘conferences’, followed by church services, at an estimated 44 locations across Kinshasa, to commemorate the killing of some 40 or so opposition demonstrators by security forces in January a year before, during the upsurge of popular protest discussed in our previous pieces. Some ‘conferences’ went ahead on the anniversary of the protests (19 January); others were stopped from taking place. Many of the organisers and activists associated with these ‘conferences’ were arrested. It is still unclear how many were arrested on the anniversary day – some put the number at around 40; others at above 100.

“Early in the morning, the government sent soldiers and policemen to the site allotted to me and my party where they blocked our access and arrested five of my activists,” said Martin Fayulu, a leading figure within the Citizen Front. “They told the priest to stop the mass, not only here but at all the other sites too.” Albert Moleka – a founding member of the Citizen Front and a veteran of Congolese politics – was supposed to attend the conference in Ngiri Ngiri, but said: “The regime wants no opposition demonstrations in Kinshasa at all”, according to Al Jazeera in its report on the ‘conferences’.

Both Albert Moleka and Vital Kamerhe, a Citizen Front heavyweight who finished third in what many regard as the flawed presidential elections in 2011, both claim that the police were assisted by machete-wielding thugs loyal to the DRC’s president, Joseph Kabila, who harangued and intimidated opposition activists. The United Nations’ mission in the DRC, MONUSCO, has not gathered any evidence to substantiate these allegations, but Jose Maria Aranaz, the director of the UN’s Joint Human Rights Office, told Al Jazeera that “there was a concerted effort by the police and the ANR [the intelligence agency] to impede the opposition’s demonstrations from taking place.”

Pierrot Mwanamputu, spokesperson for the Congolese National Police, justified the clampdown by saying that the organisers had published leaflets of “seditious character calling on the population to rebel against” the government and had not secured proper authorisation – something opposition leaders insist was not required. He also declared that everyone detained was soon released.

The census – a pretext for Kabila’s third term?

Readers will recall that protesters took to the streets of the capital and other cities in the DRC in January 2015 to oppose a draft law that would allow Kabila to extend his stay in power beyond his current mandate, which ends in December 2016. The law called for a new, nationwide census to serve as the basis for the voter list and distribution of parliamentary seats – an undertaking that could take years in a country as vast and poorly connected as DRC. The opposition saw it as an attempt by Kabila and his supporters to buy time during which he could engineer a modified constitution that would allow him to run for a third term in office.

The census provision was removed from the legislation that was subsequently passed, but the opposition says it was only ever one of numerous methods available to Kabila to delay the holding of elections. The most effective method, some say, has been to undermine the workings of the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), chiefly by withholding funds allocated to it in the national budget. Lambert Mende, the communications minister, has denied that the government could block the electoral process and that CENI, not the government, is charged with organising elections.

But this is the electoral commission that the opposition believes to be independent only in name, and according to Jason Stearns, the director of the Congo Research Group at New York University, the opposition’s accusations are justified. “The political influence on the electoral commission has been clear,” says Stearns. “While, in theory, the political opposition can nominate members to the body, almost none of those are still recognised by the opposition.” Indeed, a timetable prepared by CENI in mid-January 2016 and distributed to embassies in Kinshasa shows that the electoral commission foresees it taking between 13 and 16 months just to update DRC’s electoral roll.

Will there be elections?

At its formal launch, just before Christmas, the Citizen Front gave the government an ultimatum: It must “unblock the electoral process” before the end of January and allow CENI to publish an electoral calendar. Should Kabila fail to meet this fast-approaching deadline, the opposition coalition promised to launch a programme of nonviolent resistance. This ‘red line’, however, was clearly optimistic, and few seriously expected a meaningful organisation of elections to get under way before February. Even the leaders of the Citizen Front doubted that much will change.

“The government won’t unblock the electoral process,” said Martin Fayulu. He thinks Kabila may nominate ‘a weak successor’, if he encounters a strong and united opposition, but believes that the president’s “first choice is to violate the constitution and carry on as president without elections.” Moleka suggests that “Kabila’s logic is that it’s him or chaos and civil war.” “Elections will not be held because of lack of political will. If President Kabila could run, then elections would take place,” according to Vital Kamerhe.

In February 2016, Carol Jean Gallo, writing in UN Dispatch from Bukavu in South Kivu (in eastern Congo), suggested that ‘Elections in the DRC could mean trouble’, commenting that the DRC is scheduled to hold national elections in November. And though that is months away, there are already signs that this volatile and conflict prone country may be headed toward a deep political crisis.’

Growing discontent

He reports that “here in Bukavu, South Kivu, in DRC, murmurs of discontent can be heard with regard to upcoming DRC elections. People understand that the DRC, like other countries in the region, are being watched – and international support depends in large part on respecting constitutional mandates. But opposition parties and activists in DRC think that Kabila is trying to be more clever and surreptitious about staying in power by coming up with ways of delaying the elections scheduled for November – a strategy known as glissement (“slippage” in French.)”

One of these is the suggestion, mooted in January 2015 – and which resulted in the upsurge of popular protest about which we wrote about – to introduce a new law to enable the revision of the voting register, as approximately seven million new voters between the ages of 18 and 22 still need to be registered, according to a report commissioned by CENI, the national electoral commission. The revision of the register has not started yet, and this has caused delays in local and provincial elections, which were supposed to start in October 2015 and take place before national elections. The UN Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) for DRC said in January 2016 that Congo’s bilateral partners “are ready to support the revision of the voter register… It is a prerequisite [to elections]… time should not be wasted politicizing it.”

The spokesman of the ruling party has said that it would take two to four more years to organize credible elections. The delays and this kind of assertion have fueled opposition suspicions that the government – and the president – is merely seeking administrative and technical strategies to delay the elections and prolong the president’s term of office. According to Gallo: “right now, the two main glissement strategies people have been talking about in Bukavu are the claim that the government does not have enough money or resources to hold elections in November; and the government’s assertion that the DRC must complete a “national dialogue” before elections are held.” Kabila called for this dialogue about three months ago, and CENI estimates it will cost over $1 billion.

The president and pro-presidential majority see the dialogue as necessary to stabilize relations and “avoid a crisis” before elections are held. In a way, this is understandable in a country with the deep-seated divisions that DRC has. However, like many people I’ve spoken with in Bukavu, opposition groups have come out against the dialogue, believing it is a ploy to delay the elections; and the BBC reported in December that “activists believe violence would escalate if the election deadline is missed.” The top UN official in the country also said that the country is facing a “very real risks of unrest and violence” over the issue of potentially delaying elections.

Pressure for elections

The Citizen Front has demanded CENI publish a revised electoral calendar. Diplomats, however, from the African Union to the UN, have welcomed the national dialogue; ideally without causing a delay in the electoral calendar. As Gallo writes, “But here in Bukavu ordinary people – bartenders, taxi drivers, and even ex-rebels – have told me in no uncertain terms that, whether knowingly or inadvertently, these international actors are simply buying into Kabila’s shenanigans and that a comprehensive dialogue will only result in a delay in the elections, which will cause those fed up with the status quo to react with political violence.”

Interestingly, on 10 March this year, the European Parliament, in an emergency plenary sitting organised on the initiative of Maria Arena, MEP and member of the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, called on the DRC government to meet deadlines required by the constitution for the organization of free and transparent elections, and on President Kabila to respect the constitution of his country. Maria Arena commented that, “elections are nine months away and there are no clear signs given of its organisation and worse is the indication that everything is being done so that the elections do not take place in time to allow Kabila hold on to power despite constitutional rules.”

The European Parliament noted that the Congolese constitution adopted and promulgated in February 2006 clearly gives the president the right to run for only two consecutive terms, and commented that “if President Joseph Kabila, who was elected in 2006 and re-elected in 2011, deeply respects the constitution, he cannot be a candidate to be his own successor.” It also called on international bodies to take responsibility, starting with the African Union to ensure a role of political mediator in the interest of stability in the region and then the United Nations to renew and extend the mandate of MONUSCO to be competent in civil protection in the electoral context.

It further called on the European Union “to commit to use all instruments at its disposal, be they political, diplomatic or economic, to lobby for the respect of the Constitution and the protection of local populations”, adding that it would favour political dialogue but indicating that targeted sanctions would be activated if necessary. It also called for an end to arbitrary arrests and intimidation, and the opening of prosecution of perpetrators of violations of human rights.

The pressure on President Kabila has increased significantly, both from within and also from outside, over the last few months. The formation of the Citizen Front 2016 is an important step in building a strong and coherent opposition to the various attempts by the regime to postpone elections and enable Kabila to prolong his period in office. The intervention by the European Parliament is also important at this point. The likelihood of elections taking place as proposed in November 2016 and of Kabila standing down in December 2016 as the constitution demands remains a matter of debate. But if there is no progress very soon and the glissement of which Gallo speaks continues, then there is likely to be another upsurge in popular protest within the country.

Burundi

The events of late 2015

In Burundi, as we discussed in the last issue, mass protests in April 2015 against President Pierre Nkurunziza’s plan to run for a third term in June 2016 led to a confrontation between the regime and the people, unleashing a cycle of violence that has become ever more vicious and pervasive over the last six months. On 2 November 2015, the BBC reported that “Burundi is at risk of returning to civil war following a recent upsurge in violence, the United Nations has warned. The unrest follows July’s re-election of President Pierre Nkurunziza for a third term. Opposition protests and a government crackdown have led to almost 200,000 people fleeing the country.” The International Crisis Group stated that:

Burundi again faces the possibility of mass atrocities and civil war. Escalating violence, increasingly hardline rhetoric and the continued stream of refugees (more than 200,000) indicate that divisions are widening, and the ‘national dialogue’ is doing little to relieve the mounting tensions. … it appears that President Pierre Nkurunziza and those around him intend to use force to end the protests that have been held in Bujumbura since April. The president made public an ultimatum giving the “criminals” seven days to lay down arms. Révérien Ndikuriyo, the Senate president … (used)… language unambiguous to Burundians and chillingly similar to that used in Rwanda in the 1990s before the genocide.

The UN Security Council discussed the growing violence in Burundi at a meeting on 9 November 2015 and adopted a resolution that called for urgent talks. From 9 to 11 November, Jürg Lauber undertook his first visit to Burundi in his capacity as Chair of the Burundi Configuration of the UN Peacebuilding Commission (PBC). He then went on to Uganda and Tanzania before returning to report to the PBC Burundi Configuration in New York. In the meanwhile, officials from Uganda and Kenya flew into Bujumbura for talks.

Meanwhile, on the ground, the scale and also the intensity of the conflict had increased. On 11 December, three military camps and an officers’ school in Bujumbura came under fire. Several soldiers were reportedly killed, but the government said that the attacks failed. Nevertheless, fighting continued well into the day, although it had apparently stopped by 12 December. But then, a ‘massacre’ of some 87 people was reported in what The Guardian called “the worst outbreak of political violence since an attempted coup in April, with residents describing victims shot execution-style, some with hands bound behind their backs.” The army, on the other hand, stated that the death toll included eight members of the security forces and that the escalating violence came a day after an unidentified group carried out a trio of co-ordinated attacks on military targets.

An army spokesman, Colonel Gaspard Baratuza, initially claimed that those who had attempted to raid the Ngagara military camp had retreated and were pursued by security forces. When residents in Bujumbura discovered 39 bodies lying on the streets, Baratuza said the bodies belonged to ‘enemies’. A report produced by Amnesty International shortly after this incident states, however, that “most of those killed on 11 December were residents of districts mostly inhabited by members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group”, adding that “they are considered by the authorities to be pro-opposition areas, as the protests that began in April against President Nkurunziza’s bid for a third term in office started in these neighbourhoods.”

This strongly suggests an ethnic dimension to the conflict in Burundi, even if this is not entirely clear-cut; and worries about the potential for a civil war in which ethnic differences come to play a dominant part were undoubtedly growing towards the end of the year, both inside Burundi and outside. The UN Security Council strongly condemned the violence and the US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, said the Security Council should look at “how the international community can protect civilians from mass violence, including for the possible deployment of a regionally led peace support operation.” State department spokesman, John Kirby, said the US was deeply concerned about the violence and called for neighbouring countries to put pressure on the government to start negotiations with opposition groups. In the meanwhile, the African Union announced in mid-December 2015 that it planned to send peacekeepers to Burundi, but the government rejected any such deployment and said that if the troops were sent without its permission, it would be considered an invasion.

On 23 December 2015, a former army general announced the formation of an opposition force with the stated objective of removing President Nkurunziza from power; the group called itself the Republican Forces of Burundi (FOREBU). In the meanwhile, Nkurunziza reiterated on 30 December that AU peacekeepers were not welcome and that the army would fight back if they tried to deploy in Burundi. His comments, coupled with stalled negotiations, left the situation suspended in uncertainty as the Uganda-led mediation group works to lay the foundation for ‘peace talks’ in Tanzania in January. Furthermore, there were now growing fears of a severe social and economic crisis, as major cuts in the health, education and agriculture sectors, envisaged in the 29 December 2015 austerity budget further heightened the vulnerability of many Burundians and limited their access to basic services. A shortage of essential drugs was already reported in the country; and besides health, major concerns remained in the protection, food security and nutrition sectors.

Developments in 2016

In early January 2016, Nkurunziza repeated his threat to counter any deployment of external peacekeepers after the African Union announced plans to send in 5,000 troops to protect civilians from escalating violence between government and rebel forces. On 9 January, the government refused to join peace talks with the opposition. On 14 January the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that over 230,000 Burundians had now fled the country, while at least 15,000 others were internally displaced in two provinces. At least 400 people, mostly civilians, had been killed since 26 April 2015, with the numbers rising in the last few months and the largest number killed in one month being in December 2015, with 162 killed.

On 15 January 2016, UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Raad al-Hussein warned of “new and extremely disturbing patterns of violations” which had been revealed in the last week or so and which had evidently been triggered by the attacks made on 11 December by armed opposition forces against three military camps in Bujumbura and Mujejuru in order to seize weapons and free prisoners. The UN said it was analyzing satellite images to investigate witness reports of at least nine mass graves in and around the capital Bujumbura, including one in a military camp, containing more than 100 bodies in total, all of them reportedly killed on the day of the attacks.

It reported that it had documented more than 3,000 arrests and noted that while many had been released, an unknown number had ‘disappeared.’ On 22 January 2016, it was reported that a total of 728 people had died in different ways, forty-one in demonstrations, armed clashes resulting in 333 dead and 354 victims of state violence against civilians. Also, at least 13 cases of sexual violence, in which security forces allegedly entered the houses of victims, separated the women and then raped or gang raped them, had been documented. One of the sexually abused women testified that her abuser told her she was paying the price for being a Tutsi. Another witness said Tutsis were being systematically killed, while Hutus were being spared.

Ten years ago, tension between majority Hutus and minority Tutsis led to a civil war in Burundi in which 300,000 people died. It ended in 2005. The UN human rights chief warned of renewed violence between the two ethnic groups. “All the alarm signals, including the increasing ethnic dimension of the crisis, are flashing red”, he said. We ended our last piece on Burundi with the warning that the outlook for Burundi in 2016 was bleak. It has proved to be so in the first six months at least.

Meetings between the government and opposition leaders in Uganda at the end of December proved fruitless in terms of bringing an end to the deepening crisis and growing conflict. Proposals for a 5,000 strong African peace-keeping force were rejected by President Nkurunziza, who said it would be regarded as an invasion force, and encouraged ‘each Burundian’ to ‘stand up and fight’, if such a force were to try to enter the country.

In mid-January 2016, a leaked memo from Herve Ladsous, the UN peacekeeping chief, to the UN Security Council warned that a peace-keeping force from outside would be unable to quell large-scale violence and urged Council members to travel to Bujumbura for talks. The document outlines three possible scenarios: a continuation of the current level of violence, an escalation and finally, all-out war with fighting along ethnic lines. It stated categorically that “United Nations peacekeeping is limited in its ability to address significant violence against civilians, even violence amounting to genocide, where it lacks a political framework or the strategic consent of the host-nation and/or the main parties in the conflict.” But human rights activists recently told US Ambassador Samantha Power they would welcome the intervention of a robust international police force.

At the beginning of February 2016, African Union heads of state were to vote on whether a peace-keeping force should be sent to Burundi, despite the position adopted by President Nkurunziza who remained totally opposed to such an intervention. They decided not to do so. The UN Security Council has proposed sending in several hundred peace keepers; but it has done nothing, so far, although there are 19,000 UN troops across the border in the DRC, which could be deployed.

The EU announced in March that it would no longer give money directly to the Burundian government because it refused to participate in peace talks. It is also looking for a way to pay the 6,000 Burundian troops fighting in Somalia directly instead of through the government. Not all aid will be cut; some will be re-directed through the UN. But the share of the budget accounted for by aid is likely to fall from half in 2015 to less than a third in 2016. The repercussions of this are already clear: the government has re-directed spending from health and education and other social programmes to pay the army, leaving the UN and charities to look after children and the sick.

Relations between Burundi and its neighbour Rwanda have deteriorated over the last few months as the government of President Paul Kagame stands accused of generally supporting the rebels or opposition in Burundi and specifically of giving Burundian refugees military training in order to be better able to fight against the regime of President Nkurunziza. On 11 February 2016, the Telegraph online reported that “the United States on Wednesday accused Rwanda of trying to destabilise troubled Burundi by recruiting refugees for armed attacks on the government. The American concerns were raised in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by two senior diplomats, who cited reports from colleagues in the field that point to Rwandan involvement in the Burundi crisis.” In March, the Burundian ruling CNDD-FDD party issued a statement that went even further and accused President Paul Kagame of Rwanda of seeking to export genocide.

On 27 March 2016, the Telegraph online reported that “in a statement released on Sunday, the head of the CNDD-FDD party said Mr Kagame had previously ‘experimented’ with genocide, referring to the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which about 800,000 people were killed, mostly ethnic Tutsis.” “The genocide laboratory is in Rwanda because President Kagame, having experimented there, (wants) to export it to Burundi (to) play a minor imperialist,” wrote Pascal Nyabenda, party president. Nyabenda also claimed that some European governments supply arms and funds to the Rwandan leader, who he said was responsible for “recruiting and training young Burundians in refugee camps in Rwanda, so that they can return home to commit acts of genocide.” He went on to criticise the Catholic Church which recently called for a dialogue between Kigali and Bujumbura to help de-escalate the growing crisis.

Nyabenda also condemned foreign journalists for taking up the cause of ‘terrorists’, the term used by the ruling party to refer to opponents of the government, both armed and peaceful.

The CNDD-FDD party was formed from the main Hutu rebel group that fought against the formerly Tutsi minority-dominated army during the Burundian civil war. It initially had close ties to President Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front party but relations have soured in recent years. Concerns have been raised that more radical elements in Burundi’s ruling party are gaining influence and that this augurs badly for the future, raising the real possibility of a transformation of the conflict from one between government and opposition into one along ethnic lines.

Potential for ethnic conflict

“The Hutu extremist faction of the CNDD-FDD was marginalised until the start of this crisis … it is clear that they are now in control of the country,” a concerned diplomat told AFP on condition of anonymity. The diplomat noted that Nyabenda, as well as being ruling party head, is also president of the national assembly and the number two figure in the Burundian state. “It is feared that there would be dire consequences if the crisis worsened or if there was a serious incident like the death of a senior party official,” he said. The Economist commented, on 23 April 2916, that “ominously, there is growing evidence that the government crackdown is seeing people being targeted for their ethnicity as well as just for their political affiliation. Certainly, plenty of Hutu men have been arrested; but the neighbourhoods of Bujumbura targeted most heavily by the security forces are disproportionately Tutsi.”

Tutsi are also being increasingly side-lined in key government institutions and, it seems, purged in the army. On 15 April, the government announced that 700 soldiers – almost all of whom served in the army when it was an entirely Tutsi institution – were to be forced to retire. If the army, which has in recent years been of mixed ethnicity, becomes a predominantly Hutu force, then there are indications that it will be targeted by opposition militants. An example of this can be seen in the attack, on 25 April, on the security adviser to Burundi’s Vice President, General Athanase Kararuza, while dropping off his daughter at school. He was killed together with his wife; the daughter was injured. Other members of the government and those close to the government have also been assassinated in recent months. Shortly after the attack on General Kararuza, the International Criminal Court announced that it was starting a preliminary investigation into the violence in Burundi.

In the meanwhile, the government security forces and youth militia continue to target those suspected of supporting the opposition; hundreds, possibly thousands of people, mainly young men and mostly Tutsis have ‘disappeared’ or become internally displaced persons (IDPs) or have left the country (an estimated 250,000). Roadblocks and security patrols have been established in most parts of Bujumbura, particularly in those neighbourhoods considered ‘hotbeds’ of opposition, and in other towns, and people find it increasingly hard to move around for fear of being harassed and arrested if caught in the wrong place. This is having a negative effect on the commercial life of the cities and on households. The black market has blossomed and in some neighbourhoods of Bujumbura, the price of rice has trebled. This is also creating problems in the rural areas, where the sale of farm produce is increasingly difficult; and so the economy is in decline and people suffer accordingly.

The Economist on 23 April stated, perhaps over-dramatically, that “the economy is collapsing”, but certainly GDP contracted by 7 per cent in 2015, according to the IMF, and looks set to continue this decline still further in 2016. The conflict now threatens to become a major humanitarian crisis and even if the Economist is right to suggest that “it is far from clear that genocide is looming”, the prospects for Burundi and its people remain bleak.

Burkina Faso

2014

In Burkina Faso, by comparison, things look better. As we discussed in the first of this series, attempts, made in the latter part of 2014, to change the constitution to enable President Blaise Compaoré to extend his 27 years in office were met by a wave of demonstrations. On 30 October 2014, thousands marched on the parliament in Ouagadougou, stormed it and set it on fire. Twitter @Burkina24 showed a photo with a caption that read: “the protesters sat in the seats of parliament, shouting: ‘the National Assembly is for the people.’” Government buildings were also targets, as was the HQ of the ruling Congress for Democracy and Progress Party (CDP).

One of the main features of the protests was the involvement of Balai Citoyen (Citizen’s Broom) – a movement ‘to sweep away corruption and clean up public life’. Founded in 2013 by rapper Serge ‘Smockey’ Bambara, they derive much of their inspiration from the former president, Thomas Sankara. The reggae artist Sams’k Le Jah told Alexandra Reza that “the truths of Thomas Sankara are flourishing again” and informed her that ‘Smockey’ regarded Sankara as representing “all the qualities we ask for… courage, application, honesty, integrity, curiosity.”

Compaoré dissolved his government at noon on 30 October 2014 and declared a state of emergency before fleeing to Ivory Coast. Balai Citoyen considered the overthrow of Compaoré “a victory for popular sovereignty”, and spoke of “remaining mobilised whatever happened next.” What happened next was that, on 1 November 2014, Lieutenant-Colonel Isaac Zida declared himself head of state. Initially, it seemed the army would determine the country’s future, but after domestic negotiations and threats from the African Union, a transitional civilian president, Michel Kafando was appointed and Zida was made prime minister. As Alexandra Reza observed, at the end of 2014, “Kafando’s appointment appears to have seen off the army for the moment.” A National Transitional Council (NTC) was established and it seemed likely that further extensions to the presidential term of office would be outlawed and preparations for elections in October 2015 would move ahead.

2015

In April 2015, however, the electoral code was reformed to prevent those who supported the scrapping of presidential term limits from contesting elections. In protest, the former ruling CDP and its allies announced the suspension of their participation in the NTC. On 13 July, the ECOWAS Court of Justice ruled against the reform, as “a violation of fundamental human rights.” Three days later, President Kafando appeared to accept this. The same day, Compaoré was charged with ‘high treason’ for his bid to change the constitution and run for a third term; government officials who had approved his bid were also indicted. Compaoré supporters appealed to the Constitutional Council to annul the charges; but on 10 August, that body ruled that it lacked the authority to decide. Two weeks later, however, the Council ruled that the exclusionary law remained in effect; accordingly, it barred 42 prospective candidates who had supported changing the constitution from standing as parliamentary candidates.

The CDP vowed civil disobedience and an electoral boycott. On 29 August 2015, the Council announced that only 16 of the 22 presidential candidates could run: two leading Compaoré supporters were excluded, but two others cleared to stand. Three candidates then argued that those who had served in the Compaoré government should also be excluded; and on 10 September 2015 two more were struck from the list. Of the remainder, two had served under Compaoré, but later joined the opposition. A week later, on 17 September 2015, General Gilbert Diendéré seized power with the help of the Presidential Security Regiment (RSP) – a 1,300-strong elite unit loyal to Compaoré – and declared himself head of a National Council for Democracy. Kafando and Zida were placed under house arrest. Protests erupted; some 10 people were killed and over 100 injured in the course of the coup and its aftermath.

There was also an international outcry. On 20 September, ECOWAS mediators announced that “Diendéré would step down in exchange for the participation of Compaoré in the October elections.” But Diendéré was not present at this ‘agreement’. He declared he would remain in power until after the elections, and pro-coup elements stormed the hotel where the talks were being held: “members of Balai Citoyen involved in the mediation process were among those attacked by masked Presidential Guard soldiers who burst into the Leico Hotel earlier in the day on September 20, as they waved assault rifles, pistols and shotguns.” In response, the army prepared to march on Ouagadougou, while opposition cadres erected barricades around the capital; ‘Smockey’, the leader of Balai Citoyen, wrote on his Facebook page: “Our country calls us comrades! We must paralyze Ouagadougou by any means.”

The next day, the BBC World Service reported that “the coup leader in Burkina Faso has said he is ready to hand over power to transitional civilian authorities as the army is marching on the capital.” Diendéré was reported to have admitted the coup was a mistake: “we knew the people were not in favour of it. That is why we have given up.” On 23 September, Kafando and Zida were both re-installed. A delay of ‘several weeks’ in the holding of the elections was announced; but on 29 November 2015, general elections were duly held. These were the first national elections since the 2014 ‘uprising’ and the departure of President Blaise Compaoré.

The party of former President Compaoré, the Congress for Democracy and Progress, was banned from running a presidential candidate but was still able to participate in the parliamentary election. The presidential election was won by Roch Marc Christian Kaboré of the People’s Movement for Progress (MPP), who received 53 per cent of the vote in the first round, negating the need for a second round. Results for the parliamentary election, were announced on 15 December 2015. Kaboré was sworn in as President on 29 December 2015, and the national assembly elected Salif Diallo, a leading member of the MPP, as President of the National Assembly on 30 December.

The head of the electoral commission, Barthelemy Kere, said that “this election went off in calm and serenity, which shows the maturity of the people of Burkina Faso.” Zéphirin Diabré, the runner-up in the vote, came to President-elect Roch Marc Christian Kaboré’s campaign headquarters as his supporters celebrated his win to congratulate him, Al Jazeera reported. Foreign governments also extended congratulations to Kaboré. At the end of the year, Burkina Faso had a democratically elected president, national assembly and government.

2016

On 19 February 2016, The Guardian online carried an article by Neven Mimica of the EU, which praised Burkina Faso – its people and its government – for its ‘remarkable transition process.’ The peaceful elections that took place in December were described as ‘a victory for Burkina Faso’ and as ‘good news for the region and the continent.’ The maturity and resilience of the country’s civil society, which played a pivotal role, is cited as an example for many. The EU has now committed around €623m – £481m – for the coming years to support governance, access to healthcare, water and sanitation, resilience and food security; and it is proposed to accelerate disbursements and commit €400m by the end of 2016.

As regards security – in the light of the attacks by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) that took place in January in Ouagadougou and killed 28 people and injured dozens more – the EU announced that it was preparing “a new package of actions from the new EU trust fund which will be announced by mid-April” in order to “reinforce the presence of the state in areas that are fragile and could quickly become fertile ground for recruitment by terrorists” and also to “strengthen the resilience and basic services of local communities who have been particularly affected by the socio-economic and security challenges, in the spirit of the fund to address root causes of instability and migration in Africa.”

Part Two

A Comparative Analysis: Central Africa

As we remarked at the end of the last piece in this series: “these three cases reveal three very different processes – in the way in which attempts by African presidents have sought in recent years to extend their period in office and thus their power, and in the way popular protest at this has emerged and evolved – and three very different outcomes. It would be premature, I suggest, to try to draw too many conclusions from these three cases, although two things are clear: first, that there is a general tendency for presidents and prime ministers in African countries, whether elected or not in the first place, to attempt to over-ride or change their country’s constitution, if necessary, to enable them to extend their period in office and so in power; and second, that there will be popular protest, in a variety of forms, by various sections of the population in opposition to these efforts to move from democracy to effective dictatorship.”

We drew attention at the end of the second part of the project, to the large number of African countries whose rulers have been in office for more than ten years, many of them with questionable legitimacy. The individuals concerned include:

Paul Biya of Cameroon, who is 83 and has been in office, first as Prime Minster from 1975 to 1982, and then as President since 1982); Mohamed Abdel Aziz of the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), who assumed office as President in 1976; Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, who assumed office in 1979 as Chairman first of the Revolutionary Military Council and then of the Supreme Military Council, before becoming president in 1982; José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, who was Acting President and then President from 1979 onwards; Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who is 92 and has been in office since 1987; Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, who became President in 1986 after he took power in a coup in 1985; Omar al Bashir of Sudan, who was President of the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation from 1989 to 1993, and then President of Sudan from 1993;

Idriss Déby of Chad, who was first President of the Patriotic Salvation Movement in 1990, and then President of the Council of State from 1990 to 1991, and finally President of Chad from 1991 to the present time; Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea, who was President from 1991 onwards; Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia, who was first Chairman of the Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council from 1994 to 1996, and then President of the Gambia from 1996; Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo Brazzaville, who has been President since 1997; Abdel Aziz Bouteflika of Algeria, who has been President since 1999; Paul Kagame of Rwanda, who was first Acting President and then President from 2000 onwards; and Joseph Kabila of the DRC, who was President from 2001, elected from 2006 onwards.

We did not include in this list a number of other African rulers of shorter duration but who have attempted to extend their period of office beyond what is permitted by the constitution of the country concerned. These include, in recent years: President Nkurunziza of Burundi, who (as we have seen above) recently attempted to extend his period of office beyond the two terms allowed by the constitution of Burundi, with the consequences we have described; and President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso, who also tried to extend his period in office, with the consequences described above and in previous pieces in this series.

Other rulers of Central African countries who have attempted recently to extend their periods of office, include President Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), who received the go-ahead, from a political forum on the future of the country’s institutions held in July 2015, to run for president in elections to be held in 2016, and President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, who, in the same month as Sassou Nguesso was able to gain the support of virtually all of the members of the Rwandan parliament for a further term in office.

Republic of Congo (Brazzaville)

This decision by an unelected body – a national forum – paved the way for a referendum on a new constitution allowing Sassou Nguesso, who has led the country for a total of 30 years, to stand for re-election in 2016. Opposition leaders reacted angrily to the forum’s conclusions, seeing in them a ploy by Sassou Nguesso to extend his rule. “What has happened is… a constitutional coup decided by President Sassou Nguesso,” commented Clement Mierassa of the Republican Front for the Respect of Constitutional Order and Democratic Change (FROCAD), an opposition coalition. “We have a responsibility to work through peaceful and democratic means to stop this coup,” he added. Under the constitution, presidential mandates were limited to two terms and only candidates under 70 can run for the top office.

Denis Sassou Nguesso is one of Africa’s five longest-serving leaders, having first come to power three decades ago, and he is now 73 years old. He was part of the 1968 military coup that brought Marien Ngouabi to power, and in 1970, he was made Director of Security and a minister in the new presidential council. When Ngouabi was assassinated in March 1977, Nguesso played a key role in maintaining control, briefly heading the Military Committee of the Party (CMP, Comité Militaire du Parti) that controlled the state before the succession of Colonel Joachim Yhombi-Opango. He was rewarded with a promotion to colonel and the post of vice-president of the CMP. He remained there until 5 February 1979, when Yhombi-Opango was forced from power in a technical coup accused of corruption and political deviancy.

On 8 February 1979, the CMP chose Nguesso as the new President, and at the Third Extraordinary Congress of the PCT his position was unanimously approved on 27 March 1979. He was Chairman of the Organization of African Unity from 1986 to 1987. In late 1987 he faced down a serious military revolt in the north of the country with French aid. At the PCT’s Fourth Ordinary Congress on 26–31 July 1989, Sassou Nguesso was re-elected as President of the PCT Central Committee and President of the Republic. With the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and with the support of the French, he began to prepare the process of opening up the economy and the political regime. In December 1989 he announced the end of government control of the economy and declared a partial amnesty for political prisoners. The following year he attempted to improve the failing economic situation and reduce the outrageous levels of corruption. From September 1990, political parties other than the PCT were allowed and Sassou Nguesso undertook a symbolic state visit to the United States of America, laying the grounds for a new series of conditional IMF loans later that year.

In February 1991, he approved a national conference to discuss the future of Congolese politics. The conference, which concluded in June 1991, chose André Milongo as Prime Minister during the transitional period leading to scheduled elections in 1992. Milongo was given executive powers, leaving Sassou Nguesso as effectively a figurehead president. His power was so limited by the Conference that he was barred from travelling outside of Congo without the transitional government’s approval. He was also subjected to serious criticism and allegations, including a claim that he was involved in Ngouabi’s 1977 assassination. He remained as head of state until the introduction of multi-party politics, which culminated in elections that he lost in the first round in 1992 and that eventually resulted in the election of Pascal Lissouba as president.

Lissouba was faced with accusations of voting irregularities to which he responded with increasing repression and during 1993 there were constant clashes between his supporters and those of the other main presidential contender, Bernard Kolelas, which resulted in almost 1,500 deaths. In 1994, Sassou Nguesso prudently left the country for Paris. He did not return to Congo until January 1997, intending to contest the presidential election scheduled for July. He then devoted himself to building up political and para-military support. In June 1997, fighting broke out between Sassou Nguesso’s militia, the Cobras, and government forces, which led to a more sustained conflict in which Sassou Nguesso was aided by Angolan troops. By October, Sassou Nguesso was in control of the country, and he was sworn in as President on 25 October.

He declared that he was willing to allow a return to democracy and began a three-year transition process in 1998. But renewed fighting with opposition groups led to the collapse of the process. With the government forces in ascendancy and following peace agreements in 1999, elections were re-scheduled for 2002, although not all rebel groups signed the accords. On 10 March 2002, Sassou Nguesso won the presidency with almost 90 per cent of the vote; his two main rivals Lissouba and Kolelas were prevented from competing. He was sworn in on 14 August 2002. He was re-elected in July 2009, despite an opposition boycott, with nearly 80 per cent of the vote, and was sworn in on 14 August 2009. He said at the time that his re-election meant continued peace, stability and security.

In August 2010, as Congo-Brazzaville prepared to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence from France, Sassou Nguesso noted that the country had far to go in fully realizing the dream of independence: “Our country will not be totally independent until our people are free of the yoke of poverty.” He appeared to see himself as the architect of that transformation. On 27 March 2015, he announced that his government would hold a referendum to change the 2002 constitution, which would allow him to run for a third consecutive term in office.

The opposition called for a ‘civil disobedience’ protest after voters – 92 per cent -overwhelmingly approved changes to the constitution in October 2015 that allowed the President to extend his three-decade rule. (The referendum reduced the presidential mandate from seven to five years and abolished the death penalty, among other changes). “We will maintain civil disobedience until the withdrawal of the planned constitution, which is a masquerade,” declared the Republican Front for the Respect of Constitutional Order and Democracy (FROCAD) opposition coalition spokesman Guy-Romain Kinfoussia. Al Jazeera’s Haru Mutasa, reporting from the capital Brazzaville, commented that:

the opposition is not happy. They say the vote is rigged. They say there is no way the voter turnout could have been that high. The opposition are threatening to go on the streets to protest, but here is a challenge. A lot of the opposition leaders are under house arrest … also a lot of people are scared. Last week, they took to the streets to protest, but the police opened fire and shot some of them.

The Economist on 12 December 2015 reported that “in October…troops fired on protestors who objected to Denis Sassou Nguesso’s plan to extend his three-decade rule – the protestors’ slogan was ‘Soussoufit, a play on the French for ‘That’s enough’. For whatever reason, there was, in fact, very little public response to the call by FROCAD, at the time, or indeed, over subsequent months, and Denis Sassou Nguesso was re-elected in March 2016, with a majority in the first round, for another seven year term, further extending his 32-year period of rule.” Al Jazeera reported, however, that the final results were released amid tight security and a communications blackout to prevent opposition candidates from publishing their own results. The government extended an order to shut down telephone, internet and SMS services for 48 hours during the voting for ‘reasons of security’ and to prevent unrest and a government source said that they would remain suspended until after the official results were announced. Opposition leaders said that they would not accept another win for the incumbent, but there was very little sign of public unrest once the results were announced, despite the fact that it was reported that ‘tensions were running high.’

Other predictions of ‘domestic instability’, such as those made by the IMF in a report released in July 2015, have not materialised, despite the fact that the Republic of Congo suffers from high rates of poverty and inequality, large infrastructure gaps and important development challenges, according to the IMF. Unemployment reached 34 per cent in 2013, the last data available, and stood at 60 per cent for 15 to 24-year-olds. As in so many other similar Central African states, poverty and inequality alone are not sufficient a reason for popular protest and unrest, particularly in cases where the opposition to what might be termed ‘an authoritarian democracy’ is generally seen to be led by personal political opponents of the head of state rather than to represent a widespread dissatisfaction with the regime. On the other hand, the ‘dampening effect’ of systematic repression on public unrest cannot be over-estimated.

Rwanda

In the same month that Sassou Nguessou was enabled to stand for re-election as president in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Rwandan law-makers voted almost unanimously to hold a referendum on proposed changes to the constitution that would allow President Paul Kagame to extend his 15 years in power. Rwandan officials have strongly denied that it is Kagame who is angling for a third term, insisting that the president—hailed by his supporters as a guarantor of post-genocide security and stability, as well as a champion of economic development—enjoys popular support for him to stay. “At least 3.7 million Rwandans petitioned the legislature to amend the charter” according to the Speaker of Parliament, Donatille Mukabalisa.

Rwanda’s Green Party, the country’s tiny but main opposition, has vowed to challenge this in court, but said it was being hampered by the reluctance of lawyers to take up its challenge to moves which would allow President Paul Kagame to stand for a third term. “Five lawyers have refused to take the case. One said he was threatened, another said God was against it, others said they were afraid or did not want to go to court against millions of Rwandans,” according to Green Party President, Frank Habineza. The Rwandan constitution, which was adopted in 2003, limits the number of presidential terms to two, and therefore bars Kagame—who was elected first in 2003 and again in 2010—to stand for a third term in 2017.

But officials predicted that parliament would soon debate a change to the constitution in response to what Kagame’s aides have described as ‘popular demand’ for the former rebel. Kagame, now 57, has been at the helm in Rwanda since 1994, when an offensive by his ethnic Tutsi rebel force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), put an end to what was internationally recognised as ‘a genocide by Hutu extremists’ in which an estimated 800,000 people were massacred, the vast majority of them Tutsis. He first served as defence minister and vice president, and then took the presidency by winning 95 percent of the vote. He was re-elected with a similarly resounding mandate.

President Kagame had himself declared that Rwanda’s constitution should not be changed to modify how long a president can serve. “I belong to the group that doesn’t support change of the constitution,” Kagame announced in April 2015, “but in a democratic society, debates are allowed and they are healthy.” “I’m open to going or not going depending on the interest and future of this country,” he said. As Rwanda began commemorations for the 21st anniversary of the genocide, that future was a key consideration. In fact, however, seeking to make the decision on his period in office a broader one, Kagame set up a committee of his ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) nearly three years ago to consult and recommend a course of action. Though the report of the committee has not been made public, sources familiar with its content say that it recommended that the constitution be amended.

Foreign investors and international markets are also seen as favouring Kagame’s continuation, viewing his presence as reassuring, as he is likely to continue his hardline stance against corruption, which had made Rwanda one of the least corrupt nations in Africa according to Transparency International. He has also overseen reforms that have made Rwanda a regional front runner in the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business” Index.

For a president who got 93 per cent of the vote in the August 2010 elections, in all probability if the matter was left to the people to choose, and given that politics in Rwanda is not as contentious as in some other Central African states, the majority would probably vote for a Kagame stay. Even though critics, arguably rightly, characterise him as a despot who brooks no dissent, having introduced the most universal health care insurance system in Africa and notched up the sharpest drop in infant mortality ever recorded in human history, a strong case can be made that he has a concrete record on which an appreciative people would vote to keep him in office.

He also co-chairs the ITU’s Broadband Commission, and has the reputation of being a wired president; he is a regular at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and hangs out with the famous and rich of the world, including former president Bill Clinton and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates; and he is on good terms with former president George Bush. As one commentator remarked, “he probably has one of the longest address book of Fortune 500 CEOs of any other leader on the continent.” His international support remains strong.

Kagame is a forceful man who does not suffer fools gladly; a teetotaler, workaholic, and former guerrilla leader, the need for his strong personal control over the political economy of Rwanda is one reason his supporters give for encouraging him to rule beyond 2017. However, if he had invested enough in building successors, he could have laid a more reliable foundation for Rwanda’s future stability and success, and Rwanda would not require such an authoritarian regime. Rwanda’s institutional depth remains largely untested, and it is doubtful the country would function the way it does without his presidential presence.

There is no vice president and the prime minister performs the role of the president’s deputy. Since Kagame was elected president in 2000, there have been three prime ministers. Although Bernard Makuza was in office for 10 years, the job of PM in Rwanda has generally been a short tour of duty, not allowing time for the incumbents to develop the skills to take on the presidential mantle, while the role of the parliament has been very much that of cheer-leader to Kagame’s presidential performance.

If his supporters are numerous and vocal; so too are his critics and detractors. So far, however, they have always lost – finding it a hard job to run against his record – and they are angry. They are waiting for their moment, and right now they think it is about to be handed to them if and when a constitutional amendment removes term limits. The headlines and columns might well already have been written. If he runs for re-election, there may be an upsurge in opposition; but whether it will result in popular protest and open dissidence, or will be received by and large with widespread approbation, remains to be seen. Staying on for a further term of office may be seen as evidence of Kagame’s inherent authoritarianism or as a re-assurance of his commitment to political continuity and strong leadership.

Crafting a nation that actually functions from the depths of the genocide graveyard is a big part of ‘Brand Kagame’; the man who did what in 1994 looked like the impossible is a hard target to hit and an even harder act to follow. His demonstrable ability to hold the country together, so far, in the face of deep historical social divisions has been crucial, not only to his reputation but to his ability to command support. In this, he resembles Yoweri Museveni, whose long period of presidential rule in Uganda has also been widely regarded, even if not unanimously, both inside and outside the country, as a generally positive thing for the country, even if it indicates a preference for stability with the taint of authoritarianism over a more democratic regime with the risk of instability.

A decision on Kagame’s part to run again for the presidency would, however, be a big gamble, because the biggest assets he brings to the Rwanda presidency – being a man of his word, and someone who looks at the presidency as public service not a personal power trip – could be lost and he could easily become toxic. In that case, he would no longer be able to marshal the attributes that his supporters banked on to give him a third course of the presidency. Stepping down might leave him with the moral authority to influence the direction of the country, much as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere was able to do, and even perhaps stage a comeback should the country be plunged in a future crisis; on the other hand, it might itself engender instability and precipitate precisely the crisis that all in Rwanda fear – an ethnic bloodbath. Ideally, in the year to come, efforts will be made both inside Rwanda and outside to promote and develop the institutional basis for a strong but democratic regime that does not rely so heavily on one man.

On 12 December 2015, the Economist remarked, of the DRC, that “Congo’s problems are a grander, more dangerous version of what is happening in neighbouring countries” and referred to both Congo Brazzaville and Burundi. It failed, however, to mention Rwanda – or indeed any of the other countries where we believe a broadly similar process is occurring albeit with different trajectories and outcomes. In the next issue of the series, I shall extend still further the examination of African states in which those already long in power have sought to extend their term of office, either successfully or not, either through the ballot box or by other means, and attempt to draw some general conclusions.

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

Ghana: The ‘Rising Star’ of Inequality

ROAPE

April 28, 2016

By David Johnson

Over the last 20 years Ghana’s sustained GDP growth, reduction in poverty levels and progress in other areas of human development have seen the country classified as a ‘rising star’ of sub-Saharan African political economy – most recently in a report by the Overseas Development Institute published in 2015. The progress is impressive and orthodox analysis reflects this: GDP growth has averaged well over four per cent since 1992, with fluctuations of around nine and 14 per cent in 2008 and 2011 respectively according to the World Bank in 2016; poverty has reduced significantly, with Ghana meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving extreme poverty by 2015 based on its own national poverty rates; it is one of the only non-OECD countries with a universal health insurance scheme; and net enrollment in primary education has substantially increased. These factors have also combined to create a burgeoning middle class and subsequently a highly visible consumer market, most prominently in the capital Accra. The African Development Bank in 2012 attributed the rising Ghanaian middle class as a causal factor in the increasing consumer market spending that was valued at US $15 billion in 2010, and that they predict to almost double by 2020. This isn’t a Ghanaian phenomenon, with most other sub-Saharan African countries that fit into the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative increasing their consumer markets not only due to economic growth and a booming middle class but growing populations, high urbanisation, increasingly attractive business environments, technological innovation and falling poverty levels.

However, what the emergence of the middle class, impressive growth/spending figures and reductions in poverty, hide is the rampant and discernible inequality that pervades Ghana. Although the country’s progress in poverty reduction has to be acknowledged, income inequality has significantly increased with the Gini coefficient – though flawed, it remains the most standard measure of income inequality – swelling from 0.35 to 0.42 since the Fourth Republic was established in 1992. This is an important factor in Ghana’s ‘rise’ as increasing inequality has the potential to undermine earlier progress, weaken social connections and substantially slowing further poverty reduction efforts. Most employment, for example, is found in the informal economy – 88 per cent according to the Ghana Living Standards Survey – with most workers earning below the GHC 8 (around US $2) a day or GHC 240 a month ($40) minimum wage, still dangerously close to the national poverty level of US $2 a day. There is no reliable unemployment data, with the dominance of the informal economy a contributing factor, so it is likely these figures could be worse. However, the lack of data could also be considered a determined move by governments to combat the anxiety that alarmingly high official unemployment rates would cause.

Regardless of official statistics, the consequences of high unemployment and informal work are most conspicuous in the capital Accra, as well as other metropolitan areas. Outside the offices of trans/multi-national corporation headquarters, businesses and coffee shops adults and young children work as street vendors, offering water, plantain chips and electrical devices etc. on busy streets, diving in between cars. Poverty is highly visible but again, this is not a Ghanaian, nor African phenomenon, but characteristic of many capitalist cities worldwide. Though today it is more prominent and, juxtaposed against material wealth and conspicuous consumption that also dominates the metropolitan streets, it is a concerning dynamic.

The substantial wealth that has been created by Ghana’s abundant primary resources and economic diversification has not spread across the country, as the reduction in poverty levels would indicate. It has only reached a minority of people, with the youthful population particularly excluded through low wages and high unemployment and under-employment. Ghana’s Trade Union Congress has been similarly dissatisfied with the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDCs) insistence that GDP growth is equal to inclusive national development, when this growth has not contributed to any substantial employment creation. An example from the recent boom illustrates this. So although the productive structure of the economy has changed – in 2015 the service sector (50 per cent) contributed more to GDP than the previously dominate sectors of industry (28 per cent) and agriculture (19 per cent) – employment growth is highly concentrated in urban areas which has led to further spatial inequality between regions.

With much of the growth that has been seen based on the commodity boom of recent years – with high prices of oil, gold and cocoa contributing most to GDP– the economy is highly susceptible to global shocks. With the bubble now bursting as world commodity prices plummet, current social and economic policies in Ghana are likely to exacerbate the current spatial and distributive inequalities that exist. Before my arrival in January, for example, large militant protests were organised against the recent utility price hikes and taxes, which have increased the cost of electricity by 59 per cent, water by 67 per cent and fuel by 28 per cent. The middle class may have the resources to somewhat buttress themselves from these increased living costs but the impact on the majority of the population – those in the informal economy, rural farmers, service sector workers on the minimum wage, and of course the unemployed – will be most pronounced. As Kofi Asamoah, the Secretary-General of the TUC has put it in 2014, “[the NDC is] pointing to our middle-income status when they know that we have come into middle income with all the characteristics of a lower – income country, paying the lowest wage rates with deteriorating social indicators.”

The reduction in social indicators – income, health, housing, education, employment and crime etc – highlights many of the repercussions of rising inequality as further pressures and conflicts are produced and reproduced within society. Recent research from the US explores these phenomena and suggests that higher degrees of economic insecurity and inequality, combined with increasing conspicuous consumption, can lead to higher rates of crime, including economic fraud and trickery; when wealth and assets are visible, flaunted and seemingly out of reach, those that are excluded may pursue other avenues to increase their own material well-being. Applying this to Accra’s highly visible consumer market and ensuing conspicuous consumption, it would seem this trend has also spread to the Global South. There is some evidence for such speculation. The 2009 Crime Victimisation Survey in Ghana, for example, indicated that a significant 47 per cent of respondents identified themselves as victims of consumer fraud, or cheated when buying something or requesting services in the course of seemingly legitimate business transactions – the highest prevalence in the survey. Interestingly, the latest recorded crime rate in Accra fell in 2014, however new forms of crime were actually found to have increased – predominantly those of consumer and economic fraud. This trend has not dissipated and at the time of writing there are cases of fraud covered in mainstream media outlets on a weekly basis. The most widely known is that of sim-box fraud, where incoming calls to the country from international destinations are channeled through fraudulent boxes at zero cost, bypassing state and service provider infrastructure. This is estimated to have lost the state and service providers US $919,296 and the government is increasing measures to combat and prosecute such crimes. Further research is required but it would seem that different forms of economic fraud are rising along with different forms of inequality in Ghana and that high levels of economic fraud, sub-standard goods and other practices may be linked to highly unequal societies. Unfortunately, the government’s approach to combating fraud is similar to that of addressing inequality, unemployment and poverty, namely deference to private sector interests and the preservation of profits over people.

Ghana’s status as a Middle Income Country is yet another orthodox indicator that distracts from the issues affecting the country. Rising inequality can already be seen to have undermined earlier progress, weakened social indicators and created new norms of ‘getting by’. If current trends continue then the decent employment, inclusive development of the informal sector, and the provision of high quality basic services that are needed (at the very basic level) to combat inequality will continue to be missed. These are all central issues that can be fostered by challenging free-market orthodoxy to improve the equitable distribution of opportunities and wealth. There are, of course, other complex factors that affect rising inequality: patronage networks still pervade the public and private sectors, democratic consolidation is improving but still highly susceptible to manipulation, and corruption still rears its head – both as a cause and symptom of inequality. With the general election scheduled for November 2016, however, there is an opportunity for these issues of inequality to be fundamentally addressed.

David Johnson is studying International Development at the University of Leeds, he is currently doing research on the political economy of democratic consolidation, inequality, NGOs and state development in Africa at the University of Ghana in Accra.

Featured photograph: Guido Sohne

Everything Must Change: South Africa’s Fork in the Road

ROAPE

April 26, 2016

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig talks to Trevor Ngwane about political developments in South Africa, the crisis in the ANC, the growth of new struggles on the left, in the universities and workplaces. Ngwane is a long-standing socialist activist, researcher and writer.

Can you please, first of all, introduce yourself and explain something about your own political developments, through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s?

I was born the same year the ANC was banned in 1960. My parents, who were both medical nurses, left the country but came back two years later. My father was enthused by his brief stay in Dar es Salaam where he had a whiff of the political ferment there, the spirt of African liberation under Nyerere. At that time this Tanzanian city was a hotbed of revolution with most African liberation movements having offices there. I remember this because when he talked about “Dar” my father’s eyes would light up and he would get very excited. My aunt, Victoria Chitepo, who has very recently passed away, was married to Herbert Chitepo, the ZANU chairperson who was assassinated in Zambia in 1975. My family lived a bit in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, and Tanzania, then called Tanganyika. Then we came back to live in South Africa where my father was always being visited by the Special Branch police. I think they tortured him at some point because he used to tell stories about police torture.

I remember the 1973 Durban strikes as I used to visit my aunt in Lamontville, Durban. Everyone was excited and talking about it in the township with workers going around shouting “Usuthu!” which is a Zulu war cry. I was a high school student during the 1976 June 16 student uprising. There was a student strike at our school in Mariannhill, a Roman Catholic boarding school which Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader who was killed by apartheid police, attended in 1964. My university days at Fort Hare University were also marked by “student disturbances” as the struggle against apartheid got into gear in the country and abroad. Bheki Mlangeni, an anti-apartheid lawyer who was assassinated with earphone bombs that exploded in his ears, was a student during my time there.

In the 1980s I got drawn into the struggle when studying and then later teaching at Wits University in Johannesburg. I also became active in the township civics as I was living in Soweto, Central Western Jabavu. In 1986 I spent two weeks in detention after police swooped onto campus arresting and beating up students during the many demonstrations that took place then. Marxist lecturers dominated the humanities and there was a line of division between the nationalists and the socialists although everyone claimed to be a socialist and everyone supported national liberation. I became a Trotskyist round about 1989 joining the Socialist Workers League, which later became the Socialist Group, and I am still a member today. At that time there were a lot of socialist groups in operation despite the ban on Marxism and socialist politics. When I lost my job as a Sociology junior lecturer in 1989 I coordinated the Wits Workers School, a workers’ literacy project on campus, and in 1993 got a job in a COSATU union, the Transport and General Workers’ Union where I was later twice expelled for opposing what I called the politics of class collaboration of the ANC, SACP and COSATU leadership.

In the township we were busy setting up civic structures, street committees and later self-defence units during the political violence of the 1990s. I also worked a bit with the ANC underground and joined the organisation when it got unbanned in 1990. I joined the SACP for six months and found their “heavy duty” Marxism mechanistic; practically they were intent on subordinating the workers struggle to a nationalist not socialist programme. However, we all had to work together on the ground building civics, the ANC, unions, calling meetings, stay-aways, mobilising for an ANC victory, etc. This culminated in my becoming a public representative (ward councillor) for my area in Pimville, Soweto, where I was now living with my family.

A short time after the 1994 settlement there were voices that began to be raised about the failure, limits, that the new ANC government had imposed on any serious programme of reform. Could you explain a little of the settlement and your role in slowly emerging criticism and movements that challenged it?

I was expelled by the ANC in 1999 for opposing the privatisation of municipal services in my capacity as a local councillor. The struggle against privatisation had begun when the ANC government ditched the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), a mildly redistributive policy, and adopted the decidedly “neoliberal” Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) programme in 1996. At the forefront of the struggle was the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU), a COSATU affiliate, whose members’ jobs were directly on the line. Working class communities in the townships and informal settlements – shantytowns – also began to take their fights to the street demanding better services.

The reason for the conflict with the ANC government is that, a few years after its taking over, it was becoming increasingly clear that the “miracle” settlement that saw the “peaceful” transition from apartheid to democracy had been brokered in the form of a deal that protected capital and the capitalist system in exchange for the vote for the majority and other political and social reforms. The ANC leaders, actually from day one of their arrival from exile and jail, were busy whittling down the demands of the people and talking about the unviability of a socialist path. The RDP was a transitional programme from socialist idealism to a pragmatic accommodation to capital. Indeed, it did not last long and the capitalist interest reasserted itself with a vengeance through GEAR with its various attacks on the working class, namely, lay-offs of state employees, sub-contracting, privatisation, etc. The government’s budget prioritised the interests of capital and the commitment to “rolling back the legacy of apartheid” through vigorous “delivery” of services and jobs for all took a backseat. Neoliberal pro-capitalist policies such as the removal of exchange controls and other protectionist measures led to massive capital flight and job losses. The reintegration of the South African economy into capitalist global circuits, after the (relative economic) isolation of the apartheid regime, benefited the capitalist class at the expense of the working class including doing tremendous damage to the developmental prospects of the country bordering on deindustrialisation.

In this guise I became active in the international “anti-globalisation” movement becoming a regular attendee of the World Social Forum and active in the African Social Forum. The decline in the power of this movement saw many movements that emerged at that time implode including the Anti-Privatisation Forum.

In the early 2000s South Africa had active radical groups, community protests, civil society organisations that in different ways were trying to challenge the governments and its commitment to neoliberalism. Can you describe some of these movements you were involved in building and the experience during this time?

As the penny began to drop various communities took to the streets in protest challenging policies that threatened their access to services such as the user-must-pay policy, penalisation and criminalisation of those who could not afford these paid-for-services, installation of pre-paid water meters, reduction of electricity amperage to the poor, etc. In Johannesburg the union SAMWU combined with students fighting against privatisation at Wits University and communities to form a fighting front against the privatisation programme of the Johannesburg City Council. This front later became the Anti-Privatisation Forum in which I was the organiser. In Soweto we formed the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee fighting against power cut-offs to force residents to pay the suddenly exorbitant bills. This organisation soon took up the struggle against the installation of water meters.

In Durban, the Concerned Citizens Forum was formed and led by Fatima Meer and Ashwin Desai, among others, organising in Chatsworth, a working class “Indian” area, the apartheid geography, against services payment enforcement by the municipality. The Landless Peoples Movement was formed to fight against land evictions in the rural areas, the Anti-Eviction Campaign fought against this in Cape Town. The Treatment Action Campaign fought for the provision of medication for people living with HIV/AIDS in the face of a president of the country, Thabo Mbeki, who flatly denied the very existence of the virus, no doubt trying to shirk responsibility due to fiscal considerations. Meanwhile, the trade unions, the SACP and ANC were blowing hot and cold in the face of the emergence of these grievances, struggles and movements. The ANC-SACP-COSATU Alliance was used to containing struggle and isolating loyalists from contamination by this spirit of struggle.

When Zuma was elected to the head of the ANC and then in elections in 2009, there was some hope that he would speak more readily for the poor. This obviously hasn’t happened. How would you characterise the years of his presidency? Though much has been made of his blunders, he has also been careful to develop a rural support base.

ANC, SACP and COSATU members, including those of the South African National Civic Organisation, a fourth member of the tripartite alliance, suffered as much as everyone else from the anti-working class policies of the government, especially those on the ground. Soon the rumblings could not be contained and the leadership especially of the SACP, which controls COSATU, in unprincipled ways sought to put the blame on Thabo Mbeki’s head in an internal power struggle. A closer look shows that the whole Mbeki-Zuma debacle which saw Zuma win at the Polokwane national conference in 2007 served two political purposes. The first one was the internal power struggle itself, the jostling inside the party for ascendancy. The second one was a deeper process of hegemony consolidation, namely, aligning the party organisation to the party inside the state. In practice the two were closely interrelated but must be separated for analysis.

Mbeki was blamed for the “1996 class project” which was said to be the neoliberal prioritisation of bosses interests over those of the workers. In this way the opportunistic ANC-SACP-COSATU leaders used the internal struggle for power as a lightning rod to channel the real anger of the working class, including organised labour, for the socioeconomic reversals experienced under an ANC government of liberation. Zuma was falsely painted as a people’s leader and champion of the working class. Mbeki was painted as aloof, intellectualist and serving bosses and imperialist interests. Zuma sang his way to winning the presidency of the ANC with his trademark struggle song “Mshini wami” which means “my machine gun.” I was there at the COSATU congress in 2007 when Zuma was presented to the delegates as a born socialist whose mother had been a domestic worker. Mbeki lost the election and later was recalled from being country’s president before his term ended.

The fact that the ANC went straight from jail and exile into the corridors of power created a misalignment between the ANC as government and as movement. The ANC in the party branch and in the street had to be brought into line with the ANC in government. This is why one of the war cries against Mbeki and for Zuma during the power struggle was that Mbeki was not listening to the branches as if there were two ANC’s. During Zuma’s rape trial ANC supporters took to the streets something that had not been seen in South Africa for a long time. Zuma then symbolised the unification of the two ANC’s: as government and as movement. Once this unity was achieved it was possible for the ANC to speak with one voice. Unfortunately that voice is the voice of big capital and not of the working class. Zuma defaulted on all the promises that had been made to the working class on his behalf by the ANC, SACP and COSATU leaders. That is why soon afterwards radicals like Julius Malema , Zwelinzima Vavi and Irvin Jim, respectively the leaders of the ANC Youth League, of COSATU and of NUMSA, found themselves out in the cold. They were under pressure from their constituencies whose expectations had been raised by the Zuma campaign in which they had personally made some bombastic claims. Indeed, the chickens came home to roost and Julius Malema was expelled from the ANC and went on to form the Economic Freedom Fighters. Jim led NUMSA in its break with the tripartite alliance. And Zwelinzima Vavi was expelled as general secretary of COSATU in 2015 for opposing the subsequent expulsion of NUMSA from COSATU. All three leaders became increasingly and irreconcilably critical of the ANC government’s pro-capitalist policies. This has opened a new era in South African working class politics.

During the 2000s there have been efforts to develop a left alternative, out of a range of different groups. Currently the Democratic Left Front (DLF) is one such effort. How successful have these been? What are the challenges for a radical left?

I am the national secretary of the Democratic Left Front (DLF). This is an organisation that was formed five years ago in an attempt to regroup the left. Vishwas Satgar, an ex-SACP leader who was expelled by the party, was at the forefront of the initiative. At the time there was a feeling that the social movements and community organisations behind the numerous protests in South Africa were not addressing the question of power and a left alternative to bourgeois rule. The DLF was launched with the participation of both left groups and community organisations on an anti-capitalist platform. It has evolved into a pro-socialist stance and is supportive of the call by NUMSA to build a workers’ party. It also participates in the United Front, another structure spearheaded in the course of what is called here the “NUMSA moment.” The UF unites labour, community and student/youth struggles on an anti-capitalist platform. It is starting off somewhat similar to how the DLF started but it has the muscle of NUMSA behind it. The DLF is fully behind NUMSA in its attempt to build a new left pole in South Africa including the plans to launch a new trade union federation and the Movement for Socialism initiative.

The attempt at left regroupment by the DLF has been a difficult one and is currently yielding mixed results. The challenge, in my opinion, has been getting around the demobilisation and demoralisation of the working class and of the left. The vision of a different society has been systematically trampled upon for so long and this has resulted in a loss of hope that a different future is possible and that workers by themselves can lead the struggle towards that future. There can be no socialism without working class leadership. Without knowledge of and belief in the organic capacity of the working class to effect social change, that is, the self-activity for self-emancipation, the struggle begins to lose direction. Militancy without class politics gives an illusion of movement but in reality little change takes place. The DLF was formed in a context of militant struggles in working class communities and in the workplaces but the political turmoil did not seem to have a centre of authority. There was certainly little overt connection between the various struggles taking place. There seemed to be no shared vision.

The DLF was formed upon an anti-capitalist platform in a search for alternatives. It soon became apparent that being anti-capitalist is not enough, we also needed to be pro-socialist. This move created some tensions and dissension inside the organisation because initially there had been an emphasis on pluralism, in other words, accommodating different political traditions and tendencies in the DLF. Some comrades felt that an aspect of this pluralism was being lost by this political-ideological development of the organisation. Another problem has been a fundamental one, namely, to what extent the DLF could regard itself as a front in the light of the absence of mass organisations in its membership. There is only one trade union affiliate of the DLF. Some comrades felt it was more realistic to regard it as a solidarity forum whose work was to support struggles while raising the flag of socialism, of an alternative.

At the moment the DLF continues its work in a radically changed political terrain containing many possibilities and challenges. The DLF worked hard to support the strikes in the platinum mines including during the Lonmin strike that resulted in the Marikana Massacre in 2012. Some of the DLF’s leading members helped form the Marikana Support Campaign which is fighting for justice for the slain miners. A documentary, Miners Shot Down, was put together by a leading member of the DLF, Rehad Desai, and this contributed to raising awareness about what actually happened on that mountain on 16 August 2012 when 34 miners were shot dead by the state police. The DLF formed a strike support committee during the four-month long industry-wide strike in the platinum mines in South Africa in early 2014. The committee organised political and material support to the striking miners including food and clothing collections and a massive feeding operation that involved the churches, community organisations and Gift of the Givers, the non-partisan disaster relief organisation. The message was spread abroad and a solidarity fund was set up and benefited from international support. Most recently, the DLF has supported the student and worker uprisings in the universities that took place in October 2015. The students and workers were demanding the pulling down of Cecil Rhodes’s statue at the University of Cape Town, scrapping of a proposed tuition fee increase and an end to outsourcing of cleaning, security and other services because it adversely affected workers.

The massacre of workers at Marikana in 2012 is regarded as a fork in the road for the ANC, the Alliance and the working class. Can you tell us how you see this moment, what it means, exposes and how this has played out?

The Marikana Massacre was a very painful moment in the struggle for liberation of the workers here. Everyone was stunned when the police opened fire on the miners on strike. No one expected a government of liberation to do that. All illusions in the class character of the South African state, run by the ANC, were dispelled. The ANC government was there to protect capital and profits and was prepared to shed blood doing so. This shook the architecture of class collaboration that housed the South African state to its foundations, namely, the ANC-SACP-COSATU Alliance. The first casualty was the National Union of Mineworkers, then the biggest trade union affiliate of COSATU and biggest supporter and ally of the ANC: all its general secretaries became secretaries general of the ANC political party (Cyril Ramaphosa, Kgalema Motlanthe and Gwede Mantashe). The massacre led to the NUM losing thousands of its members to a new union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). The workers left the NUM because it did not support their strike and because they saw it as “eating with the bosses.”

The Marikana Massacre brought attention to the power of the working class. The workers at Lonmin, where the strike happened, organised themselves and went on strike against the wishes of their union, the NUM, and against a government of national liberation and its laws. They ignored the Labour Relations Act which governs industrial conflict; they did not declare a dispute or apply for a strike certificate, they just struck. They demanded R12, 500 [£600] a month which for many meant a four-fold increase in wages. In other words, their demands were based on their needs and not on what the bosses were prepared to give. They formed a workers’ strike committee to lead the strike which was directly accountable to the strikers’ assembly. And after 34 of their comrades lay dead shot by the police, they continued with their strike for another three weeks until they won substantial increases from the company.

A spectre was born which was to haunt the South African ruling class, this is the “Spirit of Marikana.” The spirit of defiance, of do-or-die, of moving forward against all odds. This is what the workers on that mountain displayed. This is what millions of workers saw. The workers were ready to lose their lives rather than continue being exploited by the mine owners. Certainly they were prepared to lose their jobs in the process. Later a worker who was shot nine times and survived, Mzoxolo Magidiwana, said that they were fighting to make sure that their children did not suffer as they did. A few months later the same workers who joined tens of thousands of other workers from other platinum-mining companies to wage a four-month long strike demanding R12 500. The strike was long and hard but the workers vowed never to call off the strike because doing so would be a betrayal of the spirit of the dead miners on that mountain. The “Spirit of Marikana” strengthened their resolve and they eventually won a significant wage increase.

At about the same time, in 2012, a sector of some of the most oppressed and exploited workers in South Africa, the farmworkers, broke out in struggle demanding a living wage. This struggle took place mostly in the Western Cape’s winelands where wages and working conditions render workers to be no better than modern slaves. The farmworkers also did not follow any procedures, they simply took action. Police brutality and state repression of the strike was the order of the day. A union which did its best to support the workers who, like the miners, struck without their unions, the CSAAWU (the Commercial, Stevedoring, Agricultural and Allied Workers Union), is still facing closure today after being slapped with a million-rand damages claim by the bosses for its involvement in the strike. Despite the attacks from the state and capital, the farmworkers won a significant wage increase.

The “Spirit of Marikana” drifted around and affected the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), now the biggest union in the country with 370 000 members. The so-called “NUMSA moment” was born when the union decided to break out of the ANC-SACP-COSATU Alliance in a special national congress in 2014. Delegates watched the documentary, Miners Shot Down, and listened to some widows of the slain miners speak. Afterwards they broke into song and individually and in groups, many in tears, went to the front with money in their hands donating over R100 000 to the dead miners’ solidarity fund. Later they resolved not to vote for the ANC and to form a worker’s party and fight for workers power and socialism.

Working class communities were also touched by the “Spirit of Marikana.” The housing crisis and the unresolved land question in South Africa saw four settlements being set-up in different parts of the country by way of land invasions and housing occupations. These takeovers were just some among many but what is significant with these four is that they named their settlements “Marikana.” They took over the land with the spirit of do-or-die: “Let the state kill us as they did in Marikana but we are not moving from this piece of ground.” These new Marikanas are in Cato Crest, Durban; Philippi, Cape Town; Mzimhlophe, Soweto and Tlokwe, Potshefstroom.

The student and worker rebellion in the universities in late 2015 have also been infected by the “Spirit of Marikana.” The students took to the street without seeking permission from the authorities as required by the Public Gatherings Act. They marched, blocked roads, boycotted classes, and generally disrupted university operations forcing the authorities to listen to and eventually to accede to some of their demands. Workers, especially cleaners, went on strike in several campuses without acquiring a strike certificate. The student marches to parliament in Cape Town and to the seat of government in Pretoria in October 2015 happened because the students wanted it, not because the authorities agreed to it. They sought permission from no one, the permission came from the strength of their mobilisation. The victories of the workers and students, the workers won an in-principle agreement in most of the universities that outsourcing would end, and the students won their zero percent increase. It was the unity of workers and students and the power of disruption that won the victories.

A recent month-long strike from March this year by municipal workers who collect garbage in the city and clean the streets has also shown aspects of the new mood among workers in the country. These workers, mostly against the wishes of their union, the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU), and without following strike procedures, have been on a militant strike that has included trashing the streets, that is, throwing rubbish all over town to press forward their demands. The garbage piled up in Johannesburg until the city relented and an agreement was signed with the workers winning some concessions including a no victimisation clause after the hysteria of the middle classes against the trashing of the city and accusations of strike violence directed at scabs. The weapon of the workers was again disruption of business as usual and forcing the authorities to accede to their demands.

I would say that the “NUMSA moment” has recently disappointed many people who were hoping for a stronger and bolder way forward. There is a feeling that despite the radical left turn taken by the NUMSA leadership, it will take time for them to shake off the baggage of SACP politics and habits including a top-down approach to struggle and weak belief in the organic capacity of the working class to lead its own struggle to socialism. There is also the reality that none of the COSATU unions actually left the union federation after the expulsion of NUMSA and later of Zwelinzima Vavi, the COSATU general secretary, the latter for opposing NUMSA’s expulsion. The nine unions that sympathised with NUMSA have not taken any visible action in support. Hope now lies on NUMSA and Vavi’s plans to launch a new union federation later this year.

The actions on the ground by workers and communities, in my assessment, are the ones that are giving new life to the flagging NUMSA moment. Workers are leading the way showing that to win you need to fight based on your needs not on what the bosses are willing to give. You need to fight with weapons that you choose and that are readily available to all workers and not those chosen by your enemy – you have to fight because you are ready to and not because the enemy has given you permission to do so. You have to disrupt operations and stop the enemy’s business as usual. Solidarity in struggle is the heart of the workers movement. These are lessons that many trade union, political and community leaders can learn from; the struggles mentioned here and which they appear to have forgotten during their long, cosy residence inside the ANC-SACP-COSATU edifice of class collaboration.

Recently, in 2015 there was an extraordinary uprising of students demanding both bread and butter reforms and the removal of symbols of privilege and the racist, settler past of South Africa. Much of the language in this movement has spoken of the need for black empowerment, black consciousness, rather than of class and socialism. How do you see the development of this movement?

The student movement is very important because the youth are the future. However, the only future is a workers future. What is important about the student movement is that it began as an ideological critique of the legacy of colonialism, capitalism, racism and patriarchy in the universities, in particular as symbolised by the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. But it soon transposed into a movement against the increase in tuition fees and even against paying for education. From very early on, it united with and took on board the struggles of the workers against outsourcing. This was remarkable and partly a result of many long years of struggle by university workers, especially cleaning and security, against the hardships of outsourcing. The heightened racial consciousness among militant students, most of whom were black, led them to see the workers as black like themselves, indeed as their mothers and fathers. This showed the interrelationship between race, class and gender in the struggle for emancipation. Many cleaning workers are women and the students found this significant. The student movement rescued Black Consciousness and Pan-Africanism from the history books into living systems of thought relevant for day to day struggle.

An important theoretical and ideological theme in the student movement is decolonisation. There is an ideological ferment and militant dynamism in South African universities that centres around this idea. It is a powerful and radical idea that goes beyond surface appearance and the usual terms in which we talk about society. The students are talking about the need to change the very structure of society. Not to change certain parts or aspects, but to change society totally. Race is central to this vision. It is an inspired vision because ideologically it represents a total negation: the negation of the negation. It is an idea that says no to everything existing. The radical students are saying everything is wrong about this society. The education system is wrong, it must change. The suffering of cleaning workers is wrong. White power, white supremacy and white monopoly capital are all wrong. The racism, sexism, all of it. Black pain: there has been too much suffering, we can’t take it anymore, it must all come to an end. We cannot continue this way, it must all stop.

Practically it can lead to militant action. We cannot allow so-called normality to prevail. Nothing is normal in this situation and in the way society is run. Let us disrupt everything because it is all wrong. The garbage workers trash the city saying: “let it be all dirty, let the rubbish pile up because when it looks clean it is actually hiding a lot of dirt that exist underneath -the corruption of the municipal officers, the exploitation of the workers, the daily pain and suffering.” Students disrupt lectures and student registration processes on the same grounds: these lectures and these processes exclude the majority from higher education, we must not allow them to continue, they must be disrupted.

This total rejection may lead one to ask: what are you going to do if we change everything? The answer is that we don’t know, all we know is that things cannot continue this way. Everything must change. This approach lays the seeds of a new society. It begins with the condemnation of all that exists in order to clear the ground for the new. From this point of view, the decolonization movement is a revolutionary movement.

The movement has won workers important concessions in their struggle against outsourcing. In principle agreements and commitments have been made by the university authorities which means that there will be struggles ahead to ensure that these are met and in ways that benefit rather than penalize workers. It is the same with the student victory where the freeze in fee increase still means that higher education must be paid for and already university administrators are implementing austerity programmes on the grounds that there is less money available. The strength of the movement will lie in keeping the connection and solidarity alive between student and worker struggles.

The difference between the June 16 1976 student uprising and this one is that the first happened in working class high schools while the 2015 uprising took place in middle class universities. Universities are factories that manufacture and vindicate class privilege and inequalities. To avoid elitism the slogan: “Free education from crèche to university” is the correct one. It is also important for the university struggles to connect with other struggles in all spheres of working class life. The commodification of higher education is not the only commodification taking place in the world. There is commodification of food, water, electricity, housing, healthcare, transport, recreation, culture, etc. The student movement cannot move forward without embracing and being embraced by other working class and popular struggles in society.

The ideological shortcomings of Black Consciousness and decolonization must be faced squarely. The emphasis on race, unless qualified by a rigorous class analysis, can lead to identity essentialism. The idea that black is good and suffers while white is bad and is privileged is a counterproductive oversimplification which unfortunately is rife in the South African movement. For example, the Rhodes Must Fall meetings in the University of Cape Town are racially segregated with white students not allowed in. But the danger can be much bigger. There appears to be a marriage of black separatist nationalist ideas and the more extreme or crude ideas in post-colonial theory. For example, there is talk that Marxism must be rejected because it originates from Europe and Marx was a white man. Some versions of post-colonial theory reject Eurocentrism, modernity and the Enlightenment on the ground of complicity in historical crimes, namely, racism, slavery, colonialism, etc. European theoretical categories are said to adorn the imperialist garments of universalism, that is, claiming universal applications to the whole world, a world that is different and cannot be understood in Eurocentric terms. Vivek Chibber wrote a book in 2013 where he shows the shortcomings of subaltern studies, an important strand within post-colonial theory. This problem has to be addressed by Marxist scholars in South Africa too because in practice and in the long term it represents a retreat from class analysis and the class struggle. It opens the door to middle class leadership of the struggle and can severely weaken the movement going forward.

On the left, a new organisation, the Economic Freedom Fighters, has emerged and now seems to occupy a prominent role in opposition – speaking powerfully to the anger and injustice of contemporary South Africa. How do you see the role of the EFF and how should the radical left respond?

The Economic Freedom Fighters grabbed the imagination of the youth and sections of the working class because they speak loudly and in a straightforward way about power, wealth and struggle. They talk about how the black working class needs to take power. They talk about the need to take back the wealth, to nationalise the farms, mines, factories and banks. Nationalisation figured prominently in the platform they adopted during the 2014 national election and which won them a million votes. They are a welcome development in South African politics in the manner in which they are rattling the cage to the left of the ANC and SACP. They are also youthful and their political method includes taking to the streets to push forward their agenda. They certainly revived public interest in what goes on in the South African parliament. The overwhelming majority of the ANC in that parliament had turned it into one huge sleepy rubber stamp for neoliberal policies and occasional left posturing. The EFF has also taken its struggle into the universities running candidates in Student Representative Councils (SRC) which so far have been dominated by ANC-aligned student organisations notably the South African Students Congress and the Progressive Youth Alliance who all seem to take their orders from Luthuli House, the ANC headquarters in Johannesburg. The “fighters,” as they call themselves, were in the thick of the student uprising against the fee increase even though they did not necessarily lead it. However, they will likely and deservedly benefit handsomely from this involvement in SRC elections in South Africa’s twenty-three universities. This will be the case all the more so because the “independent” or spontaneous leadership of this movement has tended to adopt an autonomist anti-electoral and anti-party political stance. Those who support the movement will find that they can only vote for the EFF if they vote at all.

The strengths and weaknesses of the EFF can be traced to the revival of decolonisation and post-colonial politics and theories, in a word: nationalism. On the one hand Julius Malema’s cry is that the ANC has failed the people, it has not implemented the Freedom Charter, a document that guided the struggle for decades and which, among other things, called for the nationalisation of the “commanding heights of the economy.” This is a call for the completion of the so-called National Democratic Revolution, a theoretical and programmatic formulation of the SACP. Its essence is the two-stage theory of revolution. I think it is fair to say that historically this approach is Stalinist-inspired. The EFF’s official ideology is Marxism-Leninism-Fanonism. The question is whether, in practice, this will be a combination of the best or the worst of these ideologies. The nationalist inflection of the EFF’s discourse finds fertile ground in the people’s disappointment with national liberation and as such is powerful as a mobilising tool. However, the downside is locking the class struggle again into the nationalist cage, a repeat of the dangers that Kwame Nkrumah , with his concept of “neo-colonialism”, and Frantz Fanon with his “false decolonization”, tried to avoid and failed.

Fanon somewhere quotes Marx on how the social revolution “cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.” The EFF, the student movement and the working class movement has to find a way forward without going back to nationalism as an ideology of struggle. The struggle against imperialism has to break out of the discourse of colonialism without denying this history and its legacy. It has to relook at some of the theoretical categories associated with this struggle in the course of the 20th century and identify and remove the shibboleths that bogged it down and ensured its defeat or partial victories when so much could have been won. One of these theoretical legacies is that of Stalinism. Careful and systematic theoretical work is still necessary to map out the strongest way forward. And at its heart will be proletarian internationalism rather than bourgeois nationalism.

Left reformism takes the struggle forward but is not the way forward. We saw in Greece how the parliamentary road to socialism, in the form of the road to national economic sovereignty, is bound to lead to a dead-end. Revolutionary rhetoric is not the same as a revolutionary programme. It can be a short-cut that inspires in the short-term but demoralises in the long term. The only way forward for the working class and the revolutionary left is the road of struggle, of revolutionary struggle, of the struggle to replace the capitalist system with the socialist system. Under conditions of global capitalist crisis the system is increasingly unable to yield any concessions. This means we are entering an era of struggle. It will take many different forms in different places. Our job as revolutionary socialists, wherever we are located, in the unions, universities, communities, youth organisations, political parties and social movements, is to orient these struggles towards the revolutionary overturn of the capitalist system and the taking of political and economic power by the working class and its allies.

For more on the issues and politics discussed by Trevor please see ROAPE’s archive that can accessed through roape.net by registering here. Read more on the background of the crisis in South Africa and the emerging alternatives in John Saul’s special issue on roape.net.

The World Bank and Inequality in South Africa

ROAPE

April 19, 2016

By Dick Forslund

In October 2014 the World Bank presented its “South Africa Economic Update No 6” at the Treasury’s Mid-Term budget workshop. The report concluded: ‘The fiscal system is already achieving a lot of redistribution, and there is little space left in the government’s purse to do more to alleviate poverty and inequality via fiscal policy.’ At the October 2015 workshop, the World Bank researchers reiterated their main finding: inequality in South Africa is not as bad as usually reported.

This has been a popular message among many economists. The report became a part of the ideological foundation of the 2016/17 budget, which fell short of protecting 16 million South Africans from real cuts in their social grants. So called austerity is now a fact for the poorest households.

Patrick Bond has slammed the report in articles and correspondence. The World Bank has only made minor concessions to his critique. In essence they argue that public health and education are largely “transferred” in South Africa from rich to poor, and that we get a truer picture if we measure income inequality after this alleged transfer of “incomes in kind”.

Bond has listed a range of state policies and services that benefit “the rich”. One example is the police, which got R598m extra over three years in the new budget.

Mainstream economics in fact acknowledges that police services are inherently biased towards the wealthy and gives this as one reason for so called progressive taxation: Rich people have more wealth to protect. Consequently, they should pay a larger share of their income for policing than the poor. The Marikana massacre is a terrible example of public policing protecting the interests of the wealthy. Policing in Khayelitsha compared to wealthy areas in Cape Town was debated last year, but such police service inequality is present in the whole country.

However, the World Bank report also has a more fundamental flaw. Let us start again from the beginning.

The World Bank concludes that there is “a lot of redistribution” going on in SA after measuring to what degree public health and education are “transferred” from people with higher incomes to the majority. It is the research program “Commitment to Equity Assessment” (CEA) that has introduced this novelty. CEA brings “the incidence of use” of a selection of state services into the inequality calculations (the ones not too difficult or impossible to quantify the use of among different income groups). CEA treats the choices of use of public services as if they are individual “incomes in kind” that you get or not get. This final analytical step is added to the standard measuring of income inequality after income taxes, subsidies, social grants and indirect taxes like VAT and the fuel levy. The result is summarised with the familiar “Gini coefficient” – the inequality measure usually explained by saying that 0 (zero) would mean perfect equality (everybody has the same income) and 1 “perfect inequality” (one person gets it all).

Every measure answers a question. It can be shown that the Gini measure answers this question (speaking of a large population): How large part of all income has to be taken from those with incomes above the average and given to those with incomes below the average in order for all to have the same income? A Gini of 0.69 means, that 69% of all income would have to be redistributed for everybody to have the same income. For this redistribution to happen, income is first taken away.

Everybody knows that South Africans with higher incomes choose to be less dependent on public health and education than others. After “correcting” for this, the World Bank can report a much lower Gini coefficient for SA than other studies: Inequality now drops from 0.77 in market income (i.e. before the state intervenes) to 0.59. This surprisingly low Gini gave political space to say in the report: ‘the fiscal space to spend more to achieve even greater redistribution is extremely limited.’ A Gini of 0.59 is bad, but not as bad as “0.695”, which the report, similar to other studies, says is income inequality after income taxes, subsidies, social grants and indirect taxes. But, again, the Word Bank could report a lower Gini after “also” taking into account that people with higher incomes pay more taxes, but largely opt out from public health and education, “transferring” these services to others.

Indeed, the researchers say (p.43): ‘Once the monetized value of education and health services is included, the poorest decile receive transfers and services worth some R6,900 (or $945 in 2010/11).’ We should compare this with R200 per year (!) in market income that the researchers have calculated, to which they add the net effect of R1,931 in cash transfers, subsidies and value added tax (VAT). The income of decile one is R2,131 per year. But after an additional “transfer” of public health and education in their analysis, the average “income” of the poorest decile increases by 243% to a “final income” of R7,100 per year, and so the World Bank ‘reformed’ Gini for South Africa plummets.

In social sciences every ideological distortion is based on a theoretical error. There is no transfer of public health and education services from high income earners to others. Everybody can come with a broken leg to a South African public hospital. Even an income millionaire can send her child to a public primary school in Eastern Cape. If fee-free and subsidised parts of public health and education are private “incomes in kind”, they are incomes to all. These services are for the rich too. Nobody is taking these services from them.

Still, we know that about 84% of the population use public health and the remaining 16% private. We know that high income earners as a rule shun public schools. Why is that? The WB researchers make this disclaimer: ‘The analysis does not take into account the quality of services (…). This limitation is particularly pertinent to the analysis of spending on health, education, and free basic services.’

Well, it is the dynamics of this limitation that is “pertinent”. The theoretical error directs the method and the method will deliver the following paradoxical result: If the Finance Minister didn’t budget enough for teachers there will be more class rooms with 50 or more learners. More people will now shun public schools, at all costs. Now they too start to “transfer” public school services to lower income earners. If the situation gets worse in the public sector and more people reject public health and education, the World Bank will report a lower Gini coefficient, i.e. that income inequality has dropped!

If the Finance Minister instead had budgeted for a drastic improvement in public health services, which he didn’t, then the methodological novelty would register an increase in inequality! Why? Well, people with higher incomes would start to use public health, “transfer” less of it and instead add this “income in kind” to their already high monetary incomes.

The cross country comparisons in the report must also become defunct. In countries where people with higher incomes are using public health and education more than in SA, the “reformed” Gini coefficient will be pushed up: Greater popularity of public health and education leads to a more unequal country.

This applies to all countries as far as I can see: The worse reputation public health and education get in a country, the more those who think they can afford it will use a private solution and the Gini drops, as if income distribution has become more equal. To get such a low Gini for South Africa, the World Bank mixes a strict monetary measure of inequality with the middle class/upper class reaction to the state of the public sector (a reaction that comes from culture, perception and actual service performance, one must say).

The Gini coefficient cannot be used in this way. Intuitively and even by common sense, a big quality difference between private and public health and education is a sign of inequality. I don’t know how much this method would adjust the Gini upwards (meaning “more inequality”) in Sweden, Norway, Germany or Denmark, where the public sector health and education are much more used by all income groups.

A hundred years ago, Mr Gini constructed an inequality measure that became widely used. Whatever its draw backs are, he would surely have been surprised to see how the World Bank has embraced an “improvement” of it that turns the world of inequality upside down.

From a table (2.8) in the World Bank report, we can deduce that the strictly redistributive taxation of R207,000 in average market income of the top ten percent income earners was 2.9 percent in 2011. Put otherwise: 9% (according to table 2.8) of the direct and indirect taxes on the average income of the top decile was for strictly redistributive purposes like social grants. The remaining 91 percent was put in the pot that pays for education, health, all other state functions and services, like rubber bullets.

Dick Forslund is senior economist at Alternative Information and Development Centre in South Africa.

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