Western Advocacy Groups and (Class) Conflict in the Congo

February 16, 2016

By Ben Radley

In recent years Western advocacy groups have achieved unprecedented success in mobilising Europeans and North Americans (particularly in the US) behind a ‘conflict minerals’ campaign to help end the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They have also attracted strong criticism, both internationally and in the DRC, for the perceived negative impact of their work. Over the last three years I have been working on a documentary, We Will Win Peace, which is part of this critique. As one local activist told us during the making of the film, ‘the advocacy led by these organisations, we hadn’t understood the goal, as Congolese…If we had been informed before of their intentions, we could have done something.‘ Similarly, speaking to a group of small-scale rural cultivators, one said ‘we didn’t understand what was happening or why such a decision had been made…No-one explained to us what was going on.’ So what was the goal, and what is going on?

While it is important not to conflate the work of all DRC-focused advocacy organisations under the same umbrella, central to the success of the ‘conflict minerals’ campaign was the emergence of a dominant narrative that placed Western consumers at the heart of the solution. The story went that armed groups operating in the eastern DRC were raping women to access and control mineral resources, and that if Western consumers exert pressure on electronic giants like Apple and Samsung to stop purchasing these minerals, they can prevent rape and help end the conflict. In the US, celebrities and sports stars were engaged by the Enough Project to help promote the campaign, whose message appealed particularly strongly to student groups and middle and upper-class liberals.

Bukavu Bukavu. Photograph: Seth Chase

The campaign eventually led to policy successes in both Washington and Brussels. In 2010 (and as We Will Win Peace documents), the Enough Project’s lobbying was instrumental in having Congress pass Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which asks all companies registered on the US stock market to reveal their supply chains to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when sourcing gold, tin, tungsten or tantalum from the eastern DRC or neighbouring countries. In 2014, the European Trade Commissioner proposed European Union ‘conflict minerals’ legislation for discussion, which Amnesty International, Global Witness and a broad coalition of European NGOs are now lobbying to be strengthened.

The foundations of the ‘conflict minerals’ campaign can be traced back to 2001, when a UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources in the DRC submitted its first report to the Security Council, recommending an immediate embargo on the trade in minerals from the eastern DRC due to their systematic exploitation by armed groups as a means to finance their activities.[1] Numerous NGO and other reports followed, and in 2008, UN Security Council Resolution 1856 strengthened the UN peacekeeping force’s mandate to combat the issue.

However, there were three shortcomings to the ‘conflict minerals’ campaign that came out of this work. First, it misrepresented the causal drivers of rape and conflict in the eastern DRC. Second, it assumed the dependence of armed groups on mineral revenue for their survival. Third, it under-estimated the importance of artisanal mining to employment (particularly of young men), local economies, and therefore – ironically – security. Compounding these shortcomings, there was a fatal flaw to the US legislation enacted in 2010: at the time Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act was passed, it was not possible for companies sourcing minerals from the eastern DRC to determine whether those minerals were or were not contributing to conflict.

As a result and due to confusion over the implications of the legislation, international buyers withdrew, and an effective mineral boycott enveloped the region. With minerals the only cash export of note from the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, and artisanal mining the main off-farm source of employment, the socio-economic impact on Congolese living in the region was severe, and continues to be felt today. Many lost their jobs or were forced into more precarious labour, as the legislation inadvertently (but quite predictably) strengthened the black market in smuggling minerals to ‘clean’ markets outside of the DRC (see this Open Letter, signed by a coalition of more than 70 Congolese and international experts, for a more detailed analysis of the campaign’s shortcomings and impact).

Today, the policy solution pursued in the DRC by a range of foreign companies, NGOs and donors revolves around an expansion of the Congolese state into areas formerly beyond its control, in order to establish and oversee mineral certification and traceability systems that can attest to their ‘conflict free’ status. Early evidence from artisanal mine sites piloting the first of these systems suggests the process is catalysing the previously lethargic formalisation of artisanal mining, and with it the establishment of formal land tenure agreements.[2] In so doing, the process provides conditions that might be amenable to forms of post-conflict (capitalist) development that has eluded the region for so long. However, this is contingent upon internal dynamics beyond the control of external actors, and will not take place overnight. Indeed, this is an oft-heard refrain by those who defend the campaign and the impact of Dodd-Frank 1502. While conceding that the short- and now medium-term impact has been harmful to many Congolese, the argument is made that the policy is aimed at long-term change.

BenRadley

Filming We Will Win Peace. Photograph: Ben Radley

Meanwhile, ‘en attendant’, the change enacted negatively affects the lowest classes of labour and already marginalised social groups by accelerating and creating new processes of dispossession, economic exclusion and social differentiation (albeit built on pre-existing inequalities). Herein lies the main tension in the work of Western advocacy organisations, and the reason they attract such strong critique: there is a heavy dissonance between their stated constituency and their actual constituency, or who they work for and who they work with. Reading the reflections of the radical American organiser Saul Alinsky, two major themes are apparent in his work.[3] First, the need to simplify your message to mobilise people from apathy to action. On this point, the ‘conflict minerals’ campaign has been extremely effective. Where the campaign falls short, however, is the second theme in Alinsky’s work, which is how close he always was to the constituency he represented. He either lived in the community he was helping organise, or he had been invited in to help them pursue solutions to problems they themselves defined (to paraphrase Alex van der Waal, himself a strong and vocal critic of what he has labelled ‘designer activism’).[4] Yet the relationship between advocacy organisations headquartered in Western capitals and their supposed constituency of marginalised or disadvantaged African groups is far more tenuous.

This is because often, the organisations have no permanent presence in the countries affected by their policy successes. Even for those who do have an in-country office much of their time is spent working with government, business and other elites in national and provincial capital cities. The majority of people who stand to be most affected by the policy outcomes of their advocacy, living in rural and peri-urban areas, will not have met them nor know who they are. One of the most striking elements during the making of the film was the difficulty of finding Congolese people in these areas who both knew about and were supportive of the ‘conflict minerals’ campaign, beyond a narrow but influential consortium of church leaders. Indeed, many bemoaned the lack of engagement with the Congolese classes and social groups who stood to be most directly impacted by policy change in Western capital cities. While the advocacy organisations use images of the poorest and most vulnerable in their marketing material, in reality they work predominantly with elites, and the disruptive and contingent process of state-building they engage in and promote often works against the very people they claim to represent.

And so, to return to the ‘conflict minerals’ campaign, organisations such as the Enough Project claim that progress is being made, and critics counter that on the contrary, harm is being done. There is truth to both claims, but they are focused on different aspects of the same process. To resolve this tension and to respond to the criticism, Western advocacy organisations are faced with a choice. They could change how they market their interventions and talk about their work. Helping strengthen the state in peripheral countries such as the DRC is a legitimate pursuit, not least as history tells us that an interventionist state is a necessary prerequisite to lessening dependency and advancing capitalist development in the Global South. However, it will likely be difficult to mobilise people and funding around long-term goals that are contingent and that entrench new forms of class conflict that negatively impact the poorest and most marginalised.

Alternatively, and perhaps more realistically, they could reorient their efforts to working not just for but with the non-elites they use to promote their public image and in whose name they justify their external interventions. What their work would lose in structural impact, it would gain in honesty and legitimacy, both in the DRC and abroad. The groups and classes of artisanal miners, peasants and other informal workers we spoke with would come to know more concretely who the organisations are, and influence more strongly the direction of their work. They would also provide more appropriate solutions to their own problems and struggles than the pursuit of overseas policy change which fails to respond to their local needs.

Ben Radley is a PhD candidate and film-maker based in Kinshasa and working on the re-emergence of industrial mining in South Kivu Province, with a focus on how foreign direct investment enters into and influences local labour and accumulation regimes.

Notes

[1] Vogel and Radley (2015) ‘Fighting Windmills in Eastern Congo: The Ambiguous Impact of the ‘Conflict Minerals’ Movement’, The Extractive Industries and Society 2: 406-410.

[2] Verbrugge, Cuvelier and Bockstael (2015) ‘Min(d)ing the Land: The Relationship between Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining and Surface Land Arrangements in the Southern Philippines, Eastern DRC and Liberia’, Journal of Rural Studies 37: 50-60.

[3] Alinsky, S, 1971. Rules for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books.

[4] Royal African Society, 20 January 2016, http://www.royalafricansociety.org/event/advocacy-conflict-alex-de-waal-rise-designer-activists.

Mozambican Workers and Communities in Resistance (Part 1)

ROAPE

February 11, 2016

By Judith Marshall

Part 1: Strikes, Bread Riots and Blockades

In the first of a two part article on the struggle of Mozambique’s workers and poor, Judith Marshall writes about the experiment in radical transformation in the first years of the country’s independence. She sees this project of building socialism unraveling under the impact of the low-intensity war and sabotage by apartheid South Africa, national bankruptcy, famine and the seemingly endemic centralism of the Frelimo government. The result was a tragic slide in the 1980s into the arms of the IMF and World Bank and the adoption of structural adjustment. The neo-liberal period from the late 1980s saw the birth of new protest movements against the government and international capital. In the second part of her article – to be published next month – Marshall analyses the extraordinary new challenges and struggles of Mozambique’s poor in the early 21st century.

21st Century Protests: New Actors, New Forms, New Triggers, New Targets

More than 100 activists from grass roots movements fighting for land or housing or work converged on the Vatican in October 2014 for a World Meeting of Popular Movements. The participants ranged from cardboard recyclers in Buenos Aires to the homeless in Cape Town, from indignados fighting the austerity agenda in Spain to the national slum dwellers association in India. Two grassroots activists from Mozambique were among the participants. One came from UNAC (União Nacional de Camponeses), the national peasants’ union that today supports peasant farming communities in their fight against dispossession through land grabs by mining companies and big agro-industry projects. The other came from ASSOTSI (Associacao dos Operadores e Trabalhadores do Sector Informal), a national organization of informal sector workers, living on the periphery of one of the world’s poorest countries where even formal sector workers earn far from a living wage.

The gathering was a direct initiative of Pope Francis, long a familiar figure among the poor and excluded in the shanty towns of Buenos Aires as Bishop Bergoglio. He brought to Rome a passionate desire for a church for the poor, one that would accompany and support those on the periphery where, against all efforts by the rich and powerful to dispossess them, discard them, and relegate them to sacrifice zones, the poor continue to invent ways to survive and resist.

Today as Pope, he is arguably the strongest establishment voice speaking out about the obscenity of global inequality. More importantly, whether in Vatican statements directed to the faithful or in dialogue with world leaders at events like G20 meetings, he is making pungent criticisms of the current global system. He is naming the forces that drive social exclusion and unemployment – speculative financial capital, mindless consumption and waste, individual greed over collective well-being, wanton destruction of nature, all driven by the unregulated power of global corporations.

Pope Francis’ analysis was echoed by the grass roots participants who gathered in Rome, along with 30 Bishops and a dozen NGOs and human rights groups vetted by the popular movements.[1] Those who came were united in their condemnation of neoliberal policies that bring destruction to the planet and create sacrifice zones for the young, the old, the weak and the poor, all in order to re-stabilize a global system driven by powerful corporations and financial institutions whose main beneficiaries are the rich. When the Pope met with the activists he stressed the importance of their actual presence in the Vatican as a signal, drawing attention to what is usually a hidden reality. ‘The poor not only suffer injustice. They are also struggling against it…the poor are no longer waiting.’ (Francis: 2014)

It is not by chance that Pope Francis invited these grass roots activists fighting for land and work and housing to the Vatican. The industrial proletariat, mass political parties and national liberation movements that led struggles for social justice in the 20th century are not, today, in the forefront. The patterns of discontent and uprisings are changing. An increase in university tuition fees (Quebec) or a rise in the cost of urban transport (Brazil) or demolition of a park (Turkey) can quickly conflagrate into a mass protest, linking readily with other issues and sources of discontent to prompt thousands to the streets. These grassroots actions, whether urban or rural, are driven primarily by local issues and by ordinary people fed up with being exploited and excluded. There is generalized distrust of politicians and electoral processes and the media. The actions are often emblematic of alternatives – more compassionate societies, more active citizenship, more robust democracies and wiser stewardship of the planet. As Pancha Rodriguez, a rural indigenous woman from Chile, said to the group in Rome, ‘In this era where the planet is under grave threat, smart farming is indigenous farming.’ [2]

Mozambique: From Colony to Socialist Construction to Neoliberal Accommodation

Mozambique is not a country that has been noted for protagonism from the working class and the poor in recent years. A rapid review of Mozambican history confirms this, locates some of the factors at play and begins to document the scope and regularity of protests in recent years. Historically, Portugal offered little democratic space to its citizens in Europe, and even less in its African colonies. Full-fledged settler colonialism under Portugal was established at the end of the 19th century, complete with a “civilizing mission” to bring black Mozambicans from “idleness” into productivity, i.e. forced labour for the colonial state and contract labour to South Africa’s mines. Full colonial governance was established only in the south, with control of the central and northern regions contracted out to crown companies interested primarily in plantations for agricultural exports like cotton, sisal and tea. In colonial Mozambique, labour or professional organizations were permitted for Portuguese workers and “assimilated” blacks, resulting in unions of dock workers, railway workers, metal workers, etc. Black workers, however, were relegated to cultural associations determined by race with grievances channelled through cultural presentation using music, dance and theatre. Worker resistance tended to be muted. Strikes did occur, among port and railway workers or rural cane cutters, for example, but they tended to be focussed on immediate workplace issues rather than colonialism as such. (Penvenne:1993, 1995; Tinosse 2015).

The strong revenue flows from contract labour to the South African mines and fees for South African and Rhodesian use of port and rail facilities in Maputo and Beira were the main sources of revenue for the colony. Portugal and South Africa established a pattern whereby the Portuguese colonial regime would export – using forced recruitment – at least 100,000 contract workers annually to the mines in South Africa in return for which South Africa would route at least 47.5% of its Transvaal transit trade via Mozambican ports and railways. (Mittelman 1997:182)

In an effort to ward off impending decolonization and provide a safe buffer for the white minority regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa, Portugal opened Mozambique significantly to foreign investors from Europe and South Africa in the 1960s. By 1973, two years before independence, South Africa had replaced Portugal as the main exporter to Mozambique, supplying machinery, spare parts, fertilizers, iron and steel, wheat, potatoes and coal. (Munslow 1993:48)

There was no effective buffer, however, from the sweep of African nationalism that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, rolling southward starting from Ghana in 1957. By the mid-1960s, almost all of the British and French colonies had negotiated their independence. Faced with Portugal’s intransigence, armed national liberation movements were fighting for independence in all three of its colonies in Africa – Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau/Cape Verde. They were closely allied with the liberation movements fighting to end white minority rule in Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa. These liberation movements in southern Africa quickly gained full political support from the United Nations, military support from the USSR and China, and rear-guard support from newly independent neighbours in Tanzania and Zambia. By the 1970s, Mozambique also enjoyed support from the Scandinavian countries and Holland in the liberated zones of northern Mozambique.

The composition of the forces of liberation varied in each country. In neighbouring South Africa, for example, a multiplicity of social actors sought to end apartheid over the decades. Some were long established like the ANC which was founded in 1912. The ANC took on increasingly militant tactics over the years with strikes and street protests and the Defiance Campaign. It formally adopted armed struggle in 1961. From the 1970s on, important new internal forces emerged including the black consciousness movement, a resurgent trade union movement, student protests and a broad United Democratic Front. These new actors in the struggle for South African liberation had a complex and often contested relationship with the ANC. (Saul & Bond: 2014)

There was no equivalent civil society articulation over the decades within Mozambique. Many of those who eventually led the national liberation struggle earned their political stripes not in Mozambican factory and township struggles but in the heady debates about imperialism and decolonization as university students in Portugal. There they struggled to affirm themselves as Africans and to fight for a Centre of African Studies in Lisbon. They also formed lasting links with future liberation movement leaders from other Portuguese colonies such as Amilcar Cabral from Guinea Bissau and Agostinho Neto from Angola. [3]

In the 1960s, Mozambican students abroad and the several Mozambican nationalist organizations that had formed in newly independent Zambia and Tanzania, plus youth from the internal student movement, NESAM, converged to form the Mozambique Liberation Front. Frelimo launched its armed struggle in 1964 from rear bases in Tanzania and Zambia. It established significant liberated territories in northern Mozambique, a laboratory for new forms of participatory democracy and an option for socialism.

After the military coup in Portugal in 1974, Frelimo became part of a transitional government and formed Mozambique’s first independent government on June 25, 1975. With rumours rampant of an impending racial blood bath, 90 percent of the settler population of 200,000 took flight. The abrupt departure of managers and technicians, some carrying out industrial sabotage as a parting shot, left the economy in a state of paralysis. Frelimo’s construction of a socialist state led by workers and peasants began, then, in an extremely volatile climate. Where owners stayed, private companies continued to operate. The state intervened as necessary with nationalizations or administration commissions in cases of abandonment, decapitalization and sabotage. (Hanlon 1996; Pitcher 2002: Webster 2005)

João Mosca in his cogent analysis entitled ‘The Socialist Experience in Mozambique (1975-1986)’ recalls the moment in this way:

With independence priority was given to the question of establishing power, which meant mainly institutional restructuring and setting up Frelimo structures throughout the territory, political and cultural liberation and affirmation, setting up the army and mobilizing the general population to guarantee popular support and avoid a surge of ethnic initiatives and to resist the already embryonic regional conflict. The big questions related to the economy…were given relatively little importance. The political discourse and the propaganda message emphasized the victories over colonialism, raised the banner of external aggression and the need to support the processes of liberation of people still colonized or ruled by white minority regimes and apartheids (cases of Southern Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa. (Mosca 1999:69 My translation.)

The attention of the newly installed Frelimo government was caught at macro level in the “cold war”. Western powers made abandonment of the socialist project and Frelimo’s imaginary of deeper socialist transformation a precondition for their support while the USSR made its support contingent on military bases in the Indian Ocean. Frelimo’s post-independence discourse focussed on victory over Portuguese colonialism and urged sacrifice and solidarity to build the new Mozambique and liberate the remaining colonies and white minority regimes. The depth of Mozambique’s economic subordination to the apartheid regime was rarely made visible. Yet just prior to independence in 1975, South Africa was providing 50-60% of Mozambique’s foreign exchange earnings, with another 13% coming from port, rail and pipe lines linking the Beira port to Rhodesia. (Mittelman 1997:182)

By the early 1980s the apartheid regime had mounted a full-scale low intensity war against Mozambique, made the more difficult by being undeclared by the perpetrator and unacknowledged by the victims. South African aggression included economic destabilization, disinformation campaigns, occasional incursions by South African military forces and increasing support for a surrogate force, Renamo, wreaking terror in the rural areas and attacking the gains of independence like new health posts and transport infrastructure.

South Africa quickly seized on migrant labour quotas as a key tool for economic destabilization.

…the number of Mozambican mineworkers…tumbled from a peak of 115,000 in 1975 to less than 40,000 in 1983. Frelimo wanted to cut back the supply of migrant labourers in the future. However, this decline was directly attributable to the decision of the mining industry to vary the countries of origin of foreign labour…as well as to the South African government’s desire to punish Mozambique. (Mittelman 1998:193)

By 1983, Mozambique was facing a multiple crisis with a collapsed economy and a serious drought, within the larger context of both the low intensity regional war and the ongoing cold war pressures. On January 30, 1984, Mozambique declared bankruptcy and defaulted on its loans. In March, 1984, it signed the Nkomati Accord, with South Africa, binding each party not to harbour dissident forces fighting against each other’s regimes. [4]

From Socialist Construction to Neoliberal Accommodation

Creditors refused to renegotiate unless Mozambique joined the IMF. This was done and over the next few years Mozambique followed the classic IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programme with its mandatory conditionalities of devaluation, privatization, deregulation and cuts in social sector spending. Noticias, the national newspaper, announced on the first page of its January 15, 1998 edition that 100,000 workers had lost their jobs during the decade of structural adjustment. (Hanlon 1984; Loxley 1988; Mosca 1993; Marshall 1992).

In 1989, the 5th Congress of Frelimo dropped all references to Marxism-Leninism. The line in the Mozambican workers’ hymn celebrating “victories over the manoeuvres of imperialism” was changed to “victories over the manoeuvres of the corporations.” The endless war with Renamo abated with a peace agreement signed in 1992. There were further pressures from the IMF and the World Bank to introduce a pluralist democracy that resulted in a new law on union freedom in 1991 and measures to introduce political pluralism. The first multi-party elections were held in 1994, with the original Frelimo leaders holding on to power. They were now strong proponents of neoliberalism, however, presiding over a Mozambique, wide open to foreign investment.

Government, party and military leaders had already shown their adroitness in carrying out a sweeping privatization exercise in which they continue to play a significant role. Anne Pitcher’s studies document how the very centralized Frelimo government took control of the privatization process, carving out roles for senior levels of government, party and military as private entrepreneurs.

The government retains a percentage of total investment. In some capacity, the government is present in almost every major economic undertaking, from agriculture to mining to Mozal to the Maputo corridor. The state still owns and in some cases operates key strategic sectors in the economy such as communications, transportation and electricity. …Moreover the government has formed partnerships with all of the major investors: foreign and domestic investors, black, white and Indian investors in industry, agriculture and commerce; investors in the north and the south. (Pitcher 2002:173)

Popular participation and protagonism vs hierarchies and centralism

The project of creating “people’s power” had proved to be elusive. “Poder Popular” had been the watchword in newly independent Mozambique. Dinamizing (energising) Groups were set up in workplaces, communities, schools and universities. Frelimo used these to transmit messages to – and also from – the base and to create a vehicle for popular participation, mobilizing the energies and euphoria unleased by independence to maintain production in abandoned work places, take on voluntary work projects like city clean-up or carry out cultural and solidarity activities. Frelimo had launched various initiatives to create “people’s power” and a society led by workers and peasants. These included massive expansion of basic services including education, health, housing and sanitation, worker participation and control through Production Councils, consumer cooperatives, national literacy campaigns, communal villages, community security brigades and community legal structures.

Workers who, until independence, had endured humiliation from colonial managers and technicians were suddenly valued as the protagonists of the new socialist society. Veteran urban factory workers were offered intensive education programmes to get their school certificates and take on responsibilities in running the workplace. When rentable property was nationalized a year after independence, many workers were able to occupy the houses and apartments of the departed settlers. Although wages remained low, those with secure employment enjoyed many workplace benefits, from special rations to company transport, schooling on company time to workers’ holiday camps. [5]

The early years of independence were years of scarcity, but they were also years of hope. Kok Nam, well-known Mozambican photo-journalist, captured the ethos of the time in his images of the euphoria of independence and Samora Machel’s charismatic energy and vision for Mozambique. He also documented the agony of war and internal refugees. He was asked many years later whether the socialist moment was anything more than a romantic idea.

There were things that were real. Everybody could go to school, everybody had access to hospitals and people had the opportunity to have a house, occupying the thousands of abandoned houses…. And there weren’t any rich. We were all poor. But this united us. And the feeling that the figure at the pinnacle of the state was like us, that he was a man of impressive moral character, also united us….Even the shortages. In those days I had to stand in line to buy sugar. Today people approach me on the street to sell me flowers. (EPM-CELP 2010:34 My translation)

The socialist project in Mozambique is woefully under-documented. Existing documentation is often within rigid ideological perspectives, left or right, but little rooted in the often contradictory meanings attached to it by those who lived it. Since the Frelimo leaders in power currently are strong proponents of neoliberalism and have their own private entrepreneurial projects, they show an eagerness to rewrite history, erasing the socialist moment. “Forgetting from above and memory from below” is the prevailing order today. [6] For working people and the poor, however, the memory of Samora Machel and the socialist moment continue to be evocative.

The project of building socialism began to unravel as dramatically as it had begun with both the increasing scope of the low-intensity war, national bankruptcy, famine and the seemingly endemic centralism of the Frelimo government. The propensity for rigid hierarchical control ran counter to all the initiatives to build robust, participatory democratic spaces. Legislative, executive and judicial powers were all concentrated in the CPP [Permanent Political Committee of nine senior Frelimo leaders], a structure superior both to the Frelimo Central Committee and the People’s Assembly.

The members of the CPP held a concentration of high positions in the party, the state and the army. The unions (initially Production Councils) and the organizations of youth and women were controlled by Frelimo, not just through the elaboration of their programmes but also in naming those to take leadership positions. The elections for office in these organizations were based on lists of candidates decided on previously by the Frelimo party. (Mosca 1999:78 My translation)

By the beginning of the 1990s working people and the poor were dealing with the harsh impact of the structural adjustment programme, government’s fulsome adoption of neoliberalism and the spectre of a small group of government, military and business leaders becoming ostentatiously rich amidst the grueling poverty of the majority. Mozambicans interviewed for a study of the social impact of the Economic Recuperation Programme (PRE) in 1992 told me there was both a “PRE” and a “PRI”. The “PRI” was the Individual Recuperation Programme. While the poor were being told to tighten their belts, people at the top were loosening theirs to allow for the expanding girth resulting from rich living.

Signs of Popular Resistance

The beginning of the 1990s brought the first signs of popular resistance with a wave of strikes,[7] initiated by workers at Tempo magazine and the steel rolling mill, CIFEL, but quickly spreading to the bus companies, Maputo Central Hospital, Maputo City Council and APIE, the state housing authorities. Glass, tire and textile workers also went out on strike. By late January 1990, health and construction workers in Beira, bus drivers in Nampula and coal miners in Moatize had joined their southern colleagues in strike action. When the school year resumed in February, teachers also joined in. (Marshall 1992: 52,53)

The widespread scope of the strike actions demanded real answers from government. Workers were making legitimate demands. Many of the newly nationalized small businesses had floundered, leaving workers without jobs, with salaries and overtime pay in arrears and no severance. Teachers demanded additional pay for teaching double shifts. Government intervened rapidly with a general 16% wage increase for all workers – and stronger regulations about what constituted a “legal” strike.

There was a “fuel riot” in November 1993, triggered by announcements of a 100% price rise for transport in the overcrowded and dangerous mini-vans that served as public transport for the poor, known as Chapa 100. There was a spontaneous response from below with 10,000 people going onto the streets on November 24 in Maputo and other urban communities on the outskirts, including Matola, a major industrial suburb. Blockades were improvised at major intersections, text messages providing the means of rough coordination from one part of the city to another.

The main newspaper, Noticias, did the math to explain the explosion onto the streets. In 1993, a person earning the government minimum wage earned 70,000 meticais. Transport to and from work cost 44,000 meticais with food at work taking another 22,000. Only 4000 MT was left for everything else – housing, food, education and health. Every urban household was forced to find sources of income to supplement the inadequate wage incomes of its formally employed members. These ranged from multiple jobs to petty trading to connections with families in rural areas producing food. (Chaimite 2014: 89)

Noted Mozambican economist Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco captures succinctly how the labour system was, and is, negatively articulated to the broader political economy.

… the dominant political economy of Mozambique is focused on three fundamental and interlinked processes, namely the maximization of inflows of foreign capital – FDI or commercial loans – without political conditionality; the development of linkages between these capital inflows and the domestic process of accumulation and the formation of national capitalist classes; and the reproduction of a labour system in which the workforce is remunerated at below its social cost of subsistence and families have to bear the responsibility for maintaining (especially feeding) the wage-earning workers by complementing their wages… (Castel-Branco: 2015)

The people on the streets demonstrating were not workers earning a minimum wage, however, nor did unions give support to the protesters. Those on the streets demonstrating were the poor and excluded. It was unemployed youth and informal sector workers and school children that were on the streets, once blockades were set up, Chapa 100 vans stopped running and schools closed. The demonstrators marched chanting slogans against the higher prices. They blocked roads with rocks, garbage cans and anything that came to hand. They stoned cars and raided stores with sporadic actions continuing in the more remote communities for an entire week. Government claimed sympathy and acknowledged the validity of the complaints but said it could do little to change the situation.

21st Century Motors of Growth: Mining, Oil and Agro-Industry

Industrialization had been adopted as the engine of national development in the imaginaries of the newly independent African states in the 1960s and 1970s, inextricably bound up with modernization, urbanization and proletarianization. At Mozambique’s independence, Frelimo had inherited a not inconsiderable industrial sector that had become firmly integrated into supply chains with South Africa in the final years of colonialism. Much of it had been abandoned and, in some cases sabotaged, by departing Portuguese owners and technicians. Government efforts to intervene and bring workplaces back into productive order were thwarted by a mixture of lack of capital and technical capacity from the Mozambican side and South African economic sabotage. These industrial workplaces were encompassed in the privatization process of the 1980s.

In the neoliberal world order, however, mining, oil and agro-industry have reigned as the engines for development. As the new century unfolded, Mozambicans found themselves dealing with all three. Major extractive sector transnationals began to build megaprojects with mine, railway, pipeline and port complexes shipping Mozambican resources onto world markets. They include mining companies from old imperial centres like Australia’s Rio Tinto and Ireland’s Kenmare and those from emerging global powers in the BRICS like Brazil’s Vale and India’s Jindal (Marshall 2014a).

The mines are concentrated in Tete and Nampula provinces. The arrival of these foreign investors was heralded with promises of economic growth, employment and regional development. There is a huge gap, however, between the corporations’ job promises and actual employment of Mozambican labour, between the expectations of contracts for local suppliers and the self-sufficient enclave nature of today’s big mining companies, between a revenue stream from mining that can be redistributed to strengthen social programmes for all citizens and the less than transparent agreements between government and mining companies based on low rents for resource concessions.

21st Century transnationals in mining are far more articulated to their own operational networks and to global supply chains than to the national economy in which the resource is located. In his essay, “Governing Extraction: New Spatializations of Order and Disorder in Neoliberal Africa”, noted American anthropologist James Ferguson makes cogent arguments about the nature of extractive sector enclaves. Far from catalyzing national development, their tendency is to weaken national economic spaces.

… it is worth noting how such enclaves participate not only in the destruction of national economic spaces but also in the construction of “global’ ones. For just as enclaves of, say, mining production are often fenced off (literally and metaphorically) from their surrounding societies, they are at the same time linked up, with a “flexibility” that is exemplary of the most up-to-date, “post-Fordist” neoliberalism, both with giant transnational corporations and with networks of small contractors and subcontractors that span thousands of miles and link nodes across multiple continents… .(Ferguson 2006:13)

Further north in Cabo Delgado province bordering Tanzania, there is a boom in oil and gas exploration. The Italian oil and gas operation ENI and Anadarko Petroleum from the US are developing a multi-billion dollar oil project in the Rovuma Basin. This same area has huge gas reserves which, coupled with gas reserves in Inhambane, prompt Mozambican government and business leaders to dream of Mozambique as a future energy super power.

Agro-business is the third component of the neoliberal growth engine and here too, Mozambique is being inundated with new investments. Most prominent is ProSavana. This is a tri-partite project between the governments of Mozambique, Brazil and Japan in the Nacala Corridor in northern Mozambique. Harkening back to the “terra nullius” days of the conquest of the Americas, the programme hopes to occupy 14.5 thousand hectares of land in 19 districts in the provinces of Niassa, Nampula and Zambezia. In Mozambique, 81% of the economically active population depends on agriculture for a living. The ProSavana land grab would replace peasant farmers engaged in family agriculture who presently grow the bulk of food consumed in Mozambique with agro-industry producing primarily export crops like cotton, sisal and soya.

Clemente Ntauazi, is Executive Coordinator of ADECRU (Academic Actions for the Development of Rural Communities), one of the civil society organizations strongly critical of ProSavana. He claims that this mega-project in agro-industry calls into question the major collective conquests of national independence, namely, regaining control of the land and of production. The ProSavana No campaign video is entitled “Terra Usurpada Vida Roubada”. “Usurping Our Land. Robbing Our Lives” starts with images of the armed struggle in which Mozambican peasants and youth are fighting to liberate the land from colonial control. The Portuguese settlers had tried to construct African peasant producers as “indigenous”, claiming them to be uncivilized, idle, “other” with no legitimate claims to land or dignity. Through ten years of armed struggle, however, the Indigenous had triumphed, creating liberated zones at first and finally winning back their entire country from colonial control and asserting their dignity as legitimate protagonists of history. Some peasant farmers had even won their land back twice, having later fought off Renamo occupation during the post-independence “civil” war during which South Africa supported a surrogate force. Now, in the 21st century, these peasant farmers faced a situation in which their own government was trying to dispossess them of what they had fought for and won, collaborating with foreign investors to retake the land, with the justification that it was “unoccupied” and “unproductive”. (Ntauazi:2015)

As David Harvey argues so cogently (Harvey: 2004), “accumulation by dispossession” is not a concept limited to a “primitive” stage of capitalist development. These predatory practices have been continuous through the historical development of capitalism, and have intensified since the onslaught of neoliberalism in the mid-1970s. ‘In the neoliberal era, assets previously held under collective ownership, either by the state or in common, have been forced on an unprecedented scale into the realm of the market, often through fraud, coercion, and innumerable forms of predation both by the state and powerful private actors.’ (Quoted in Webber 2008:5)

The eagerness to proceed with ProSavana may have abated. This is partly due to effective international organizing including the tri-national civil society forum created by Japanese, Brazilian and Mozambique civil society activists to make peasant farmers visible and bring them actively into the debate. It is also due to the end of the commodities super cycle that characterized the first decade of the 21st century with aid and investment dollars in abundance, and expectations of continued high prices for agro-exports. Be that as it may, the critiques of ProSavana were sufficiently strong to force the Mozambique government to schedule a Public Hearing in June 2015 at the prestigious Joaquim Chissano International Conference Centre. The Minister of Agriculture, flanked by former Ministers, opened the hearing with a call for presentations only by “patriotic Mozambicans”, a not very subtle code for only those in favour of current government policies. The Minister was challenged by Alice Mabota, head of the Human Rights League, for suppressing critical discussion. Yet when well-respected economist, Professor Joao Mosca, who also heads the Observatory of Rural Environment, arrived at the microphone, he was told that his presentation could only be made in writing since time for oral presentations had run out. The peasant farmers and civil society activists present carried out a spontaneous exodus from the Hearing and issued a joint statement in protest. (farmland grab:2015)

21st Century Forms of Protest

As the 21st century unfolds, then, Mozambicans are protesting in a multitude of forms that question the legitimacy of the existing order. The new areas of investment in mining, oil and agro-industry have focussed these questions sharply. Citizen resentment has grown as government has ended any pretense of balancing demands from multiple social actors and catered only to foreign investors and a national business elite that collaborates with them. Peasant farmers find themselves alone and defenceless in the face of land grabs. Workers needs are jettisoned as government equates the interests of the mining and oil companies with the national interest. Pressures for a decent wage or safe working conditions are interpreted as sabotage of the national economy. National union structures endorse the government/corporate embrace, playing their assigned role of ensuring worker submission to low wage strategies. Yet despite government propensity to marginalize and criminalize citizen dissent, popular protest actions continue to grow.

The first of the new megaprojects, the $1.34 billion Mozal aluminum smelter, was opened in 2000. In many ways, the positioning of the various social actors – corporation, governments, unions, broader civil society organizations both national and international – pre-figures what was to become the pattern. The Mozal case, then, deserves to be studied in some detail.

BHP-Billiton’s investment in an aluminum smelter, Mozal, marked Mozambique’s full-blown entry into the neoliberal embrace. Mozal was formally opened in 2000, part of a much touted regional industrial development project with South Africa. The Mozambique Development Corridor was designated as an export processing zone (EPZ), linking production sites to the Maputo harbour. The aluminum smelter was the centerpiece, with shares divided among BHP-Billiton (47%), Mitsubishi (25%), South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation (24%) and Mozambique government (4%). Mozal was opened triumphantly by President Joaquim Chissano in September 2000. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa was at his side, heralding Mozal as emblematic of the “African Renaissance”.

Behind the high-flown political rhetoric was a hard-nosed business deal. Cheap power was a key component. South Africa’s powerful Anglo-American had taken advantage of Portugal’s decision to open Mozambique for investment in the 1960s and became a shareholder in the Cahora Bassa dam and hydro-electric project. Mozambique had been supplying low-cost power to the South African state electricity company, ESKOM, since that time. ESKOM in turn had been supplying this cheap power to BHPs two aluminum smelters in South Africa. MOTRACO, a private company was set up to supply cheap power to Mozal. It also enjoyed enjoyed EPZ privileges.

BHP got other major economic advantages. Proximity to the Maputo port reduced shipping costs. EPZ status eased regulatory procedures and import/export tariffs. Mozal was granted a 15 year corporate tax exemption. BHP also benefitted from Mozambique’s Least Developed Country designation under the Lome Convention. Aluminium exports to EEC countries from Mozal got a 6% tariff reduction unavailable to BHP’s exports from South Africa. (Pretorius 2000)

South Africa also benefitted from Mozambique’s weak environmental and labour infrastructure. A hasty environmental assessment was carried out by a South African institution not known for its rigor. (Pretorius 2000) BHP was able to take advantage of weak trade unions in Mozambique, in marked contrast with the combative unions like Numsa which represented BHP workers in South Africa. The Mozambicans unions were still closely linked to the government and had no experience in dealing with transnational companies.

The Mozal construction phase was marked by strong labour conflicts. BHP brought in South African sub-contractors, each bringing a core group of its own workers. Operating from strong stereotypes of Mozambican backwardness, the sub-contractors automatically allocated the skilled, high-paying jobs to South Africans. A representative of SINTICIM, the Mozambican Construction, Wood and Miners Union, recalled the moment some years later. He said that the union had advised its members not to protest, but to accept the unskilled jobs, prove themselves in practice and hope for a higher category in the next phase. (Marshall 2014)

Once the smelter became operational, even stronger labour protests emerged. The new generation of technical and administrative workers employed by Mozal had impressive levels of training, skills and even supervisory experience. They also had high expectations about employment by a transnational corporation. They were shocked to learn that officials from the Mozambican Metalworkers Union, SINTIME, had already been wined and dined by BHP in South Africa. Even more disconcerting, SINTIME had returned with a collective agreement. It included not just general principles but detailed job classifications and salaries with huge salary differentials. Virtually all the Mozambican workers were placed in the lowest classification. The agreement gave away the right to strike, claiming continuous production in the aluminum smelter was “essential”, ILO definition of what constitutes “essential services” notwithstanding. (ITUC: 2009). Furthermore there was a clause stating that this agreement took precedence over other existing labour agreements in Mozambique. English was established as the language in the workplace and foreign workers were paid in dollars while Mozambicans were paid in the rapidly devaluing local currency. (Pretorius: 2000)

The first workplace Union Committee elected at Mozal took on BHP-Billiton in a “David and Goliath” contest. Their first hurdle was to persuade BHP to recognize Mozambican labour law. The second was to reopen the job classifications and salary scale. Despite efforts by government mediators and later, by a team of “independent” arbitrators including lawyers from Mozal and SINTIME, there was an impasse. Mozal went ahead to announce a new salary schedule for 2001, with no union input. In February, 200 workers carried out a one-day work stoppage to protest expatriate pay levels. Frustration levels ran high among the workers. Many had successfully completed Mozal’s maintenance technician training. After graduation, they were told to reapply. The only positions open, however, were for lesser paid maintenance assistants, even though the graduates now constituted the entire Mozal maintenance staff.[8]

Finally in September 2001, a formal strike notice was given. The union accepted Mozal’s request for a meeting the day before the strike deadline, still hoping to avert a strike. The meeting continued until 7 pm. Union members went home, assuming resumption the next morning. Meanwhile workers entering at 9 pm found Mozal management had been acting in bad faith. The shift was prevented from entering by 200 armed riot police and police dogs surrounding the smelter. Although BHP never officially declared a lock-out, the union soon learned that ex-BHP workers from South African had been flown to Mozambique and hired on as scabs, lured by BHP’s offer of US$200/day and luxury beach hotel accommodation. (Pretorius 2000)

BHP felt little pressure to settle since production continued with the scab workers. It took full advantage of the situation to undermine the new union, using home visits, emails and newspaper ads to persuade workers to drop their demands and return under the existing conditions. There was little public support. Common sentiment was that Mozal workers already earned more than most and were foolish to take on a powerful company like BHP.

The Mozambican Workers Organization (OTM) issued an initial statement characterizing the workers’ demands as “fair and legitimate” and BHP’s position as “intransigent and inflexible”. Nine days into the three weeks strike/lockout, however, Mozambique government – itself a Mozal shareholder – weighed in firmly behind BHP and urged the broader labour movement to reject worker demands. During the government-organized OTM 18th anniversary reception, President Chissano strongly criticized the Mozal workers, claiming that attracting a big investor like BHP represented a huge victory for Mozambique.

This [Mozal] is the bait to attract other foreign investment… but now there is a danger that this will all be brought down…. The workers who say they are suffering injustice at Mozal are not the poorest workers…We have many workers who are much poorer…. We have to find a solution which ensures that Mozal remains a basis for attracting the projects that are essential for the elimination of unemployment and absolute poverty. (AIM 2001)

With government allied with BHP and almost half their members back at work in the smelter, the local union leaders dropped their demands. Despite earlier promises of no disciplinary action, BHP refused to reintegrate the 40 workers they labelled as strike leaders, including four of the six elected union leaders.

While Mozambican government and national union leaders were urging the BHP workers at Mozal to back down, the BHP workers in South Africa were militant in their solidarity. Stewards at BHPs Bayside and Hillside smelters interrupted every scheduled meeting with the company with a motion to place Mozal on the agenda. Shifts reported for work refusing to pick up their tools until the scabs were brought back from Mozambique. Numsa was highly embarrassed that ex-Numsa members had been enticed into scabbing. Numsa officials met with BHP and the Industrial Development Corporation in Johannesburg. They felt they had the makings of a deal that could break the impasse in Mozambique and proposed a joint BHP, IDC, Numsa mission to Maputo under the aegis of the International Metalworkers Federation. They also lobbied for an International BHP Billiton Council. (Motau: 2003)

Numsa was one of the initiators of an exchange in Maputo in November 2001 to lay the groundwork for an international campaign to reinstate the 40 Mozal workers. [9] Simeao Nhantumbo, SINTIME Secretary General at the time, commented on the strike, saying ‘what was won or lost in the first major project would have big implications for what workers would be able to achieve in other major investment projects.’ Yet shortly thereafter, Nhantumbo officially informed Numsa that it was no longer welcome in Mozambique and that Numsa’s contact with Mozal workers was tantamount to foreign interference in Mozambique’s internal affairs. (Motau 2003)

The Mozal events at the beginning of the millennium set the pattern for future labour struggles. The best educated and technically trained workers in Mozambique had tried to use the existing trade union structures to defend themselves. When they pushed the company for a better contract, they found themselves pitted against not just Mozal but also against their own government, against the wider Mozambican labour movement and even against general public opinion. When unions representing BHP workers in other countries offered solidarity, they were denigrated as foreign agitators. Even elected worker leaders got no protection from company reprisals. The lessons were not lost on other union leaders throughout Mozambique.

Judith Marshall is a Canadian labour educator, writer and global activist who has traveled extensively in Africa and Latin America. She worked in the Ministry of Education in Mozambique for 8 years and on her return to Canada, wrote her doctoral thesis on a literacy campaign in a Mozambican factory. She has recently retired after working for 20 years in the Department of Global Affairs and Workplace Issues of the Canadian Steelworkers union.

References

AIM. 2001. President Chissano Criticizes the MOZAL Strike. www.poptel.org.uk/mozambique_news/newsletter/ain217/html. Accessed on February 4, 2015.

Bertelsen, B.E. 2014. Effervescence and Ephemerality: Popular Urban Uprisings in Mozambique in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. http://www.academia.edu/8056852/_Effervescence_and Ephemerality_Popular_Urban_Uprisings_in_Mozambique_Ethnos_2014_10.1080_00141844.2014.929596-OPEN_ACCESS_

Bila, Iracema Malopue. 2015. Communities abandoned and trapped in mining zones in Tete. Maputo: Savana 06-02-2015.

de Brito, L., E. Chaimite, C. Pereira, L. Posse, M. Sambo and A. Shankland. 2014. Hunger Revolts and Citizen Strikes: Popular Protests in Mozambique, 2008-2012. Food Riots and Food Rights project report. Brighton/Maputo; Institute of Development Studies/Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Economicos. www.foodriots.org.

Cabaço, Jose Luis (2001) ‘THE NEW MAN (Brief History of a Project) in Antonio Sopa. SAMORA Man of the People, Maputo: Maguezo Editors, pp 103-111.

Cabral, Amilcar (1967) Revolution in Guinea: An African People’s Struggle, London: Stage 1.

Castel-Branco, Carlos Nuno (2014) Growth, capital accumulation and economic porosity in Mozambique: social losses, private gains, Review of African Political Economy, 41:sup1, S26-S48, DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2014.976363 http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/crea20

Chaimite, Egidio. 2014. Das Revoltas as Marchas: Emergencia de um Repertorio de Accao Colectiva em Mocambique in Luis de Brito et al. Desafios para Mocambique 2014. Maputo:IESE.

Club of Mozambique. 2012. Labour Minister Cancels Work Permits. www.clubofmozambique.com/solutions1/sectionnews.php?secao=… Accessed on December 13, 2015

EPM-CELP. 2010. KOK NAM o homen por detras da camara. Maputo: Escola Portuguesa de Mocambique/Centro de Ensino e Lingua Portuguesa.

Fanon, Frantz. 1966. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Farmland Grab. 2015. The seemingly public hearing of the ProSavana program yet another phoney dialogue process. http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/25048-the-seemingly-public-hearing-of-the-prosavana-program-yet-another-phoney-dialogue-process Accessed on December 16, 2015

Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press.

Francis. 2014. Address of Pope Francis to the Participants of the World Meeting of Popular Movements. October 28, Rome. http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2014/october/documents/papa-francesco_20141028_incontro-mondiale-movimenti-popolari.html

Hanlon, Joe. 1996. Peace Without Profit. Oxford: James Currey.

Harvey, David. 2004. The “New” Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession. In Socialist Register Volume 40. Ponteypool:The Merlin Press.HRW (Human Rights Watch). 2013. O Que e Uma Casa Sem Comida: O Boom da Mineracao em Mocambique. Maputo:Human Rights Watch.

HRW.2013. “What is a House without Food?” Mozambique’s Coal Mining Boom and Resettlements. Report of Human Rights Watch, May 23, 2013

https://www.hrw.org/report/2013/05/23/what-house-without-food/mozambiques-coal-mining-boom-and-resettlements. Accessed January 8, 2016

International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). 2009. Internationally Recognised Core Labour Standards in Mozambique: Report for the WTO General Council Review of the Trade Policies of

JA!Justica Ambiental.2012. Direitos comunitarios, Violação corporativa. Maputo: Justiça Ambiental.

Johannson, Kajsa and Michael Sambo. 2014. As revoltas do pão: um exercicio de cidadania. Unpublished paper presented at IESE Conference, Maputo, September 2014.

Jose, Andre Cristiano. 2005. Neoliberalismo e crise de trabalho em moçambique. O Cabo dos trabalhos: Mozambique (Geneva 22 and 24 April, 2009). http://cabodostrabalhos.ces.uc.pt/n1/documentos/200611_neoliberalismo_mocambique.pdf Accessed July 10/14.

Loxley, John 1988. “Stabilisation and Structural Adjustment in Africa: Some Lessons from the Experiences of Ghana and Zambia” with Roger Young, in Structural Adjustment in Africa: External Financing for Development. North-South Institute, Ottawa, February, 1988.

Marshall, Judith. 2014. Workers in the Neo-liberal World Order: Relations with Corporations, Governments – and Their Unions. Accessible on https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l8pjalqd5evpyh4/AACTRSGE2suuHpEyjH30nOwia/judith%20Marshall.pdf?dl=0.

Marshall Judith. 2002. Interview with Hlokoza Motau, Numsa Secretary of International Affairs.

Marshall, Judith. 2001. Minutes of the Mozal Exchange, November 2001. Unpublished

Marshall, Judith. 1993. Literacy, Power and Democracy in Mozambique The Governance of Learning from Colonization to the Present. Boulder:Westview Press.

Marshall, Judith. 1992. War, debt and structural adjustment in Mozambique: The social impact. Ottawa:The North South Institute, Ottawa, Canada

Mittelman, James H. 1988. Out from Underdevelopment Revisited. London; Macmillan.

Ntauazi,Clemente.2015. Resistance to ProSavana in Mozambique. www.plaas.org.za/plaas-publications/ADC-pres-mozambique

Mosca, João. 2014. Producao Alimentar: Um problema central para resolver. Destaque Rural no 3. Maputo: Observatorio do Meio Rural (OMR). http://omrmz.org/images/publicacoes/D3.pdf

Mosca, João. 1999. A Experiencia Socialista em Mocambique (1975-1986) Estudos e Documentos 4. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget.

Mosca, João. 1994. Programa de Ajuste Estrutural: alguns aspectos teoricos e los principales temas de debate. In Revista de Fomento Social, No. 193, Volumen 49, Cordoba; ETEA.

Mosca, João and Thomas Selemane. 2012. Mega-projectos no meio rural, desenvolvimento do territorio e pobreza: o case de Tete. In L de Brito et al, Orgs. Desafios para Mozambique 2012. Maputo:IESE.

Motau, Hlokoza. 2003. Interview with Hlokoza Motau, International Secretary, Numsa. Johannesburg:2003.

O Pais. 2013. “Oleiros de Cateme Voltam a Barricar Linha-ferrea. Available at http\;//opais.sapo.mz/index.php/sociedade/45-sociedade/25341-oleiros-de-cateme-voltam-a-barricar-linha-ferrea.html. Accessed on March 22, 2015.

Penvenne, Jeanne. 1995. African Workers and Colonial Racism; Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenco Marques, 1877-1962. London: James Currey

Penvenne, Jeanne. 1993. Trabalhadores de Lourenco Marques, 1870-1974. Maputo:AHM.

Pitcher, M. Anne. 2006. “Forgetting from Above and Memory from Below: Strategies of Legitimation and Struggle in Postsocialist Mozambique”. Africa 76, 1 (2006), pp. 88-112.

Pitcher, M. Anne. 2002. Transforming Mozambique The Politics of Privatization 1975-2000. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Pretorius, Leon. 2000. Regional integration and development in Southern Africa: A case study of the MOZAL Project and its implications for workers. Occasional Paper No. 4, ILRIG, Cape Town. http://vufind.carli.illinois.edu/vf-uiu/Record/uiu_6565761. Accessed on July 24, 2014.

Saul, John S. and Patrick Bond. 2014. South Africa The Present as History. Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey.

Sekame, Samuel. 2013. Interview with Samuel Sekame. Tete March 2013.

Timana, Jeremias. 2012. Letter to Kenmare Resources, November 29, 2012. (Unpublished letter copied to suspended worker who made it available to author).

Tinosse, Herman. 2015. O “silencio” dos sindicatos e a ascencao da luta dos trabalhadores\ economia, politicas e estrategias dos trabalhadores Mocambicanos, 1983-2013. Unpublished.

Verdade.2012. Lula faz lobby para a Vale Mocambique-@Verdade Online. www.verdade.co.mz/newsflash/32919-lula-faz-lobby-para-a-Vale. Accessed July 24, 2014.

Vieira, Sergio.2010. Participei, por isso Testemunho. Maputo:Editorial Ndjira (WAMPHULA FAX – 23.03.2007)

Webber, Jeffery R. 2008. Behind Colombian Coal:Mining Multinational and Human Rights. Book Review of Chomsky, Aviva and Garry Leech and Steve Striffler, eds. 2007. The People Behind Colombian Coal: Mining Multinationals and Human Rights. Bogota; Casa Editorial Pisando Callos

Webster, Edward et al. 2005. Residual Unionism and Renewal: Organized Labor in Mozambique. In Journal of Industrial Relations. Vol 48 (2).

Notes

[1] My own invitation to the event came in recognition of the work of the Steelworkers Humanity Fund, one of several labour international social justice funds in Canada. The SHF has supported homeless movements in Cape Town, the landless in Chiapas and workers in Mozambique.

[2] For a fuller report on the World Meeting of Popular Movements see Pope Francis’s speech to the delegates available at http://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html and my own report “Challenging the globalisation of indifference: Pope Francis meets with popular movements” available on http://links.org.au/node/4172

[3] Frelimo veteran leader Sergio Vieira gives a fascinating account of students from the Portuguese colonies in Lisbon in the 1960s in his recent biography, Participei, Por IssoTestemunho. (Vieira 2010)

[4] While the Nkomati agreement was undoubtedly necessitated by Mozambique’s economic collapse and military vulnerability, veteran Frelimo leaders Sergio Vieira and Jose Luis Cabaço give fascinating accounts of Samora Machel’s consultations leading up to its signing. Samora’s cogent analysis of the correlation of internal forces in South Africa and his questions about the ANC’s strategy of armed struggle and its less than robust alliances with other significant anti-apartheid protagonists such as the unions under COSATU and the United Democratic Front are particularly interesting. (Vieira 2010; Cabaço 2001)

[5] Literacy Power and Democracy, my ethnographic study of a workplace literacy programme in 1986 documents how literacy, one of the key instruments for transformation, had been introduced but later eroded by the combined forces of the low intensity war and the hierarchies of power in classroom, workplace and education ministry. (Marshall 1993)

[6] I have borrowed this phrase from Anne Pitcher’s article with this arresting title. (Pitcher: 2006)

[7] The word “strike” is used indiscriminately to describe work stoppages and wildcat strikes as well as legal strikes. Street demonstrations to protest costs of living increases are also often referred to as strikes.

[8] BHP had tried to carry out the same manoeuvre in South Africa, but Numsa took them to court and won. (Motau 2003) In Mozambique, Mozal carried out the manoeuvre successfully.

[9] Participants in the exchange include Numsa, Steelworkers Humanity Fund, ILRIG, FES, SINTICIM (national) and SINTIME (national, provincial and plant levels. Minutes were prepared by Judith Marshall.

Gender in the Mining Industry

ROAPE

February 10, 2016

By Thandi Dlamini

More than twenty years after democracy women make up only 11% of the operational mining workforce in South Africa. Before 1994, underground work was exclusively for males. This report assesses the possible side effects of the mining industry’s apparent new found enthusiasm for female employees. The urgency with which the industry seeks to recruit female employees is ultimately driven by the threat of their losing mining licenses if they do not ‘transform.’ The report has been produced with the assistance of the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR).

The creation of the South African worker

The effects of colonialism and apartheid on black people are well chronicled and correctly deplored. Rather less attention is given to the effects of these two destructive political and economic forces on black women specifically. The effects of colonialism were felt most intensely during the long 1800s in which waves of European settlers arrived on the coast and moved into the hinterland of what would later become South Africa. Colonialism went hand in hand with the dispossession of the land on which African people had subsisted for generations. As land was the basis of the agrarian economy upon which indigenous people depended, their removal from it also severely impoverished them.

Poverty drove mainly male Africans into the wage economy servicing white agriculture and later mining and manufacturing interests. Indeed, together with the imposition of various taxes, historians see the removal of black people from the land as a means to force them to seek employment at very low wage rates. As most of jobs were in the city and since wage levels would not support entire families, black males became migrant labourers, leaving wives and mothers in charge of the rural household. Females, children and the elderly would have to survive as best they could on remittances and whatever crops and livestock they were able to cultivate.

It is difficult to assess the reliance on female labour power to sustain pre-colonial societies. Some evidence exists to suggest that women, in any event, were assigned the tasks of cultivating the fields and drawing water in addition to domestic work and child-rearing whereas the division of labour favoured men working with livestock, engaging in war and homestead protection.[1] Aside from genuinely hunter-gatherer groups, there is little debate that traditional pastoral African society was patriarchal. Whatever the case, the removal of men seeking work as migrant labour in the cities would have added even further to the workloads of females remaining behind to sustain villages and farms.

In 1948 the National Party regime in South Africa formally legislated many of colonialism’s exclusions of black people from social, political and economic life. Apartheid came into being. The migrant labour system intensified with economically ‘unproductive’ blacks theoretically confined to only 13% of the land in nominally independent bantustans or ‘homelands’. Notwithstanding this, a number of densely populated ‘townships’ sprang up around centres of economic activity. These reservoirs of labour were tolerated, although highly regulated, because they were useful to the white economy. To name but a few, Johannesburg had Soweto and Alexandria, Cape Town had Khayelitsha and Gugulethu, Pretoria had Soshanguve and Mamelodi and East London had Mdantsane. Where a labour intensive operation such as a mine existed far from an established town, the employer would provide a rudimentary compound in which workers would be housed. Housing conditions were very poor with many reduced to residing in shanties.

Apartheid as a crime against women too

Under the social conditions described above, not only in South Africa but throughout the black diaspora, it is proposed that black women suffered ‘triple oppression’; first as blacks oppressed by white people, second as women oppressed by patriarchy, and third as members of the working class exploited by capitalists.[2] Under apartheid the labour market was racially highly segregated, with black people being restricted to do the more menial jobs, requiring little skill and earning low wages. This is well known. However, the fact that blacks as a group were kept out of most categories of work obscures the fact that sex discrimination was also alive and well under apartheid. Because of the nature of the labour market, this only becomes clear when one considers the informal job reservation that existed for white women too.

During apartheid, patriarchal attitudes also applied in the labour market. Many occupations such as law, higher education and engineering supposedly required the manly aptitudes of logic, physical strength or mental fortitude. While not outright prevented from studying in these fields, women were deliberately streamed into other occupations. This started already at school where girl learners were not readily permitted to take ‘technical’ subjects. Male-oriented working environments were also hostile to women who did manage to enter them. Aside from negative attitudes from male colleagues, facilities often did not cater for female workers, or rules existed that made it exceptionally easy for them to be dismissed for reasons such as marriage, divorce or pregnancy. Throughout all sectors, a glass ceiling was certainly in place when it came to promotions with the regressive idea that women struggled to exercise leadership holding sway in many, if not most, boardrooms. This exclusion of women from sectors of the economy occurred notwithstanding the fact that the social stereotypes against them were increasingly being debunked as more and more capable women entered the global labour market, particularly in the post-war West.

In certain sectors things were even worse for women as they were legislatively prevented from meaningful entry. Examples are mining and defense, where laws prevented women from doing most jobs.

Redress after 1994

Viewed against this backdrop, apartheid was not only a racist social order, it was also a sexist one. That is why, when democracy finally came to South Africa in 1994, law-makers included in legislation the imperative to stop unfair discrimination not only against black people as a class, but as women as a class of their own too. Section 6 of the Employment Equity Act of 1999 goes so far as to not only outlaw sex or gender discrimination but to also permit preferential treatment to be afforded to women, (along with blacks and people with disabilities) in order to achieve workplace demographics that accord with that of the economically active portion of the population as a whole. Thus, as a matter of law, all employers were obliged to cease any direct discrimination against women and to identify and remove any occupational barriers that might indirectly stand in their way. In addition, employers with more than 50 employees, were obliged to go out of their way to attract and retain female employees at every occupational level where there was a deficiency.

Because of past hiring practices, these deficiencies were drastic in mining with no females performing core mining functions, especially underground work. As already mentioned, the target of female employees large employers were expected to meet was roughly 50%. One of the most effective methods an employer could use to increase its number of female employees was through affirmative action; that is giving preferential treatment in promotions or appointments to women who might be equal or slightly less capable than a male counterpart. The idea was that such positive discrimination in favour of a female candidate, although detrimental to the interests of an individual male colleague, served the larger social purpose of redressing past discrimination against the whole group of women. The same redress was available to black people. Affirmative action was thus legally permitted up until the point where women, black people with disabilities enjoyed representation in the workplace proportional to their demographic percentage.

The situation in mining

One of the most skewed demographic profiles from the point of view of its male / female split is mining. Twenty years after democracy women make up only 11% of the operational mining workforce. Before 1994, underground work was exclusively for males. Female employees on mines were to be found in human resources, finance or laboratory work above ground. Even after the coming into being of the Employment Equity Act of 1999, mining was slow to transform. Relying on a caveat in section 6 of the Employment Equity Act, mining houses argued that females were unable to meet the ‘inherent requirements’ of much of the underground work. As female employment levels stayed resolutely low, the government increasingly rejected these arguments and insisted on higher levels of female employment, setting targets to rectify the gender imbalances in the industry. This was done in terms of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act of 2002 and the Broad-based Socio Economic Charter for the South African Mining Industry of 2004. The penalty for not meeting these targets ended in the non-renewal of mining licenses.

Under pressure to transform, mines have aggressively recruited female employees. Even where a suitable male candidate exists, employers would be entitled to prefer a female applicant for a job, indeed they would end up not complying with legislation if they did not. In the words of a human resource practitioner at Impala Platinum, female miners ‘are like gold.’[3]

While rectifying these imbalances is undoubtedly a just cause, it is also important to assess the possible side effects of the mining industry’s new found enthusiasm for female employees. The urgency with which the industry seeks to recruit female employees is ultimately driven by the threat of their losing mining licenses if they do not ‘transform’. However, there are hidden costs associated with mining houses suddenly treating female employees ‘like gold.’ These costs become plain only if one looks past the statistics and focuses on the full human beings involved.

Unintended and un-researched consequences

Even in societies without apartheid, mining is overwhelmingly a male occupation, especially in its core function of drilling into and moving rocks to the surface from deep underground. To some extent the gender imbalance may make sense. Underground mine work is particularly strenuous. It takes place in the most inhospitable conditions, in cramped and dangerous conditions, at temperatures that test the limit of human endurance, with heavy machinery and with scant facilities. Could this account for women either not choosing or not coping with this work?

At first glance, a statement proposing that any of the above-mentioned conditions constitute a general problem for female employees would seem to reproduce sexist attitudes. Surely some women may be able to perform under these conditions just as some men would not. However, saying that a female teacher is unsuitable as a Principal because women lack the required leadership skills to enforce discipline (an obvious canard), is different to saying that the heavy machinery in a mine may, notwithstanding an individual’s capacity to work, be damaging her reproductive health. The one is a social construct, the other a physical reality.

The associated question then becomes whether the noble goal of opening up sectors of the economy to female participation might, in certain limited areas, harm those female individuals to whom those jobs are offered in unintended ways. While opening up the economy to women is a noble goal, any unintended harm must be assessed and addressed. This is what the remainder of this article seeks to do.

Factors affecting female miners

Physical (aerobic) Strength

Despite popular arguments in sections of academia, sexual differences are not all culturally assigned. As a matter of physiology, the physical work capacity of women is up to 30% lower than that of men.[4] This is measured by the maximum amount of oxygen intake possible to sustain high intensity work. Mining work, such as digging and drilling, is high intensity physical labour. To attain the same levels of productivity, women would, physiologically, thus have to work far closer to their maximum possible oxygen intake than men. This in turn leads to far greater levels of fatigue in women after doing the same work. This greatly increases the possibility of accidents and injury.

The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) is the dominant trade union in the North West Province’s platinum belt. Its regional secretary is a woman, Pontsho Sello. Sello used to work underground as a scrapper winch operator at Impala Platinum. She describes the most physically demanding jobs as rock-drill operator, winch operator, loco operator and rigger. She concedes that fewer females than males will be suited to underground work but states that if a female employee has “passion” for the job and is properly trained, she will be able to do it. ‘But a woman needs more passion than a man’.[5]

This is precisely the insight suggested by aerobic strength differences between men and women. In an industry where production targets are high and apply equally to men and women, the average female worker who is capable of performing her daily labour properly is nevertheless working far closer to her outer physical limits than the average male. To use an analogy, the bodies of average male employees performing high intensity work every day behave as if having jogged along the beach. The bodies of average women feel like they have sprinted the whole way.

The South African mining industry has no data on the long-term effects of such a punishing regimen. Research in associated fields, perhaps sport science, is needed to understand what health risks are associated with a specific class of people working so much closer to their natural limits than others. Specifically, what dietary steps could be taken to off-set any negative effects in the longer term? Rest periods may need to be adjusted and physiotherapy provided.

Another measure is to subject all employees to more rigorous pre-employment strength and aerobic screening to ensure that male and female employees are drawn from a pool of those most able to handle high-intensity work. It sounds a worrying note to state the issue in such starkly capitalist terms, but this would winnow out the frailer employees, or those whose productivity requires too great a physical exertion from them. This would apply to all sexes even if, biologically, it disproportionately excludes more women than men.

Personal Protective Equipment

Mines are inherently dangerous workplaces. Scarcely a year goes by without several fatalities in mining operations. Miners must wear a range of PPEs such as safety boots, dust-masks, gloves and overalls. Amcu’s Pontsho Sello is particularly critical of the one-piece design of overalls throughout the industry, made with men in mind. When a female employee wishes to relieve herself, this means she has to take off the entire garment. Sello suggests a two-piece overall. It is surprising that this relatively simple accommodation has seemingly not yet been made. In 2009, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) recommended this change in overall design to at least one mining house, Lonmin. [6]

General Mining Equipment Design

Drills and other equipment are very heavy, historically designed for manipulation by men. On average, women have about 50% of a male’s upper body strength and three-quarters of a male’s leg strength. A woman’s lifting strength is two thirds that of a man’s.[7] Men are also taller than women on average. Everything from spades to drills is thus a bit too long for average female employees. Consequently, unless equipment is significantly redesigned, it is to be expected that greater muscular and skeletal strain and possibly injury may result from women using this machinery.

Ergonomic redesign and mass supply of new equipment, however, has financial repercussions that may be difficult to bear in an environment of low resource prices. This is especially where South African mining houses who must compete with employers in other jurisdictions exempt from having to fund these accommodations. A question also arises whether to properly accommodate female employees employers would have to redesign the very way a locomotive functions and performs under use. In the Journal of the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, Botha, et al, record a female locomotive driver stating:

I don’t have the steam to work at the position that I am working at. I am not strong enough. The job of mine is too hard. We are sweating underground.

The loco is like a train, nè? It’s hard to operate. The steering wheel and everything is hard. The brakes. And to be on it every day, yô, it is hard. When you go on period you have some pains. Your back it pains. And that thing, it vibrates. I’m on it eight hours every day.[9]

The above quote, if reflective of a general problem, would suggest locomotive redesign is necessary to remove a real obstacle to the employment of female miners. Such a laudable human resources goal however would have considerable cost which, in the context of financial challenges in the mining industry, could conceivably tip a marginal shaft into closure. While the unintended consequences of shaft closures as a result of legal compliance is not an argument lightly to be accepted by social justice advocates, the economic reality is that South African companies may elect to do so as a recessionary measure.

Dignity and Reproductive Health

According to Botha and Cronje, female employees report interference with their menstrual cycles when operating certain vibrating machinery. Women also tend to prefer dark overalls to white overalls ‘for menstrual reasons’, the IFC report states. This opens a Pandora’s Box since lighter colours, preferably white, are indicated for safety reasons. In addition, any differentiation in overall colours could signify or entrench gender divisions in the workforce. Thus, if overalls are changed it would have to be for the whole workforce. It would be a human resource minefield to communicate to workers as a whole that a safety requirement is being modified to accommodate female employees, although reflector strips might be a solution.

At one level, the seemingly casual manner in which the IFC report seeks to accommodate the fact that female employees menstruate by simply assigning a darker colour overall to them could be seen to be liberating. It refuses the trope that menstruation is the sort of bodily function that should set women apart or hold them back in performing physical exercise, lest any signs show. On the other hand, this same cavalier attitude might be seen as insensitively profit-minded, the subtext being that female employees should get on with the job while menstruating rather than attending the bathrooms frequently for hygiene reasons. It is difficult to find a midway between the poles of a marginalizing preciousness around menstruation and a callous disregard for dignity and privacy about this body function. A second female interviewee, also working underground as a mine overseer, states that she would prefer more ‘public rooms’ for her and her female colleagues and for those to be dedicated to women.[10] She states that most rock faces or underground sections do not have separate toilet facilities.

In the rush to bring women into underground operations to comply with mining charter targets, companies seem to have lagged behind in an obvious respect; separate ablution facilities. Besides the one-piece overall, Sello’s other complaint was that toilets underground are unisex. Privacy is limited and ‘you don’t know who is behind you.’ There is thus a psychological downside to the entry of women into mining operations. At present, female employees must adjust their sense of privacy considerably. The same is probably true of male employees too socialized to expect privacy in respect of members of the opposite sex. This would however seem to be an aspect easily addressed by the employer.

Mines are no places for pregnant women, especially those operating heavy machinery. This is why pregnant (and lactating) women are moved to the surface to perform work there. However, since this risk of a foetus detaching from the uterus is highest in the first trimester of a pregnancy, the damage may already be done before an employee knows that she was pregnant. One response by mining employers was to recruit women who are not of child-bearing age. This solution carries with it the serious limitation that older employees, are generally, not as strong. Sello says that most women recruited to work underground throughout the Platinum industry are of child-bearing age. It seems reasonable then that companies subjecting women to activities that could cause a pregnancy to terminate should bear the cost of early-pregnancy testing for those employees wishing to make use of this service. In addition detailed birth-control advice should be provided.

Social Expectation to Submit to Work

The IFC Women in Mining study acknowledges that the imperative to transform means that a premium may have to be paid to attract female employees. This is likely to apply only in job categories where there is a shortage of skills. Nevertheless, even for entry level jobs women are given preference over and equally situated men. This has a distorting effect on local labour markets especially around mines situated at a distance from big towns or cities in locations with relatively few inhabitants.

With mines very actively seeking, training, recruiting and preferring female employees, the mine overseer interviewee reported an impression that needs further research. This is that social pressure is now applied by husbands, siblings, parents for female family members to submit themselves for underground work where this expectation never existed before. ‘Now you can be told you are lazy’, she comments. She continues: ‘We do these jobs because of the money, poverty. No-one wants to do them but now the company is attracting ladies. If you don’t also go, your boyfriend who is not working, he looks at you funny.’

Patriarchal attitudes excluded women from mining work in the past on the basis that this kind of work was not suited to their sex. Women who wished to work in this sector were thus discriminatorily kept out. The laudable push for transformation has seen mines recently place a premium on female employees who are ‘like gold.’ A possible unintended consequence is that a sort of reverse social engineering could remove from some women a protection from which they benefited. This is the social idea that some tasks were not fitting a woman’s status is society, regardless of her physical capacity to do it.

The well-advertised, progressive idea that mining is open to women could have repercussions for those women who do not wish to subject themselves to mining work because it feels unsuited to their gender, maternal duties and tolerance for risk. This is that they will face increasing pressure to nevertheless do so. It has been said that in capitalism’s progressive sweep, the fixed, frozen relations of patriarchy with its ‘train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away.’ Might it be that some of these opinions benefited at least some women from having to partake of certain objectively horrible working conditions?

It is easy to dismiss ideas like these, even if held by women themselves, as anti-feminist, conservative or outdated. However something seems amiss when a government, through legislation, encourages women to take up objectively harsh work in mines but does not also simultaneously provide them with a proper social wage for their role in reproducing society, thus enabling their refusal of such work. The result could well be that yet another task is added to their long list: mother, domestic and miner.

Although the cure of communism is in significant doubt, there appears to be something still of value in Marx’s assessment of the disease: ‘The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and woman is at last compelled to face with sober senses her real conditions of life, and her relations with her kind.’[11]

Thandi Dlamini is an independent African journalist and writer. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in Europe and across the continent.

Notes

[1] See Lambert, J, “The Homestead Economy in Colonial Natal”, in South Africa’s Environmental History, eds Dovers and Edgecombe, Ohio University Press, 2002

[2] see Smith, C, Preaching as Weeping: Confession and Resistance, John Knox Press, 1992, p120

[3] Interview 7 January 2016, Siesta Single Quarters, Rustenburg.

[4] Schutte, P.C., Edwards, A., and Milanzi, L.A. 2012. How hard do mineworkers work? An assessment of workplace stress associated with routine mining activities. http://researchspace.csir.co.za/dspace/bitstream/10204/5855/1/Schutte_2012.pdf

[5] Telephone interview, 13 January 2016

[6] IFC, Women in Mining, A Guide to Integrating Women Into the Workforce, http://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/b31e4e804879eacfafb9ef51e3a7223f/IFC-LONMIN_WomenInMining_Manual.pdf?MOD=AJPERES

[7] see Botha, D, Occupational Health and Safety Considerations for Women Employed in Core Mining Operations, South African Human Resource Management Journal, 2015, http://www.sajhrm.co.za/index.php/sajhrm/article/viewFile/652/pdf_1

[8] Botha, D and Crinje J, The physical ability of women in mining: Can they show muscle?, http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S0038-223X2015000800004&script=sci_arttext

[10] 7 January 2016, Siesta Single Quarters, Rustenburg. The interviewee requested that her name not be used.

[11] Gender changed in quote.

Kongo Majesty, European Savagery

ROAPE

February 9, 2016

By Meredeth Turshen

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan held an exhibition entitled, Kongo: Power and Majesty (September 18, 2015 – January 3, 2016). The first gallery showed a selection of exquisite oliphants or trumpets, fine ivories expertly sculpted from elephant tusks in the sixteenth century.

Portuguese traders and missionaries acquired these masterpieces and brought them back to Europe. Two found their way into the Medici collection, inventoried in 1553 as ‘two ivory horns with engraved motifs.’

These sophisticated and sublimely beautiful oliphants are artifacts of a remarkable civilization that was wealthy and stable enough to be capable of producing subtle, intricate and inventive artistry. European explorers saw something else. The exhibition label noted that ‘non-European objects were of interest primarily for their marvelous materials and as evidence of manufacturing skills.’ Why were the Africans who created these instruments not honored as contemporaries of Michelangelo? Why didn’t Europeans regard the Kongo civilization as comparable to the Renaissance? Why did they reduce Africans to raw human labour?

Having just finished writing a book, Gender and the political economy of conflict in Africa: the persistence of violence, in which I traced the history of domestic slavery in eastern Congo, the details of the Portuguese transatlantic slave trade were uppermost in my mind. As early as 1650 the Kingdom of Kongo and the territory of Angola were the epicenter of the slave trade, and sculptors commemorated the cataclysmic events in extraordinary narrative oliphants. The exhibition commentary reads: ‘The pain and suffering inflicted on Kongo communities is inscribed in detail within the spiraling bands of ivory tusks carved for export in Loango. They depict columns of subjugated slaves and forced laborers, chained to one another, headed to toil in the New World or to exploit local resources for European profit.’

Missionary zeal

In Gallery Four a dozen vitrines contained striking wood carvings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that depict a mother squatting with an infant laid across her lap. The exhibition note attributed the large numbers of these figures to Kongo female power, to the reverence of a woman’s potential to act as a vessel for life. This explanation strikes me as an example of what psychologists call transference – the projection of one’s beliefs onto another.

Everything that I have read about domestic slavery and the status of women in colonial Congo suggests that, although high rates of childbirth were desired by slave owners and by Belgian colonists, women’s status declined steadily. The systematic restriction of women’s activities, limiting them to farming and childbearing/child rearing; the denial of meaningful education to girls; the reinforcement of elder men’s hold on women at every turn of the industrial wheel, as more men were wanted for colonial commercial and infrastructure projects, private as well as public; the suppression of matrilineal societies and the tampering with customary laws that gave women some rights to divorce and inheritance; the blocking of any possibility of women becoming proletarians, of earning wages for their labor, of entering the modern economy on the same terms as African men – if all this is placed on top of the legacy of the slave trade, domestic slavery and pawnship, the downward trajectory of women’s status in Congolese society is unmistakable.

Searching for another interpretation, I remembered that Jesuits swiftly followed Portuguese explorers; King Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptized on 3 May 1491 and took the name João I. Renderings of mother and infant are rare outside of areas influenced by Christianity. The image has been familiarized by the spread of the cult of the Virgin Mary, but it is scarce in prehistoric and ancient art. There is no lack of portrayals of women – fertility symbols, goddesses and queens abound in the art of many early civilizations. The dyad of mother-and-baby is all but absent, however, raising questions about high rates of infant mortality in those societies.

Defensive art

In this last gallery powerful Mangaaka (nkisi n’kondi) from the mid-nineteenth century were on display. For many visitors, these large composite figures of wood, metal, raffia and other materials are iconic African objects (along with masks). Africans credited the nkisi with providing aid to petitioners and destruction to their opponents – essential weapons in the losing struggle against slavery and colonialism. The crudeness of these carvings, while adding to their power, contrasts sharply with the delicacy of the oliphants. Still meditating on the slave trade, which severely disrupted and reshaped African societies for a millennium, I wondered about the deskilling of societies, of regression to the provision of basic necessities requiring everyone’s labor, and of the inability of reduced communities to nurture and support dedicated artists.

We know that slavery and the slave trades — across the Sahara, over the Atlantic Ocean and beyond the Indian Ocean — changed everyone in Africa: they affected kinship and community across generations, social relations of gender and work, sex and status, procreation and demography, hierarchy and stratification. And as surely, slavery also changed artistic production.

Meredeth Turshen is a Professor in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Her research interests include international health and she specializes in public health policy. She has recently published Gender and the political economy of conflict in Africa: the persistence of violence.

Popular Protest & Social Movements – Part 2

ROAPE

February 6, 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 this second piece, we examine recent events in those countries in particular and then begin 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.

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

From one perspective, the political and economic situation in the DRC has improved in recent years. The devastating war – fought mainly in the east – that claimed hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives over more than a decade and a half has effectively come to an end, and with improved security has come economic growth. Aid and investment have poured into Kinshasa and the east, and a mining boom helped fill the public coffers. Average annual growth has been over 7 per-cent a year since 2009 and reached 9 per-cent in 2014. The gains, however, are likely to be temporary as commodity prices fall again, and in any case have been unequally distributed.

Kinshasa is one of Africa’s fastest growing cities, with a population of around 12 million, and only Cairo and Lagos are larger. In Gombe, where the expatriates and Kinshasa elite are concentrated, new apartment complexes have proliferated – including, notably, the Cité du Fleuve – River City, a self-contained block of smart dwellings built on reclaimed land where the average price is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Posh nightclubs and restaurants are full at the weekends and the music scene has revived. Outside this bubble, however, things are different.

Most Kinois live in crowded slums without electricity or clean water. When the river is high, their homes flood. Over a third of the population is under 15 and unemployment is rife, with fewer than 10 per cent having regular wage work. Inflation may be low, but the cost of living is high, and corruption so widespread that it operates effectively as a heavy tax on all economic activity. And, if the capital and the southwest, and some mining areas in the east have benefited from what increasingly looks like a temporary boom, most of the country remains largely unaffected. Total GDP remains small for a country of this size – 2.3 million sq. kms. in area and a total population of over 73 million – at around $25 billion. The DRC occupies the final spot on the IMF’s list of per capita GDP, with a total production of just $231 per person. Average per capita income is barely $1 dollar a day and for most rural dwellers (the vast majority of the population) perhaps half that.

But if economic and social inequality is rampant, it is the nature of the regime that provides the major source of instability. The state is perilously fragile and Joseph Kabila, who assumed the presidency when his father Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001, is not popular, in the capital or outside. Educated in Tanzania, he struggles with both French and Lingala (the main language in Kinshasa), and is seen as an outsider and an autocrat. He is an elected president, however, and although his party – the People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy (PPRD), dominates the national assembly – the DRC is not a one party state.

In December 2005, a referendum approved a new constitution, paving way for the first multiparty elections in 46 years, which were held in July 2006. Voters went to the polls to elect a new President, federal parliament and provincial parliaments. Although he took over directly from his father in 2001, Kabila was undoubtedly elected to the presidency in 2006, and has claimed since then that he has a continuing mandate to rule.

In the November 2011 presidential elections, Kabila again won. But violence marred the run-up to the elections and there were claims of intimidation, vote-rigging and other forms of gerrymandering during the polling itself; as a result, the elections were extended by a day. The results of the first round gave Kabila only a narrow lead over Etienne Tshisekedi, leader of the main opposition UDPS, but Kabila was declared the winner by the Independent National Electoral Commission on 9 December 2011 and this was later confirmed by the Supreme Court. Many in the opposition, including Tshisekedi and a group of 35 Catholic bishops, as well as various foreign observer missions, objected, but the die was cast.

President Kabila was inaugurated on 20 December 2011 to serve his second term (in addition to his period in office between 2001 and 2006). In 2012, the government passed laws to abolish the second round of the presidential election and also tried to change the legislative electoral system from proportional to majority representation, a move which was strongly criticised by the opposition and which eventually did not succeed. Three years later, another change in the electoral law provoked an outburst of popular protest. The new law, which was adopted on 17 January 2015 by the National Assembly, proposed the holding of a national census prior to the next round of legislative and presidential elections (due in November 2016). This was widely seen – given the time it would take to lay the groundwork and to conduct such a census – as part of an initiative by President Kabila to extend his term of office beyond the Constitutional requirement that he step down in 2016.

Demonstrations were held in cities across the country, including Kinshasa, Bukavu, Bunia, Goma, Lubumbashi, Mbandaka and Uvira, as a wave of popular protest erupted in response to the new law. In Kinshasa, protesters demonstrated on 19, 20, and 21 January 2015 near the Palais du Peuple parliament building, around the University of Kinshasa, and in Bandal, Kalamu, Kasa-vubu, Kimbanseke, Lemba, Limete, Makala, Masina, Matete, Ndjili, and Ngaba communes. Many of the demonstrations turned violent after members of the National Police and the Republican Guard presidential security detail fired teargas and live ammunition into the crowds. The demonstrators in some cases hurled rocks at the security forces and looted and burned shops and offices of perceived government supporters.

After several days of violence, in Kinshasa and other towns, in which students were at the forefront, at least 42 people had been killed, according to the International Federation of Human Rights. The army and the police had arrested dozens of protestors as they hurled rocks at state buildings, public buses and even passing cars. In Brussels, where he was recovering from illness, Etienne Tshisekedi, the veteran (82 year old) leader of the main opposition party urged the Congolese people to force ‘a dying regime’ from power. On 23 January 2015, the International Crisis Group commented that ‘this surge of protest is the latest and, so far, most violent confrontation between the government and the opposition since the deeply flawed November 2011 elections and is a clear demonstration of the continuing crisis of legitimacy that faces Kabila’s presidency’.

It also remarked that ‘the reaction of the Kabila government to the protests has been heavy-handed, involving the deployment of riot police and troops, including the Republican Guard. Demonstrators were violently repressed and there are reports of several casualties. Several opposition leaders have been arrested or had their freedom of movement limited. From 20 January, the government has blocked or limited SMS and internet access’.

On 23 January 2015, however, in an unusual move, the Senate amended the census law in order to allow the 2016 elections to take place. The new version, to be approved by the lower house, removed the requirement to hold a census before the next elections. “We have listened to the street. That is why the vote today is a historic vote,” Senate President Leon Kenga Wa Dondo said after the amendment was passed. The bill still had to return to the House of Representatives before it could become a law, but on 25 January, approval was given by parliament to the amendment, shorn of its controversial census component.

This move stymied the opposition. At the end of January, AFP reported that ‘a call by the Congolese opposition for peaceful demonstrations to oust President Joseph Kabila went unheeded Monday as authorities maintained a crippling block on text messages and social networks used to rally demonstrators. Only about 50 people gathered at the headquarters of veteran opposition leader Tshisekedi’s Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UPDS) in the capital Kinshasa, despite the party calling for mass protests. The small crowd dispersed shortly before midday when several jeeploads of police arrived at the scene after authorities warned no opposition demonstrations would be permitted.’ On 12 February 2015, election officials announced that presidential elections would be held in November, thereby satisfying a key demand of the opposition.

The tolerance of the government towards opposition activists remained limited. In March 2015, it was reported that the immediate expulsion of four foreign pro-democracy activists detained over the weekend had been ordered, following an event supported by the USA. Government spokesman Lambert Mende said the foreign activists including a Burkinabé and three Senegalese activists were part of a ‘subversive movement inspired from abroad.’ Authorities had found military uniforms in their luggage but Congo has dropped a criminal investigation into them, he added. The foreign activists have organized protests in their home countries supporting presidential term limits ahead of elections.

The Burkinabé activist was a member of grassroots political group ‘Balai Citoyen’ (The Citizen’s Broom), which played a leading role in toppling long-term President Blaise Compaore in 2014 as he – like so many other elected presidents – sought to extend his mandate. The four detainees were among some 40 activists, musicians and journalists arrested in the capital. A US diplomat was also briefly detained. Mende said a ‘black hand’ had been active in Congolese politics this year and singled out the role of the U.S. embassy, which has acknowledged partially sponsoring Sunday’s news conference.

‘The U.S. embassy does not have the status to organize political events in Democratic Republic of Congo’, Mende said. The US embassy declined to give an immediate response to the spokesman’s comment, although it has previously said that representatives at the event were respected and non-partisan. One Congolese journalist in Kinshasa was released shortly after his arrest but the remainder of the local activists remained in custody. Mende said their cases would be ‘closed very soon’. In the eastern city of Goma, about a dozen youth activists were released after having been detained earlier in the day by intelligence agents while protesting the Kinshasa arrests.

The issue of Kabila’s eligibility for election in 2016 continued to arouse popular concern throughout the second half of 2015. In June, the government launched talks – labelled a national dialogue or consultation – between the various political parties, hoping that it would result in the consensus view that holding elections in 2016 would be impossible for technical reasons and that the dialogue would also create a legal framework for this eventuality. Only the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) agreed to attend, with two other sizeable groups boycotting them. It emerged that Kabila’s inner circle wanted to impose a Government of National Unity, with Félix Tshisekedi from the opposition UDPS as Prime Minister.

This new government, according to the plan, would oversee a three-year transition period up to the end of 2018. In this time, the constitution would be revised, provincial and senate elections would be held in 2016, and local elections would be conducted in 2017. Presidential elections would then finally be held in 2018. In this scenario, Kabila would not only remain president during the transition, but would also stand for elections for his first mandate under the Fourth Republic. One of the cornerstones of the scheme was to integrate UDPS in a new government.

On 16 September 2015, however, it was reported (by Al Jazeera, citing a bulletin produced by AFP) that ‘violent clashes have broken out in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, after an opposition rally was attacked by unidentified youths hurling stones, sparking a lynching attempt and a police crackdown. Up to 3,000 people had gathered in a southern area of the capital to oppose any bid by President Joseph Kabila to seek a third term in elections due in November 2016’. After these attacks on the opposition rally, UDPS president Etienne Tshisekedi, issued a statement saying that the talks – the national dialogue – had failed and that he had called on his party’s delegates ‘to withdraw immediately from the negotiating table’. After the main opposition party withdrew from the talks, the ‘dialogue’ lost authority.

On 18 September, it was reported by Al Jazeera that ‘seven senior political figures have been expelled from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s ruling coalition for signing a letter urging President Joseph Kabila not to cling to power after his term expires next year’. The planning minister was also sacked from his post later on Wednesday on an order from the president, as was another long-time ally of Kabila whose party signed the letter. In the letter to Kabila, the leaders of the G7, a group of parties within the coalition, demanded immediate steps to ensure a presidential election scheduled for November 2016 was held on time. The pressure was on. Al Jazeera commented that:

A successful vote would mark the first peaceful transition of power in the vast Central African nation. But Kabila’s critics fear he intends to exploit a packed and expensive slate of local, provincial and national polls over the next 14 months to force delays to the presidential vote. Kabila, who has refused to say he will step down in 2016, is one of several long-ruling African leaders approaching the end of constitutional term limits. Moves by other leaders to extend their rule have triggered mass protests in Burundi, Burkina Faso and other countries.

In this regard, the analysis published by Kris Berwouts on 9 October 2015 in African Arguments is of interest. He comments that ‘President Kabila faces challenges on a number of fronts, from the opposition to the grassroots to members of his own inner circle’, and asks: ‘How much longer can he hold on?’ He discusses the divisions within Kabila’s own inner circle and also the weakness of the opposition parties, including the UDPS, and addresses the question of how ‘the grassroots will respond as the elections planned for November 2016 approach. He concludes that:

‘It is difficult to ascertain what people at the grassroots level think, and the emotional and violent reactions to the electoral law submitted in January 2015 came as a big surprise to most observers. Furthermore, it is notable that the demonstrators only partially seemed to heed the instructions of the opposition. Much of the Congolese population appears to be not only allergic to the continuation of the present regime, but disconnected from the entire political caste. Politicians are viewed as archetypal Big Men out to enrich themselves and not much distinction is made between those in government and those in opposition. One can easily imagine a popular uprising degenerating into violence, plundering and chaos, causing a lot of human and material damage before being suppressed by security forces.

Indeed, it is to be expected that Kabila will use more and more repression if he feels his control slipping away. This was clearly the strategy towards the demonstrations in January, though it may have backfired. Not everybody within Congo’s circles of power agree with the way the regime deals with youth movements such as La Lucha and Filimbi, and when mass graves were discovered in Kinshasa in March 2015, sources inside the regime told African Arguments that the way information was leaked suggested it was being used by different leaders to weaken and discredit each other.’

Kris Berwouts considers the role of two key figures in Kabila’s entourage, Evariste Boshab and Kalev Mutondo:

Boshab, who is secretary-general of Kabila’s PPRD party, failed in his ambition to become PM but came back in style when he was appointed Vice-Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior and Security. Boshab openly supported a revision of the constitution in favour of a third mandate for Kabila and organised the repression of demonstrators who protested in January 2015 against the electoral law. At least 40 people were killed. Since then, however, Boshab has lost influence. Kabila is understood to have held the vice-PM responsible for the failure to pass the electoral law, and in May, Boshab was replaced by Henri Mova as secretary-general of the PPRD.

Mutondo, chief of the central intelligence agency, the Agence National des Renseignements (ANR), increased in prominence as he became Kabila’s main messenger in laying the groundwork with the opposition for a national dialogue. Both of these men reportedly prepared gangs to dismantle the demonstration of 15 September, and it could only be a matter of time before they will start to fight each other. The Congolese regime lacks the necessary coherence to deploy effective repression. If it tried, it would likely quickly put the country in chaos, but one cannot exclude the possibility it will deliberately chose that option if that turns out to be the last route to stay in power.

Kabila is currently constitutionally barred from contesting the presidential election in 2016; he has not officially declared his intentions for the election, although the government denies he is deliberately seeking to extend his presidency and has now dropped plans for a controversial census to be held before elections. The United States has repeatedly urged Kabila to respect term limits and set a date for the election. It remains unclear what will in fact happen, although for the time being the elections are still officially ‘on’ for November 2016.

Burundi

In Burundi, 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 in recent months. [1]

The demonstrations continued until 13 May 2015, when a military coup intervened (while Nkurunziza was out of the country). Forces loyal to the president rapidly crushed the attempt; and on his return, Nkurunziza purged his government and arrested the coup leaders. In the meanwhile, by 6 May the United Nations reported that 40,000 people had fled to seek safety in neighbouring Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. By 13 May at least an additional 10,000 people had fled. On 14 May the UN said that over 70,000 people had fled the country. On 18 May 2015 the figure had been revised up to 112,000 refugees and asylum-seekers.

On 18 May 2015, protesters took to the streets again, despite a ban on demonstrations: ‘Our politics are different’, they chanted, ’because we are against corruption’. These demonstrations were swiftly quelled; but the situation remained tense and uncertain. Already by the third week of May, some 120,000 people were estimated to have fled abroad. On 2 June, the killing of the leader of a small opposition party led to fresh protests; again the regime responded with force. On 11 June, a security chief claimed: ‘there are no more demonstrations in Bujumbura or inside the country’; but civil society leader Pacifique Nininahazwe responded: ‘If there are no more demonstrations, why is it the police fire every morning and every night in Bujumbura’s neighbourhoods? Why do we bury people every day killed by the police?’

Widespread demonstrations in the capital, Bujumbura, and elsewhere lasted for over three weeks. During that time the country’s highest court approved Nkurunziza’s right to run for a third term in office, despite the fact that at least one of the court’s judges fled the country claiming he had received death threats from members of the government. As a result of the protests the government also shut down the country’s internet and telephone network, closed all of the country’s universities and government officials publicly referred to the protesters as ‘terrorists’. And so, despite continuing domestic opposition and criticisms by the international community, parliamentary elections were held on 29 June, and Nkurunziza was re-elected on 15 July to a third term as president, with 70 per cent of the vote. [2]

The violence, however, continued, and included tit-for-tat attacks on high profile individuals. Amnesty International reported that the security forces were rounding up opposition activists and subjecting them to torture to extract names and confessions. UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein said ‘this reinforces fears that there is a systematic policy of targeting members of the opposition, journalists, human rights defenders and ordinary citizens perceived to be opposing the government’. What had begun as popular protest against the regime and against plans for Nkurunziza’s re-election was reinforced by his election in July and by the repression that followed; over the next three months the level of violence continued rise and the risk of a more generalised conflict began to grow. Popular protest had turned into organised armed opposition to the regime.

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’. On 6 November 2015, the body of Welly Nzitonda, the son of a leading human rights activist, was discovered. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon commented that the discovery of bodies in Bujumbura had become ‘a regular occurrence – and many victims showed evidence of summary execution’. He emphasised that the Burundian authorities had a responsibility to protect civilians. Révérien Ndikuriyo, the Senate President, however, called on supporters of the regime to ‘pulverize’, ‘exterminate’ and ‘spray’ – their opponents, echoing the ‘cockroach’ metaphor of the Rwandan genocide.

Indeed, the French daily Liberation commented: ‘c’ést un genocide qui a commencé’ (It’s the start of a genocide), while 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, Mr. Jürg Lauber undertook his first visit to Burundi in his capacity as Chair of the Burundi Configuration of the UN Peacebuilding Commission (PBC). The objective of his visit was to establish contacts with the Government of Burundi and other key stakeholders, to gain a better understanding of the current political crisis and to learn about the Government’s plans to address the situation. The Chair also explored opportunities for the PBC’s engagement both regarding immediate steps to lower the tensions and in support to medium and long-term peacebuilding priorities.

During his visit, the Chair met President Nkurunziza, senior government officials, leaders of political parties, senior officials from national institutions, representatives of civil society organizations, women associations, representatives of regional organizations, members of the diplomatic community, international and regional financial institutions, as well as representatives of the UN family, both MENUB and the UN Country Team. The discussions were organized around four main issues: the security situation and on-going violence, dialogue initiatives, the socio-economic impact of the current crisis, and partnerships both at regional and international levels.

From Bujumbura, Lauber went on to Kampala, Uganda, where on 12 November he met the Minister of Defence, Crispus Kiyonga, who was to lead the East African Community mediation process on behalf of President Museveni. On Friday and Saturday, 13-14 November, he held discussions with representatives of the Government of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam, of the East African Legislative Assembly, the World Bank, UN agencies and the diplomatic community. On 18 November, he was to report to the PBC Burundi Configuration in New York. In the meanwhile, President Uhuru Kenyatta had sent an envoy, Joseph Nyagah, to assist in mediation; and a few days later, on 13 November, Uganda’s Defence Minister, Crispus Kiyonga, flew into Bujumbura for ‘consultations on the situation and the peace process in Burundi’. Kiyonga had previously discussed the situation in Burundi with the European Union delegation and EU ambassadors in Uganda.

On 17 November, the UNHCR stated that ‘the security situation in the cities of Bujumbura, Makamba and Kirundo is extremely tense. Violence has surged in recent weeks and although the insurgency (sic) is armed, is still operating at a relatively low scale. Nevertheless, there are indications that the government has not been able to contain the situation. On the regional level, UNHCR is scaling up its contingency planning and preparedness in the event of a sustained increase in arrivals in the weeks to come’. It reported that a total of 221,375 Burundian refugees and asylum seekers had arrived in the neighbouring countries of the DRC, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia since April 2015.

Meanwhile, inside Burundi, 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 had failed. Nevertheless, fighting continued well into the day, although it had apparently stopped by 12 December. On Saturday 12 December 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. An eyewitness told AP he had counted at least 21 bodies with bullet wounds in the neighbourhood of Nyakabiga, which has been the flashpoint for anti-government protest. Some had their hands tied behind their backs, the witness said. In Musaga, close to a military college that was one of the installations attacked by armed men early the previous day, a local official told AFP he had seen at least 14 corpses, and that “soldiers and police” had killed them late on Friday night.

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. Colonel Gaspard Baratuza that those who had attempted to raid the Ngagara military camp had retreated and were pursued by security forces. He added that 12 attackers had been killed and 21 captured, saying they had aimed ‘to stock up on weapons and ammunition. He later updated the death toll to say: ‘the final toll of the attacks yesterday is 79 enemies killed, 45 captured, and 97 weapons seized, and on our side eight soldiers and policemen were killed and 21 wounded’. When residents in Bujumbura discovered 39 bodies lying on the streets, Baratuza said the bodies belonged to ‘enemies’. The death toll also later rose to 87.

A Bujumbura police spokesman, Pierre Nkurikiye, told Reuters there were no ‘collateral victims’ in the violence overnight on Friday and into Saturday, and that those killed had links to the attacks on military installations. Residents, however, expressed doubt that all those who were killed had direct connections to the attack. One victim was named by a local eyewitness as a 14-year-old boy, James Ntunzwenimana, who was reported to have gone out to buy sugar. One witness told AFP the victims were ‘kids’, and said they had been shot execution-style through the top of the skull. ‘It is an absolute horror; those who committed this are war criminals’, the witness said. ‘Most of those killed are young heads of households who were at home … it’s carnage, there is no other word for it’, one resident of Nyakabiga said. Meanwhile, other reports suggested that soldiers and police went door to door dragging out young men from their homes before killing them. Some residents posted pictures on social media showing some of the bodies with their hands tied behind their backs.

A report produced by Amnesty International shortly after this incident states 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.

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, 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 are now 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 could further heighten the vulnerability of many Burundians and limit their access to basic services. A shortage of essential drugs is already reported in the country; and besides health, major concerns remain in the protection, foods security and nutrition sectors.

In early January, 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 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 (162) being in December 2015. Not all of the killings, however, have been recorded.

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 says it is 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.

As well as retaking the camps, government forces also responded by raiding areas considered to be centres of opposition to the regime. It seems that, during searches undertaken in the Musaga, Nyakabiga, Ngagara, Citboke and Mutakura neighbourhoods of Bujumbura on 11 and 12 December 2015, police, army and Imbonerakure militia forces arrested many young men who were later tortured, killed or taken to unknown destinations. Residents reported summary killings and the discovery of dozens of bodies. The UN rights office had documented more than 3,000 arrests and that while many had been released, an unknown number had disappeared’. Investigators were planning to deploy on 25 January but were still waiting for a government response’.

Also, said the UN Human Rights Commissioner, 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. 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. The future for Burundi in 2016 looks bleak.

Burkina Faso

In Burkina Faso, 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). Compaoré dissolved his government at noon and declared a state of emergency before fleeing to Ivory Coast.

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, the leadership includes a number of musicians. 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.’[3] 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.

In April 2015, 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; but 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. There was a 60 per cent turnout. Results for the parliamentary election were announced on 2 December 2015, showing that Kaboré’s party, the MPP, was first with 55 out of 127 seats, but fell short of a majority. Zéphirin Diabré’s party, the Union for Progress and Reform (UPC), won 33 seats, and the Congress for Democracy and Progress (CDP) won 18 seats. The final official results from the Constitutional Council 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.

Concluding thoughts

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.

As regards the first point, it is worth emphasising how many African countries now have rulers who may have been elected in the first place (although not in all cases) but have now been in office for many years, several decades in some instances, and are still hanging on to power. The longest serving are:

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 Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (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 as President 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 (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 (President since 1999), Paul Kagame of Rwanda (first Acting President and then President from 2000 onwards), and Joseph Kabila of the DRC (President from 2001, elected from 2006 onwards).

In the next issue of this series of pieces, I intend to consider some of these long-lasting rulers and their regimes, and the response of their people to their political (as well as in many cases their personal) longevity, with a view to identifying some similarities and some differences.

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

Notes

[1] This piece was written in mid-January 2016

[2] Which were boycotted by the opposition.

[3] Written on 21 November 2014, and published in the London Review of Books, 4 December 2014.

Lessons from Africa: Challenges of the Zika Virus

ROAPE

February 4, 2016

By Gary Littlejohn

The outbreak of the Zika virus in Central and South America, across some 23 countries, has caught international health agencies by surprise. It has also shown up in recent months in Cape Verde, so it has returned to Africa after circling the globe eastwards in less than 70 years. It was first identified in Uganda in 1947, and was thought to be benign, with many people showing no symptoms, or a few symptoms that were manageable, and tended to last for about 10 days. Some of the symptoms are reminiscent of dengue fever, but are less severe. This similarity of symptoms has also affected the accuracy of diagnoses among doctors who have not encountered it before, and has probably delayed organised responses to some extent. There is no treatment for it, and any vaccine would take at least three years to develop, which is far slower than the current pace of events. This implies that public hygiene and preventative health measures will be the most appropriate health policy response in the immediate future.

It spread from Africa to Pakistan and Indonesia in the 1970s, and from there to Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean, where it was detected in 2007 on the island of Yap. From there it has spread to the Americas, with Colombia and Brazil reported to be particularly affected. In the last 9 months or so, it has clearly spread rapidly among populations that have not had time to build up any immunity. It is now being seen as constituting a threat that is at least as great as that of the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which itself is not completely over yet. Consequently it will stretch the resources not only of national health agencies in each country, but also of international health agencies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and international medical and health charities.

So far the virus has spread across the tropics, but in the case of the Americas, it could easily spread into the USA as people travel north, or mosquitoes travel on their own. Health experts are on record as saying that only the (basically cold) countries of Chile and Canada will escape infection in the Americas, because the mosquitoes cannot survive there.

It has now become clear that the disease can be spread by other mosquitoes, in addition to Aedes aegypti, the original vector. These additional species are also daytime biting mosquitoes. It can also be spread by sexual transmission, and from mother to foetus. It is claimed that the rate of sexual transmission is very low. Though I cannot see how one can be sure of that, since most adults (perhaps 80 per cent) are unaware of symptoms, apart from the occasional rash. In many of these countries, the health services are extremely unlikely to have picked up evidence of sexually transmitted cases, so I think that one must suspend judgement about the rate of sexual transmission until more data is available. In addition, one must also reserve judgement about the length of time that the virus stays in the body. The fact that the symptoms are over in about ten days does not mean that the virus is gone. Indeed the mention of the possibility of transmission at birth as well as through the placenta suggests that it can survive much longer. It is not clear if anyone knows at this stage whether or not it is like Chicken Pox, in the sense that the latter never leaves the body and can cause Shingles decades later. I have seen no evidence on this issue.

In Brazil, a health prevention project was already under way to evaluate the effectiveness of releasing genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes into the environment as a means of reducing the incidence of dengue fever (a notorious haemorrhagic fever). With the advent of the Zika virus, this approach is now being used to try to limit the prevalence of the new health hazard. Yet, the release of GM mosquitoes to combat the Zika virus may be counter-productive. Inevitably such information is rather limited given the state of medical understanding at this early stage of the outbreak in Central and South America. The problem with the use of GM mosquitoes is claimed to be that Brazil uses a lot of tetracycline in its animal feed, which allegedly affects the timing of when the fatal gene in the GM mosquitoes becomes active, thereby rendering GM mosquitoes less effective. Apparently Brazil has a higher use of tetracycline for this purpose than almost any other country. In addition, the El Nino event of 2015 created conditions for lots more pools of stagnant water in Brazil and elsewhere.

The preventive measures being considered by health professionals include the use of DDT to eliminate the affected species of mosquitoes, despite the known adverse consequences for the environment. This may prove to be unavoidable, while attempting to minimise the negative environmental impact, if other public health measures prove ineffective. There is ample evidence that public health education often has little impact. Yet Mozambique in the period immediately after independence can be seen as an example of effective health education.

In Mozambique, the approach to malaria was basically to persuade people to ‘drain the swamp’ with a campaign of digging latrines, getting rid of standing water, and Dutch aid to build a large ditch in Maputo (now with a highway on either side known as the Via Rapida). The latter dramatically reduced the incidence of malaria in Maputo. The clearance of standing water can be very low tech, if one secures widespread voluntary support. In recent days I watched a Brazilian women complaining to camera about large pools of standing water resulting from a house demolition. There was enough earth above the water on the site to level the site to bury the water so that mosquitoes would not breed there. This sort of self-help action no longer happens in Mozambique, but it is worth recalling the experience as an example of community participation in public hygiene.

To indicate the context, it should be borne in mind that before he left for Algeria for military training prior to joining the armed struggle for Mozambican independence, Samora Machel had been a male nurse. After independence, he retained a strong interest in public health and would make long speeches on the radio encouraging people to improve their hygienic practices. Mozambique manufactured its own transistor radios and these were readily available in rural areas. (Agricultural advice was also disseminated by this and other means.) The Ministry of Health was one of the first in the world to publish and use a generic list of pharmaceutical drugs, which were much cheaper but as effective as commercial brands. Medical students had to live in rural areas with their teachers as part of their training, so that they understood the health problems of the rural poor and what measures could be taken to deal with them. There was also a series of public campaigns, including an ongoing one to encourage villagers to dig latrines 11 metres deep to reduce infection risks. During the war against Renamo, the population was encouraged to live in Economic Priority Areas (EPAs) which were chosen for soil fertility and because they were located next to the coast, so that they could be defended more readily against Renamo attacks, which could thereby only come from further inland. At this time of denser population groupings, hygiene was even more important and it was during this time that a record number of latrines were dug.

This ability to achieve ‘popular mobilisation’ was based on a tradition that had been established (with less than total success) after independence. It included a tradition of jornadas (voluntary additional work days) that most commonly took place during July, when the actividades de Julho were encouraged. Yet jornadas could be organised at other times by any group of volunteers who felt that something needed to be done. To give an unusual example, foreigners who had come to Mozambique out of solidarity were known as cooperantes. The cooperantes from the UK were organised into a group known as MAGIC (Mozambique Angola Guinea-Bissau Information Centre) through which most of them had been recruited to Mozambique. On discovering that the East Timor independence movement was in difficulties, MAGIC organised a jornada during which they donated two water pumps to irrigate some agricultural land occupied by FRETILIN (Frente de Libertação de Timor Leste Independente) and planted 8,000 cabbages in a single day. This basically helped FRETILIN to feed its members in Mozambique and to grow as more members arrived from Portugal.

It is my view it is this kind of ‘voluntary community buy-in’ that should be fostered in Latin American countries, as well as in Africa. In the case of Rio de Janeiro, there are open sewers quite near the Olympic Stadium. Apart from encouraging people to form voluntary groups to fill in puddles with earth and otherwise deal with standing water where mosquitoes can breed, it seems to me that dry reed beds of varying sizes (as circumstances require) would also help treat raw sewage and eliminate standing water. Dry reed beds work because the reeds allow oxygen into the roots, where aerobic bacteria digest almost any form of pollution including raw sewage and of course the reeds absorb water to grow. The important thing is to design the underlying ground structure with materials such as gravel and clay to ensure that the underlying slope of the reed bed slows down that water flow to the point at which the bacteria have time to digest the pollution. Companies capable of such design work have existed for decades, but since they would be unable to operate on the scale required by this health emergency a different approach to reed bed construction is needed.

Given the extensive risk to the poorest sections of the population, this would need to be done by a system of cascade training (involving training of trainers) that has already been devised for India (though not actually implemented, regrettably). There are universities or colleges in Brazil and elsewhere that could be used as training centres for trainers in the construction of dry reed beds. This would require initial emergency funding from national governments, international aid agencies, or cooperation with the charities specialising in the provision of clean water. The reed beds could then be constructed by trained local volunteer groups.

There is a fear among experts of the prospect that a mutated virus associated with microcephaly returns to Africa. Given the proximity of Cape Verde to mainland Africa that is indeed a possibility, as is transmission to Portugal, owing to historical connections affecting possible human travel. In that case, Africa would find that the Zika virus had returned in a much more harmful form from its travel round the world.

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

Reflections on African Political Economy

ROAPE

February 4, 2016

By Femi Aborisade

‘Whither Africa in the Global South? Lessons of Bandung and Pan-Africanism’ by Issa Shivji [Keynote address to the International Seminar on the Global South – From Bandung to the XXI Century (September 28-30, 2015), Universidade Federal Sāo Paulo].

Professor Issa Shivji is a long-time Marxist who cut his teeth criticising the nationalism of Julius Nyerere in the early 1970s and is still going strong. But he appears to unnecessarily accommodate nationalism and pan-Africanism in his paper titled ‘Whither Africa in the Global South? Lessons of Bandung and Pan-Africanism.’ He asks, ‘Can a refurbished pan-Africanism, integrating the agendas of both national liberation and social emancipation, provide such an ideology?’ The answer from the experience of post-colonial Africa appears to be a resounding ‘No!’, it does not appear to us that there is any nationalist short-cut. The organised working class can unite with wider layers of the impoverished popular classes around a clear agenda of equality, redistribution of wealth and anti-corruption. This has been demonstrated many times, for a recent example the uprising across Nigeria in January 2012 illustrates this clearly, this was organised around a general strike against removal of fuel subsidies. However, nationalism and any accommodation with the local bosses appears fraught with danger and results, at best, with the trade unions giving into the interests of the local ruling class of corrupt bosses and politicians. Nkrumah, Nyerere and Sankara all claimed to be socialists, but ended up attacking the trade unions.

Shivji also appears to accept too uncritically Samir Amin’s division of the world into the centre and the periphery and the wish to develop auto-centric centres of capital accumulation. Though the implication may not be consciously intended, we believe that this argument is a nationalist dream, shared by sections of the local capitalist class to develop their own areas where they can exploit ‘their own’ workers without interference or competition from the industrial countries. So Shivji says that the movement of history over the last five centuries has been determined by the relationship between the northern centre and the periphery of the Global South. This appears to contrast sharply with Marx’s claim in the Communist Manifesto that ‘The [written] history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.’ This suggests there is struggle within the Global South against the local ruling classes and, of course, against the northern imperialists. In other words, there is a contradiction, not just between the developed exploiter capitalist countries of the world and the exploited underdeveloped countries, there is also class struggle between the capitalist and the working classes within the Global South and the northern imperialists. The interests of the working masses lie in building international solidarity against imperialism, which is an international economic system.

The division of the world into the centre and the periphery also appears to be contradicted by the growth of China as an ‘autonomous centre of capital accumulation.’ The last thirty years of neoliberalism has also seen a huge growth of inequality. There are now areas of abject poverty in the US (as demonstrated, for example, by the differential impacts of Hurricane Katrina on different communities of New Orleans) and areas of obscene wealth in at least the capital cities of most of the countries of the Global South. Thus Aliko Dangote of Nigeria is rated as being the richest man in Africa and the 49th/50^th or so in the entire world.

Shivji also accepts Amin’s division of the ruling class in the Global South into the nationalists and comprador. In reality, the local ruling classes of the Global South have always made alliances with the imperialists, not in the interest of ‘the nation’ but in their own interests. For hundreds of years, African leaders gained huge power and influence by trading slaves for guns. More recently, the ruling classes of the Global South have gained huge wealth and capital by adopting and promoting neoliberalism, whilst simultaneously blaming the ‘imperialists’ for any disadvantageous aspects. The real divisions in the world remain between the 1% of the ruling class (global and local) and the 99% (north and south). We have to remember that it was Reagan (US), Thatcher (Britain) and Deng Xiaoping (China) who ushered in the era of neoliberalism. Deng as a leader from the Global South is conveniently forgotten by Shivji.

There are, of course, divisions between the general level of salaries in the Global South and those in the industrialised countries. But these are not due to exploitation of Africa by Europe. They are mainly due to a political economy in which a regime of low wages is imposed, helped by growing massive unemployment, a labour force that is dominated by unskilled hands and outdated technology, all of which feed into wide differences in productivity between the South and the North. How can African capital compete globally when their public infrastructure and, for example, public electricity supply is so poor? In addition, the social value of labour in much of the Global South is being undermined by unemployment continually fed by migration from the rural hinterlands. The bosses in the Global South and the North maintain these divisions by imposing immigration controls. The salaries of the workers in the industrial countries are undermined by the threat of moving production to areas which have more flexible and lower paid labour. Northern workers suffer, they are not beneficiaries of low wages in the Global South. Thus, in the end, the capitalists in the North and South benefit from promoting divisions between workers in the two worlds; workers in the Global South feel threatened by the influx of expatriates and immigration controls are used to justify restricting mass exodus to the North, for economic, and lately, security reasons.

Shivji is right to say that the ‘national question in Africa remains unresolved. The agrarian and social questions in much of the periphery [sic] remain unresolved.’ However, these questions also remain unresolved in the US and Britain. Britain still has the unelected House of Lords as the second chamber of its Parliament. Scotland appears to be moving towards independence and the national question is very much alive in Northern Ireland. All these issues are part of the myriad problems of capitalism and are unlikely to be resolved while it still exists.

Towards the end of his paper Shivji aptly recognises that Africa’s ruling classes are ‘incapable of providing leadership’ to make another world possible. He quite correctly states that, ‘The leadership and the agency of the post-neo-liberal phase of struggle in the periphery have to be reclaimed by the working people and the popular classes.’ However, he then goes on to suggest that a refurbished African nationalism could be a suitable ideology to guide these struggles. Nationalism is the ideology of the capitalist class meant to hoodwink and defect the struggles of workers and the poor; nationalism is not the ideology of the working class.

He ends with the following rallying call, ‘History thus beckons the working people and nations of the South to the rendezvous of revolution on the long road to socialism.’ However, this is a long way from the finale of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels which calls on the workers of the world, not just of a geographic unit, to unite against the global class of the employers and exploiters. In case we need to be reminded the Communist Manifesto reads, ‘The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite!’

Though it is recognised that inevitably struggles are primarily commenced on the local levels, the perspective of internationalising working class struggles should not be lost. We have to be clear that the local ruling classes of the Global South, including sub-Saharan Africa, bosses and politicians, are members of the global ruling class. These are not the, ‘despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed – in short, the underdogs of the human race’ who Issa claims met in Bandung in 1955. Aliko Dangote, for example, is now richer than any British boss and easily one of the 100 most wealthy and powerful individuals in the world. African presidents, especially Obasanjo of Nigeria and Mbeki of South Africa developed and launched the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in 2001. This was used to further impose neoliberalism across sub-Saharan Africa largely to the benefit of the local ruling class and their imperialist masters but at great cost to the continent’s real poor and downtrodden. The immediate class enemies of the poor of the Global South are their own ruling classes who act in conspiracy with the imperialists of the North. These are the people that the popular masses of Africa face in their day to day struggles and are the people they will have to rise up against if their desire for a decent life for themselves and their children are to be realised. Nationalism of any form – from ethnic to pan-African nationalism – undermines the struggles of the working class and the poor and needs to be argued against on a sustained basis. This is one of the greatest challenges that still confronts progressive movements on the continent.

‘New capitalist domination and imperialism in Africa‘ by Jean Nanga (October, 2015)

Nanga is originally from the Congo and is the African correspondent of Inprecor. In his article titled ‘New capitalist domination and imperialism in Africa’, he provides an overview of the impact of imperialism on Africa. The ‘new’ capitalist domination being the growth of interest by China and the other BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), but also by the indigenous African bosses led by Dangote.

Whilst much of the paper is dominated by the role of the traditional imperialist powers, Nanga notes that the number of dollar billionaires in Africa increased from eight in 2009 to 55 in 2014 (relying on Venture Africa). These capitalist bosses are now junior members, at least, of the global ruling class. As such, they have benefited hugely from the spread of neoliberalism, privatisation, deregulation and free trade over the last three decades. In only a year from 2013 to 2014, their global wealth increased by over 12% (the thieving politicians are not counted here). This has, of course, been helped by vulnerable poorly paid jobs and the virtual absence of environmental protection as a norm to flexible labour markets to encourage ‘foreign direct investment.’

The IMF and World Bank may have started the process in the 1980s with their ‘structural adjustment programs’ (SAPs), but these ideas were internalised and adopted as ‘home grown’ ideas by African rulers, for example, through the enthusiastic development of NEPAD by Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Obasanjo of Nigeria. The end of Apartheid allowed South African capital to spread its tentacles across the continent. MTN and Shoprite are just two examples and are backed up by the South African state. The Nigerian, and to a lesser extent, the Angolan states play a similar role in making Africa safe for their respective capitals.

Of course, on a much bigger scale, the US and the states of the European Union play a similar role in protecting and promoting the companies from their own countries. Similarly, Chinese capital has also joined the scramble for African raw materials. Nanga recognises that although China claims to play up its role in south to south solidarity, in essence, its role in Africa is no different to the US or European companies and states. He quotes the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, as saying, ‘China takes our raw materials and provides us with manufactured goods. This was also the essence of colonialism […] Africa has willingly opened up now to a new form of imperialism.’

The role of globalisation has included freeing up Africa from its old colonial rulers of Britain, France and Portugal. This has allowed the entry of US capital and more recently growing Chinese interests. The stock of Chinese capital investment in Africa is less than the US or Europe (it is only half the level of the US, Britain or France), but its investment each year is much higher and so China is catching up with the older imperialists.

In the case of Portugal, at least, there is also the growth of ‘reverse’ imperialism with Angolan capital now having a significant influence in its old imperial centre. More generally, with interest, debt re-payment and capital flight (much from corrupt politicians) Africa has been a net source of capital to Europe and the US for the last few decades. Over 5% of African GDP has been exported in the twenty first century – a much higher rate for South Africa (partly due to investment in other parts of Africa).

Unfortunately, Nanga still tends to use the nationalistic terminology of ‘dependence’ and makes the centre/periphery distinction which recent changes further invalidate. It is not clear why demand for African oil, for example, makes African countries more dependent on Europe or China. It is also clear that there is a pecking order across the world with the US by far the strongest power (at least militarily) and other countries like Britain are prepared to become willing allies to the extent that some consider it to be the fifty first state of the US.

There are also limits to this dependence as in the case of the European Union’s Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) which some African governments have resisted for at least a dozen years. Nanga may underestimate the level of collective class struggle which is taking place in Nigeria, South Africa and other African countries, but he does correctly end by writing, ‘Without building and consolidating popular solidarity and convergences in the struggles against the various tentacles of the capitalist octopus in Africa, in other words a pan-African anti-capitalist dynamic, there will be no emancipation of the exploited and oppressed people of Africa and no participation by them in the construction of a humanity where people will live well.’

Femi Aborisade is a socialist, writer and lawyer from Nigeria.

Radical Agendas: Afterword

ROAPE

February 3, 2016

By John Saul

It took more than six-months for the “e-issue” of AfricaFiles, where this series and the six essays that comprise it first were written and released once a month from July to December, 2015, to appear – and the overall series may therefore reflect something of the unavoidable time-lag between each essay in their monthly appearance. Moreover, it is this issue of AfricaFiles (that e-magazine’s final number unfortunately) that is now presented here as a series for parallel publication in ROAPE’s own new virtual-extension of itself; indeed, ROAPE’s added e-format, so self-evidently a valuable extension of the journal’s own outreach, is also (if I, as a committed protagonist of both, may say so) in many ways an appropriate successor to Africafiles itself.

Of course, journal pieces can take quite a long time to work their way through the hands of editors in any journal, and I am gratified, looking back at the various pieces here re-incarnated in ROAPE Online, to find nothing that is not fresh and insightful. At the same time a lot can happen in six-months in a country as volatile as South Africa presently is and my introductory essay to this series, written more than six-months ago, reflects this fact. It was then easy to overestimate the broader impact of the Numsa split from COSATU and the likely political import of its newly-crafted United Front, for example. Of course, such developments continue to be relevant and exciting but, as Webster’s article in this series testifies, activists are still struggling to further discover just how relevant such novel practices can actually be, and in what precise ways they can best be developed to take on more effective organizational form and to engage in ever more pertinent actions.

In contrast we have also seen the quite recent emergence of boisterous and irreverent student fees-based protests, as alluded to in Hassim’s article in this series and as is central to Satgar’s concluding essay; indeed, the potential for such an outcome I could even glimpse for myself when I spoke at UJ earlier in the year [see my account of that talk in the recent year-end edition of SA’s Transformation journal]. But I would never have predicted the scope and intensity of such protests. Nor would I have seen quite so clearly that they would prove to be one more promising component of the increasingly vibrant and assertive civil society surveyed here by McKinley – with the assertions of that civil society now further reinforced by the novel environmental activism discussed by Cock (also above).

For there is real promise here; indeed, as Satgar puts the point above, “the crisis of state and ruling party legitimacy is deepening.” In sum – trite but true – the struggle in South Africa continues…as all the contributors to this symposium have confirmed and as, I trust, ROAPE (in both hard-copy and virtual formats) will continue to report upon and bear witness to.

John S. Saul has also taught at York University, the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), the University of Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique) and the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa). He is the author/editor of more than twenty books on southern Africa and development issues.

Radical Agendas #6: Where to for South Africa’s Left?

ROAPE

January 27, 2016

By Vishwas Satgar

In October 2015, South Africa was rocked by over two weeks (commencing 14th October) of student protests. These protests shut down most universities, led to violent confrontations between police and students (most notably at parliament and with a march of thousands of students on the Union Buildings), and vocalized demands that President ZUMA address the call for free higher education, “insourcing” and a moratorium on fee increases for 2016. Twenty-one years into post-apartheid democracy a new generation of university student activists openly rebelled against the ANC government’s neoliberal fiscal cutbacks of public universities and reclaimed the importance of “public goods.” The use of mass mobilisation and social media, such as #FeesMustFall, led some commentators to suggest the “Arab Spring Moment” had arrived in South Africa. Students themselves in their assemblies and messaging also discoursed in the language of revolution. This manifestation of resistance is far from over and cannot be isolated. It has to be located in the crisis of national liberation politics and renewal of a new South African left.

After World War II, national liberation politics captured much of the left imagination. For the South African liberation movement, the 1980s were decisive years in which the internal and external movements consolidated their struggle against the apartheid state. The future seemed poised for a radical alternative. What is often not acknowledged, however, is that national liberation politics was actually exhausted by the 1980s (Armin, 1994: 105-148). The Bandung project’s anti-colonial and revolutionary nationalisms came unhinged by their own internal limits and the shifting relations of imperial force. This crisis of national liberation politics existed alongside the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the neo-liberalisation of social democracy forced the left into defensive struggles to protect gains achieved under Keynesian–welfare capitalism. Since 1980 global neoliberal restructuring completely remade the ideological and political landscape. The defeats endured by the left in this conjuncture added to the confusion of left politics and identity. Coupled with earlier horrors, strategic defeats and political shortcomings this further contributed to the left’s discredited 20th century inheritance. In this context, “revolutionary nationalist” “communist” and “social democrat” are all anachronistic labels and meaningless slogans to the generation of youth rewriting history through their recent protests. In this article, I look at the crisis of the South African left and explore the possibilities for its renewal.

“In this context, “revolutionary nationalist,” “communist” and “social democrat” are all anachronistic labels and meaningless slogans to the generation of youth rewriting history through their recent protests.”

For even as the 20th century variants of left alternatives to capitalism have waned, we see new manifestations of resistance struggles. Global neoliberal restructuring has given rise to a new cycle of global resistance engendering a renewed global left imagination, new practices of strategic politics, alternative forms of mass power, the rethinking of our political instruments and an articulation of transformative systemic alternatives (Harnecker, 2015; Panitch et al, 2012). This cycle is punctuated by the social movements in Latin America, the institutional left experiences from the Workers Party in Brazil to Chavistas in Venezuela to Syriza in Greece, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the transnational activism of global networks, movements and the World Social Forum. In these experiences there have also been defeats, setbacks and challenges. But most important for the left is its new acknowledgement of the complexity of transformation and the growing sophistication of its sense of the diversity of contexts, the timing and democratic coordination of multiple confrontations – this instead of the mere mimicking of some one-size-fits-all model of change as a basis of resistance. In fact, taken together all these new experiences provide important reference-points for building a vital anti-authoritarian new left in South Africa.

When South Africa secured its democratic transition in 1994, the South African national liberation left was largely shaped and influenced by the revolutionary nationalist, communist and social democratic traditions of the 20th century, which provided it with a template, identity and grammar. At the same time, the liberation movement developed and translated these influences into a South African discourse shaped by local conditions. The ANC-SACP-COSATU Alliance both expressed and further evolved this ideological orientation: the ANC championed the ‘national question’ and liberation for all South Africans from apartheid, the SACP evidenced a vanguardist and Sovietised imagination, and COSATU’s populist worker-controlled socialism was heavily influenced by social democracy. The legacies of these conceptions of left politics continue to influence left movements in South Africa, even as many try to wrench themselves free. This challenge for contemporary left politics in South Africa is also explored in this article.

“the South African national liberation left was largely shaped and influenced by the revolutionary nationalist, communist and social democratic traditions of the 20th century, which provided it with a template, identity and grammar.”

The Crisis of the National Liberation Left in South Africa

Central to understanding the crisis of the national liberation left is the question of working-class hegemony. Many commentators and analysts work with a static conception of hegemony in which the South African political scene is reduced to the unassailable power of the ANC and a naturalized hegemony transcending all conjunctural shifts (e.g., Marais, 2011: 388-424). Linked to this is a failure to appreciate the necessary conditions for maintaining class hegemony and a tendency to read the ANC’s continued electoral successes as an indicator of just such class hegemony.

In fact, contrary to this understanding working class hegemony of the post-apartheid order—organized through the ANC-led Alliance was actually a short lived affair. The ideological project of working class leadership of society through national liberation vanguardism was dead by 1996, when the ANC adopted its homegrown strategy of financialised and globalised accumulation, the Growth Employment and Redistribution macro-economic strategy (GEAR). The adoption of GEAR not only demonstrated the limits of a vanguardist politics in a world of globalising capitalism, but vitiated working class agency. For the better part of the last two decades the working class has been increasingly squeezed by the imperatives of neoliberal accumulation: stagnating low wages, precariatisation, high and growing unemployment, poverty that disproportionately affects women, the Marikana massacre of mineworkers and now the destruction of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) by an ANC-SACP faction operating in the labour federation (Satgar and Southall, 2015). This is neither hegemonic working class politics nor can it be defended as left politics. Rather this is about the cooption and undermining of working class leadership of society to ensure the reproduction of a globalising capitalism and the rule of transnationalising capital through the ANC-led Alliance.

“For the better part of the last two decades the working class has been increasingly squeezed by the imperatives of neo-liberal accumulation…”

At the same time, corruption and the theft of public money by the ruling party and its “deployees” in the state have become widespread and systemic. The license for corruption emanates from the top in the ruling ANC with the sitting President of the country and the ANC, Jacob Zuma, implicated in arms deal corruption, patronage relations to promote members of his family and more recently the R240 million Nkandla scandal in which a palatial rural home was built for him with taxpayer money. Zuma is merely emblematic, the face of a deeper crisis that accompanies corruption: the parasitic creation of a bureaucratic capitalist class with immense social distance from the masses. This disconnect is growing and expressed through violent and non-violent protest actions across civil society, including the recent student protests across the country. In short, the crisis of state and ruling party legitimacy is deepening (Dale, 2015).

Moreover, contrary to the national liberation myth in which the ANC is synonymous with “the people,” a people’s history and understanding of South Africa’s struggle suggests that all progressive South Africans (from all race groups) achieved democracy, whether through resisting pass laws, marrying across colour lines, living defiantly together in some mixed communities and struggling against apartheid through various movements. Resistance, both formal and informal, organised and unorganised, domestic and international – all these played a part in ending apartheid. At the same time, and contrary to the ANC’s articulation of African nationalism, elements from all race groups also tried to defend and reproduce the apartheid system. Who were the liberators and who were the oppressors under apartheid is a complex issue as Dlamini (2014) powerfully demonstrates. At the same time, the ANC’s embrace of erstwhile enemies such as the National Party, traditional leaders and former “Homeland leaders” further undermines the ANC’s proprietary claims over post-apartheid democracy and also reduces non-racialism to electoral expediency. Moreover, the ANC rules South Africa with such disregard for the complexities of how post-apartheid South Africa was made that through the hubris of power it is increasingly playing a role in weakening constitutional democracy and rolling back democratic gains that were fought for by all progressives, both South African and internationalist.

The ANC-led Alliance has also re-racialised and deepened patriarchal norms in South African society in hideous ways. The ANC-led Alliance’s degeneration and its maldeveloped ideological template (expressed through a claim to South African exceptionalism as the cornerstone of its “theory of colonialism of a special type”) has meant that, in its very nationalism, the ANC Alliance’s understanding of Africa in terms of the centrality of such nationalism has always contained the seeds of xenophobia. Today, in fact, the Alliance’s narrow African nationalism not only turns against ‘Pan-Africanism’ but also is increasingly about sub-national exceptionalisms linked to old ethnic identities constructed around apartheid-era “bantustans.” There is a dangerous retribalising of ethnic identity at work in the ANC’s nationalism (Jara, 2013: 272-276). This is further re-enforced by increased power given to traditional authorities and through land dispossessions happening in rural communities, this mainly in favour of extractive industries. Moreover, in such a context women have had to struggle particularly strenuously to affirm their rights, power and agency as modern citizens (Claassens, 2015).

At a structural level, in short, both race and gender hierarchies have been remade but also reinforced in the context of a globalising capitalism. The racism and male domination of neoliberalism has its roots in a Eurocentric patriarchy that has been constructed over 500 years through militarist mercantilism, slavery, colonialism and imperialism. Indeed, the existence of global racism has never been part of the remit of analyses linked to the centrality of a “National Democratic Revolution,” this including “national question” debates within the ANC-led Alliance (Van Diepen, 1988). This also made it increasingly difficult for the ANC to appreciate how transnational neoliberalism has been tied into reproducing racialised patterns of global accumulation and masculinised imperial domination. It also means the historically-specific globalising of both apartheid and male domination, as brought in from the outside, have been central to “deracialising” monopoly capital in the country as part of neoliberalisation. Thus the commanding heights of South African capitalism are about transnationalising monopoly power, which, despite the freedom of post-apartheid democracy, is still white and male dominated.

“…the commanding heights of South African capitalism are about transnationalising monopoly power, which, despite the freedom of post-apartheid democracy, is still white and male dominated…”

South Africa’s racialised income inequality bears testimony to this as it stands at the centre of explanations about the crisis of social reproduction in South African society (Forslund and Reddy, 2015). In this regard liberal historiography, with its argument that racism was not essential for capitalism, has been wrong. For the end of apartheid has not ended racialised and male dominated accumulation; actually, with globalisation this has been deepened, both from within and from the outside. In this context, any such break with a racialising and masculinised neoliberalism has not happened despite the much vaunted expectations created by the parasitic, ethnicised and sexist “Zuma project” that now dominates the ANC-led Alliance.

Hence, it is important to ask what is “left” of national liberation politics today? From the perspective of working class hegemony, what can we identify and defend from the more than twenty years of post-apartheid democracy? Is it not farcical to talk about the agency of a national liberation-centered left given what has actually happened in South Africa? Indeed, isn’t it quite possible that the ANC-led national liberation movement has reached its historical terminus and the most it can evoke is a mythical and sentimental past as a means to justify the present. Yet this now clearly means that state power is increasingly instrumentalised merely to reproduce a South African order that meets only the needs of a few, especially those of the ANC’s own “heroic cadre” of leaders… and with the “national interest” now being deemed to be synonymous with the patronage machine of the ANC (Southall, 2013). And yet, as inequality and poverty have grown, this has actually become ever more morally and politically indefensible: both illegitimate from the perspective of students wanting free higher education, for example, but also contrary to working class hegemony.

“…state power is increasingly instrumentalised merely to reproduce a South African order that meets only the needs of a few, especially those of the ANC’s own “heroic cadre” of leaders… and with the “national interest” now being deemed to be synonymous with the patronage machine of the ANC.”

The Making of a New Left from Below

Almost three decades of neoliberalisation has enabled important resistance against racialised and gendered forms of commodification, dispossession, exploitation and ecological destruction. In the post-apartheid context this resistance has gone through two cycles. The first cycle (the late 1990s into the early 2000s) was marked by the emergence of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the Landless Peoples Movement and the Anti-Privatisation Forum, many of which are now moribund or trying to renew themselves (like the TAC). A second cycle has come to the fore, this marking the emergence of a much more discernible and variegated left. Beginning in 2007 (to the present) this has been punctuated by struggles for ‘service delivery’, building solidarity economies, the Right to Know, Equal Education, social justice, defense of constitutional freedoms, food sovereignty, rural democracy and rights for women, against extractivism, climate jobs, housing, rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersexed (LGBTI), the recent student protests demanding decolonisation, free education and insourcing of universities and struggles against corruption (including a Vote No campaign during the 2014 national elections). Nor is it merely a “rebellion of the poor’ (Alexander, 2010) or a “violent democracy” (Von Holdt, 2013) as suggested by some sociological perspectives. For these reductive analyses mainly focus on service delivery struggles and miss the broader range of struggles emerging in contemporary South African civil society, and miss the polyvalent character of institutional agency and the various and diverse forms of resistance coming to the fore. In fact, while there may be different tactical repertoires and institutional bases taken by these struggles, their predominant thrust addresses systemic challenges, articulates transformative alternatives and mobilizes popular power.

Moreover, three other factors have contributed to amplifying the recent cycle of resistance. First, the rise of Jacob Zuma in the ANC, culminating at the Polokwane conference in 2008, was a deeply polarizing process inside the ANC-led Alliance and the country. Not only did the ANC experience its first split (with the break-away of many in the Mbeki faction to form the Congress of the People/COPE), but it also closed off strategic debate across all the Alliance’s constituent formations. In this context, critical voices challenging the ‘Zumafication’ of the Alliance and society were vilified and declared dissidents (Satgar, 2009: 294-316). Thus, in the end, the closing of the ranks around Zuma served to produce deep factions inside COSATU and purges in the SACP, culminating in the factionalising of the SACP and its further weakening through its cooption and collapse into the ANC. More positively, this reconfiguration of a Zumafied ANC-led Alliance has loosened loyalties to the Alliance amongst committed cadres, opened up space to the left of the ANC, and disaffected many once sympathetic to the ANC-led Alliance – all developments that have fed directly into the deepening cycle of resistance.

Second, since 2008 various grassroots activists involved in movements and campaigns, and coming out of the ANC-led Alliance, part of the independent Marxist left, the labour left and the Trotskyist left, began conversations about the global crises of capitalism and the national liberation project. The significance of this convergence cannot be understated as it is the first time that such a broad range of different traditions came together to work collectively. This gave rise to the formation and launch of the Democratic Left Front (DLF) in January of 2011. The DLF was not formed as a political party but more as a space for solidarity, building capacity for resistance around transformative alternatives, developing analyses of the contemporary crises and advancing an anti-capitalist imagination beyond neoliberalised national liberation politics (DLF, 2011). It essentially functioned as a pole of attraction as part of a process of reclaiming lost ground. While the DLF did not realize all its objectives and has become much too centered around South Africa’s Trotskyist left, it has played a crucial organising role to bring South Africa’s very divided left into a common political space to begin crucial conversations. It provided a political home for some, supported important resistance to xenophobic violence, campaigned against the wasteful expenditure of the World Cup, and gave support to several grassroots community struggles, including worker committees involved in the platinum belt and the Marikana Campaign for Justice, and the Climate Jobs Campaign. True, the DLF is at a crossroads as grassroots social forces are being realigned around the NUMSA-led United Front, some aligning to the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and as rising anti-systemic forces build their own capacities as part of the cycle of resistance. And yet the DLF has provided valuable lessons for left convergence. And it may still have an important contribution to make to strengthening the emerging alliance between community and worker struggles, as part of building the NUMSA-led United Front.

“…yet the DLF has provided valuable lessons for left convergence. And it may still have an important contribution to make to strengthening the emerging alliance between community and worker struggles…”

Third, the massacre of 36 platinum mine workers on August 16th, 2012 did not mark just another militant moment in post-apartheid industrial relations or a mere expression of the securitisation of neoliberal politics. For this brutal massacre and historical event was in fact a truly conjunctural development, one that gave rise to a fundamental rupture in the working class support base of the national liberation bloc of forces. The realignments flowing from this have given rise to an independent union in the platinum mining sector, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), taking away significant support for the ANC-aligned National Union of Mine Workers. In addition, Marikana has had significant ramifications for COSATU itself – contributing directly, for example, to the largest union in South Africa, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa/NUMSA (with over 340 000 members), withdrawing support for the ANC in the 2014 elections, leaving the ANC-led Alliance, and exploring the process of developing a United Front and a Movement for Socialism (NUMSA, 2014). Since NUMSA resolved on this direction at its 2013 special congress it has convened a resistance assembly to learn about grassroots movements, campaigned against neoliberal policy proposals such as the Youth Wage Subsidy and the national budget, hosted an international symposium with various left movements and parties from around the world, initiated a United Front building process, convened a conference on socialism and actively championed mass mobilisation against corruption. Today NUMSA, together with eight other unions, is also poised to lead the building of a new labour federation in South Africa after it was expelled, together with the General Secretary of COSATU, Zwelinzima Vavi, from COSATU.

The Horizon and Challenges for Post-National Liberation Left Counter-Hegemony

There is growing consensus that South Africa’s national liberation project is exhausted, in part due to its profound capitulation to neoliberalisation. Put more starkly such national liberation politics is, like most national liberation projects, not a way forward for the working class and national-popular forces committed to transformation. Thus, while it was perhaps not inevitable for the national liberation project to end up where it has, it is in fact being eaten up by its own contradictions and limitations. Not that this, in itself, guarantees the emergence of a genuine left alternative. The EFF is a negative example in this regard. It is a product of the ANC and it has emerged by feeding off the ANC’s weaknesses, particularly through its being anti-Zuma. In its practice, however, it is a self-styled vanguard, organised around the “cult of the personality” and a militarised internal hierarchy, and lumpen in its tactical interventions in everyday politics. The EFF gestures to the left of the ANC–led Alliance, but is afflicted with the same limits and contradictions of the ANC. While it captures headlines for its disruptive and populist politics, it has not broken the mould of national liberation politics and has not captured the imagination of most South African youth, including those involved in the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement, the students demanding free education (#FeesMustFall) and others involved in the various anti-systemic movements that are on the rise. The EFF is in its essence an electoral opposition, and would really be tested if it were ever to come to control state power even at a local government level. How different, we might well ask, would it actually be from the ANC if in power?

In short, for an effective and meaningful left to emerge as a serious contender it will have to provide an imagination and horizon of politics beyond the national liberation template and neoliberal capitalism. It will have to remake itself in fundamental ways in order to constitute a new balance of forces and a political project with broad mass appeal, while also advancing new transformative practices. It is too simplistic to believe that merely replacing one kind of vanguard with another or narrow electoral contestation will bring about a rupture with neoliberal capitalism. Similarly, evoking old formulas from the revolutionary nationalist, social democratic and soviet experience are inadequate to the new conjuncture. A globalising capitalism, grounded in transnational circuits, harnessing new technologies and constituting new space-time dynamics has remade social relations in fundamental ways. Central in this regard is the weakening of the global and domestic working class, of course. Yet South Africa’s post-national liberation left is itself in transition from crisis to renewal: still being made but with immense potential!

“…for an effective and meaningful left to emerge as a serious contender it will have to provide an imagination and horizon of politics beyond the national liberation template and neo-liberal capitalism. It will have to constitute a new balance of forces and a political project with broad mass appeal…”

In fact, there are four formidable challenges confronting South Africa’s left. But, in light of the advances that are now being made, they are not impossible to address. First, South African capitalism reflects a deep set of systemic crises that were not resolved by the national liberation project and have worsened in the context of neoliberal restructuring and deep financialised globalisation. A crucial challenge in this regard is the deglobalisation of finance to reverse the economic regression and financialised chaos that has taken place over the past three decades and to which South Africa’s political economy is articulated. Contrary to Picketty (2014: 515-539), who visited South Africa in 2015, this requires more than just increased taxation on capital but also the introduction of exchange controls, new investment laws, structurally diversifying the financial system, the introduction of a universal basic income grant and democratic planning. Moreover, it requires a programmatic politics unifying various anti-systemic solutions emerging from the new cycle of resistance in the country such as ‘free university education’, insourcing, food sovereignty, climate jobs, Right to Know proposals, equal education, and so on.

Of course, this will have to be done in a manner that is deliberative and participatory and one that, in pursuit of genuine left convergence, respects the independence of social forces. But the conditions are ripe for this. Thus, if the NUMSA-led United Front appreciates that left convergence is more than merely connecting service delivery flashpoints, it could be central in facilitating such convergence around a common programmatic platform of resistance from below. Moreover, if rising anti-systemic movements appreciate the necessity of solidarity then a new mass politics is a real possibility. In this process of democratic convergence a new class and national popular alliance of the organised working class, the precariat, the permanently unemployed, the landless, youth, students, sections of the progressive middle class and left intelligentsia could congeal. A new historical bloc and class project could potentially emerge articulating transformative alternatives for a post-neoliberal South Africa.

“In this process of democratic convergence a new class and national popular alliance of the organised working class, the precariat, the permanently unemployed, the landless, youth, students, sections of the progressive middle class and left intelligentsia could congeal.”

Second, the sectarianism of some sections of South Africa’s left – rooted in their belief that they have historically always had the correct analysis, the monopoly on political truth and the only understanding of what revolutionary change is – will not assist left convergence. The historical inheritance of socialism was never about one transhistorical model. Instead the historical inheritance of socialism is rich and varied. Socialism as an object of study is more than recovering blueprints and state-centric formulae but requires a deeper and more critical analysis of the Soviet experience (and its copies), of revolutionary nationalist experiences and of social democracy. Many on the South African left hold onto a romanticised understanding of the 1917 Russian Revolution or of the “golden years of social democracy” or merely crudely justify revolutionary nationalism.

More specifically, the African experience of revolutionary and transformative change does not even feature as a critical point of reference. This entire inheritance of 20th century socialism has to be engaged with critically to appreciate what were the limitations, contradictions and excesses (Saul 2013; Glaser 2013). These critical reflections, conversations and engagements need to begin in earnest and as part of ongoing attempts to ensure a broad horizon and vision for transformative change, even as transformative systemic alternatives are being advanced in the present to address the new contradictions of a globalising capitalism. Ultimately a 21st century South African socialism should be shaped by its rigorous appreciation of historical socialism’s limitations and the systemic alternatives required to overcome the new contradictions of globalising capitalism.

“Ultimately a 21st century South African socialism should be shaped by its rigorous appreciation of historical socialism’s limitations and the systemic alternatives required to overcome the new contradictions of globalising capitalism…”

Third, the re-racialising dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa has affected class, gender, spatiality and ecology. Race still matters at every level of society and is important for a renewed left politics. In this regard, questions related to the non-racialism of mass politics and of the constitutional order cannot be surrendered to the ANC. Indeed, it is the ANC’s own version of non-racialism that is itself in crisis, this further affirming the need to move beyond a singular conception of non-racialism as a political tradition. For it suggests instead the importance of affirming a plurality of non-racialisms: a diverse tradition of official and non-official, everyday, non-racialisms. Moreover, non-racialism as an organising principle and a fresh critique of capitalism (connecting race, class and gender) are existential resources for reflecting on blackness, whiteness and their intersections with class and gender and developing the new imaginary and programmatic referent (a real “Freedom Charter”) that has to be rescued from a degenerate ANC-led Alliance.

In short, non-racialism must be re-grounded in a new political economy analysis of a globalised social formation, one that evidences dangerous ecological contradictions, must be brought into dialogue with a resurgent black consciousness movement and must be the principled basis for confronting white and black privilege. In this regard, a non-racial approach to the climate crisis and the just transition is a crucial challenge for left politics in discovering a new horizon for itself. For the mere affirmation of blackness or whiteness actually becomes meaningless in the context of a scorched country and planet and ultimately the extinction of the human race. We need to find a renewed human solidarity to confront this challenge and to survive. In this regard a true, hard-won, non-racialism must be key to a struggle for systemic transformation as part of the just transition. But there remains much work to be done on this front.

Finally, a new left politics has to appreciate the need to build capacity for a new revolutionary politics, one more appropriately termed a new “transformative politics.” This is very much the horizon of the global left and many of the social forces championing systemic alternatives as part of the new cycle of resistance in South Africa. Transformative politics is very different from the technocratic managerialism of social democracy or coercive control of Sovietised Marxism or the patronage machine politics of revolutionary nationalism. In each of these frames of politics a vanguard was featured as a self-declared advanced layer and the custodian of history and change. Transformative politics now promises to turn its back on this elite understanding of agency, power and politics.

Instead, transformative politics is about pre-figuring the future now through building systemic alternatives, evoking capacities for change from below, constituting new forms of mass power, rethinking the political instrument, extending and broadening democracy, reclaiming a transformed, genuinely popular, sovereignty and strengthening international solidarity. It is consistently anti-authoritarian and about democratically constituting a new working class-led counter-hegemony to sustain life. In South Africa the idea of a “movement for socialism” best embodies the logic of this politics, one within which a United Front of anti-systemic movements, an independent and worker controlled trade union federation, and a mass left party are constituted. But it is not led by “the party.” Instead such a movement for socialism is grounded in collective leadership in all its structures, a democratically conceived and commonly agreed program and a political division of labour in which a party is merely a tactical device in a mass transformative strategy. There is potential for this to be realised although whether this is what will actually happen remains an open question.

Vishwas Satgar is a Senior Lecturer in the International Relations Department at the University of the Witwatersrand. An activist for over 30 years, he edits the Democratic Marxism book series and has published on transformative systemic alternatives. He has also co-founded various grass roots organizations and campaigns, a National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (Numsa) social theory course at Wits and has actively supported student demands for in-sourcing, “free education” and the decolonization of the university.

Notes

Alexander, P. 2010. ‘Rebellion of the poor: South Africa’s service delivery protests – A preliminary analysis’ Social Movement Studies, 27 (123)

Amin, S., 1994. Re-Reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual History. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Claassens, A., 2015. ‘Law, land and custom, 1913-2014:What is at stake today?’ in Ben Cousins and Cherryl Walker (eds) Land Divided Land Restored: Land Reform in South Africa for the 21st Century. Auckland Park: Jacana Media

Dlamini, J. 2014. Askari: The Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle Auckland Park: Jacana Media.

Democratic Left Front Conference Report, 2011. ‘Another South Africa and World is Possible!’ University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Forslund D. and Reddy N. 2015. “Wages and the Struggle Against Income Inequality” in Vishwas Satgar and Roger Southall (eds). COSATU in Crisis: The fragmentation of an African trade union federation Johannesburg: KMM Publishers.

Glaser, D. 2013. ‘Retrospect: Seven theses about Africa’s Marxist Regimes’ in Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar (eds) Marxisms in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis, Critiques and Struggles, University of the Witwatersrand Press 2014

Harnecker, M., 2015. A World To Build : New Paths toward Twenty First Century Socialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Jara, M. 2013. ‘Critical reflections on the crisis and limits of ANC ‘Marxism’ ‘ in Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar (eds) Marxisms in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis, Critiques and Struggles University of the Witwatersrand Press 2014

Marais, H. 2011. South Africa Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change. Clarmont: South Africa

Mckinley D. 2015. ‘Its all about power and money: The present state of the ANC’

NUMSA (National Union of Metalworkers). 2014. ‘Resolutions adopted at NUMSA Special National Congress, 16–20 December, 2013.’30 January.

Panitch, L., Albo G. and Chibber V. 2012. ‘The Question of Strategy’ Socialist Register 2013. Pontypool: Merlin Press.

Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England:The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Satgar V. and Southall R. 2015. COSATU in Crisis: The fragmentation of an African trade union federation. Johannesburg: KMM Publishers.

Satgar V. 2009. ‘Reflections : The Age of Barbarism’ in Vishwas Satgar and Langa Zita (eds.) New Frontiers for Socialism in the 21st Century – Conversations on a Global Journey. Johannesburg: COPAC

Saul, J. 2013. “Socialism and Southern Africa” in Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar (eds) Marxisms in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis, Critiques and Struggles University of the Witwatersrand Press 2014.

Southall. R. 2013. Liberation Movements In Power: Party and State in Southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University Of KwaZulu-Natal Press

Van Diepen M. (ed.) 1988. The National Question in South Africa. London and New Jersey: Zed Books.

Von Holdt. K, 2013. ‘The transition to the violent democracy.’ Review of African Political Economy, 40(138).

Five Years of Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt

ROAPE

January 25, 2016

By Brecht De Smet

Five years after the Egyptian 25 January uprising and the subsequent ‘18 Days’ of protest that shook the world the outcome of the revolutionary process is bleak. After the almost fascistic fever of anti-Brotherhood mass mobilizations in 2013, orchestrated by the ‘deep state’, the once vibrant politics ‘from below’ appear to have given way to the apathy and cynicism that characterized the Mubarak era. Opposition parties and revolutionary movements have largely been neutralized, either by vicious repression and calculated cooptation, or they have simply collapsed under the weight of internal political contradictions and personal strife.

As the structures of the deep state and the economy emerged relatively unscathed from their confrontation with mass popular movements, scholars came to reject the labeling of the events that took place since 2011 as a ‘revolution’. This interpretation was rooted in Theda Skocpol’s comparative methodology which “highlights successful change as a basic defining feature” of revolution (1979: 4). Such a ‘consequentialist’ approach is informed by a historian’s desire to compare and judge past events on the basis of the same, objective measure: their outcome. This means that a process can only be defined as a revolution post factum, when it has run its historical course. In Gramsci on Tahrir. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt (2016, Pluto) I criticize this ‘distant’ outlook from the perspective of revolutionary activists who do not have the luxury to wait out the process but find themselves in the midst of it, in want of a concept of their political practice that allows them to actively determine the outcome of the struggle. When protesters on Tahrir claimed that they were ‘making a revolution’, they did not claim to have transformed Egypt’s state and society structures: they demonstrated their developing desire, intent, and will to change the status quo. The study of revolution cannot satisfy itself with an investigation of the structures that are the outcome of mass struggle, it also needs to comprehend the construction of collective subjects and wills that aim to produce these structures and the absence of change in the face of a revolutionary mass movement.

With regard to Egypt I propose to conduct the study of the 25 January Revolution precisely from the perspective of the absence of transformation. Instead of the nonexistence of revolution this absence highlights the success of counter-revolution. In their struggle to change the status quo revolutionary actors do not face the ruling forces in the form of a passive and homogeneous obstacle that has to be surmounted, but as an ensemble of agents with a will, initiative, and agency of their own. Failed revolutions always presuppose successful counter-revolutions, and vice versa. In the case of Egypt, however, activists and scholars alike disagree about the forces, nature, and temporality of revolution and counter-revolution. This debate immediately began after the forced departure of Mubarak in February 2011, when some activists wanted to remain in Tahrir to put direct pressure on the unreliable ‘transitional government’ while others were content to leave the square, seeing the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) as temporary caretakers and feeling confident they could mobilize again if political and social reforms did not materialize. The 19 March 2011 constitutional referendum drew lines, for the first time, between ‘secularists’ and ‘Islamists’, in which Salafist and Muslim Brother activists found themselves in the same camp as the military and security apparatus. The run-off between Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammad Morsi and former air force commander Ahmed Shafiq during the presidential elections of 2012 renewed the split of the revolutionary movement, with many voters feeling forced to choose between the lesser evils of an ‘Islamist opposition’ or the ‘secular régime’. Although the first months of Morsi’s presidency created expectations among a wide layer of revolutionary actors, his failure and unwillingness to confront and reform the power structures of the deep state and the economy led to a new, unsavory divide between Brotherhood loyalists and democratic legalists on the one hand, and radical revolutionaries, liberal secularists, and feloul – remnants of the old régime – on the other hand. Playing up historical suspicions and contemporary frustrations with the Brotherhood, elements of the deep state were able to infiltrate, organize, and influence the popular protest movement Tamarod (Rebel) that emerged in 2013 against the presidency. The anti-Brotherhood alliance between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary actors paved the way for a new coup backed by street protests, which reasserted the military’s control over the political institutions.

Morsi’s deposal has been framed by some scholars and activists as a missed opportunity of democratic transition. The underlying assumption is that Morsi’s presidency represented a real – albeit imperfect – step toward ‘democratic transition’ and that the coup against Egypt’s ‘first democratically elected president’ represented the victory of the counter-revolution. Some leftists have even chastised radical revolutionaries and socialists for their opposition against the Brotherhood presidency, claiming these forces wasted an opportunity for democratic reform in Egypt in their utopian and dogmatic quest for ‘permanent revolution’. As the massacre of Brotherhood sympathizers at Rabea al-Adawiya and elsewhere and the fascistic leadership of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi appeared to spell the end of emancipatory politics ‘from below’, it is understandable that the brief episode of Morsi’s presidency evoked the feeling of a missed chance to build a real alternative. Yet this nostalgia for the lesser evil is dangerous, because it underestimates the counter-revolutionary character of Morsi’s presidency and it restricts the mass struggles in Egypt to a mere political, democratic revolution.

In order to understand the complexity of Egypt’s revolution and counter-revolution, transcend simple binaries and tease out the internal contradictions of the process it is useful to turn to Marx’s idea of permanent revolution and Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and passive revolution. Marx’s concept of permanent revolution is based on the premise that every modern revolution has a social soul, a drive for social or human emancipation that pushes the struggle beyond the boundaries of a mere political reconfiguration of institutions and relations of power. This notion of permanent revolution evades the Skocpolian outcome-based binary typology of ‘political’ and ‘social’ revolutions as it draws our attention to revolution as an internal process of subject formation, the interpenetration of political and social protests, collective learning, and the prefiguration of new, emancipatory forms of living and interpersonal relations. In his assessment of the Paris Commune of 1871 Marx mused that in previous revolutions “the words went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the words” (Marx 1979: 106). What people were doing (introducing socialism) was much more radical than what they were claiming to do (establishing a democratic republic). From this perspective the pivotal moment of the 25 January Revolution is not the short episode of the ‘first democratically elected president’, but the lived experience of Tahrir and the spontaneous democratic experiments in the popular neighborhood and workplace committees. Hence Tahrir should be remembered radically: not as a mere stepping stone to a top-down engineered ‘transition’ toward Western-style liberal democracy, but as a grassroots prefiguration of a free and solidary society, which, in turn, inspired a global wave of ‘square’ or ‘occupation’ movements.

Since 2011 the very idea of ‘democratic transition’ has played a nefarious role in demobilizing, dividing, deflecting, and destroying the revolutionary movement. It offered political and economic elites a means to channel recalcitrant popular will into representational structures and procedures that could be circumscribed and controlled. Thus the authoritarian dimension of counter-revolution – open and violent repression of revolutionary groups and movements and sexual intimidation of female activists – was complemented with a ‘counter-revolution in democratic form’: elections, constitution-making, the cosmetic reform of state institutions, and so on. Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution addresses this continuous displacement of permanent revolution from the historical perspective of the ongoing constitution and reconstitution of capitalist structures, moving from the process of Italian unification, over the rise of Fascism to the transition of imperialism to Fordism. Ruling groups learn from revolutionary episodes and are often able to preempt radical change and overcome economic and hegemonic crises through gradual reforms that leave essential political and economic relations of power intact and through the absorption of opposition figures and groups in their project.

The discourse that since 2011 Egypt and, of course, Tunisia, have gone through a – botched? – democratic, political revolution merely re-inserted the nation in the liberal-utopian narrative of global democratization. Due to ‘persistent authoritarianism’ and ‘Islamic obscurantism’ the MENA region had escaped the ‘third wave of democratization’ (cf. Huntington 1991) that brought authoritarian régimes such as Portugal, Spain, Latin American dictatorships, and Eastern Bloc countries into the fold of bourgeois democracy. Through the ‘Arab Spring’ the MENA was either catching up to the third wave, or it constituted a fourth wave that could, perhaps, engulf other stubbornly authoritarian nations such as Iran, North Korea, and China. In the case of Egypt, the interpretation of ‘transition’ from the Mubarak dictatorship was immediately understood as a transition toward the finality of Western-style liberal democracy. Hence the dominant interpretation of the revolutionary process became determined by its normatively supposed end point, inducing an ideological blindness toward the ‘social soul’ of the uprisings. The orientalist, paternalist view that the MENA countries were still catching up to Western modernity rendered the idea unfathomable that the self-organization of the masses during these uprisings represented an embryonic society that was already moving beyond the restricted paradigm of bourgeois, representative democracy. The imaginary of Tahrir galvanized groups in Europe and the US, which not only asserted the geographical character of the ‘permanent revolution’ that was taken place, but also the ability of revolutionary masses in ‘backward’ nations to pose the most radical and advanced solutions to the problems of global capitalism.

Moreover, the notion that Egypt’s deep state can be transformed into a genuine bourgeois democracy without radically transforming the economic structure is fundamentally utopian because it abstracts from existing national, regional, and global relations of power. Ironically the ‘third wave of democratization’ of the 1970s and 1980s has gone hand in hand with a neoliberal restructuring of the global economy, which entailed a politically authoritarian project that reinforced the position of international capital against labor, and acted as a scaffold for US imperialism. In my book I turn to Gramsci’s concept of Caesarism as an analytical tool to understand the naked representational relation between state and capital. After a historically brief Fordist and developmentalist interlude neoliberal transformations are – gradually and unevenly – rendering the essence of the capitalist state as the dictatorship of capital explicit. Instead of expressing an eternal form of ‘praetorianism’ that stretches back to the Nasserist or even Mamluk era, the repressive régime of Sisi is very much in touch with its time. As much as the Egyptian revolution has been a source of inspiration for contemporary radical politics, the counter-revolutionary Egyptian state holds the mirror up to the core countries of the West, which can recognize their own policies in the peripheral, broken reflection of an authoritarian, debt-ridden, and unstable ensemble that is only able to fuel its hegemony negatively: by fear, coercion, and exclusion of the Other.

Brecht De Smet is a post-doctoral lecturer and researcher at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University and author of the recently published Gramsci on Tahrir: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt published by Pluto Press.

Notes

Huntington, S. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late 20th Century. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press.

Marx, K. 1979 [1852]. ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’. Marx-Engels Collected Works 11: 99–197.

Skocpol, T. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1...939495...98 Page 94 of 98

ROAPEJournal

ROAPEJournal

Western Advocacy Groups and (Class) Conflict in the Congo

Mozambican Workers and Communities in Resistance (Part 1)

Gender in the Mining Industry

Kongo Majesty, European Savagery

Popular Protest & Social Movements – Part 2

Lessons from Africa: Challenges of the Zika Virus

Reflections on African Political Economy

Radical Agendas: Afterword

Radical Agendas #6: Where to for South Africa’s Left?

An interview with David Hemson – lessons from the South African...

Ruth First Prize: James Musonda’s radical analysis of the 2021 election...

When the IMF and World Bank visited my father

News

The Journal

Activities

Activities