Group items tagged

This policy insulation from mass opinion could only be achieved through the leadership of Mandela. It was justified by invoking the mantra of “international competitiveness”, and it initially peaked with Mandela’s 1996 Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy. Obeisance to multinational corporations helped shape the terrain on the platinum belt that inexorably generated the Marikana Massacre in 2012, for example. In the South African case, it must be stressed, the decision to reduce the room for maneuver was made as much by the local principals as it was by the Bretton Woods Institutions, other financiers and investors.

Ending the apartheid regime was one of the greatest human achievements of the past century. However, to promote a peaceful transition, the agreement negotiated between the racist regime and Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) allowed whites to keep the best land, the mines, manufacturing plants, and financial institutions, and to export vast quantities of capital.

there had been only two basic paths that the ANC could have followed.

The white ruling bloc’s political strategy included weakening the incoming ANC government through repression, internecine township violence, and divide-and-conquer blandishments offered to leaders by way of elite-pacting.

The unbanning of the ANC allowed many of the pacting processes to come above ground, through methodologies such as “scenario planning” promoted first by Shell Oil and then Anglo American, Nedbank and a variety of other corporates during the critical 1990-94 period.

So even without going through the process of lending to transitional South Africa, until the IMF’s $850 million loan in 1993, the Bretton Woods Institutions had enormous influence. The Bank carefully recruited ANC officials to work with them in Washington during the early 1990s, and also gave substantial consultancies to local allies in South Africa. But notwithstanding all the political maneuvers associated with the rise and fall of personalities, blocs and ideas during the 1990-94 era, perhaps the most important fusion of the old and new occurred on the economic terrain five months prior to the April 27, 1994 democratic election, when the “Transitional Executive Committee” (TEC) took control of the South African government, combining a few leading ANC cadre with the ruling National Party, which was in its last year of 45 in power.

The loan’s secret conditions – leaked to Business Day in March 1994 – included the usual items from the classical structural adjustment menu: lower import tariffs, cuts in state spending, and large cuts in public sector wages.

This was justified to an adoring society desperate for reconciliation, because highly creative vote tallying gave the National Party just over 20 percent and Inkatha 10 percent of electoral support and denied the ANC the two-thirds which Mandela himself had stated would be an adverse outcome, insofar as it would dent investor confidence to know the Constitution might be alterable.

By mid-1996, with neoliberal economic policy in place, the elite transition was cemented and only provincial power shifts – from Inkatha to ANC in 2004 in KwaZulu-Natal, and from ANC to the Democratic Alliance in 2009 in the Western Cape – disturbed the political power-balance arrangements established in 1994. The ANC continued to receive between 60 and 67 percent of the national votes, and Mandela continued to be venerated after he departed the presidency, for having guided the “miracle” of a political solution to the surface-level problems of apartheid.

However, seen from below, the replacement of racial for what we might term “class apartheid” was decisive under Mandela’s rule.

Along with Tito Mboweni and Maria Ramos (his future wife), Manuel ensured that a small group of neoliberal managers were gradually brought into the Treasury and SA Reserve Bank.

The Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) and SA Communist Party (SACP) offered similar pragmatists who – no matter their personal predilections and internecine conflicts – could be trusted to impose neoliberal policies, including future trade minister Alec Erwin, Reconstruction and Development Programme minister Jay Naidoo, housing minister Joe Slovo, transport minister Mac Maharaj, and minister-at-large Essop Pahad. This politically-fluid group of change managers within the ANC-Cosatu-SACP Alliance had become trustworthy to the Afrikaners and English-speaking businesses.

Without capital controls, the Reserve Bank lost its main protection against a run on the currency. So when one began 11 months later, the only strategy left was to raise interest rates to a record high, resulting in a long period of double-digit prime interest rates.

The most important post-apartheid economic decision was taken in June 1996, when the top echelon of ANC policymakers imposed what Finance Minister Manuel termed a “non-negotiable” macroeconomic strategy without bothering to properly consult its Alliance partners in the union movement and SACP, much less its own constituents. The World Bank contributed two economists and its econometric model of South Africa for the exercise, known as “Growth, Employment and Redistribution” (GEAR).

The document, authored by 17 white men using the World Bank’s economic model, allowed the government to psychologically distance itself from the somewhat more Keynesian RDP, a 150-page document which in 1994 had served as the ANC’s campaign platform, and which the ANC’s civil society allies had insisted be implemented. An audit of the RDP, however, showed that only the RDP’s more neoliberal features were supported by the dominant bloc in government during the late 1990s.

by the late 1990s, mainly through disinvesting from South Africa, the major Johannesburg and Cape Town conglomerates found overseas avenues and reversed the downward profits slide. By 2001 they were achieving profits that were the ninth highest in the industrialised world, according to a British government study.

There was a steady shift of the national surplus from labour to capital after 1994 (amounting to an eight percent redistribution from workers to big business in the post-apartheid era), with the major decline in labour’s share – a full five percent fall – occurring from 1998-2001. These processes confirmed the larger problem of choiceless democracy, in which the deal to end apartheid on neoliberal terms prevailed: black nationalists won state power, while white people and corporations would remove their capital from the country, but also remain welcome for domicile, and enjoy yet more privileges through economic liberalization.

In the controversial words of one observer, “I am sure that Cecil John Rhodes would have given his approval to this effort to make the South African economy of the early 21st century appropriate and fit for its time.” That was Nelson Mandela in mid-2003, when launching the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation in Cape Town. “Fit for its time” meant the Minerals-Energy Complex and financial institutions at the South African economy’s commanding heights were given priority in all policy decisions, as had been the case over the prior century and a third, along the lines Rhodes had established.

the context was stagnation, for overall GDP/capita declined in the late 1990s, and even in 2000 – a growth year after a mini-recession in the wake of the Asian crisis – there was a negative per person rate of national wealth accumulation recorded by the World Bank (in its book Where is the Wealth of Nations?) if we subtract non-renewable resource extraction from GDP so as to more accurately reflect economic activity and net changes in wealth;

The transition is often said to be characterized by “macroeconomic stability,” but this ignores the easiest measure of such stability: exchange rate fluctuations.

These moments of macroeconomic instability were as dramatic as any other incidents during the previous two centuries, including the September 1985 financial panic that split big business from the apartheid regime and paved the way for ANC rule. Domestic investment was sickly (with less than 2 percent increase a year during the late 1990s GEAR era when it was meant to increase by 7 percent), and were it not for the partial privatization of the telephone company (disastrous by all accounts), foreign investment would not have even registered during Mandela’s presidency. Domestic private sector investment was net negative (below replacement costs of wear and tear) for several years, as capital effectively went on strike, moving mobile resources offshore as rapidly as possible.

Recall the mandate for “Growth, Employment and Redistribution”. Yet of all GEAR’s targets over the period 1996-2000, the only ones successfully reached were those most crucial to big business: reduced inflation (down from 9 percent to 5.5 percent instead of GEAR’s projected 7-8 percent), the current account (temporarily in surplus prior to the 2000s capital outflow, not in deficit as projected), and the fiscal deficit (below 2 percent of GDP, instead of the projected 3 percent). What about the main targets?

The “E” for employment was the most damaging initial result of South Africa’s embrace of the neoliberal economic approach, for instead of employment growth of 3–4 percent per year promised by GEAR proponents, annual job losses of 1–4 percent characterized the late 1990s. South Africa’s official measure of unemployment rose from 16 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002.

Finally, the “R” – redistribution – benefited corporations most because a succession of finance ministers lowered primary company taxes dramatically, from 48 percent in 1994 to 30 percent in 1999, and maintained the deficit below 3 percent of GDP by restricting social spending, notwithstanding the avalanche of unemployment.

The big question was whether a variety of social protests witnessed after apartheid by civil society – many groups associated with what was formerly known as the Mass Democratic Movement – would shift social policy away from its moorings in apartheid white privilege and instead towards a transformative approach empowering of poor people, women, youth, the elderly, the disabled and the ill.

Mandela had already, in 1992 after the Bisho massacre and in 1993 after the Hani assassination, taken upon himself to cork the anger building below. At the opening of parliament in 1995, Mandela inveighed, “The government literally does not have the money to meet the demands that are being advanced.” As for social policy, “We must rid ourselves of the culture of entitlement which leads to the expectation that the government must promptly deliver whatever it is that we demand.”

the Interim Constitution permitted veto power over planning and budgeting with just a third of a council’s seats, again reinforcing residual white power and making rapid change impossible. These compromises of the Interim Constitution, approved by Mandela, meant that prospects for a genuinely democratic local government were reduced to an even lower-intensity level than earlier.

The neoliberal critics of progressive block tariffs correctly insisted that such distortions of the market logic introduced a disincentive to supply low-volume users. For them, the point of supplying any good or service was to make profits or at minimum to break even in narrow cost-recovery terms. In advocating against the proposal for a free lifeline and rising block tariff, a leading World Bank expert advised the first democratic water minister, Kader Asmal, that privatisation contracts “would be much harder to establish” if poor consumers had the expectation of getting something for nothing. If consumers weren’t paying, the Bank suggested, South African authorities required a “credible threat of cutting service”. This was the logic that began to prevail during Mandela’s years in power.

the size and orientation of social grants were not particularly satisfactory, for according to University of KwaZulu-Natal researchers Nina Hunter, Julian May and Vishnu Padayachee, “The grants do not provide comprehensive coverage for those in need. Unless they are able to access the disability grant, adults are largely excluded from this framework of assistance. It is only possible for the Unemployment Insurance Fund to be received by the unemployed for a maximum of six months and then only by those who were registered with the Fund, for the most part the formally employed.” There were other problems: means-testing was utilized with the inevitable stigmatization that comes with a state demanding proof of poor people’s income; cost-recovery strategies were still being imposed, by stealth, on recipients of state services; the state’s potentially vast job-creating capacity was never utilized aside from a few short-term public works activities; and land and housing were not delivered at appropriate rates.

structured superexploitation was exacerbated by an apparent increase in domestic sexual violence associated with rising male unemployment and the feminization of poverty. Women also remained the main caregivers in the home, there again bearing the highest burden associated with degraded health.

The most severe blight on South Africa’s post-apartheid record of health leadership was, without question, its HIV/AIDS policy. This could be blamed upon both the personal leadership flaws of presidents Mandela and Mbeki and their health ministers, and upon features of the socio-political structure of accumulation. With millions of people dying early because of AIDS, and approximately five million HIV+ South Africans by 2000, the battle against the disease was one of the most crucial tests of the post-apartheid government. Pretoria’s problem began, arguably, with Mandela’s reticence even before 1994. As he told one interviewer regarding hesitation to raise AIDS as a social crisis, “I was very careful because in our culture you don’t talk about sex no matter what you do.”

If Mandela was too coy, and prone to accepting quack solutions like the industrial solvent Virodene proposed by local researchers – and apparently financed with Mbeki’s assistance – then Pretoria’s subsequent failure in the early 2000s to provide medicinal treatment for HIV+ patients led to periodic charges of “genocide” by authoritative figures such as the heads of the Medical Research Council (Malegapuru William Makgoba), SA Medical Association (Kgosi Letlape), and Pan Africanist Congress health desk (Costa Gazi), as well as leading public intellectual Sipho Seepe

It is important to add that the government’s regular claim of “insufficient state capacity” to solve economic, social and environmental problems was matched by a willingness to turn resources over to the private sector. If outsourcing, corporatization, and privatization could have worked anywhere in Africa, they should in South Africa – with its large, wealthy markets, relatively competent firms and advanced infrastructure. However, contrary evidence emerges from the four major cases of commodification of state services: telecommunications, transport, electricity, and water.

Racial apartheid was always explicitly manifested in residential segregation, and after liberation in 1994, Pretoria adopted World Bank advice that included an avoidance of public housing (virtually no new municipal or even cooperatively-owned units have been constructed), smaller housing subsidies than were necessary, and much greater reliance upon banks and commercial developers instead of state and community-driven development. The privatization of housing was, indeed, one of the most extreme ironies of post-apartheid South Africa, not least because the man taking advice from the World Bank, Joe Slovo, was chair of the SA Communist Party. (Slovo died of cancer soon thereafter and his main ANC bureaucrat, who was responsible for designing the policy, soon became a leading World Bank functionary.)

For example, poet-activist Dennis Brutus and Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane founded Jubilee South Africa in 1998, and argued that the $25 billion in debt that the Mandela government allegedly owed Western banks should be repudiated. They made the case for default on grounds of “Odious Debt”. Yet on that point, and many others, post-apartheid foreign policy did not return the favour of anti-apartheid solidarity.

The state soon turned to the task of systemicatic demobilisation of community groups that had played such an important role in destabilizing apartheid. One example was the SA National Civic Organisation (Sanco), which the ANC began to fund by the late 1990s, leading to a much denuded institution. After all, it was in the urban sphere where most such struggles unfolded (although in 2001 a “Landless Peoples Movement” briefly arose).

The solution to the problems that Mandela left behind will only come when a democratic society votes for a political party – probably the one after the ANC fully degenerates and loses power, perhaps in 2019 after six more years of destruction under Jacob Zuma’s rule – to overturn all these inheritances of apartheid capitalism. And then, an eco-socialist and feminist perspective within a strong but loving state will be vital.

No one said it better than Mandela himself, when in January 1990 he wrote to the Mass Democractic Movement: “The nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC, and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable. Black economic empowerment is a goal we fully support and encourage, but in our situation state control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable.”

Ironically, though, to transcend the society he has left us, the memory of Nelson Mandela will inspire many. And in one way or another they will always ask, when reminded of the problems caused by the “devil’s pact,” was he pushed or did he jump? Perhaps he did both.

To understand why requires combining analysis of the changing structure of capital – especially its worsening unevenness and financialisation – with study of divisions within the subordinate classes.

Along with International Monetary Fund (IMF) visits and a 1993 loan, the Bank’s Reconnaissance Missions fused with neoliberal agencies’ strategies during the early 1990s to shape policy framings for the post-apartheid market-friendly government. These were far more persuasive to the ANC leadership than the more populist ambitions of the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP).

Bank promotion of “market-oriented” land reform in 1993-94, which established such onerous conditions (similar to the failed policy in neighbouring Zimbabwe) that instead of 30 percent land redistribution as mandated in the RDP, less than 1 percent of good land was redistributed

the Bank’s participation in the writing of the (ultimately doomed to fail) Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy in June 1996, both contributing two staff economists and providing its economic model to help frame GEAR

In addition, Michel Camdessus, then IMF managing director, put informal but intense pressure on incoming president Mandela to reappoint the two main stalwarts of apartheid-era neoliberalism, the finance minister and central bank governor, both from the National Party.

The behind-the-scenes economic policy agreements forged during the early 1990s meant the Afrikaner regime’s own internal power-bloc transition from apartheid “securocrats” (e.g., defense minister Magnus Malan and police minister Adriaan Vlok) to post-apartheid “econocrats” (such as finance minister Barend du Plessis and Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals).

A few weeks after liberation in May 1994, when Pretoria joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on disadvantageous terms as a “transitional” not “developing” country, as a result of pressure from Bill Clinton’s White House, the economy’s deindustrialization was guaranteed.

finance minister Manuel let the capital flood out when in 1999 he gave permission for the relisting of financial headquarters for most of the largest companies on the London Stock Exchange. The firms that took the gap and permanently moved their historic apartheid loot offshore include Anglo American, DeBeers diamonds, Investec bank, Old Mutual insurance, Didata ICT, SAB Miller breweries (all to London), and Mondi paper (to New York).

the most profitable, fast-growing sectors of the SA economy, as everywhere in the world during the roaring 1990s, were finance, insurance and real estate, as well as communications and commerce, due to speculative and trade-related activity associated with neoliberalism

instead of funding new plant and equipment in this stagnant environment, corporate profits were redirected into speculative real estate and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange which by the late 1990s had created the conditions that generated a 50 percent increase in share prices during the first half of the 2000s, while the property boom which began in 1999 had by 2008 sent house prices up by a world record 389 percent (in comparison to just 100 percent in the US market

The “G” for growth was actually negative in per capita terms using GDP as a measure (no matter how biased that statistic is in a Resource Cursed society like South Africa).

The driving forces behind South African GDP were decreasingly based in real “productive” activity, and increasingly in financial/speculative functions that are potentially unsustainable and even parasitical.

Most tellingly, the category of “financial intermediation” (including insurance and real estate) rose from 16 percent of GDP in 1994 to 20 percent eight years later.

Meanwhile, labour productivity increased steadily and the number of days lost to strike action fell, the latter in part because of ANC demobilization of unions and hostility to national strikes undertaken for political purposes.

average black African household income fell 19 percent from 1995–2000 (to $3,714 per year), while white household income rose 15 percent (to $22,600 per year).

The income of the top 1 percent went from under 10 percent of the total in 1990 to 15 percent in 2002, (That figure peaked at 18 percent in 2007, the same level as in 1949.) The most common measure, the Gini coefficient, soared from below 0.6 in 1994 to 0.72 by 2006 (0.8 if welfare income is excluded).

In sum, the acronym GEAR might have more accurately been revised to Decline, Unemployment and Polarization Economics.

Notwithstanding advertisements by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, its failure coincided with rapid increases in water and electricity prices that were required by the 85 percent cut in central-to-local state operating subsidy funding transfers, leaving municipalities bankrupt just at the stage they were taking on vast numbers of new residents.

Thanks to the compromised Interim Constitution of November 1993, 50 percent of the municipal council seats were allocated to that odd combination, while 50 percent went to African townships, serving to break the unity of combined “black” politics.

Reflecting the cost-recovery approach to service delivery and hence the inability of the state to properly roll out and maintain these functions, the category of GDP components known as “electricity, gas and water” fell steadily during the Mandela years, from 3.5 percent of the total in 1994 to 2.4 percent in 2002.

This would have consciously distorted the relationship of cost to price and hence sent economically “inefficient” pricing signals to consumers. In short, the RDP insisted, poor people should use more essential services (for the sake of gender equity, health and economic side benefits), while rich people should save the environment by cutting back on their hedonistic consumption.

FBW ended up being delivered in a tokenistic way and, in Durban – the main site of FBW pilot-exploration starting in 1997 – the overall real cost of water ended up doubling for poor households in the subsequent six years because the FBW was so small, and because the second bloc of water was priced so high. This price hike had the direct impact of causing a decline in consumption by poor people, by one third, during that period’s pandemics of cholera, diarhhoea and AIDS when more water was needed the most, especially in the city with the world’s highest number of HIV+ residents.

There were some who argued that these shifts were profound, including Stellenbosch University professor Servaas van der Berg. He insisted that between 1993 and 1997, social spending increased for the poorest 60 percent of households, especially the poorest 20 percent and especially the rural poor, and state subsidies decreased for the 40 percent who were better off; together by counting in non-pecuniary support from the state, Pretoria could claim a one-third improvement in the Gini coefficient. Hence the overall impact of state spending, he posited, would lead to a dramatic decline in actual inequality. Unfortunately, van der Berg (a regular consultant to the neoliberal Treasury Department) made no effort to calculate or even estimate state subsidies to capital, i.e. corporate welfare. Such subsidies remained enormous because most of the economic infrastructure created through taxation – roads and other transport, industrial districts, the world’s cheapest electricity, R&D subsidies – overwhelmingly benefits capital and its shareholders, as do many tax loopholes.

Women were also victims of other forms of post-apartheid economic restructuring, with unemployment broadly defined at 46 percent (compared to 35 percent for men), and a massive late 1990s decline in relative pay, from 78 percent of male wages in 1995 to just 66 percent in 1999.

One reason was that contemporary South Africa retained apartheid’s patriarchal modes of surplus extraction, thanks to both residual sex discrimination and the migrant (rural-urban) labour system, which is subsidized by women stuck in the former bantustan homelands. These women were not paid for their role in social reproduction, which in a normal labour market would be handled by state schooling, health insurance, and pensions.

Life expectancy fell from 65 at the time of liberation to 52 a decade later. Diarrhea killed 43,000 children a year, as a result mainly of inadequate potable water provision. Most South Africans with HIV had, until the mid-2000s, little prospect of receiving antiretroviral medicines to extend their lives.

And there was indeed some progress to report because most importantly, perhaps, the national Department of Health committed in 1994 that Primary Health Care (PHC) would be free for pregnant women and children under age six, and in 1996 expanded the commitment to assure all South Africans would not pay for “all personal consultation services, and all non-personal services provided by the publicly funded PHC system”, according to government’s Towards a National Health System statement. Indeed there was a major budget shift from curative care to PHC, with the latter projected to increase by 8.3 percent in average real terms annually. Closures of hospital facilities in several cities were anticipated to save money and allow for redeployment of personnel (although they also affected access, since many consumers used these in lieu of clinics).

But of great concern was the difficulty in staffing new clinics (particularly those in isolated areas). There were serious shortfalls in medical personnel willing to work in rural South Africa, requiring two major programmatic initiatives: the deployment of foreign personnel (especially several hundred Cuban general practitioners) in rural clinics; and the imposition of a two-year Community Service requirement on students graduating from publicly-subsidised medical schools.

Yet if the personnel issue remained a barrier to implementation, regrettably the Department of Health was ambivalent about mobilising civil society in areas where Community Health Workers could have supported service delivery.

ne reason was the pressure exerted by international and domestic financial markets to keep Pretoria’s state budget deficit to 3 percent of GDP, as mandated in GEAR.

“That mother is going to die and that HIV-negative child will be an orphan. That child must be brought up. Who is going to bring the child up? It’s the state, the state. That’s resources, you see.”

The second structural reason was the residual power of pharmaceutical manufacturers to defend their rights to “intellectual property”, i.e., monopoly patents on life-saving medicines.

The third structural reason for the elongated HIV/AIDS holocaust in South Africa was the vast size of the reserve army of labour in South Africa. This feature of the socio-political structure of accumulation allowed companies to readily replace sick HIV+ workers with desperate, unemployed people, instead of providing them treatment. In 2000, for example, Anglo American Corporation had 160,000 employees. With more than a fifth HIV+, the firm began planning “to make special payments to miners suffering from HIV/AIDS, on condition they take voluntary retirement.”

Aside from bribing workers to go home and die, there was a provisional hypothesis that “treatment of employees with anti-retrovirals can be cheaper than the costs incurred by leaving them untreated.” However, in October 2001, a detailed cost-benefit analysis showed the opposite. As a result, “the company’s 14,000 senior staff would receive anti-retroviral treatment as part of their medical insurance, but the provision of drug treatment for lower income employees was too expensive.”

As for the electricity sector, Pretoria announced in 2004 that 30 percent of the Eskom parastatal (the world’s fourth largest electricity producer) would be sold. That position shifted after a Cosatu protest, and soon state policy was to allow 30 percent of generating capacity to come from new Independent Power Producers. Meanwhile, still anticipating deeper institutional privatisation, a corporatizing Eskom fired thirty thousand electricity workers during the 1990s.

the state expanded spending on nuclear energy research. This occurred first through pebble-bed reactor technology in partnership with US and British firms and then after that investment (in the range of $2 billion) was written off, ordinary nuclear reactors were authorized that were estimated to cost $60 billion or more.

lthough water and sanitation privatization applied to only 5 percent of all municipalities, the South African pilot projects run by world’s biggest water companies (Biwater, Suez, and Saur) resulted in a number of problems related to overpricing and underservice: contracts were renegotiated to raise rates because of insufficient profits; services were not extended to most poor people; many low-income residents were disconnected; prepaid water meters were widely installed; and sanitation was often substandard. It was simply not in the interests of Paris or London water corporations to provide water services to people who could not afford to pay at least the operations and maintenance costs plus a profit mark-up.

Cost-recovery policy applied in northern KwaZulu-Natal led to the continent’s worst-ever cholera outbreak, catalyzed by mass disconnections of rural residents in August 2000, for want of a $10 per household connection fee, which forced more than a thousand people to halt consumption of what had earlier been free, clean water.

With privatization came more intense class segregation. By 2003, the provincial housing minister responsible for greater Johannesburg admitted to a mainstream newspaper that South Africa’s resulting residential class apartheid had become an embarrassment: “If we are to integrate communities both economically and racially, then there is a real need to depart from the present concept of housing delivery that is determined by stands, completed houses and budget spent.”

Unfortunately it was the likes of Geffen, the commercial bankers and allied construction companies who drove housing implementation, so it was reasonable to anticipate no change in Johannesburg’s landscape – featuring not “quality houses” but what many black residents term “kennels.” Several hundred thousand post-apartheid state-subsidized starter houses were often half as large as the 40 square meter “matchboxes” built during apartheid, and located even further away from jobs and community amenities.

For example, in spite of water scarcity and water table pollution in the country’s main megalopolis, Gauteng, the first two mega-dams within the Lesotho Highlands Water Project were built during the late 1990s, with destructive environmental consequences downriver, and the extremely high costs of water transfer deterred consumption by poor people in Gauteng townships. One result was the world’s highest-profile legal case of Third World development corruption.

Rural (black) women still stand in line for hours at communal taps in the parched former bantustan areas. The location of natural surface and groundwater remained skewed towards white farmers due to apartheid land dispossession, and with fewer than 2 percent of arable plots redistributed by 2000 (as against a 1994-99 RDP target of 30 percent), Pretoria’s neoliberal land policy had conclusively failed.

Thanks to accommodating state policies, South African commercial agriculture remained extremely reliant upon fertilizers and pesticides, with Genetically Modified Organisms increasing across the food chain and virtually no attention given to potential organic farming markets. The government’s failure to prevent toxic dumping and incineration led to a nascent but portentous group of mass tort (class action) lawsuits. The victims included asbestos and silicosis sufferers who worked in or lived close to the country’s mines.

Indeed by 2012, South Africa was recognized as the fifth worst environmental performer out of 132 countries surveyed by Yale and Columbia University ecologists. Moreover, the South African economy’s contribution to climate change was amongst the world’s highest – twenty times higher than even that of the US – when carbon intensity is measured (CO2 equivalents emitted each year per person per unit of GDP).

A 2011 edition of Changing Wealth of Nations calculates a 25 percent drop in South Africa’s natural capital mainly due to land degradation. By 2008, according to the ‘adjusted net savings’ measure, the average South African was losing $245 per person per year.

There were other examples of Pretoria’s anti-solidaristic foreign relations, in which democrats and social justice activists suffered because of elite links between the ANC and tyrants: the Indonesian and East Timorese people suffering under the corrupt dictator Suharto, Nigerian democracy activists who in 1995 were denied a visa to meet in Johannesburg, the Burmese people (thanks to the Myanmar junta’s unusually friendly diplomatic relations with Pretoria), and victims of murderous central African regimes which were SA arms recipients.

Pretoria’s support for tyrants in Swaziland and Zimbabwe were the most extreme cases, especially after Mbeki took power in 1999 and democrats rose to challenge tyrants.

The occasional exception – his outrage at the execution of Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa – proved the rule; the unanimous backlash against Mandela by other African elites convinced Pretoria not to side with democratic movements.

By 1995, Mandela pronounced, “Let it be clear to all that the battle against the forces of anarchy and chaos has been joined,” referring to the rumble of mass actions, wildcat strikes, land and building invasions and other disruptions. Thus, while often dismissed as Mandela’s honeymoon period, the 1994-99 phase of post-apartheid capitalist consolidation included anti-neoliberal protest by trade unions, community-based organisations, women’s and youth groups, Non-Governmental Organisations, think-tanks, networks of CBOs and NGOs, progressive churches, political groups and independent leftists.

There, capital began to earn a status as the ANC’s ally of deracialisation. The most important voice of business was the Johannesburg-based Urban Foundation, later renamed the Centre for Development and Enterprise, which attempted to win civics to their position. One of its leading strategists, Jeff McCarthy, had argued that winning civics over to a “market-oriented” urban policy would “hasten the prospect of alliances on broader political questions of ‘vision’.” In other words, a consensus on urban issues would then form the basis for a new post-apartheid political order.

Until 1994, the civics were resolutely anti-capitalist but after demobilisation began in earnest in the wake of the country’s May 1994 liberation, Sanco turned to a corporatist relationship with the ruling party, leading in the late 1990s to a revival of the civics under a new guise, more commonly referred to as the “new social movements”.

ritical civil society of this sort was meant to be nurtured, according to official documents such as the 1994 RDP: “Social Movements and Community-Based Organisations are a major asset in the effort to democratise and develop our society. Attention must be given to enhancing the capacity of such formations to adapt to partially changed roles. Attention must also be given to extending social-movement and CBO structures into areas and sectors where they are weak or non-existent.” This did not happen, as an enormous funding boost meant for civics and other CBOs in late 1994 was diverted by Roelf Meyer and Valli Moosa of the Ministry of Constitutional Development into advertising (by Saatchi&Saatchi) the state’s unsuccessful Masakhane campaign, aimed at getting poor people to start paying for state services they had boycotted payment for during apartheid.

When “pressure from below” is exerted, it should aim at complementing the work of those who are exerting “pressure” against the old order “from above.”

Still, as the first Mandela moment of post-apartheid South Africa passed, something bigger began to jell around 1999, when social movements emerged to offer radical challenges to the status quo, including the Treatment Action Campaign with their stunningly successful single-issue concerns about AIDS medicines, and the new urban social movements with their much broader potential but much greater disappointments. It is, in their wake, that the traditions of Mandela can best be recalled: full liberation, even if as President there was less socio-economic and environmental progress than there should have been.

A conscious political decision by some of the leading forces of our movement was that time was not ripe to embark on a “socialist road”; for us it was necessary, first, to secure national independence from the dictatorship of global capital. Applying our experience to South Africa, I would say that even today (let alone when South Africa had its first democratic election in April 1994) the struggle is for national independence from the domination of global capital.

There is no space to elaborate on this point, but a few illustrative examples might help. One, the government deregulated the capital account resulting in massive capital exit. Two, it allowed, for example, Old Mutual (a dominant life insurance firm) to demutualise, and de facto converted over 100 years of workers’ savings into share capital, and open to purchase in global capital markets. Three: it entered into a partial Free Trade Agreement with the European Union which opened South Africa (and almost by default, the Southern African Customs Union (SACU)) to European imports without very limited corresponding benefits, a situation that bedevils South Africa’s relations with its neighbours to this day. Four: it committed itself to repaying the pre-1995 apartheid debt under the illusion that this would build confidence with the international financial institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) and the global market to attract foreign direct investment. It is my strong contention that South Africa ought to have unilaterally repudiated all apartheid-incurred illicit debts. I find it incomprehensible that independent South Africa should pay for debts incurred as a result of crimes against humanity. Five: the negotiations on the Bilateral Investment Treaty with the United Kingdom that preceded democratic elections. Finally: the 1996 GEAR– the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution – strategy. It set the country, I believe, into a reverse gear: many of the gains of the struggle for independence were lost in the process. Evidence of this is visible all over South Africa today.

the ANC and the SACP were basking under the sunshine of the “rainbow nation”, and a few hard facts of life escaped their scrutiny. Actually, looking back I would go further to say that it would have been better for the independent government of South Africa to have made an alliance with Boer capital (for example, in the banking sector) than with global capital (represented by the likes of the Anglo-American and the Old Mutual).

For them to change the course of history they must understand the underlying social and economic forces that define that course.

The strategic and policy implications of the above point are enormous. Instead of consolidating national independence to build national capital, the post-apartheid government opened the doors to global capital. Where the apartheid regime was seriously trying to develop “Boer national capital”, the post-apartheid government opened up the gates to free flow of global capital into and out of South Africa.

Plekhanov argued that Marxism provided a good basis for understanding the movement of the forces of capitalism which is the dominant mode of production of the times. To this, I would add a caveat of my own. Marxism is not a simple science. There are no ready-made answers to existential challenges. Leaders like Lenin, Mao and Fidel Castro have made errors, for sure, but they learnt from practice as they went along, and changed the course of history for their nations, and for the world.

Mandela was a great man, a great humanist, may be even a “saint”. But he saw his role as uniting his people across race and tribe, and left the nitty-gritty of state affairs to the ANC and the SACP. These, not Mandela, might be judged by history to have taken the nation to the depressing situation in which the bulk of the poor and the workers find themselves today.

I had taken the view that the "sunset clause" was a mistake, a view I still hold. The ANC could have negotiated a better deal. The balance of forces had shifted significantly in favour of the freedom fighters, especially after the decisive defeat of apartheid South African forces at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 at the hands of Cuban and Angolan forces. The ANC, in my view, missed an historic opportunity during the 1990-94 negotiations.

After 29 African countries of travel, I’ve heard it all. Tribes are useless. Kenyans are violent. Tanzanians are lazy. Nigerians are criminals. South Africans are racist. The DRC is too dangerous. Where is Namibia? All from the mouth of other Africans who have never been or even dreamed of going to the countries in question. We make all these definitive statements based on information filtered through an elitist and biased lens, that is comparing the worst of Africa with the best of the US or the UK. Africans are otherised, and we play along, forgetting that we are Africans too. Then we learn to hate ourselves and fear each other simply because the narrative tells us to.

“The most potent tool in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” The potency of this tool comes from its ability to skew our thinking and shape our actions. Like a child who, seeing shadows at night and believing that they are ghosts, cannot leave his bed to relieve himself, our irrational fear of each other is forcing us to sleep in the urine of lowered expectations and mutual suspicion.

So as I reflect on the state of African youth, it occurs to me that the biggest problem facing African youth today is not a lack of opportunity, or poverty, or whatever. Our biggest problem from where I stand is our inability to see ourselves with unfiltered honesty and a raw love.

This time around the Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Mines and Energy (one Dr. Kwabena Donkor) expressed shock that Newmont has started mining gold at its Akyem mine even before its mining lease is ratified by parliament. I understand some other MPs have expressed similar worries. Dr. Donkor has consequently described Newmont’s operations at the said mine as illegal, hence the company is engaging in ‘‘galamsey’’ mining activity – a very popular categorization for widespread illegal small scale mining activities in the country

I understand that the President of Ghana Chamber of Mines (one Dr. Tony Aubynn) and an External Affairs and Communications Director at Newmont (one Adiki Ayitevie) have waded into the debate, suggesting that it’s been the practice and Newmont is not doing anything illegal. This is indeed a bad practice and an illegal one. Even though Dr. Aubynn indicated his profound respect for rule of law it is clear that such respect cannot be extended to all laws and some aspects of the constitution in the country.

I understand that the President of Ghana Chamber of Mines (one Dr. Tony Aubynn) and an External Affairs and Communications Director at Newmont (one Adiki Ayitevie) have waded into the debate, suggesting that it’s been the practice and Newmont is not doing anything illegal. This is indeed a bad practice and an illegal one. Even though Dr. Aubynn indicated his profound respect for rule of law it is clear that such respect cannot be extended to all laws and some aspects of the constitution in the country.

I understand that the President of Ghana Chamber of Mines (one Dr. Tony Aubynn) and an External Affairs and Communications Director at Newmont (one Adiki Ayitevie) have waded into the debate, suggesting that it’s been the practice and Newmont is not doing anything illegal. This is indeed a bad practice and an illegal one. Even though Dr. Aubynn indicated his profound respect for rule of law it is clear that such respect cannot be extended to all laws and some aspects of the constitution in the country. He ough

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.

Sankara was somewhat unique as a revolutionary leader - and particularly as a president - in attributing the success of the revolution to the obtainment of gender equality. Sankara said, ‘The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph’.

Thomas Sankara, a Burkinabé with military training, had witnessed the student and worker-led uprisings in Madagascar.

Blaise Compaoré remains the president of Burkina Faso today and has been implicated in conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, and in arms trafficking and the trafficking of diamonds. There has been no independent investigation into Thomas Sankara’s assassination, despite repeated requests by the judiciary committee of the International Campaign for Justice for Thomas Sankara, a legal group working in the name of the Sankara family. The UN Committee for Human Rights closed Sankara’s record in April of 2008, without conducting an investigation into the crimes.

The revolution’s promises are already a reality for men. But for women, they are still merely a rumor. And yet the authenticity and the future of our revolution depend on women. Nothing definitive or lasting can be accomplished in our country as long as a crucial part of ourselves is kept in this condition of subjugation - a condition imposed…by various systems of exploitation.

He locates the roots of African women’s oppression in the historical processes of European colonialism and the unequal social relations of capitalism and capital exploitation. Most importantly, he stressed the importance of women’s equal mobilisation. He urges Burkinabé women into revolutionary action, not as passive victims but as respected, equal partners in the revolution and wellbeing of the nation. He acknowledges the central space of African women in African society and demanded that other Burkinabé men do the same.

In an interview with the Cameroonian anticolonial historian Mongo Beti, he said, ‘We are fighting for the equality of men and women - not a mechanical, mathematical equality but making women the equal of men before the law and especially in relation to wage labor. The emancipation of women requires their education and their gaining economic power. In this way, labor on an equal footing with men on all levels, having the same responsibilities and the same rights and obligations…’.

He criticised the oppressive gendered nature of the capitalist system, where women (particularly women with children to support) make an ideal labour force because the need to support their families renders them malleable and controllable to exploitative labour practices.

US-backed militarisation of Africa takes a couple of different forms.

First, it means an increase in troops on the ground. US Special Ops and US military personnel have been deployed in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Mauritania, South Sudan, and (potentially) Nigeria.

Second, US military personnel conduct training sequences with African militaries.

Third, the US military funds social science research into African society, culture and politics. This takes various forms, one of which is the use of SCRATs (or Sociocultural Advisory Teams) for the purposes of preparing US military personnel for deployment and missions.

A strong military structure paves the way for the resource plunder and large scale dispossessions that are seen in neoliberal states in the so-called Global South. In this system, the state ensures profit for class elites (both international and domestic) by guaranteeing the super-exploitation of labour and the dispossession of millions of people of their lands and livelihoods for resource extraction at serious costs to local ecology, health and wellbeing. This guarantee can only be made through an increased militarism that stifles political mobilisation.

Thomas Sankara and the August Revolution of 1983 tells us another story. They provide a different way of thinking about social organisation. Sankara understood that capitalism is dependent upon the unequal deployment of and distribution of power, particularly state power. But, as he showed us, the state is not unalterable. The state is a complex system of human relationships that are maintained through violent power/coercion and persuasion. And what Sankara did was work to bring the state apparatus down to the level of the people, so to speak.

The image of my daughter’s grandfather entering his home and collapsing onto the sofa, holding his face in his hands and crying emerges in my head each time I think of Sankara. This image of a middle aged Cameroonian man, Jacque Ndewa, thousands of miles away, who had never travelled to Burkina Faso, crying quietly on his sofa. This is the resonance that Sankara had, across the African continent and among disenfranchised and dispossessed people everywhere.

Far from a ladder of opportunity, workers in globalised production networks are incorporated into economic systems that reproduce their poverty to sustain corporation profits. Arguments by liberals and statists for further global integration are based upon the expectation (and requirement) of the continued subordination of the working classes to the objectives of capital accumulation.

Is there a way of changing the relationship between poverty and rising global wealth? A labour-centred concept of development would recognise that global wealth is based upon the working classes.

It would note that improvements to workers’ livelihoods come about not by working for global capital, but through their own struggles for better wages and conditions, gender equality, access to land, and for political and economic democracy. The significant human development gains of the European working classes after the second world war were due not to the generosity of capitalists and states, but to the threat of mass unrest from below: “If you don’t give the people social reform, they will give you social revolution,” Quintin Hogg, a leading light in the Tory party, told the British parliament in 1943.

In many of these factories, productivity, employment and wages increased as workers enjoyed an unprecedented degree of workplace democracy and, for the first time, a real incentive to collaborate to enhance their labour, as they were its direct beneficiaries.

In this elitist conception of development, innovating entrepreneurs, supported by benign states, generate wealth through participation in capitalist markets, which then trickles down to the population, who should be grateful for the enhancement of their lives. This view rests on a paradox. The process of wealth creation, whether through incorporation into “free” markets, or through state-led generation and allocation of resources, requires the subordination of the working masses to the elite’s objectives — low wages, long hours and subjection to strict management discipline, denial of trade union rights and suppression of workers’ political actions.

It is heartbreaking to watch the video footage [iv] of Sankara appealing to his fellow presidents to repudiate unfair debt agreements with IMF and other foreign creditors at the Organization of African Unity Summit in 1987. He accused them of degrading their people. He says, only half-jokingly, that if they do not support him he is going to be assassinated: “I may not make it to the next meeting.”

On the face of it, General Yoweri Museveni, the Ugandan president, seemed of similar mettle to Sankara. Anecdotes confirming his revolutionary credentials arrived thick and fast in the diaspora. It was said that at State functions he drank from plastic (or was it tin?) mugs rather than long-stemmed wine glasses. (It is possible he was merely adjusting from the bush war.) He too repudiated debt as a solution to all that ails Africa. But after an attempt to barter trade with neighbouring countries he gave in to the beckoning finger of the North.

His daughter was flown to Germany in a Lear jet to give birth to her child at a cost of GBP 70,000 if you believe the British media or GBP 20,000 if you believe Government. In either case, his official statement was clear, “When it comes to medical care for myself and my family there is no compromise [vi].” The families of the 16 women a day who die in childbirth for lack of essential drugs, properly motivated (or simply paid) staff and lack of equipment held their peace.

A pattern emerges. Genuine agents of change die young. Either they do not make it to State House or they die while there (with the possible exception of Jerry Rawlings in Ghana). Such is the dynamic. The rest capitulate early while continuing to assume the demeanour of revolutionaries. They can do so because Western powers are willing to turn a blind eye to their increasing profligacy in return for their signatures on a succession of documents keeping their countries in debt bondage.

The continent-wide Resource Curse makes the Marikana massacre look like a picnic, and allows us to dismiss Spector’s article as the kind of idle spin-doctoring fluff one gets from the State Department’s US Information Service (his former employer). But that is not a particularly satisfying place to leave matters, for the broader assumptions about the US in Africa also need a rethink, in part because South Africa is hosting the BRICS summit in Durban next March, and we’re being subjected to rhetoric from Pretoria about a ‘new dynamic’ in the emerging market power bloc, supposedly challenging the sole-superpower system of global governance.

Thanks to White House patronage, murderous African dictators still retain power until too late, most obviously Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who is personally worth at least $40 billion (according to an ABC News report) and who was recipient of many billions of dollars in US military aid in the 18 months following Obama’s speech. As Carson’s boss Hillary Clinton remarked in 2009, ‘I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,’

Amongst the 40 were Cameroonian dictator Paul Biya, and as his office reported, ‘At the end of the two and half hours that they spent together, most of the African leaders left the dining hall visibly satisfied.’

also have some sort of response should they not heed these warnings not to proceed?,’ the official answer was chilling: ‘I think we haven’t telegraphed any response at this point.’ One reason not to annoy Jammeh was the US Central Intelligence Agency’s reliance upon a Banjul airport as a secret destination and refueling site for ‘rendition’ victims, that is, the illegal transfer of suspected terrorists to countries carrying out torture on behalf of Washington.

former US National Security Council official John Prendergast’s concern about ‘a vexing policy quandary’ in Washington’s relations with Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan: ‘All of them have served American interests or have a strong US constituency, but all have deeply troubling human rights records.’ (Whether this is a ‘vexing quandary’ or instead best described as a time-honoured tradition is up to the reader to decide.)

why launch this latest enterprise of dubious value? Well, when you have created an AfriCom, when you have staffed it with a few thousand personnel, when you have a Special Forces corps numbering 60,000, when you have a vastly expanded CIA Operations Division, and when American strategic thinking is still locked in the auto-pilot mode set in September 2001 – when all these forces are at work, there will be action.’

within a few months, that the Central Intelligence Agency was extremely active in Somalia and that mercenaries (such as Bancroft Global Development) were Washington’s hired guns, as Carson admitted to the New York Times, ‘We do not want an American footprint or boot on the ground.’ Hence, according to The Times, drones were used against the Shabab (Al-Qaeda’s allies in Somalia).

The 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian forces was clearly a proxy war, with AfriCom providing the logistics-allowing a criminal organization like al-Shabab to claim a legitimate reason for its war and brutal terror against the very people both sides claim to be freeing: the poor ordinary Somalis.’

On two occasions (1994 and 1996) I worked in the office of a man officially labeled a ‘terrorist’, a South African targeted by the CIA in the early 1960s and only taken off the US State Department’s no-entry ‘terror watch-list’ in July 2008 (!) thanks to a formal Congressional intervention.

As WikiLeaks demonstrated, Washington is choc full of pathological hypocrites.

Another source of oil disruption in Nigeria of concern to Washington was a civil society case against Shell Oil in May 2012 in which Shell argued it should have no human rights liabilities because of its corporate status, a position that the US rejected when it came to US citizens’ rights to sue. ‘But when the Supreme Court ordered a rehearing in the case, and asked whether human rights lawsuits could be brought when the abuses happened outside the US,’ according to EarthRights International’s Marco Simons, Washington actually sided with Shell. ‘Obama is saying that if a foreign government abuses human rights, we can bomb them, like we did with Libya. But we can't hold anyone accountable in court, because that would threaten international relations.’

That means wherever there is socio-ecological, religious and economic pressure, such as Uganda and Somalia, Washington’s instinct is the iron fist, followed by denialism and ‘goo-goo’ good-governance rhetoric. ‘From Carson's presentations two years in a row at the annual African Studies Association meetings, most of us felt we heard the same speeches we heard in the Bush Administration,’ says Wiley.

Horn’s evidence is not only that Kony has not been seen for years in Uganda, but that Obama also ‘quietly waived restrictions on military aid to Chad, Yemen, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’ even though their armies all have recent documented records of recruiting child soldiers.

Indeed, it is appropriate to ask why backwardness prevails in countries that are only ‘useful’ insofar as they have resources. Of course, oil and minerals are not Washington’s only economic objective. As WikiLeaks revealed after a February 2010 meeting with Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi, ‘Carson encouraged Meles to hasten steps to liberalize the telecommunications and banking industries in Ethiopia,’ according to the secret State Department cable. An additional economic objective, also revealed at that meeting, was the destruction of the Kyoto Protocol’s binding cap on greenhouse gas emissions, a project that Obama and the heads of Brazil, China, India and South Africa agreed to in Copenhagen at a UN climate summit in December 2009. As WikiLeaks demonstrated, much diplomacy in subsequent weeks was aimed at achieving buy-in even if that entailed bribery and coercion.

with Obama half-Kenyan by ancestry (a factor regularly raised by right-wing commentators who even make ridiculous claims as to the land of his birth), this treatment should not be considered as specifically anti-African; instead, it is best described as pro-corporate. For Washington’s whacking of Africa is not so different than the whacks its rulers give everywhere.

further information has become available about former constitutional law professor Obama’s personal role in civilian-killing drone warfare (including US citizen victims), cyberterrorism, warrantless eavesdropping, suppression of civil liberties, lack of transparency and other apparent contradictions. However, do these contradictions represent, as Prendergast put it, a vexing quandary – or instead, a tradition?

according to American University professor Sean Flynn, Obama ‘endorsed a set of policy proposals in its trade negotiations with developing countries that is much worse for access to medicine concerns than those of any other past administration.’

Africa and so many other examples show how the Obama Administration has become a rotten fusion of the worst instincts within neoliberalism and neoconservatism. I hope that on November 6, he soundly defeats Mitt Romney, who is worse on all counts except the ability to huckster people in Africa that Washington acts in their interests.

Last year, citing US national security interests, Obama issued a waiver so as to send more than $200 million in military aid to US-allied regimes in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, South Sudan and Yemen in spite of a 2008 US law prohibiting such funding because of their armies’ recruitment of child soldiers. According to Human Rights Watch’s Jo Becker, ‘The Obama administration has been unwilling to make even small cuts to military assistance to governments exploiting children as soldiers. Children are paying the price for its poor leadership.’

The nervousness and anxiety of the West over the future of the U.S. financial dominance was quite clear from the communique issued after the recent 2013 G8 meeting in Ireland. Most of the points in the communique issued by the White House (the Lough Erne Declaration) dealt with the challenges coming out of Africa and the role of transnational corporations plundering African resources without paying taxes.[8] Prior to the G8 meeting, the 2013 Report of the Africa Progress Panel headed by former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Anan, called on the same G8 leaders to police their corporations. The Panel had called for inter alia:

The destructive extraction of resources from Africa is old and has taken new forms, as Patrick Bond reminds us in Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation.[10] For the past six decades the World Bank domination of economic arrangements in Africa has seen the period of dramatic capital flight from Africa.[11]

The multi-billion dollar enterprise of looting Africa was at the foundation of an international system that increasingly worked on the basis of speculative capital. The World Bank and the IMF understood that the real foundations of actual resources were to be found in Africa. To conceal the looting and plunder, the West disguised the reality that Africa is a net creditor to the advanced capitalist countries (termed “donors” in neo-liberal parlance). For this reason (and to perpetuate the myths of “spurring economic growth and investment”), the United States government has been caught in a losing battle where new rising forces such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey, South Korea and other states offer alternatives to the structural adjustment and austerity packages.

The fallout from the Libyan intervention has created insecurity and violence in all parts of North Africa and the Sahel, with racist elements within this Libyan uprising persecuting Africans as mercenaries.

From the writers in the US academic establishment, the NATO intervention was a success. [14] However, decent peoples in all parts of the world have been outraged by the continued violence and the support for the murderous militias by Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The persecution of the citizens of Tawergha stands as a permanent repudiation to the NATO intervention in Libya.

The previous justifications for US engagement had been part of the logic for the establishment of the US Africa Command. For a while there was the fiction that the United States was supporting growth and trade (via the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)), but the militarization of the engagement with Africa intensified after then Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force had designated African petroleum as “strategic” and colluded with Donald Rumsfeld to establish the Africa Command (AFRICOM).

In June 2012, the White House issued a new policy statement on Africa. What was striking about this new White House Statement was that there was no mention of the US Africa Command. The document was titled, “Policy towards Sub-Saharan Africa.”[16] Many Africans did not pay much attention to this old ruse of seeking to divide Africa between so called sub- Saharan Africa and North Africa. The reality of the African Union is something that the US policy makers do not want to recognize; hence the State Department maintains the nomenclature of sub-Sahara Africa.

When John Kerry spoke at the 50th anniversary of African Unity in Addis Ababa in May 2013, the U.S. Secretary of State did not mention the U.S. Africa Command or the War on Terror. Instead John Kerry spoke of the fact that his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, was part of the anti-apartheid struggles in Southern Africa when she was a student at the University of Witwatersrand.

While there are no funds to support educational exchange, in the week of June 19, 2013, the US Senate under the initiative of Republican Senator James Inhofe authorized, “the Department of Defense to obligate up to $90 million to provide logistical support to the national military forces of Uganda to mitigate or eliminate the threat posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and bring an end to the murderous campaign of LRA leader Joseph Kony.”[18] This clear support of the conservatives in the United States for the Yoweri Museveni government in Kampala, under the guise of fighting Kony, comes at a moment when the Museveni leadership is being challenged, even from its own officer corps. [19] More importantly, Republican Senator James Inhofe and the conservatives who initiated this new authorization are bent on supporting a regime where there are elements who believe that same-gender loving persons should be put to death.

When U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the corruption of the banks he stated, “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them.” Prosecutors, he said, must confront the problem that “if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”[21]

When Obama entered the White House in January 2009, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner advised him that prosecuting the banks would have a negative impact on the world economy.

Gary Yonge in the Guardian made the excellent argument in pointing out that Barack Obama is the Commander in Chief of the United States and is captive to US imperial power. In the article titled, “Is Obama Worse than Bush? That's Beside the Point,”[22] Yonge traced the statements of Obama the candidate to the realities of Obama as the President of the United States. His argument, that it is beside the point whether Obama is worse than Bush, is worth considering in light of the reality that the capitalist crisis facing the United States is far worse than when Bush was President 2001-2009. I will agree that the conditions of the repressive nature of the state have intensified in the midst of the global insecurity of capital, but where I would differ with Yonge would be for the progressive forces to intensify the efforts to hold the bankers accountable so that the militarists and the bankers do not take the world into other military catastrophes.

Recently, Obama appointed Susan Rice as the National Security Adviser. Rice had been groomed in anti-communism by the Madeline Albright and Clinton factions of the establishment. When Susan Rice was student at Oxford in the 1980s, she reputedly looked the other way when students such as Tajudeen Abdul Raheem were opposing apartheid. She was a member of the ignominious Bill Clinton national security team that pressured the United Nations not to intervene at the time of the Rwanda genocide in 1994.

Since those two journeys in June and July 2009, Obama has had to hide his understanding of Africa because he has been faced with a racist group called the Birthers who claim that he was born in Kenya and is therefore illegitimate as a President. There is another strong constituency that alleges that Obama is a Muslim. Obama can rightly claim his Irish heritage from his mother’s side, but is mortally afraid of making any statement that may suggest that he is familiar with the political struggles in Africa.

We know from the book by Richard Wolffe, Renegade: The Making of a President, that during the height of the Democratic Party primary battles in Iowa in January 2008, Obama had invited his sister, Auma Obama, to Iowa so that he could be kept abreast of the social forces behind the violence in Kenya at the time. When he drove around Iowa, his sister was briefing him on the issues that sparked the opposition to the theft of the elections. While preoccupied with the Iowa caucuses he was calling Kenya, reaching out to Desmond Tutu and taking an active role in seeking an end to the incredible violence that took hundreds of lives.[24] Since 2009 the Kenyans have been building a massive airport at Kisumu so that Air Force One could land in Western Kenya. This was in anticipation of the visit of Obama to visit his relatives. All of the planning for a Kenyan visit has had to be put on hold because of the outstanding questions of the initiators of the chilling violence that overtook Kenya in January 2008. Obama has instead opted to visit neighboring Tanzania.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson has stated more than once that the arming of Syrian rebels will be a backdoor to the war against Iran.[27]

The Obama administration has been trapped by the history and practices of financial industry, the military intelligence corporations and the petroleum companies. From very early in 2009, the Obama administration understood that financial innovation was not socially valuable.

Those conjuring the “stress tests” are quite aware of the scholarly output as well as the activists who are now standing up for Africa.[31]

Official statements from the US Africa Command about peacekeeping and humanitarianism in Africa have been silent on the warfare and plunder in the Eastern Congo where the military allies of the United States, Rwanda and Uganda have been indicted for looting the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This week John Kerry as the Secretary of State appointed former Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin as the Special Envoy to the DRC.

The legacies of enslavement, colonialism and apartheid dominate the social landscape in Africa. Recent scholarship on the health impacts of enslavement have pointed out the contemporary health questions in the African community in the West that emanate directly from slavery. [33] Harriet Washington in the excellent book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present [34] has deepened our understanding of how many of the health practices of contemporary western medicine can be traced back to the era of enslavement.

In those fifty years, the US undermined the processes of self-determination, supported the apartheid regimes in Southern Africa (Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe along with the Portuguese colonial forces in Angola and Mozambique), supported Jonas Savimbi for over twenty years, intervened in Somalia, destabilized the DRC by supporting Mobutu Sese Seko or thirty years, and most recently supported NATO to create havoc in Libya. At the most recent meeting of the African Union in Addis Ababa in May 2013, there were clear statements from the grassroots for the immediate unification of Africa. The confidence of the Global Pan African Family was clearly on display. The Obama administration understands the deep desires for change in Africa. Many of the current leaders who occupy office in Africa are teetering on the brink of extinction. There must be a break from the old US policy towards Africa that propped up tyrants and looters. While the media is complaining about the cost of the trip, the progressive intellectuals and activists in the US and in Africa must organize to oppose militarism and plunder in Africa. This is an inopportune moment for Obama to travel to Africa unless he is going to repudiate the growing police state that he is supervising. The mainstream establishment of the United States of America has nothing substantial other than militarism to offer Africa. This trip to Africa is a PR effort to solidify his legacy and garner waning support from his base in the United States.

Besides the agriculture sector, Olaoye said has also noticed positive changes in aviation and development, saying that the government is doing one of its primary jobs: building infrastructure. But, like Abdu, Olaoye said corruption and the increasing insecurity will become Jonathan’s legacy if the two issues are not successfully addressed.

“If I may give an unsolicited piece of advice to the president,” Olaoye told GlobalPost, “I would say his job is cut out: fight corruption, provide security for Nigerians and the country can almost run on auto-pilot.”

The ICs take advantage of these differences in order to ‘divide and dictate’ to the DCs the terms of the climate change negotiations. What makes Africa vulnerable is its dependence on the West for the so-called ‘development aid’ and ‘technical experts’. One significant illustration of this is the manner in which the industrialised West has used money and ‘technical assistance’ as a means of ensuring an outcome at COP-16 in Cancun after they had failed to do so at COP-15. Europe and the US mounted a coordinated offensive to break the ranks of the countries of the South. Some of this was quite overt and open, for example, through the use of ‘development aid’ and other financial incentives. Others were covert and secretive, such as the use of US spy network – exposed, partially, by WikiLeaks (see Pambazuka issue 510, Dec 2010).

For the purposes of this conference, I wish to focus on just one lesson. And this is that Africa needs to be wary of the use of finance (or the so-called ‘development aid’) by the industrialised countries (ICs) to divide and rule the developing countries (DCs). Globally, if there is a near-clear North–South divide, it is on the question of climate change.

It is in this light that I need to caution Africa against the processes being in put in place by several interested parties in the West to offer ‘technical advice’ to ‘poor’ African countries.

In 2001, George Soros told the Davos Economic Forum, "South Africa is in the hands of international capital."

Ironically, Mandela seemed to change in retirement, alerting the world to the post 9/11 dangers of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. His description of Blair as "Bush's foreign minister" was mischievously timed; Thabo Mbeki, his successor, was about to arrive in London to meet Blair. I wonder what he would make of the recent "pilgrimage" to his cell on Robben Island by Barack Obama, the unrelenting jailer of Guantanamo.

The apartheid regime's aim was to split the ANC between the "moderates" they could "do business with" (Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Oliver Tambo) and those in the frontline townships who led the United Democratic Front (UDF).

Mandela, too, fostered crony relationships with wealthy whites from the corporate world, including those who had profited from apartheid. He saw this as part of "reconciliation". Perhaps he and his beloved ANC had been in struggle and exile for so long they were willing to accept and collude with the forces that had been the people's enemy.

White liberals at home and abroad warmed to this, often ignoring or welcoming Mandela's reluctance to spell out a coherent vision, as Amilcar Cabral and Pandit Nehru had done.

These last 20 years we have faced a major change: the financialisation of capitalism. Now, nobody can do anything without capital. Finance controls each and every sector of society.

Immediately after Kenya’s independence (1963), a great many important liberation figures were imprisoned, exiled or killed, such as Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso. Each time a leader had the courage to rebel, Europe and the United States forced them to back down. We then came to know an empty period until the mid-1990s, when people began to resist and organise themselves again. Today in Kenya, spaces for discussion and debate are not lacking. It’s vibrant, alive and a general trend, including in Europe.

Look at Tunisia: you hear that the revolution was caused by Twitter – this can’t be serious! Pens were also used as a means of information and mobilisation. Does this mean that pens caused the revolution? This illustrates a tendency towards technological determinism, towards hi-tech fetishism. We imagine that mobile phones, SMS (short message service), Twitter and Facebook have a power. This type of discussion tends to underestimate the role of those who use them.

In Tunisia, protesting in the road called for a lot of courage. A protestor who embraces a soldier, as is seen in a photo, is not produced by technology. It’s thought that this can resolve everything, but a third of Africans have one and there hasn’t been revolution everywhere.

Take for example agriculture: the bulk of what’s produced in Africa goes to feed Europe, multinationals and supermarkets. In Kenya we produce millions of flowers. Every day, they leave for Amsterdam. The amount of water used and the chemical products involved destroy our environment. While this goes on, populations have difficulty gaining access to water and food. The countryside ought to be used to produce food!

Agricultural production needs to be democratised.

I think that Latin America is a dozen years ahead of us. Structural adjustment policies began there two decades ago. I think that in Africa a popular movement will rise up from this from 2020. Chávez is not an exception; he is the product of his history, of a movement for emancipation, like Lula. The question is, how can we ourselves politicise this process? It’s not easy; there’s no technical solution. Workers and farmers need to become organised. This takes time. The positive thing is that this point is now discussed; this wasn’t the case 10 years ago.

A Cameroonian child seeking admission into a state school, a student wishing to enter a university, a college graduate seeking employment in the public service, a businessman or woman tendering for a contract, a citizen applying for a national ID or passport, or seeking access to any of the avenues controlled by the state, will sooner or later fill out a form which requires him to confess his tribe (or less crudely and more hypocritically, his region of origin).

to debar anyone from working anywhere in their country or from participating in the social, political and economic life of the community in which they choose to live on the basis of tribe is another matter altogether. Our constitution outlaws it. Yet prejudice against ‘outsiders’ or ‘strangers’ is an attitude one finds everywhere in Cameroon.

Cameroon is not totally unredeemable. Our situation is critical but not hopeless. But we should not lose sight of the fact that every single day of neglect brings Cameroon closer to the brink of collapse. The task of pulling Cameroon back and turning it around is clearly beyond the contrivance of the mediocre leadership that we have today. It calls for greatness and selflessness, two qualities that our leaders sorely lack. Cameroonians are what they are today only because their leaders are not what they ought to be. Cameroon has been less than fortunate in its leadership. The young republic emerging out of a dual colonial contraption found Ahmadou Ahidjo, a benighted semi-illiterate, as their first president. The rest is history. Today, we have a sanctimonious megalomaniacal hypocrite, Paul Biya, as head of state. A basic element of this mishap is the conspicuous absence of intellectual rigor in the political thought of our leaders — a tendency to pious materialistic woolliness and self-centered pedestrianism.

‘virtues’ like ‘patriotism’ and ‘unity’ are not absolute but conditional on their satisfaction of other purposes. As Achebe points out, ‘Their social validity depends on the willingness or the ability of citizens to ask the searching question’ (33) [5]. This calls for some degree of mental rigor, a quality for which Cameroonians, unfortunately, are not famous. In spite of much loose talk about patriotism from those at the helm there is no doubt that Cameroonians are among the world’s most unpatriotic people. This is not because Cameroonians are particularly evil. In fact, they are not. It is rather because patriotism, being part of an unwritten social contract between citizens and the state, cannot exist where the state or its leaders renege on the agreement (Achebe, 1983). It is indisputable that the ideal of patriotism is unattainable in a country as badly run as Cameroon is today.

He grieves over the fact that Cameroon is a country where tribalism has been raised to the pedestal of a national culture that pervades every discourse, controls the way people think and defines what they oppose or support.

During my recent stint in Burkina Faso, a country often touted as the poorest in the world, I noticed to my dismay that there was no power failure throughout my stay in the capital city Ouagadougou; the taps in the hotel room ran all the time with the kind of pressure one sees in Western hotels. My hotel room was modest but impeccably clean.

Cameroon is a country with an eccentric minority who can restrain themselves and an overwhelming majority who just cannot. This leaves the minority of reasonable Cameroonian citizens feeling like a bunch of sane people trapped in a dangerously rowdy mental asylum. This conundrum is compounded by corrupt practices.

Mr Biya condones corruption because his tribesmen are the biggest looters. Cameroonians have grown accustomed to his silly interrogation où sont les preuves? [13] This is the way the president dismisses cases of wanton looting of the national coffers brought to his attention.

We are living witnesses to the failure of the executive branch of government to stem the tide of rampant corruption that now threatens to paralyze our nation in every sinew and limb. There is no question that it will take some time to correct this irksome situation that has built up over the years, assuming we want to correct it. But to initiate change the president of the Republic must take and be seen to take a decisive first step toward ridding his administration of all persons on whom the slightest whistle of corruption and scandal has been blown. If he would summon the courage to do that then it will dawn on him that he ought to be Cameroon’s leader; not just its president. More importantly, Biya must learn to deal fairly with all citizens, including the troublesome Anglophones.

Some critics have compared the frictional co-habitation between the two distinct linguistic communities in Cameroon to the attitude of two travelers who met by chance in a roadside shelter and are merely waiting for the rain to cease before they continue their separate journeys in different directions. This metaphor captures the mutual distrust and animosity that distance Anglophone Cameroonians from their Francophone compatriots. All too often, the perpetrators of this malicious game of divide and conquer are the political leaders on the French-speaking side of the national divide who take delight in fishing in troubled waters. Francophone politicians love to stoke the flames of animosity, thereby whipping up sentiments of mutual hatred on both sides of the Mungo River at the expense of nation-building. Many Francophones make statements intended either to cow Anglophones into submission or incite them into open rebellion.

Our inaction or cynical action constitute a serious betrayal of our education, of our historic mission and of succeeding generations who will have no future unless we do battle now to preserve it for them.

Where does a Chairman, on whose watch the SDF has consistently lost an average of 30% of its political fortunes after each election, find the nerve to be so foul-mouthed? Mr. Fru Ndi might have pulled Akonteh from the gutter and paid his rents as he claims, but Akonteh’s commitment and service to the SDF and to Cameroon’s democracy are also unimpeachable.

This piece has also been enriched as a result of his experience as a civil administrator with the the CPDM clan, and his experience as a civil Affairs officer with UNMI HAITI.

Julio in your piece you said, you sai any serious politician seeking to accede to the pinnacle of power in Cameroon should know by intuition that it is in his best interest to be in the good books of France. WHY?" This is a culture i strongly discourage.Must Cameroon be governed from foriegn boundaries? Fru Ndi like any other Cameroonian with a Democratic mind thought that will be a strategy to reduce French interest in Cameroon.