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Do you think that Green Capitalism is a satisfactory response from the status quo to address the challenges of climate change, peak oil and resource scarcity in Africa? YASH TANDON: I am afraid not. It does not solve the problem of the control of Africa`s resources – including oil, minerals, land, water and forestry – by global corporations.

I doubt that China and India are driven by the motive of “helping Africa to develop”. They are in Africa because they need Africa`s resources, and openings for investing their capital. Nobody from outside is going to develop Africa. That is Africa`s responsibility. Therefore African governments must negotiate trade and investment terms with India, China -- and others -- with knowledge, skill and shrewdness.

the SC seeks to provide a policy platform for the countries of the South to coordinate their negotiating positions on issues ranging from trade agreements to intellectual property, climate change, human rights, health and human security.

Nonetheless, there are policies that the present government has put in place that are sensible – for example, on putting limitations on capital account and ownership of banks – but Ethiopia is still too dependent on aid from outside. This constrains its ability to shape its own development path.

Development comes from a deep understanding of the situation Africa finds itself in contemporary times. Development is always self-development. It cannot come from outside. Pain and sacrifice are necessary ingredients of development, both for individuals and for nations. The “soft bed” of foreign aid is the road not to development but to slavery.

Thus, I argue below, the reform strategy will fail, although not because of Pretoria’s lack of positionality and international credibility to carry out NEPAD and win endorsements from global elites.

Instead, as argued in five subsequent sections, the failure is already emanating from the very project of global reformism itself, namely, Mbeki’s underlying philosophy and incorrect analysis, ineffectual practical strategies, uncreative and inappropriate demands, and counterproductive alliances.

Moreover, notwithstanding mixed rhetorical signals, Mbeki and NEPAD for all effective purposes exclude (indeed, most often reject) alliances with international social, labor, and environmental movements who, in their struggles for socio-environmental and economic justice, are the main agents of progressive global change.

Tellingly, NEPAD does not mention that although poverty increased dramatically in the wake of the 1997-99 emerging markets crisis, foreign investors (especially New York and London financiers) generally recovered their funds, and new U.S. investors in debt-ravaged Asian firms were able to pick up assets at fire-sale prices.

Indeed, the systematic unfairness applied to Africa also applies to South Africa, Mbeki has learned since 1994.

[T]here is nobody in the world who formed a secret committee to conspire to impose globalization on an unsuspecting humanity. The process of globalization is an objective outcome of the development of the productive forces that create wealth, including their continuous improvement and expansion through the impact on them of advances in science, technology and engineering.

The technology-centric “admission” is fundamentally apolitical and disguises the reality of dramatic changes in class relations, especially the resurgent power of U.S. and EU capital in relation to working classes there and across the world (as reflected in stronger state-corporate “partnerships” and the decline of the social wage during the Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl administrations).

The prime culprits in making South Africa so vulnerable were, firstly, the government’s March 1995 decision, under intense pressure from local and international financiers, to discard the “financial rand” dual-rate exchange control mechanism, and secondly, the permissions granted from 1999-2001 to allow the largest South African firms to relocate (or delist entirely) their financial headquarters from Johannesburg to London.

Simultaneously, economic advice poured in from international financial centers, based upon persistent demands not only for macroeconomic policies conducive to South Africa’s increased global vulnerability, but also for social policies and even political outcomes that weakened the state, the working class, the poor, and the environment.

South Africa, too, witnessed mass protests against neoliberalism: by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in May 2000 and August 2001, at the World Conference Against Racism in September 2001, and in repeated local settings (against, for example, water/electricity cutoffs and evictions due to poverty) in Soweto, Chatsworth, Mpumalanga, Bredell, Tafelsig, and many other sites.

Mbeki had earlier embarked upon a late 1990s’ “African Renaissance” branding exercise, which he endowed with poignant poetics but not much else. The contentless form was somewhat remedied in the secretive Millennium Africa Recovery Plan, whose powerpoint skeleton was unveiled to select elites in 2000, during Mbeki’s meetings with Bill Clinton in May, the Okinawa G-8 meeting in July, the UN Millennium Summit in September, and a subsequent European Union gathering in Portugal. The skeleton was fleshed out in November 2000 with the assistance of several economists and was immediately ratified during a special South African visit by World Bank President James Wolfensohn “at an undisclosed location,” due presumably to fears of the disruptive protests that had soured a Johannesburg trip by new IMF czar Horst Koehler a few months earlier.

To his credit, though, the erratic Obasanjo had led a surprise revolt against Mbeki’s capitulation to Northern pressure at the World Conference Against Racism in September 2001, when he helped generate a split between EU and African countries over reparations due the continent for slavery and colonialism. Tellingly, even loose talk of reparations is purged from NEPAD.

It is arguable that Mbeki’s approach to the first front, debt relief, has already done incalculable damage, mainly by virtue of his failure to endorse the Jubilee movement’s campaign against “odious debt,” including apartheid debt.

But HIPC is already widely derided–especially in the Jubilee South movement–as “a cruel hoax.” Along with the IMF/World Bank Comprehensive Development Frameworks and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Programs, HIPC deals are fundamentally committed to maintaining existing power relations and the neoliberal economic philosophy, because they entail only very slight adjustments to debt loads and in return require lowest-income countries to further liberalize.

Regarding the second issue, inflows of capital, there are two kinds worth considering: financial and foreign direct investment. It hardly needs arguing that “hot-money” speculative inflows to emerging markets such as South Africa do not by any stretch qualify as “a prerequisite for development.” Nor do the vast majority of foreign loans granted to third world governments over the past thirty years, including concessional (0.75% interest rate) loans through the World Bank’s International Development Association and African Development Bank. Those loans serve as the leverage for gaining neoliberal conditions from borrowers. Repayment of even concessional hard-currency loans is extremely expensive once a country’s currency collapses, as happens regularly to Africa.

after having done all in his power to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), not even Mbeki has succeeded. Good governance and political stability are not the key factors, Africa has learned; otherwise oil-rich Angola and Nigeria would not be the continent’s main beneficiaries of FDI inflows.

NEPAD’s main solution to the foreign investment drought appears to be the promotion of a foreign stake via “Public-Private Partnerships” in privatized infrastructure: “Establish and nurture PPPs as well as grant concessions toward the construction, development and maintenance of ports, roads, railways and maritime transportation… With the assistance of sector-specialized agencies, put in place policy and legislative frameworks to encourage competition.” The lack of justification for this initiative–aside from Africa’s capital shortage–is extremely unsatisfying, given that most infrastructure is of a “natural monopoly” type, for which competition is unsuitable.

Third, regarding foreign aid, Mbeki calls for “more and better managed aid so as to deal with the basic needs that will have to precede any form of development in certain areas.” One problem is that Mbeki did very little in practice to dissuade Clinton and other international leaders from the classically neoliberal trend known as “trade, not aid” (the 1990s value of North-South aid fell by a third).

The effectiveness of “partnership” was made explicit in 1998-99, when U.S. Vice President Al Gore lobbied Erwin, Health Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, and Mbeki himself to roll back the 1997 Medicines Act, which promoted the parallel import and generic production of antiretroviral drugs essential in fighting HIV/AIDS. The transnational pharmaceutical corporations threatened a constitutional lawsuit against the act, which they actively pursued for a month in March 2001 before international protest forced them to withdraw. This life-and-death case of technology transfer–blocked by corporations whose billions of dollars in profits overrode access to drugs that would save millions of lives–is instructive about the nature of alliances.

It was not Erwin’s philosophy of a fair and just trade partnership that persuaded Vice President Gore to reverse his position. A vibrant “Treatment Action Campaign” of grassroots militants emerged in South Africa during 1999, embarked on protests at U.S. consulates in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and began networking with the Philadelphia, New York, and Paris chapters of the advocacy group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Gore was confronted repeatedly and aggressively by protests in Tennessee, New Hampshire, California, and Pennsylvania at the very outset of his presidential election campaign in mid-1999. Numerous newspapers carried front-page stories on Gore’s quandary.

But with whom in the world does Thabo Mbeki really have an honest partnership, and with whom is he building genuine solidarity? Notwithstanding the eloquence of his Atlanta speech, the answers are not obvious.

Mbeki and the ANC repeatedly unveiled repressive tendencies: against millions of antiprivatization strikers in the trade union movements, against thousands of community residents in Soweto suffering from unaffordable services because of privatization pressure, and against leading opponents of Mbeki’s AIDS policies, who during 2000 were reportedly labeled by Mbeki as “infiltrators” of the trade union movement and agents of pharmaceutical corporations and the CIA.

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.

Crawford Young points out, although the term “Buta Matari” was particular to the Belgian Congo, “its evocative imagery can be projected onto the much larger domain” of the African colonial state. By its nature and functions, the colonial state was the state as bula matari. Political repression was its underlying basis, as it operated through force and authoritarianism.

he colonial bureaucracy ruled; as Louis XIV had proclaimed of himself, it was the state: though with this difference, that the administrator-kings of the colonial services were not even of the country; and for all their insistence that they were motivated not by political but by administrative needs, it was the needs and the politics of the metropolis which almost exclusively determined the fate of the colonial subject.

Even before the fundamental law of Guinea-Bissau was adopted, the PAIGC program had already spelled out the key aspects of the democratic system to be established. It consisted of a republican, democratic and secular government; the organization of power based on free and general elections; and the total transformation of the inherited colonial administration into democratic structures for national and local administration. In liberated areas, village councils were already the embodiment of the practice of decentralization, with increased participation by women and young people (as each council consisted of three men and two women), and people having a say in decisions that affect their lives. Such a system of local administration was more consistent with Cabral’s notion of “cooperative democracy” than a system based on opportunism, clientelism, promotion of primordial ties, telling lies, etc., as in many African countries today.

I have heard in my own country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and there are testimonies from elsewhere in Africa, of old people asking intellectuals when this “independence of yours” is going to end, so they could go back to the political order, economic stability, and social benefits of the 1950s. While this might be a minority position, it is nevertheless a strong indictment of the failure of the postcolonial state to provide at the very minimum the basic necessities of life; maternities, health centers and schools with adequate equipment, furniture and supplies; and good roads and transportation facilities to make it easier for peasant farmers to bring their produce to urban markets.

For Cabral, liberation from colonial domination is meaningful only when it goes beyond the political realm to involve the development of “production, education, health facilities and trade.” With respect to property rights, four types of property were to be recognized: personal, private, co-operative, and state. Priority was to be given to the development, modernization and transformation of agriculture, with a view to ensuring prosperity and preventing agricultural crises, drought and famine. Here again, as in the political sphere, the liberated areas were to serve as a prefiguration of the postcolonial state. There, and later on in the postcolonial state, the ruling party was to focus on the following tasks:

The transformative agenda of reconstruction and development outlined here is ambitious but doable. It is consistent with the view of Africa’s most prominent economist, Samir Amin, that the continent cannot develop without an industrialization strategy based on the modernization of agriculture and the production of capital goods in Africa. The greatest challenge for African countries is to be able to conceive and execute development strategies that are likely to satisfy the deepest aspirations of the popular masses for economic development and material prosperity. The question that Cabral raises is a simple one. Are African leaders going to make common cause with their people by opting for those policies likely to meet the latter’s needs, or are they going to side with the international bourgeoisie and accept the antisocial development strategies and policies imposed by the IMF and the World Bank?

Instead of establishing democratic developmental states, we are faced with the political economies of plunder, a subject on which Mbaya Kankwenda has published an excellent analysis with respect to the DRC.

At the memorial service for Kwame Nkrumah on May 13, 1972 in Conakry, Cabral on behalf of the African liberation movements renewed their “pledge to the total liberation of Africa and the progress of African peoples.”

What is significant about the Rwandese concept is its dual objective of saving the forests and also the ‘forest communities’. For the environmentalists forests are simply biomass that on the one hand provide fuel and on the other hand carbon dioxide absorbing ‘lungs’ as a counter against global warming. But besides the forests there are also forest dwellers. The challenge is to save the forests and the forest communities; the people as well as the environment.

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.

To those who see in it a theoretical character, we would recall that every practice produces a theory, and that if it is true that a revolution can fail even though it be based on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory.

if class struggle is the motive force of history, it is so only in a specific historical period.

The important thing for our peoples is to know whether imperialism, in its role as capital in action, has fulfilled in our countries its historical mission: the acceleration of the process of development of the productive forces and their transformation in the sense of increasing complexity in the means of production; increasing the differentiation between the classes with the development of the bourgeoisie, and intensifying the class struggle; and appreciably increasing the level of economic, social and cultural life of the peoples. It is also worth examining the influences and effects of imperialist action on the social structures and historical processes of our peoples.

On the question of the effects of imperialist domination on the social structure and historical process of our peoples, we should first of all examine the general forms of imperialist domination. There are at least two forms: the first is direct domination, by means of a power made up of people foreign to the dominated people (armed forces police, administrative agents and settlers); this is generally called classical colonialism or colonialism is indirect domination, by a political power made up mainly or completely of native agents; this is called neocolonialism.

the social structure of the dominated people, whatever its stage of development, can suffer the following consequences: (a) total destruction, generally accompanied by immediate or gradual elimination of the native population and, consequently, by the substitution of a population from outside; (b) partial destruction, generally accompanied by a greater or lesser influx of population from outside; (c) apparent conservation, conditioned by confining the native society to zones or reserves generally offering no possibilities of living, accompanied by massive implantation of population from outside.

But in the concrete conditions of the present-day world economy this dependence is fatal and thus the local pseudo-bourgeoisie, however nationalist it may be, cannot effectively fulfill its historical function; it cannot freely direct the development of the productive forces; in brief it cannot be a national bourgeoisie. For as we have seen, the productive forces are the motive force of history, and total freedom of the process of their development is an indispensable condition for their proper functioning.

the so-called policy of ‘aid for undeveloped countries’ adopted by imperialism with the aim of creating or reinforcing native pseudo-bourgeoisies which are necessarily dependent on the international bourgeoisie, and thus obstructing the path of revolution;

one of these measures seems to us indispensable, namely, the creation of a firmly united vanguard, conscious of the true meaning and objective of the national liberation struggle which it must lead

the colonial situation neither permits nor needs the existence of significant vanguard classes (working class conscious of its existence and rural proletariat)

The colonial situation, which does not permit the development of a native pseudo-bourgeoisie and in which the popular masses do not generally reach the necessary level of political consciousness before the advent of the phenomenon of national liberation, offers the petty bourgeoisie the historical opportunity of leading the struggle against foreign domination, since by nature of its objective and subjective position (higher standard of living than that of the masses, more frequent contact with the agents of colonialism, and hence more chances of being humiliated, higher level of education and political awareness, etc.) it is the stratum which most rapidly becomes aware of the need to free itself from foreign domination.

the petty bourgeoisie, as a service class (that is to say that a class not directly involved in the process of production) does not possess the economic base to guarantee the taking over of power.

This alternative — to betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class — constitutes the dilemma of the petty bourgeoisie in the general framework of the national liberation struggle.

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.

The best example of this development assistance is the building of the Tanzania–Zambia Railway (TAZARA), ‘one of the lasting monuments to its former presence’. China helped Tanzania and Zambia build the railway of 1,860km for US$500 million during 1968–86 with about 30,000 to 50,000 Chinese involved (64 people died). As Jamie Monson points out: ‘… the Chinese had articulated their own vision of development assistance in Africa throughout the Eight Principles of Development Assistance … these principles reflected China’s efforts to distinguish its approach to African development from those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Several of these principles had direct application to the TAZARA project.’[6]

Recent collaboration between China and Nigeria to launch a communications satellite, NigSat I, is a groundbreaking project where China has provided much of the technology necessary for launch and on-orbit service and even the training of Nigerian command and control operators. While Nigeria acquired satellite technology, China also gained from the collaboration by burnishing its credentials as a reliable player in the international commercial satellite market.[8]

In January 1963, China was the first to express its willingness to provide medical assistance to Algeria, marking the beginning for China to provide medical aid other countries.[9] Since then, Hubei Province has been in charge of the dispatch of the Chinese Medical Team (CMT) to Algeria. Up to 2006, Hubei had sent out more than 3,000 medical personnel/times (p/t) to Algeria and Lesotho. The latter started to receive CMT in 1997.

The great advantage of CMT is the Chinese traditional medical treatment, especially acupuncture. The reputation of CMT has spread to neighbouring countries. In Mali, while the climate and living conditions cause many cases of rheumatism, arthritis and psoatic strain, acupuncture is the most effective cure for the cases.

CMT’s service was noticed by David Shinn, the US former ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. He said: ‘China received praise in Liberia for its medical teams because they prioritise the transfer of knowledge and technology. They sent specialists and general practitioners, who upgraded and built the professional skills of local heath workers. In the case of war-torn Liberia, this is a critical medical need.’[14]

Cotecxin, the most effective anti-malaria drug produced in China, and acupuncture have won a great reputation in Africa. In certain areas, life habits and the abuse of medication cause serious disease. In Mali, malaria is very common and people have to take Quinine for treatment and many people suffer from limb hemiplegia caused by the overuse of Quinine.

Two of my students are Africans. Although the content was interesting, two of my African graduates complained when they were talking about their assistance to Africa that there was no African present except the two of them. This situation is by no means particular. I have attended some of the workshops with the same peculiar characteristic: talking about important African issues without Africans’ participation. Can we decide the issue for others? That is the key question.

The World Bank official asked the official of the ministry, ‘Do you know why you Chinese are more successful in the aid issue?’ The answer was negative. Then the World Bank official explained. ‘Let me tell you why. It’s just because we know what aid we can provide in Africa while you don’t know. Since you are not clear, you ask the Africans about this and they told you what they exactly need. That is the reason you are more successful.’ Can we decide what others need? This is another key question.

Conditional within land lease agreements is the requirement that the government will clear the area of “encumbrances”, meaning indigenous people – families, children and pastoralists, as well as cattle, wildlife, forests, anything in fact that will interfere with the levelling of the land, building of [foreign] workers’ accommodation, roads and the eventual sowing of crops.

Along with pastoralists, who number around 300,000 in Gambella alone, villagers are herded, sometimes literally, always metaphorically, at the end of a rifle, into Villagisation camps. Despite Government promises to “provide basic resources and infrastructure, the new villages”, HRW found “have inadequate food, agricultural support, and health and education facilities”.

The government proclaims land sales are part of a strategic, long-term approach to agricultural reforms and economic development, that foreign investment will fund infrastructure projects, create employment opportunities, help to eradicate hunger and poverty and benefit the community, local and national. The term “development” is itself an interesting one: distorted, linked and commonly limited almost exclusively to economic targets, meaning growth of GDP, established principally by the World Bank, whose policies and practices in relation to land sales, the OI discovered, “have glossed over critical issues such as human rights, food security and human dignity for local populations”, and its philanthropic sister, the International Monetary Fund. Meanwhile market fundamentalism drives the exported (one size fits all) policies, of both ideologically entrenched organisations, that promote models of development seeking to fulfill corporate interests first, last and at every stage in between.

Protagonists laying claim to the all-inclusive healing powers of agriculture and agro-industrial projects, contradict, the OI states, “the basic facts and evidence showing growing impoverishment experienced on the ground”. What about the bumper benefits promised, particularly the numerous employment opportunities? It turns out industrialised farming is highly mechanised and offers few jobs; overseas companies are not concerned with providing employment for local people and care little for their well-being, making good bed mates for the ruling party. They bring the workers they need, and are allowed to do so by the Ethiopian government, which places no constraints on their operations.

Fatefully for Africa, this debt came due, in the 1980s, just as the premises of the dominant players in the development game were changing. The western Keynesian consensus that had sanctioned the agricultural levies, the industrialization dream, the social services sensibility, and the activist state of the immediate post-independence decades—and lent money to support all this—was replaced by “neoliberalism.”

States in Africa felt compelled to comply: they were debtors, after all, and, with the decline of the Eastern bloc, were also fast losing whatever limited leverage this alternative source of support had given them.

“What has emerged in Accra,” Eboe Hutchful once wrote of the Ghanaian SAP experience, “is a parallel government controlled (if not created) by the international lender agencies…[while] the other side of the external appropriation of policy-making powers is the deliberate de-politicalization that has occurred under the ERP [Economic Reconstruction Programme], and the displacement of popular participation and mobilization by a narrowly-based bureaucratic management.”15

For political support, the new leaders had to rely not on urban working classes or middle classes, which mostly barely existed, but on rural notables, whose allegiance they secured through chains of patronage stretching from the ministers’ offices to the villages.

There was, of course, another trajectory to African politics—some states which professed to bend the logic of global capitalism in favor of more progressive outcomes: Ghana, Tanzania, and Mozambique, among others.

Mozambique and Angola: far too many instances of overweening industrial plans and of forced villagization in the countryside, far too little democratic sensibility towards the complex values and demands of their presumed popular constituencies. Future attempts to develop counter-hegemonic projects in Africa will have to learn lessons from such experiences and also determine how to disentangle, for purposes of popular mobilization, the discredited notion of socialism from this troubled past.

Thus Jonathan Barker speaks of the existence, in Africa and beyond, of “thousands of activist groups addressing the issues of conserving jobs and livelihoods, community health, power of women, provision of housing, functioning of local markets, availability of local social services, provision and standard of education, and abusive and damaging working conditions.”35

“African peoples have adopted many diverse strategies to challenge, deflect, or avoid bearing the costs of austerity involved and to seek a political alternative to the politicians they hold responsible.”They also document an impressive range of (primarily urban) actors—“lawyers, students, copper miners, organizations of rural women, urban workers and the unemployed, journalists, clergymen and others”—whose direct action in recent years has shaken numerous African governments.36

Such resistances—what Célestin Monga refers to as the “collective insubordination” of Africa37—have been one factor driving the renewed saliency of democratic demands on the continent.

in Zimbabwe in recent years arguing (alongside other popular organizations) for the formation of a new party to challenge the rancid Mugabe regime from the left: as Patrick Bond writes of this initiative, “What is crucial is that the opposition’s political orientation is potentially both post-nationalist and post-neoliberal, perhaps for the first time in African history.”39

"The process is more symbolic than anything else. It is really about setting the tone for the future governance of Guinea. But it is important that these messages are sent now, so that any future government can build on them."

Some question whether anti-corruption bodies have the power to make a difference. Abdoul Rahamane Diallo, Guinea programme co-ordinator for the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, says: "The problem with all these bodies is that they do investigations, they get reports, but they cannot prosecute.

"Sometimes it feels as if the state is disappearing beneath these private enterprises," adds Falcone, whose organisation has 44 staff and a budget of only £75,000 a year. "These companies have the means to influence our politicians and political parties. But fortunately we are beginning to form stronger institutions to take them on."