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Gen. Hogg says AFRICOM’s mission is to combat famine and disease. Yet, the AFRICOM-assisted Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in late 2006 led to “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa – worse than Darfur,” according to United Nations observers. The 2007 humanitarian crisis and the escalating U.S.-directed war against Somalia made the 2010 famine all but inevitable.

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.”

Maren claims that all the aid agencies in Somalia knew that relief food was being stolen, but neglected to mention this fact in their reports or during fund-raising campaigns because millions of dollars and thousands of jobs were at stake. He says that neither the US Government nor United States Agency for International Development (USAID) officials were interested in his revelations, perhaps because, as this month’s New African magazine suggests, all of the United States’ food aid programmes ‘are designed to develop and expand commercial outlets for US commodities in world markets’.