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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Washington in Africa 2012 - 0 views

  • instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends’
  • Sorry, but we recall Washington’s deregulatory support for Wall Street’s market-driven binge, which in 2008-09 contributed to the worst global economic crash in 80 years, resulting in around a million South African job losses. We know that only the wealthy recovered so far, and that in the US, the top 1 percent received 93 percent of all new income since 2009, because the system wasn’t fixed. And who can forget White House hypocrisy when it comes to vast and often illegal US agro-corporate subsidies which continue to thwart African production? And is there any capital city whose political system is more corrupted by corporate (especially banking) campaign contributions than Washington, resulting in such extreme malgovernance that Obama cannot even make an effort to convict a single banker for world-historic economic misdeeds?
  • incorporating the wasting of Africa’s ‘natural capital’ (a silly phrase but one used increasingly by powerbrokers eyeing the ‘Green Economy’). Measuring this loss is something that 10 African leaders agreed to start doing so in May, in the Gabarone Declaration initiated by Botswana president Ian Khama and the NGO Conservation International. The adjustment entails counting the outflow of natural capital (especially non-renewable mineral/petroleum resources) not only as a short-term credit to GDP (via ‘output of goods’ measuring the resources extracted and sold), but also as a long-term debit to the natural capital stocks, as non-renewable resources no longer become available to future generations. Number-crunch the resource depletion, and net wealth declines in Africa as well as the Middle East.
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  • 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.’
Arabica Robusta

South Africa's untold tragedy of neoliberal apartheid | ROAR Magazine - 0 views

  • All of this became painfully obvious in August last year when militarized police forces violently cracked down on a wildcat miners’ strike in the platinum town of Marikana. In the ensuing bloodbath, the most serious bout of state violence since the Sharpville massacre of 1960 and the end of apartheid in 1994, 34 workers were killed after being peppered with machine gun fire at close range.
  • The story of South Africa over the last 20 years must qualify as one of the most authentic political tragedies of our era. Once upon a time, not very long ago, the country was held up as an example to the world. In 1994, when the apartheid regime finally came to an end and South Africans overwhelmingly elected Mandela as their first democratic President, the world looked to South Africa with a mix of hope and expectation.
  • In this brave new world, Mandela was a former revolutionary turned philosopher-king; an elder of the global village who came to represent not only the suffering and aspirations of black Africans, but also the hopes and desires of Western progressives. Mandela mingled with world leaders, the European royalty and multi-billionaires; he hung out with popstars and sports legends, but he also maintained a close friendship with Fidel Castro and Muammar Khaddafi. Father Madiba, in a way, was above politics. Or was he?
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  • While a couple of pejoratively called “black diamonds” have made it to the top, crafting a small indigenous elite that slowly takes up residence in the old vestiges of white privilege, for the vast majority of South Africans nothing has really changed.
  • Samir Amin once wrote that “the logic of this globalization trend consists in nothing other than that of organizing apartheid on a global scale.” Apartheid here is not meant as a metaphor; it is what a philosopher might call an ontological category of the neoliberal world order. As Slavoj Žižek has argued, “the explosive growth of slums in the last decades … is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times.”
  • First of all, the ANC decided to take over existing institutions — political and economic institutions that were based on systematic exclusion and massive inequality — and thereby ended up unwittingly reproducing these same oppressive structures with a new elite formation. Secondly, as Lawrence Hamilton explains in his book The Political Philosophy of Needs, the ANC leadership deliberately embraced a particular ideological vision of how to “transform” the country: a vision he refers to as the “political philosophy of rights”, in other words: liberalism. South Africa’s new constitution was the clearest manifestation of this: everything was put to work to secure the rights of individuals to vote and be represented, to own property, and to not be discriminated against in any way. Little attention, however, was given to questions of political participation, genuine popular sovereignty, and the satisfaction of basic human needs.
  • Partly because of the reigning neoliberal ideology of the time, and partly out of fear of reproducing the Zimbabwean experience where Mugabe’s violent land expropriations had led to a white exodus and economic collapse, Mandela and the ANC opted for a gradualist approach that actually ended up turning the ANC into an agent of apartheid itself. Legally, the property rights of white landowners took priority over the human needs of local shackdwellers. Workers’ rights were increasingly hollowed out as the right to unionize gave way to the “right” to be “represented” by a corrupt and ANC co-opted union leadership. The state-oriented approach and the political philosophy of rights thus locked poor South Africans into a logic of representation and top-down decision-making whereby human needs, social autonomy and political participation came to be subordinated to the formation of a new political and corporate elite of former ANC revolutionaries.
  • The so-called Abahlali baseMjondolo, or shackdwellers’ movement, has since spread to Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg.
  • The action was just one more expression of the dawning realization around the world that, in these times of universal deceit, only an insistence on radical autonomy can take the revolution forward.
  • Twenty years after apartheid, the old freedom fighters of the ANC have come to reproduce the same structures of oppression against which they once arose.
  • A local slumdweller, probably somewhere in his thirties, lay dead on the side of the road, his body awkwardly twisted into an impossible position, his eyes still wide open. Some two hundred meters ahead, a car had pulled over on the curb, its driver casually leaning on the vehicle while talking to a policeman. No one had even bothered to cover up the body. This man just lay there like a dead animal — another road kill in endless wave of needlessly extinguished lives.
  • This time, however, the policemen and politicians responsible for the massacre were mostly black and represented the same party that had once led the struggle against racial oppression: the ruling ANC of President Jacob Zuma and the iconic freedom fighter Nelson Mandela.
  • Abahlali stresses its autonomy from state institutions, political parties, businesses and NGOs, and rejects both the ANC and its principal rivals in the opposition, drawing instead on self-organization and direct action to secure improvements in living conditions, to defend communities under threat of eviction, to reclaim urban land for social redistribution, and to democratize society from below.
Arabica Robusta

CorpWatch : Congo Copper Mine Deals Questioned - 0 views

  • Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), a global mining company that got its start in Kazakhstan, has won a new $101.5 million license to dig for copper at the Frontier mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The company has been criticized by Global Witness for its purchases of rights from offshore companies connected to Dan Gertler, a controversial Israeli diamond merchant.
  • Per-capita income in the Congo is under $300 a year and experts at the Carter Centre, which was founded by former US president Jimmy Carter, say there is a reason. "In a mining sector defined by irregularities and mismanagement, large industrial mining projects can earn huge profits for investors and government officials,” Sam Jones, associate director of the centre's human rights program, told the Guardian. “(L)ittle revenue finds its way back into desperately impoverished Congolese communities for schools, healthcare, or other social services.”
  • First Quantum, a Canadian company, acquired the rights to mine for copper at Frontier in 2001 but was forced to turn it over to Sodimco, a state owned company in 2010 by the Congolese government. The licences were then sold to Fortune Ahead, a Hong Kong shell company. Meanwhile First Quantum filed multiple legal claims demanding $4 billion in compensation for Frontier and other assets nationalized by the Congolese government.
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  • But exactly who paid whom how much for mining rights in the Congo is up for debate. “ENRC’s purchase of its stake in Kolwezi was structured through a deal between itself and at least seven companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, all connected to Dan Gertler,” states a Global Witness fact sheet. “When ENRC bought the remaining 50 per cent stake in SMKK, it purchased it from another British Virgin Islands company linked to Mr Gertler. Even ENRC’s acquisition of CAMEC involved sale purchase agreements with several offshore companies linked to Dan Gertler which held shares in CAMEC.”
  • Gertler, an Israeli diamond merchant, has been doing business in Congo for over a decade, working first with Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the former president of the Congo, and now with his son, Joseph Kabila, the current president.
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    "Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), a global mining company that got its start in Kazakhstan, has won a new $101.5 million license to dig for copper at the Frontier mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The company has been criticized by Global Witness for its purchases of rights from offshore companies connected to Dan Gertler, a controversial Israeli diamond merchant. "
Arabica Robusta

Peace, Justice and Ethnic Conflict | CODESRIA - 0 views

  • Do not conflate criminal with political violence. Political violence may be criminal, but it is more. Political violence has a constituency • Political violence is seldom a stand alone act. It is most often part of a cycle of violence. When it comes to a cycle of violence, victims and perpetrators often change sides.
  • The South African transition was marked by three characteristics. To begin with, the Cold War had ended and external involvement in South Africa was at an all-time low. Second, the internal situation had reached an impasse. Both sides dropped their maximum goal – victory or revolution – so as to give the political process a chance. Each side de-demonized the other; yesterday’s enemies became today’s adversaries. The difference between an adversary and an enemy is this: you can talk to an adversary, but you have to eliminate an enemy. Finally, when the fighting ended, there was no judicial process. The way ahead was forged through a political process.
  • The first set of concessions is what Joe Slovo, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, called sunset clauses. They promised that the personnel of the old apartheid state – including its security forces, judiciary and civil service – would survive into the post-apartheid order. The state personnel were granted impunity. Only the political establishment had to subject itself to an inclusive electoral process. Second, there was constitutional protection for white-owned property; this protection was translated into a local government law. Third, there were no court trials of perpetrators; there was no judicial process. Instead, there was an amnesty for all. The much-lauded TRC really functioned as a mock quasi-judicial process: no matter the quality of the truth offered, it had no choice but to grant amnesty.
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  • I want to suggest that South Africa offers us deeper lessons. To begin with, it calls on us to broaden and deepen our notion of justice. In the era that followed independence, we thought of justice as mainly social justice. Today, we have narrowed down the understanding of justice to criminal justice, with lawyers as its primary custodians.
  • The negotiations that ended apartheid brought us political justice. That political justice was a reform of the political system – an end to juridical and political apartheid.
  • The twist in Darfur had to do with relations between peasants and nomads. Nomads have a soft notion of borders. They move across borders. So the British decided that nomads who move over large areas of land shall have no tribal homeland. These were the nomads of northern Darfur, the northern Rizeigat.
  • How is this relevant to Kenya? Think of the violence in the Rift Valley. The deep background is colonial. The details are different. But the questions are the same: who has right to land? This is not a question of right against wrong, but right against right. In contention are two sets of rights, each with a different history; one colonial, the other post-colonial; one tribal/ethnic, the other national. The perpetrators may be different, but the issues are not so different.
  • In Kenya, you have had two experiences over the past few decades. The first was the national movement for a constitutional reform. You forged a national coalition, a coalition across ethnic and ideological boundaries. My friend Willy Mutunga called it ‘Constitution-making from the Middle. This attempt at political reform was an exemplary effort, one that inspired the region. But you failed to build on it. Instead, you turned to a contradictory initiative – don’t be vague, go to Hague. The Hague initiative undercut the gains made in the earlier period. Whatever national movement you had built around the constitutional reform process was split along ethnic lines, as each side mobilized in pursuit of revenge, rather than reform, and a different breed of lawyers took over.
  • Soon after the end of apartheid, its lessons were followed in Mozambique, where Renamo had unleashed the most brutal terror against children and women. It was a practice reminiscent of the kind of terror unleashed by LRA in Uganda. That is where the similarity between Uganda and Mozambique ends. The two governments followed entirely different paths: a political reform in Mozambique, and war and punishment in Uganda. You only need to look at the consequences to appreciate the difference: the war is over in Mozambique where the leadership of Renamo sits in Parliament. The war continues in Uganda where the leadership of LRA is still on the run.
  • I want to argue that the issue for us today, the big issue, is political violence. This violence is testimony that we have failed to come to grips with the legacy of colonialism – and the challenge of decolonization
  • The first set of concessions is what Joe Slovo, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, called sunset clauses. They promised that the personnel of the old apartheid state – including its security forces, judiciary and civil service – would survive into the post-apartheid order. The state personnel were granted impunity. Only the political establishment had to subject itself to an inclusive electoral process. Second, there was constitutional protection for white-owned property; this protection was translated into a local government law. Third, there were no court trials of perpetrators; there was no judicial process. Instead, there was an amnesty for all. The much-lauded TRC really functioned as a mock quasi-judicial process: no matter the quality of the truth offered, it had no choice but to grant amnesty. Apartheid did not end in the courts. Its end was negotiated at the conference table. It could not have been otherwise, for at least one reason.
  • Perhaps the most instructive is the case of Zimbabwe, where SADCC under Thabo Mbeki successfully resisted demands by the West that the region isolate Zimbabwe through sanctions. The result was to give time for an internal dialogue. Contrast this with Kenya where the ‘international community’ – along with an influential internal constituency – distorted the internal political process by threatening to give priority to court trials. It is of secondary significance whether these trials were to be internal or international.
Arabica Robusta

Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Power Politics of Bourgeois Democracy - Monthly Review - 0 views

  • the workers would be just as badly treated by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu). With his misleading tendency to “talk left, act right,” Mugabe gave the impression to some observers that his project was genuinely anti-imperialist and capable of empowering the millions of landless rural Zimbabweans for whom he claimed to act.
  • Standards of living had crashed during the 1990s, the state withdrew—or priced at prohibitive levels—many social services, and the economy deindustrialized. State and private sector corruption were rife. In response, various urban labor and social movements—trade unions, human rights advocates, ghetto residents’ groups, militant students, church and Jubilee anti-debt campaigners, women’s organizations, community health workers, and many others—began to offer opposition.
  • But very quickly, what had begun as a working-class party resisting Mugabe’s neoliberalism, malgovernance, and repressive state control was hijacked by international geopolitical forces, domestic (white) business and farming interests, and the black petite bourgeoisie.
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  • Once he had permitted and nurtured the land invasions in the wake of the shocking February 2000 defeat, Mugabe came to rely upon the war veterans and their followers as a paramilitary force. And yet notwithstanding the resurgence of populist rhetoric and a few material concessions from the state, poor and working people saw their incomes—and even their ability to gain access to the staple food, maize—under unprecedented threat by the time of the recent (March 9–10, 2002) presidential election.
  • Geopolitical pressure on Mugabe is mediated primarily through these suspect sources. But for all the Western hypocrisy, the Mugabe victory was nonetheless the product of brutal force. And the division between the observer missions did not break down cleanly along North-South, national, racial, or class lines.
  • One government stands ready and anxious to mediate an elite solution to the Zimbabwe crisis, if one can be found: South Africa. The same government has positioned itself as the main third world arbiter of globalization, in arenas such as trade, finance, aid, sustainable development, racism, non-aligned politics, and many others.
  • In 1976, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith was summoned to meet South African premier John Vorster and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger in Pretoria. In an uncomfortable encounter, Smith was told that his dream of delaying black majority rule in Zimbabwe for “a thousand years” was over. Accommodation with the liberation movements would be necessary, both for the sake of the West’s legitimacy in the struggle against the Soviet Union and simply because Smith’s position—defending legalized racial domination by a quarter of a million white settlers over more than six million indigenous black people, of whom fifty thousand were in the process of taking up arms, at a time of unprecedented economic crisis—was untenable. Smith resisted the inevitable with a mix of ineffectual concessions and heightened repression, but the power that South Africa held over imports and exports was decisive. Simultaneously, guerrilla war intensified and Smith could no longer count on Pretoria’s military backing. Three years after the ultimatum from Vorster and Kissinger, Smith and his conservative black allies were forced to the Lancaster House negotiating table in London, where Zimbabwe was born. Thanks to what Smith termed “the great betrayal” by South Africa and Britain, Zanu and its allies laid down their arms and swept the first democratic election in February 1980. A quarter of a century after that fateful meeting in Pretoria, an analogous moment reappeared in the relations between Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe, thirteen million black Zimbabweans suffer under the rule of an undemocratic, exploitative elite and of a repressive state machinery serving the class interests of a few tens of thousands of well-connected bureaucrats, military, and paramilitary leaders. And this is in the context of unprecedented economic crisis. In South Africa, meanwhile, it is not difficult to posit a similar trajectory of material decline, ruling-party political illegitimacy, and ascendant opposition, as the rand crashed by more than 50 percent over a two-year period and trade union critiques of neoliberal policies harden.
  • Mugabe’s “huge social spending spree” was, in reality, a brief two-year period of rising education and health expenditures, followed by systematic cutbacks and deprivation under IMF and World Bank guidance. The needs of trade unionists were as little respected as were those of any other sector of society.
  • To misread Zimbabwe’s situation so blatantly and self-servingly was not new in Pretoria. As another example that gets to the heart of the exhausted nationalist contradiction, consider the case of former ANC Land Minister Derek Hanekom, who also used Zimbabwe as a whipping boy beginning in 1997. At that stage, land hunger was causing organic land invasions (not war-veteran induced) and farmworker strikes in several areas of rural Zimbabwe. In November, of that year, Mugabe announced that the Land Designation Act would finally be implemented. For South Africa, the specter of large-scale land reform in Zimbabwe would have been terrible for investor confidence at a time when Mbeki’s own Washington-centric structural adjustment program—the misnamed Growth, Employment, and Redistribution strategy—was already failing noticeably.
  • around February 2000, two options emerged: hunker down and mindlessly defend the Zanu government against its critics; or move into a “constructive engagement” mode that might serve as the basis for an “honest broker” role on some future deal-making occasion. A third option—active support Zimbabwe’s social-justice movements, so as to ensure Mugabe authorized genuinely free and fair elections—presumably did not warrant attention; no doubt for fear that the last bullet would inspire South African trade unionists to do the same, and in the near future.
  • Vorster, Kissinger, and ultimately the British managers of Zimbabwe’s transition together hoped for a typical neocolonial solution, in which property rights would be the foundation of a new constitution, willing-seller/willing-buyer land policy would allow rural social relations to be undisturbed, and nationalization of productive economic activity would be kept to a minimum. A black government would, moreover, have greater capacity to quell labor unrest, strikes, and other challenges to law and order.
  • The romance of Southern African liberation struggles made it logical for radical activists across the world to intensify pressure first for the liberation of the Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique (1975), then the former British colony Zimbabwe (1980), then Namibia (1990), and finally South Africa (1994). That kind of solidarity was colony specific. Something more universal has subsequently emerged: North-South unity of progressive activists fighting a common scourge, international neoliberalism. What is most needed, in this new context, is a set of processes that help identify and implement popular solidarity.
  • At the fore of those who would repel both the kleptocratic elite and the generalized economic crisis associated with globalization are progressive civil society groups.
  • what lessons does this confusing period in Zimbabwe’s post-independence experience provide to other third world progressive social forces? The appropriate normative formula is not the dismissal of strengthened state sovereignty as a short–medium term objective. Instead, aligned simultaneously with international popular struggle against Washington and transnational corporate headquarters, the goal must be the rekindling of nation state sovereignty, but under fundamentally different assumptions about power relations and development objectives than during the nationalist epoch. Such power relations can probably only be changed sufficiently if the masses of oppressed people contest those comprador forces who run virtually all their nation states. To do so will require the articulation of a multifaceted post-nationalist political program, grounded in post-neoliberal economic formulations.
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    Once he had permitted and nurtured the land invasions in the wake of the shocking February 2000 defeat, Mugabe came to rely upon the war veterans and their followers as a paramilitary force.
Arabica Robusta

Memo From Africa - France Stirs Ill Will as It Consorts With Region's Autocrats - NYTim... - 0 views

  • The antigovernment demonstrators think France still pulls the strings, and while French officials deny this, their actions often suggest otherwise. In Gabon, where the election of an autocrat’s son dashed hopes for ending 40 years of rule under the Bongo family, Mr. Sarkozy’s man in Africa, Alain Joyandet, showed up at Ali Bongo’s pomp-filled inauguration, telling reporters that Mr. Bongo “must be given time.”
  • recently noted persistent human rights abuses by Cameroon
  • French officials have discouraged scrutiny of African leaders’ corruption, the fruits of which often end up in Paris. A French good-government group’s campaign to expose and recover the “ill-gotten gains” of three of the most notorious leaders — the late Omar Bongo of Gabon, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Congo Republic and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea — has been opposed by the prosecutor of the French Republic on the grounds that the group has no standing to sue, and that the facts are “ill defined.”
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  • Transparency International, had set out in detail the leaders’ extensive luxury real-estate holdings in Paris. Last month, an appeals court in Paris agreed with the prosecutors.
  • “People don’t like France because France isn’t helping Africans freely choose their leaders,” said Achille Mbembe, a political scientist and historian at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. “
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    This article can be part of a comparison of US, Chinese and French approaches to Africa, couched in rhetoric of human rights, economic development, and colonialism.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Swaziland: Wither absolute monarchism? - 0 views

  • The redeeming feature of the Swazi monarchy is that it is largely characterized by peace as compared to many of Africa’s ‘multi-party’ states. Swaziland has never experienced a humanitarian catastrophe such as those which took place in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, Cote d’Ivoire, and Libya. This is one of the chief reasons as to why many Swazis believe in the monarchy.
  • From this distance, the problem of Swaziland is thus the status of the monarchy. The issue here is not openly the legitimacy of the King, but whether in this modern era (an age of political and structural transformations, and the respect for basic human rights) he should continue enjoying the archaic and traditional privileges that previously defeated communities reserved for sovereign potentates during the last two centuries.
  • One of the many areas in which history is known to be foolproof is that when it has changed, it does not matter how long a certain establishment has been in place. This is one way in which the successes of the Arab Spring can be explained.
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  • It also explains the success of the Libyan revolution. That history is sure to impose consequences when one defies it is what Gaddafi failed to realise when he decided to invoke his military mantle with the view to face out the Libyan revolt. Having presided over Libya for close to half a century, Gaddafi became entirely convinced that nothing can depose him from the presidency. Contrary to this conviction, he eventually died a brutish and ignoble death after his capture by ‘cockroaches and rats’, the terms which he used to refer to the revolutionaries. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Paul Biya of Cameroon, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and Yahya Jammeh of Gambia are possibly making themselves victims of a changed history.
  • This system is capable of ensuring that Swaziland retains its cultural tradition within the context of a modern democratic state. This appears close to the nature of transformation which the International Crisis Group (ICG; 2005:1), proposed when it maintained that Swaziland should be transformed into a constitutional monarchy which is characterised by: • The elimination of all vestiges of the 1973 state of emergency, including removal of the king’s arbitrary powers over the legislature and judiciary as well as his right to appoint the prime minister and the cabinet; • Legalization of political parties • A directly elected house of assembly with oversight of royal spending and an elected prime minister as head of government; • Codification of traditional law and its reconciliation with common law, and appointment of an independent judiciary by an impartial judicial commission, and • Civilian oversight of professional security forces.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The revolution and the emancipation of women - 0 views

  • Sankara vehemently and publicly denounced odious debt and rallied African political leaders to do the same.
  • What distinguishes Sankara from many other revolutionary leaders was his confidence in the revolutionary capabilities of ordinary human beings. He did not see himself as a messiah or prophet, as he famously said before the United Nations General Assembly in October of 1984. It is worth quoting from Sankara at length, when before the delegation of 159 nations, he said: ‘I make no claim to lay out any doctrines here. I am neither a messiah nor a prophet. I possess no truths. My only aspiration is…to speak on behalf of my people…to speak on behalf of the “great disinherited people of the world”, those who belong to the world so ironically christened the Third World. And to state, though I may not succeed in making them understood, the reasons for our revolt’.
  • Meaningful social transformation cannot endure without the active support and participation of women. While it is true that women have been deeply involved in each of the great social revolutions of human history, their support and participation has historically often gone relatively unacknowledged by movement leaders.
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  • 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.
Arabica Robusta

Burkina Faso: "Let us remain standing" | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • The government of Burkina Faso has adopted several new policies in an attempt to confront these crises. Yet unfortunately these have mainly been designed to respond to the imperatives of the dominant world powers and they have failed to take into account the realities on the ground. As a result, the main concerns of the large majority of the population have been ignored.
  • It is not that farmers are unable to produce a sufficient quantity of food, it is that they find themselves in a political system that will not allow them to fulfill their potential.
  • Made up of about 1,000 educated and non-educated women, it is a highly organised and active cooperative of women who are aware of their potential to affect change, and to secure greater access to means of production including land, equipment, training and material inputs. Groups of women like this have been able to obtain larger parcels of land through lobbying local leaders.
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  • We regularly read in the press that Saudi Arabia ↑ has purchased enormous areas of crop land for rice production, and several members of the government possess large areas of land in some of Burkina Faso’s most fertile areas without even being farmers! The recently adopted land tenure law is encouraging the development of these destabilising trends.
  • Let me give an example. In 1999, a rural Burkinabé woman, Nagbila Aisseta, accepted ↑ the Hunger Project Africa Prize awarded to the 'women farmers of Africa'. She was a poor woman aged 35 who had not left her village since birth, had never entered a car, knew nothing at all of modern life, but who, little by little, had developed initiatives to create a large organisation involved in livestock farming, agriculture, and market gardening to tackle malnutrition in her area. She was invited to receive her prize at a ceremony at the United Nations headquarters and asked to submit her speech prior to the event in the national Mooré language. It was to be translated into English, which she did not speak, for another person to read out during the ceremony. But she said “No. If it is me that has received the prize then I should speak directly to those who gave it to me. The way I was brought up, when you thank someone you thank them directly, without a go-between.” She asked the United Nations to find a Burkinabé interpreter who could understand both Mooré and English in order to ensure simultaneous interpretation. And this is how it was done. She knew her rights -  in this case the right to speak!
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    The government of Burkina Faso has adopted several new policies in an attempt to confront these crises. Yet unfortunately these have mainly been designed to respond to the imperatives of the dominant world powers and they have failed to take into account the realities on the ground. As a result, the main concerns of the large majority of the population have been ignored.
Arabica Robusta

Mandela's legacy: a man of many parts | CODESRIA - 0 views

  • Dismantling of the Apartheid in the 1990s was one of the great events of the turbulent 20th century, even though the manner of its dismantling was deeply marred by the fact that the critical negotiations which made it possible came in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, in a significant coincidence, those negotiations on the issue of South African settler colonialism ran parallel to those other negotiations, on the Israeli settler colonialism, which led to the Oslo Accords.
  • That’s just about right: “using them.” The ANC was a conservative force when Mandela first joined and even after the radical turn that Mandela and his close associates introduced into its politics, it remained a small party based primarily in the frustrated black middle class. Origins of the alliance with the communists were purely pragmatic. As Charles Longford was to write after Mandela’s death: As an insignificant political force, removed from the black working classes and the poor, ANC stood little chance of generating any meaningful political pressure that might affect change. They needed the black majority. That is why they turned to the South African Communist Party.
  • Only in the American scheme of things is it possible to bestow upon someone the highest honours that the US can give to anyone but also keep the same person on the list of “terrorists”—just in case!
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  • Thanks to the progress towards reconciliation during those negotiations, he was released from prison in 1990, a framework for the protection of white interests in wealth and property was put in place, the whole system of racist laws was abolished, democratic elections were held, and Mandela assumed the Presidency of South Africa in May 1994.
  • On 11th July 2013, John Pilger published a piece on his interview with Mandela after ANC had taken hold of power, had abandoned the black working classes and the poor to their fate, and was launched upon a wave of brisk privatizations and deregulations, which led, among other things, to fabulous enrichment of the new ANC elite, Mandela’s close associates and cabinet ministers in particular. Pilger reports that when he said to Mandela that it was all contrary to what he had said in 1990, the latter shrugged him off with the remark “for this country, privatization is the fundamental policy.” Not only that! Mandela was frequently seen in the company of the most corrupt of his ministers even after he relinquished power and in fact supported Zuma’s bid for the Presidency; in power, Zuma, a former communist leader, acting very much like the Russian oligarchs bred by Yeltsin.
  • The white ruling elite had prepared for such outcomes with great deliberation. It had methodically nurtured a new Black entrepreneurial and professional class through loans, subsidies etc, whose interests predictably came into conflict with those of the black working classes ad the poor who were the mass base of the anti-Apartheid struggle in all its aspects.
  • White South African mining magnates, billionaires and businessmen were meanwhile meeting the exiled leaders of the ANC, such as Mbeki, in European capitals, to offer deals and hammer out the economic structure of post-Apartheid South Africa; a favourite meeting place was a majestic mansion, Mells Park House, near Bath, in England. The IMF backed up the effort with the offer of a loan in 1993 and US-trained ANC economists were soon to huddle together with World Bank officials to map out detailed blueprints for a neoliberal, crony-capitalist future. Those leaders of the ANC who had spent long years in neighbouring countries like Zimbabwe and Zambia had internalised the corrupt ways and authoritarian personality traits typical of the elites in those countries.
  • Ronnie Kasrils—member of the national executive committee of the ANC from 1987-2007 and, concurrently a member of the central committee of the CPSA from December 1986 to 2007—published a damning and self-damning piece on this subject in The Guardian of 24 June 2013, entitled “How the ANC’s Faustian pact sold out South Africa’s poor.” Kasrils would know.
  • What I call our Faustian moment came when we took an IMF loan on the eve of our first democratic election. . . Doubt had come to reign supreme: we believed, wrongly, that there was no other option; that we had to be cautious, since by 1991 our once powerful ally, the Soviet Union, bankrupted by the arms race, had collapsed. Inexcusably, we had lost faith in the ability of our own revolutionary masses to overcome all obstacles. . . by late 1993 big business strategies – hatched in 1991 at the mining mogul Harry Oppenheimer’s Johannesburg residence – were crystallising in secret late-night discussions at the Development Bank of South Africa. Present were South Africa’s mineral and energy leaders, the bosses of US and British companies with a presence in South Africa – and young ANC economists schooled in western economics. They were reporting to Mandela. An ANC-Communist party leadership eager to assume political office (myself no less than others) readily accepted this devil’s pact, only to be damned in the process.
  • When Mandela first joined the ANC it was an ineffectual, conservative platform meant to plead for minor concessions from the whites-only regime. He and his close comrades—Sisulu, Tambo and others—turned it into a fighting outfit for radical demands of racial equality.
  • His oration in Havana on that occasion was quite the equal of the oration that another great African revolutionary, Amilcar Cabral, had delivered in that same city.
  • It is difficult to say why he knowingly settled for a neoliberal dispensation in the course of reaching a settlement for the dismantling of the political and legal structures of the Apartheid regime.
  • There is probably some truth to each of these propositions. The tragedy of it all is that it was during the presidency of one of the most inspiring figures of our time that racial apartheid in South Africa was replaced by a class apartheid so severe that perhaps a majority of the blacks are now worse off today than ever before, relative not only to the white property-owners but also those privileged black ones who have amassed fabulous fortunes since the apartheid state structures were undone. It all became very much worse under Mbeki and Zuma but the foundations were laid earlier, in the process of the negotiations and then in those early years of the democratic republic when Mandela was at the helm of affairs.
  • Freed from ceremonies of state, Mandela recovered in roughly the last decade of his life that moral grandeur which had been his throughout his life until he started making all those compromises as negotiator and then as first President of the Republic. The stirring farewell the people of South Africa gave him was well deserved, and a more sober assessment of his life, his achievements and his shortcomings can now begin. There are in any case ample resources in his legacy for a new generation to invoke his name yet again as they set out to fight for a better South Africa.
  • His political career began in the 1940s, with demands for quite modest reform that fell far short of racial equality but sought to protect the professional and entrepreneurial interests of the black middle class.
  • For all the years when he was the acknowledged supreme leader of the anti-Apartheid movement, even through all those twenty-seven prison years, western governments and media corporations routinely called him a “terrorist,” “communist,” “dangerous Marxist revolutionary” etc. However, once he started negotiations with the white regime during the 1980s, though still from inside the prison, those same governments and corporations took to bestowing more and more international stature upon him. Those negotiations were held in the specific backdrop of the Tripartite Accord that was reached between Cuba, Angola ad South Africa built upon undertakings whereby 50,000 Cuban soldiers withdrew from Angola in exchange for the indepedence of Namibia and South Africa’s commitment to stop the over and covert wars that were destabilizing neighbouring countries. It took another year and two months of negotiations after that agreement for Mandela to be released.
  • Thatcher and Reagan—not to speak of the New York Times—used to refer to Mandela as a “terrorist” well into the 1980s.
  • Thus, while some of the key leaders were physically safe either in prison or in exile, at varying distances from the scenes of fighting, some of the most heroic and promising leaders were killed in battle or fell to assassins’ bullets, most notably Chris Hani, an illustrious communist and the key leader of the armed struggle. His assassination in 1993, on the eve of the accord between Mandela and de Klark, was a key event because, with an incorruptable revolutionary temper and with influence and charisma second only to Mandela’s own, Hani was expected to lead the struggle against the kind of South Africa that emerged after those accords.
  • he relevant fact is that French capital re-entered Algeria on an increasingly elaborate scale while government of the FLN kept degenerating into a spectacularly corrupt and authoritarian bureaucracy, which is what it is to this day.
  • Typical among those companions of Mandela was Cyril Ramaphosa, a former mine workers’ union leader, a deputy president of the ANC (and presidential contender), who became a billionaire board member of the corporation that owns the Marikana mine where South African police shot down 34 striking Black miners in cold blood, in August, 2012. Mandela himself was not corrupt in that sense but favours that wealthy businessmen did to him in such matters as building of his post-retirement home are well enough known.
  • Equally disastrous was the disarray in communist ranks in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Mandela might or might not have been a member of the CPSA, but we do know that Mbeki and Zuma—the second and third presidents of South Africa whose corruptions became the stuff of legend— were high-ranking members in the party’s executive bodies. Not only that. In precisely the period following the dismantling of Apartheid, when South Africa needed massive construction of public housing for the black working classes and the poor who had been condemned to segregated housing in the shanty town—for the very people, in other words, who had actually made the revolution—the privatization of housing was supervised by none other than Joe Slovo, the chair of the CPSA and famous leader of the armed struggle, who was now looking to the World Bank for advice.
  • The first phase of Mandela’s political activism before he was sent to prison, in 1962, was the time of high tide for socialist, anti-colonial and generally revolutionary movements all across the globe, so that an alliance between nationalists and communists was by no means odd or exceptional. It was during that time that socialist revolutions swept through China and Cuba; the two great European empires, the British and the French, were dissolved; revolutionary wars broke out in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria and elsewhere; the Non-Aligned movement arose as a significant force in global affairs. Liberation was the watchword of the times and Mandela was at the time ideologically comfortable in that world. By the time he came out of incarceration in 1990, the Chinese counterrevolution had been in power for over a decade; the Soviet Union was in the process of fragmentation; European social democracy was succumbing to neoliberalism; Arab secular nationalism had been defeated; and radical nationalist regimes across Asia and Africa had become mere caricatures of themselves.
  • This universalist belief was there not only in the moment of his triumph during the 1990s but from the earliest days of his victimization by the apartheid regime. Facing the death penalty during the Rivonia Trial, he spoke eloquently of the Equality he envisaged as normative moral value for all humanity at the end of his speech in court, on 20the April 1964
  • Mercifully, Mandela himself had a sense of wry humour about it. When John Pilger, the well-known journalist, asked him about this elevation to sainthood, Mandela replied: “That’s not the job I applied for.”
  • Mandela received the Order of Lenin in 1990, the last recipient before the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and the US began showering honours on him that same year. Is there any significance to this historical coincidence? Or, we may recall that Mandela relinquished the Presidency in 1999 and, only two years later, in 2001, George Soros was to tell the Davos Economic Forum, "South Africa is in the hands of international capital." When, precisely, did post-Apartheir South Africa fall into those hands: after 1999? Or before?
  • Subsequent trajectory of South Africa seems to have been profoundly shaped by the fact that most of the ANC leaders, some of whom were also important members of the SACP (Mbeke was member of the central committee; Jacob Zuma joined in 1963 and was elected to the Politburo in 1989), spent virtually the whole period of the revolutionary struggle either in prison (such as Mandela and Sisulu) or in exile (most of the others).
  • In this respect, the situation in South Africa was somewhat reminiscent of the Algerian Revolution. Leaders like Ben Bella (the first post-revolutionary President) were captured early and came out of prison with unsullied reputations of legendary proportion; they could negotiate away anything and yet be held in highest esteem. Other men, like Boumedienne (the 2nd President, who replaced Ben Bella), stayed put in neighbouring Tunisia and rose to political power after the French withdrawal on the strength of the Army of the Exterior that had remained in tact, in command of men and materials, while those who fought the bitterest battles on Algerian soil were largely decimated.
  • In Algeria, the famous Tripoli Program was promulgated virtually at the end of the war of Independence, in June 1962, in the very last meeting of the leadership of the National Liberation Front (FLN) before the factional conflicts of that summer broke out. The program was chiefly the work of Redha Malek, Mohamed Bedjaoui, and Mohamed Benyahia, and proposed a "socialist option" for Algeria’s development. It envisioned the nationalization of foreign interests, the inauguration of agricultural cooperatives and an industrial economy largely in the state sector. The program viewed the recently signed Evian Accords with France as neocolonialist because the accords guaranteed the French colons their full property rights and included an article which stated that "Algeria concedes to France the use of certain air bases, terrains, sites and military installations which are necessary to it."
  • All that was more or less written into the kind of transition that was made when the key apartheid structures were abolished. The agreement which ended apartheid and established majority rule based on universal suffrage also allowed whites to keep the best land, the mines, manufacturing plants, and financial institutions, and to export vast quantities of their wealth without restriction.
  • Mandela was an amalgam of moral courage and universalist convictions in his social vision, and of increasingly capitalist, even neoliberal convictions in matters of political economy as well as a peculiarly advanced toleration for the corruption of his colleagues.
  • he became more a symbol of that resistance than an active leader or combatant in the field of battle, and then came out of prison only when a negotiated settlement was at hand. However, three things need to be added immediately. First, not even that long period of incarceration could dent, let alone kill, his indomitable spirit. His resolve remained the same, as did his commitment to humanist value beyond racial or personal hatreds. Second, his stature was such that when a final settlement was to be made, none other—not the senior leaders in exile, nor leaders and commanders stationed in neighboring countries—could be the final negotiator with the opposing apartheid regime. Mandela alone retained that authority to represent Black South Africa as a whole. Transition to post-Apartheid peace would come with his consent, or peace would not come. This unrivalled authority of course implies a unique responsibility for what followed. Third, in his generous acknowledgement of those who had actively supported the people of South Africa he was fearless, and impervious to the effect his open expressions of gratitude would have on his enemies.
  • As Fanon memorably said: the historical phase of the national bourgeoisie is a useless phase. Much worse than useless, we may now add after far greater accumulation of horrors than what Fanon might have imagined.
  • A South African communist told me in the late 1990s while Mandela was president: “we now run the economy they own.” In state policy, the neoliberal turn that had been initiated by the apartheid regime in its latter years was to be extended greatly under ANC rule.
Arabica Robusta

Mandela's Democracy :: Monthly Review - 0 views

  • The land, then the main means of production, belonged to the whole tribe, and there was no individual ownership whatsoever. There were no classes, no rich or poor, and no exploitation of man by man. All men were free and equal and this was the foundation of government. Recognition of this general principle found expression in the constitution of the Council, variously called Imbizo, or Pitso, or Kgotla, which governs the affairs of the tribe. The council was so completely democratic that all members of the tribe could participate in its deliberations. Chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, all took part and endeavoured to influence its decisions. It was so weighty and influential a body that no step of any importance could ever be taken by the tribe without reference to it… In such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery or servitude, and in which poverty, want and insecurity shall be no more. is is the inspiration which, even today, inspires me and my colleagues in our political struggle.
  • The role of the leader is to interpret the arguments and viewpoints put forward in debate in such a way as to make that consensus possible, drawing from expressions of difference a "tribal wisdom" which reaffirms their essential unity. The model requires that the leader who takes this role should be accepted, but not necessarily elected. What is crucial is that the question of leadership be settled beforehand, and kept separate from the question of how the popular will is to be interpreted.
  • In capitalism, wage-labor is the principal means of access to the means of production, and profits depend on not paying more for it than the capitalist can help.
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  • But in this version, the tribal model of democracy remained in a fundamentally ambiguous relationship to capitalism. While it rejected capitalism, it could never provide a real analysis of it. Instead, it saw capitalism as the product of the philosophical outlook of European civilization, against which an African philosophy of harmony and unity might prevail. Invoking a pre-capitalist past as the basis for a call for racial equality within the capitalist present, it was unable to generate a real critique of capitalism, on the one hand, or to reach an effective accommodation with it, on the other.
  • The hereditary position of the chief is lost from view in this version of tribal democracy, and his tolerance of criticism and commitment to open debate comes to the fore.
  • Through all of this, the tribal model is extended significantly, in such a way as to make it a model of the democratic virtues, and in some moments a model of democracy constituted by such virtues.
  • His admiration for the African past presented no barrier to his admiration for the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, British Parliament and the American Congress. These did not belong, as for Lembede, within a fundamentally different philosophical outlook. In this sense, Mandela can be said to have returned the conception of the unified African past to its liberal and missionary origins.
  • The result of this fivefold transformation was to create a moral framework for South African politics in which Africanist and Western liberal elements were integrated in so instinctive and original a way that Mandela himself could probably not have said where the one ended and the other began. This framework had disabling effects in some respects, and enabling effects in others. Although it was a powerful mobilizing tool, it set limits to political clarity.
  • A brief account of his economic views will show how the tribal model made room for the capitulation of the ANC to capital.
  • In Mandela’s case, the ground for it was laid in his earliest economic writing, a defense of the nationalization clauses of the Freedom Charter, published in 1956. The Freedom Charter, Mandela argued, was "by no means a blueprint for a socialist state but a program for the unification of various classes and groupings amongst the people on a democratic basis… [It] visualizes the transfer of power not to any single social class but to all the people of this country, be they workers, peasants, professional men or petty bourgeoisie." The curiosity of the argument is that it neither avoids the existence of classes (as would a liberal democrat, emphasizing individual rights instead) nor draws any conclusion about their relationship (as would a Marxist). It acknowledges the existence of classes, but assumes that each can pursue its aims in harmony with the rest. The model of democracy which enables class relationships to be harmonized is surely the tribal one; just as the chief extracts a consensus from the differing opinions of the tribe, so the democratic state extracts a consensus from bosses and workers, enabling each side to pursue its interests without impeding the interests of the other.
  • Until the meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 1992, he continued to defend nationalization as an instrument of economic policy. But on his return from that event, he noted: "We have observed the hostility and concern of businessmen towards nationalization, and we can’t ignore their perceptions… We are well aware that if you cannot co-operate with business, you cannot succeed in generating growth." The policies of the ANC moved rapidly towards privatization, fiscal austerity, and budgetary discipline. By the time he addressed the Joint Houses of Congress of the United States on October 6, 1994, Mandela was ready to proclaim the free market as the "magical elixir" which would bring freedom and equality to all.
  • Once it became apparent that "the hostility and concern of businessmen towards nationalization" was more than even the prestige of Mandela could alter, his prestige had to be used for the cause of privatization. The capitalist market had become the meeting place of the global tribe!
  • A hidden consistency in his political thought holds together a dual commitment to democracy and capitalism, and legitimates a capitalist onslaught on the mass of South Africans, who sustained the struggle for democracy for decades.
  • Once Mandela had been released from prison and negotiations had begun, the crucial idea which made it possible for the ANC to organize the oppressed majority around the tribal model was that of society being made up of "sectors"—youth, women, business, labor, political parties, religious and sporting bodies, and the like—each with a distinctive role to play. This idea has emerged from the organizational needs of the struggle against apartheid when repressive conditions prevented them from mobilizing around directly political demands. It was now used to insulate the leadership of the liberation movement from critical questioning. In this vein, Mandela explained to the Consultative Business Movement in May 1990: "Both of us—you representing the business world and we a political movement—must deliver. The critical questions are whether we can in fact act together and whether it is possible for either of us to deliver if we cannot or will not co-operate." In calling upon business—and, in their turn, labor, youth, students—to act within the limits of a "national consensus," the question of the basis of that consensus could be removed from sight. In effect, the "tribal elders" of South African capitalism were gathered together in a consensus which could only be "democratic" on the basis of capitalism.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News : Issue 651 - 0 views

  • Dynamic African leaders such as Ft. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings of Ghana, Yoweri Musevini of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Isaias Aferworki of Eritrea and several others, followed in the footsteps of Africa’s founding fathers, and sought to reverse the decline of the continent and build progressive nations in which people’s rights are respected, in which different ethnic groups lived together in peace and harmony and a world in which Africans were respected on equal terms with others. ‘Developmentalism’ became the new ideology of the day. Future generations will judge them but for now, let us celebrate their good intentions.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      This is a questionable group of leaders. Are they not more the bane, and not the boon, of the continent?
  • It should be noted that Burkina Faso and its capital Ouagadougou is one of the most historic places in West Africa. It was the scene to intellectual and cultural renaissance before colonialism desecrated this land.
Arabica Robusta

Terraviva EUROPE - 0 views

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    Spain's relationship with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) also received a boost with a recent cooperation agreement signed between Miguel Ángel Moratinos, Spain's minister of foreign affairs and co-operation and Antipas Mbusu Nyamwisi, the DRC's minister of foreign affairs. The agreement is aimed at basic social services and the protection of the human rights of more vulnerable social groups such as children and women, through support for local institutions. In addition to basic health, education and transport needs, there will be collaboration in projects for environmental protection and sustainable development, and scientific and technological research. It is anticipated that the development of this agreement will begin with the setting up of a combined commission for evaluation, planning and monitoring, which will meet every four years.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Beyond the privatisation of liberation - 0 views

  • At one level the path toward liberalisation should have been opposed by the SACP, but the South African Communist Party found a convenient formulation to support the capitalist road. Their understanding of the stages theory of Marxism meant that South Africa had to pass through a period of capitalist development before the working class could be ready for an alternative to capitalism. This theoretical understanding of Marxism that twisted the revolutionary ideas of class struggles justified the support for the privatisation of large sections of the economy.
  • Former apartheid capitalists were exultant as South Africa’s ‘entrepreneurs’ traversed the continent behind the diplomatic cover of the African Renaissance. The African capitalists fronting for the old apartheid structures accepted the rules of the capitalist system, the racist hierarchy and ethnic power bases and looked to ways to maintain the system while seemingly opposing the very same system that they propped up.
  • In Zimbabwe, the integration of former freedom fighters into the circuits of the Rhodesian state found a new path. After integrating former freedom fighters into the civil service, into the university, into the army, into the police and into the wider bureaucracy, the freedom fighters wanted the land of the settlers. They turned to the language of third liberation to seize the land of the white farmers. What would have been a righteous act of reversing the theft of land from African workers and peasants became one more vehicle for the liberation fighters to become private capitalists. The conditions of the workers on the land did not change as the state became more repressive and intolerant of the wider society. Repression and the privatisation of liberation went hand in glove in Zimbabwe.
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  • in Mozambique the structures of the popular organs such as the women, youth, workers and peasants were weakened. International and western non-governmental organisations invaded the rural communities while the working people were denied the basic democratic rights for collective bargaining and industrial democracy.
  • Jonas Savimbi had fought tenaciously to be the standard bearer for Western capitalism in Angola. However, very early on the MPLA (People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola – Labour Party) accepted the IMF (International Monetary Fund) terms and conditions for neoliberal capitalism.
  • The MPLA leadership built relations with China to widen their bargaining position with international capital. However, this outreach to China and Brazil did not affect the privatisation process. In fact, Chinese private entities such as the Chinese Investment Fund strengthened the capitalist element of the party by importing conditions of labour relations that denied rights to Angolan and Chinese workers.
  • Liberation had become a business and the victories of the people were being distorted for the wealth and power of the ruling families.
  • Jacob Zuma has demeaned the meaning of links to the ancestors by invoking the ancestral spirits on the side of capitalist accumulation.
  • Within the church, the schools, universities, the old media and other intellectual and ideological institutions the struggles intensified but the white capitalists understood that the black capitalists supported the idea of the superiority of the capitalist mode of production. In essence, these blacks supported ideas of racial hierarchy and sent their children to schools that practised overt racial discrimination. So bold had the whites become that at one of the premier universities, the University of Cape Town, it was decided that there was no need to teach African studies.
  • In this political wasteland, Robert Mugabe appeared attractive and earned massive applause when he visited South Africa.
  • Throughout Africa it is imperative that education for transformation support the calls for social transformation. Private property cannot be nationalised with the same mindset that supports the crude consumption of the black capitalists in gated communities. These capitalists manipulate the workers of South Africa on the basis of racial and ethnic identification, and more significantly, these capitalists promote xenophobia to discriminate against other African workers who believe in the concept of Africa for the Africans.
Arabica Robusta

Coal versus Communities in Mozambique: Exposing poor practices by VALE and Rio Tinto - 0 views

  • This paper by Dr. Claude Kabemba and Camilo Nhancale for the Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW), entitled Coal versus Communities in Mozambique: Exposing poor practices by VALE and Rio Tinto, details many of the problems associated with the massive new coal mines from lack of contractual transparency to preference for expatriate workers and foreign suppliers to the unjust resettlement programme, which sparked protests in early January.
  • Vale reportedly paid US$123 million dollars for the mining rights but the money has never been registered with state agents. If this is correct, Vale’s presence in Mozambique – far from benefiting citizens – is undermining revenue transparency and accountability.
  • Vertical integration is undermining local entrepreneurshipThe two investments have provided a new lease of life to Tete Province. There are new economic activities opening up and an influx of people descending on the town. But beneficial links between the extractive companies and local communities do not really exist.
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  • A Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW) research team visited three communities resettled by Vale and Rio Tinto – Mualadzi, a Rio Tinto resettlement compound located about 40km from the original Capanga village; Cateme village, a Vale resettlement compound with 720 families from the villages of Chipanga, Mitete, Malabue-Gombe and Bagamoyo; and 25 de Setembro, another Vale resettlement compound housing people from the same four villages. Vale deliberately divided the communities in two with employed villagers moving to 25 de Setembro since it is closer to Moatize and the mine. The unemployed were sent to Cateme, 40 km from the town.
  • Vale has also used the resettlement process to divide communities into those with formal and those with no formal work. The impression that this model gives is that uneducated and unemployed members of a community can be dumped anywhere.
  • Communities fear that if they continue to be relocated in small groups before all the construction work is done, their legitimate demands will never be met. As they have learned from the people who have already been resettled in Cateme and Mualadzi, the companies are reluctant to complete projects once communities have been relocated.  Rio Tinto moved people to Mualadzi before it had finished building key infrastructure such as school and clinics – and they have still not been built.
Arabica Robusta

Displacement, intimidation and abuse: land loyalties in Ethiopia | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • With the coming of industrial-size farms in Ethiopia, local people, villagers and pastoralists (deemed irrelevant to the Government’s economically-driven development plans) are being threatened, and intimidated by the military; forcibly displaced and herded into camps, their homes destroyed. Along with vast agricultural complexes, dams are planned and constructed, water supplies re-directed to irrigate crops, forests burnt, natural habitats destroyed. Dissenting voices are brutally silenced – men beaten, children frightened, women raped, so too the land.
  • Three quarters of all land deals take place in sub-Saharan Africa, in some of the most food-insecure, economically vulnerable, politically repressive countries in the world; precisely, some say, because of such advantageous commercial factors.
  • In Ethiopia, land sales are occurring in six key areas. Oromia and Gambella in the south, Amhara, Beneshangul, Gumuz, the Sidaama zone, or SNNP and the Lower Omo Valley – an area of outstanding natural beauty with acclaimed UNESCO World heritage status. The Ethiopian government’s conduct in Omo and Oromia, Genocide Watch (GW) considers “to have already reached stage 7 [of 8], genocidal massacres”.
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  • 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.
Arabica Robusta

The imperialist retaking of Africa | www.socialism.com - 0 views

  • France is bombing Mali, the U.S. is expanding its military presence, China is buying up natural resources. It all confirms that Africa is still a coveted gem, and one of the few remaining frontiers for the predators of global capital.
  • With the fall of Gadhafi’s regime in Libya and NATO’s intervention there, Libya’s loosely associated ethnic groups began to unravel. Some moved into Northern Mali, escalating the insurrection there and complicating an already tense political situation.
  • As for France, its real aim is to stabilize the region to protect access to natural resources, particularly uranium.
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  • Instead, the U.S. established “Africa Command” (AFRICOM) in 2007, and has since built three Predator drone bases in the Republic of Seychelles, Ethiopia and most recently Niger, along with a forward operating base in Kenya. Army General David Rodriquez recently said that the U.S. needs a 15-fold increase in “additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities … to protect American interests and assist our close allies and partners.”
  • Only a massive, class-conscious movement that crosses borders and defends the rights and needs of all ethnic and cultural minorities can rally and integrate the working people, farmers and nomads of Africa to counteract their foreign and domestic dictators.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The war on Africa: U.S. imperialism and the world economic crisis - 0 views

  • In the U.S. itself with the advent of Cold War ideology and political repression under McCarthyism, perspectives and political organizing around Africa became a highly contentious arena of struggle. The Council on African Affairs (CAA) and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) during the early 1950s came under fierce attack by the U.S. government and were driven out of existence.
  • Later during the 1960s when the various national liberation movements and independent African states embarked upon the armed struggle as a necessity to fight the U.S. and NATO backed colonial and settler-colonial states in Africa, Pan-Africanist and socialist strategist Kwame Nkrumah identified U.S. imperialism as the major force in the movement for genuine territorial sovereignty on the continent. The U.S., although paying lip service to supporting the anti-colonial movements, sought to stifle and manipulate the national liberation movements for the benefit of Wall Street and the Pentagon.
  • The postponement of these internal crises has apparently run its course. Imperialist war no long delays the impact of the inherent failures of capitalism related to its incapacity to provide housing, jobs, medical services, education and municipal services to the majority of its people. Nonetheless, in its destructive character, imperialism continues on the path of endless war and pursuit of ever-rising rates of profit.
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  • In Somalia, the CIA and AFRICOM have been involved in propping up the Ethiopian occupation and the latter Transitional Federal Government regime since 2006. The African Union Mission to Somalia, AMISOM, is largely a U.S.-controlled military operation which is financed by Washington and provided with political, intelligence and diplomatic cover. Somalia is the source of oil and other strategic interests for imperialism and both the U.S. and NATO have large-scale naval vessels off the coast of the Horn of Africa nation in the Gulf of Aden.
  • The presence of U.S. military and intelligence forces in Africa is designed to bolster the strategic mineral and territorial interests of Wall Street. Africa is now supplying greater amounts of oil, natural gas and other essential minerals to economic interests of the ruling class.
  • The advent of regional blocs such as the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) has served to provide the African Union member-states with both economic and political alliances that are outside U.S. and European Union influence. In regard to China, the socialist state has provided direct economic trade and development assistance which is far superior to the traditional relations established by the imperialist countries which enslaved Africans and colonized the continent for centuries.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Socialist China?  Not really.
  • The Africa-South America Summit has held three gatherings, the latest of which was in March, in order to enhance cooperation and to form a bloc against U.S. efforts to undermine anti-imperialist governments in Latin America and developing relations between Africa and non-Western regional entities. Iran has also strengthened its relations with Africa and Latin America causing serious concerns on the part of the U.S.
  • The joining by the Republic of South Africa of the Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRICS) grouping has resulted in new initiatives being discussed including the creation of a development bank as well as independent foreign policy positions on Syria and Iran that are at variance with U.S. imperialism.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      BRICs.  Goldman Sachs.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Fear and freedom in Africa - 0 views

  • I believe that at this stage in our collective development, youth in many African countries are still seized by flawed ideas of what progress looks like. We hold ourselves to impossibly high standards of “development” that have only been truly achieved in a handful of countries, none of which are particularly vocal about the need to achieve these goals.
  • I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that my trip to Burkina Faso was one of the most memorable experiences that I’ve ever had. Aside from the beauty of the country in all its complexities, the incredible warmth of the welcome I received took me by surprise. Strangers opened up their homes to me. I never paid for transport. I rarely paid for food.
  • Borrowing from X, I would ask African youth: who taught us to fear each other? I’m inclined to believe that we are in fear of an Africa that does not exist save in the mind of an overzealous elitist journalist in search of a sexy by-line or adventure. I challenge you: gather all of your friends who have a passport and have ever used it and ask them where they’ve used it.
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  • 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.
Arabica Robusta

How inclusive is Rwanda's reconciliation project? | Pambazuka News - 0 views

  • According to this version of history, Rwanda’s unity was destroyed by the Belgian administration and the Catholic Church. Economic and political independence were lost, foreign education and religion undercut Rwandan culture, a divide and rule policy set Hutu and Tutsi against each other, and political ethnicity emerged. After independence, the regimes of the first and second republics continued the segregation legacy of the colonial masters, and the problems were compounded. After a lost century, Rwanda’s history resumed in 1994 when the RPF took power after defeating the genocidal regime. It liberated the country from dictatorial leadership, and built a nation based on law, democracy, peace, security, justice and development. The narrative is promoted in the national and international media, at conferences inside the country and abroad, and in speeches of national and local authorities. All Rwandans know it and can recite it flawlessly.
  • However, the RPF’s historical narrative involves “a whole set of false propositions and assertions”, according to a leading historian of Rwanda, Jan Vansina. “The linguistic and cultural unity of the country today did not exist in the 17th century and Rwanda is not a “natural” nation. Rwanda really became a nation in the 20th century … Formerly, neither abundance nor order flourished in the country and it is false to think that everyone was happy with their station in life and all lived under the shepherd’s staff of wise kings,” he writes. The RFP’s narrative of “erroneous propositions” aims at “the projection of a nostalgic utopia into the past, a past that contrasts with a painful present”.
  • The RPF has established a monopoly over the country’s history, to the extent that alternative histories cannot be articulated, at least not in the public arena. Andrea Purdeková argues that, under the RFP, history “is open to replication but closed to debate”. Debate about the past is actively policed by the regime. Indeed, a Rwandan History Project at the University of California, Berkeley initiated in 2001 encountered RFP hostility when it attempted to develop a historical curriculum that included alternative narratives.
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  • Hutus interviewed by Anuradha Chakravarty expressed feelings of sympathy, regret and shame for the genocide against ordinary Tutsi, but they were also suspicious of elite Tutsi. In general, they felt that they were victims of a new period of injustice under elite Tutsi rule. Clearly, attempts to “de-ethnicise” Rwandan society aren’t working, and the result has been to emphasise rather than de-emphasise ethnicity.
  • Graduates of these camps saw them as efforts to exercise social control over adult Hutu men: “instead of being re-educated, these graduates have merely learned new forms of ritualised dissimulation and strategic compliance”. Legislation on “divisionism” and “genocide ideology” serves a dual purpose: it shields the RPF’s views on history, and on national unity and reconciliation, while enabling the regime to silence political dissent. These vaguely formulated laws conflate criminal defamation and other lesser offences, and even the legitimate expression of opinions, with genocide ideology. Apart from legislation, “shadow methods” such as harassment, disappearances and killings are used to foster self-censorship.
  • Rwanda is not unique in having a dominant ideology that is not—entirely—based on reality, whether historical or contemporary. Nor is it unique in having a dominant ideology that is not shared by many people in society whose lives it wishes to affect, and that is challenged publicly or clandestinely, at home and abroad. The problem with the RPF’s ideology is that it goes against the grain: many Rwandans do not share it, instead seeing it as a weapon of oppression. A wealth of field research has shown that there is a wide gap between the government’s official version of history and the versions told in private in Rwanda. This is a major challenge to the validity of the RPF’s ambitious reconciliation project.
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