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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...48919

development government international mugabe oppression pambazuka panafrican progressive transition zimbabwe

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Jun 08 - Cached
  • ZIMBABWE AND THE QUESTION OF IMPERIALISM First, there should be an attempt to clear the landscape of certain obstacles. Zimbabwe was in growing trouble before the sanctions imposed by the governments of Britain and the United States. Still, the attempt to bully a small country’s ruler who was in turn bullying his compatriots draped Robert Mugabe in the role of a hero against imperialism. The attempt encouraged a blundering ruler to stay on course. The ZANU-PF forces and sympathizers have blamed the disastrous economic situation on the sanctions. Yet, the political leaders have accumulated wealth in such a conspicuous manner that their consumption of luxury goods stands out in a country where more than 80 per cent of the eligible workers are unemployed. Millions more Zimbabweans have been rendered as economic refugees in Africa and beyond.
  • Zimbabwe‘s situation has some striking parallels with that of the recent history of Guyana in the Caribbean, where rivalry between anti-colonial forces started long before independence and was only draped in flags at the moment of Uhuru, without serious attempts at a deep resolution of the difficulties. Once in power the Burnham regime did nothing to resolve the ethnic conflict but superimposed on it a parliamentary dictatorship.
  • Of late the western media and certain forces within the United Nations have been reporting the possibility of talks of power sharing, and the arrangement of some form of a transitional authority. While the spirit of these discussions may be guided by the search for social peace, it is urgent that these discussions between the various elements are not carried out behind the backs of the people and do nothing to undermine the political will of the people. But above all there must be an engagement by all to ensure that the elections and its aftermath does not deteriorate into the kind of violence and destruction that was witnessed in Kenya after the elections of December 27, 2007. At all costs, war must be avoided. The present leadership cannot expect to be supported when it terrorizes its own people and unleashes the very same Rhodesian military apparatus (the Joint Operation Command) against the opposition and unarmed civilians.
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  • In 1987 the fusion of ZANU with the Patriotic Front led by Joshua Nkomo was done in such a way that the post-colonial world knew little about it, except that it led to the virtual silencing of the section of the liberation front that had been led by Joshua Nkomo.
  • President Robert Mugabe has been a heroic figure in the continent of Africa, the Diaspora, among African observers and well-wishers. And he would have remained so, if the Pan African world had assisted Zimbabweans with friendly criticism of the government when the flaws began to show. Instead, the whole movement and the international left, including us, remained silent, some longer than others, hoping that such a well-resourced government would correct its own shortcomings. Earlier we had special cause to be partisan to Robert Mugabe, who had extended solidarity to our colleague Walter Rodney when he was being persecuted by the Guyana government.
  • We want to go on record in saying that neither the government of Britain nor the government of the United States has the moral authority to oppose the present government of Zimbabwe. Imperialists and neo- conservatives have their own agenda when imposing sanctions and we are against sanctions in Zimbabwe. Progressive Pan Africanists must remain vigilant so that brutal oppression of the Zimbabwean peoples is not countenanced in the name of anti-imperialism.
  • Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PF may be against imperialism but this group is not against capitalism or the looting of the assets of the society.
  • Those who support the working peoples of Zimbabwe must insist on transparency in dealing with transnational corporations and the integrity of the ruling personnel in their day-to-day activities. This call for accountability is especially important in so far as though we are opposed to the threat of war coming from ZANU PF we are not encouraged by the policies and posture of the leadership of the MDC. These elements have displayed an amazing level of intellectual subservience to the West and to the ideas of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Zimbabwe needs leaders who place the interest of the working people first. It is proper that all progressives support the Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative of the United Nations so that corrupt leaders cannot stash away funds when the people suffer.
  • Experiences in Guyana, in Kenya and in Zimbabwe have taught us that it is a mistake to adopt western standards of victory as our own. Victory for us must mean reconciliation of divided populations. This in each case may best be approached through widespread national conversation spelling out its purpose. Reconciliation will fail utterly if it is imposed; or allows free rein to corruption, militarism or if it ignores the choices of the people in valid elections.
  • Arabica Robusta on 29 Jun 08
     
    Victory for us must mean reconciliation of divided populations. Reconciliation will fail utterly if it is imposed; or allows free rein to corruption, militarism or if it ignores the choices of the people in valid elections. We have responsibility as progressives and Pan-Africanists to Zimbabwe.
  • Arabica Robusta on 29 Jun 08
     
    A more nuanced yet still critical view of Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Particularly useful for critically evaluating the original liberation.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...48819

africa codesria corporations delta epas european hegemony industry mend mosop multinational niger nigeria pambazuka petro-capitalism petroleum shell union

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Jun 08 - Cached
  • In even the most exploitative African sites of repression and capital accumulation, sometimes corporations take a hit, and victims sometimes unite on continental lines instead of being divided-and-conquered.
  • In early June, the British-Dutch firm Shell Oil – one of Rodney’s targets - was instructed to depart from the Ogoniland region within the Niger Delta, where in 1995 Shell officials were responsible for the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa by Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. After decades of abuse, women protesters, local NGOs and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) gave Shell the shove. France’s Total appears next in line, in part because of additional pressure from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.
  • Although it was six months ago that the European Union’s ultramanipulative trade negotiator, Peter Mandelson, cajoled 18 weak African leaderships -- including crisis-ridden Cote d’Ivoire, neoliberal Ghana and numerous frightened agro-exporting countries -- into the trap of signing interim “Economic Partnership Agreements” (EPAs), a backlash is now growing.
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  • “We can’t continue to deal with incompetent, weak, corrupt, supine governments,” explained Dot Keet of the Alternative Information and Development Centre in Cape Town. “But these are not factors of the same order of magnitude. The domination of African countries by neocolonialism and the subordinate stance by African governments are not the same. We must be clear where the main driving force comes from: outside Africa. We have to tackle the source.”
  • Since 2002, the EPAs have supplanted the agenda of the gridlocked World Trade Organisation, just as bilateral trade deals with the US, China and Brazil are also now commonplace. A united Europe deals with individual African countries in an especially pernicious way, because aside from free trade in goods, Mandelson last October hinted at other invasive EPA conditions that will decimate national sovereignty: “Our objective remains to conclude comprehensive, full economic partnership agreements. These agreements have a WTO-compatible goods agreement at their core, but also cover other issues.” Those other “Singapore” issues (named after the site of a 1996 WTO summit) include investment protection (so future policies don’t hamper corporate profits), competition policy (to break local large firms up) and government procurement (to end programmes like South Africa’s affirmative action).
  • As Walter Rodney observed, “It is typical of underdeveloped economies that they do not -- or are not allowed to -- concentrate on those sectors of the economy which in turn will generate growth and raise production to a new level altogether, and there are very few ties between one sector and another so that, say, agriculture and industry could react beneficially on each other.”
  • African countries face unreliable provision of public utilities (electricity and water); poor public infrastructure (run down roads and railways); rapidly fluctuating exchange rates and high inflation; labour productivity problems arising from poor education, health and housing provision; vulnerable market institutions (such as immature financial systems); and poorly-functioning legal frameworks. The EU has no interest in reversing such fundamental structural economic challenges.
  • From early on, African civil society movements – especially the African Trade Network - called on elites to halt the negotiations. But it has not been easy to develop a strong coalition, as Third World Network director Yao Graham concedes: “Unions have been too syndicalist, while our justice movements have been exhausted fighting structural adjustment. The local private sector has been absent. But in some regions, like West Africa, agricultural producers have been well organised and opposed to EPAs. Links to the Caribbean are weak. But we are working behind enemy lines with progressive allies in Europe, including within the Brussels parliament.”
  • because Mandelson is squeezing so hard, he may be single-handedly breaking the links between elites. Led by Senegalese and Malian politicians, most of the African officials at the conference agreed with the left intelligentsia that dangers now arise of: - regional disintegration (due to EU bilateral negotiations and subregional blocs) and internecine race-to-the-bottom competition:
  • Arabica Robusta on 29 Jun 08
     
    In even the most exploitative African sites of repression and capital accumulation, sometimes corporations take a hit, and victims sometimes unite on continental lines instead of being divided-and-conquered.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Hope and despair on the postcolonial campus - 1 views

pambazuka.org/...62349

education postcolonial development international africa pambazuka

shared by Arabica Robusta on 21 Feb 10 - Cached
brian R liked it
  • Colonial professors were what they were, distinguishable hardly from the colonial administrators in town hall. Both had been to college together. Now both were in Africa living the same colonial life in an unjust, unequal, racially divided society.
  • The university radiated serenity, civility, wholesomeness. Within its four walls you forgot you were in the colonies. Within its charmed corridors the colonial professor became again the man of learning that he really in many instances was.
  • To the extent that the writer Chinua Achebe has said of the colonial university that it was the only good thing colonialism did in Nigeria.
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  • The old colonial professors continued to do the same things they did before. Some among them grew contemptuous. The idea of independence for the natives, the audacity of it annoyed them. They vented their anger on students. Look at you, they told the uncomprehending freshmen students.
  • Look at you. In the villages they would be giving you wives now and a spear and a hoe. Here in this white man’s enclave we are giving you books, pen and paper. Look at you. See me Lakayana with my spear. Look at you. The professor assumed a Conrad posture. The natives were welcoming us, cursing us, who could tell.
  • The little known and even less read novel, ‘Marks on the Run’, published in the year 2002 at the Ahmadu Bello University, where I teach, offers some clues. It does so in a way none other has attempted. There is very little debate in Africa about African universities. You are unlikely to encounter anywhere this kind of polemics
  • But nothing has been put in its place. In the vacuum, the regime of marks, grades and the final certificate at the end takes centre stage. It is wielded through the combined dictatorship of lecturers and professors.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Nigeria: Goodluck Jonathan - business as usual? - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...63110

nigeria government politics pambazuka yar'adua

shared by Arabica Robusta on 19 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Behind the scenes is the reliance on the military and mobilisation of base sentiments of ethnic and regional forces by each power camp. While the Yar’Adua camp is mobilising the military bureaucrats (who fear for their careers in a new arrangement) to ensure the thin thread tying Yar’Adua to power, the Jonathan emerging bloc is relying on intelligence forces and old military forces to sustain itself, as seen in the removal of Yar’Adua’s National Security Adviser.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 19 Mar 10
       
      Research further. Jonathan removed the entire cabinet, and not just the national security advisor.
  • the US and European capitalist governments’ concern for democracy in Nigeria is underlined by the economic interests of their big capitalist sharks. This explains the ambiguity in their statements, trying to boost support for Jonathan and at the same time giving room for Yar’Adua’s comeback.
  • the NLC’s statement after its last NEC meeting stated the reason behind its lukewarm attitude toward the country’s political crises. It maintained that some anti-democratic forces want to use mass labour action to hijack power through the military. Does the NLC mean that its actions are a recipe for an anti-democratic takeover of power? Is this not a viable excuse for any repressive government that may emerge from this current muddy struggle for power to suspend labour movement and civil society activities? More importantly, how can a mass action of workers and other oppressed people, maintaining opposition to military rule and demanding a sovereign national conference, lead to the emergence of military rule? The NLC’s position only reflects its previously failed policy of political neutrality and collaboration with anti-poor governments, a version of policy of lesser evil-ism.
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  • Rather than demand Jonathan’s enthronement (and thus the continuation of anti-poor economic policies), one expects the labour movement to demand at the minimum a truly democratic sovereign national conference that will determine the economic, political, social and cultural bases of Nigeria’s existence. Such a conference will be determined through the direct election of representatives of workers’ unions, pensioners’ associations, unemployed groups, professional organisations, students’ and youth movements, peasants’ and artisans’ organisations and ethnic nationalities.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Beyond the privatisation of liberation - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...73591

development africa international industry news governance pambazuka world bank privatization horacecampbell

shared by Arabica Robusta on 31 May 11 - No Cached
  • 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

Pambazuka - On sub-imperialism and BRICS-bashing - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...91832

africa development international governance pambazuka patrickbond

shared by Arabica Robusta on 13 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • It is obvious that in the conceptual framework of the sub-imperialist theorists there is simply no room for regionalism in Africa or regional struggles against the imperialist countries of the US and Europe. I find this most disempowering. For the last almost 30 years some of us have been actively engaged in battling against Europe’s attempt to impose a totally iniquitous ‘Economic Partnership Agreements’ (EPAs) on our countries – among them, for example, that our countries stop all domestic production and export subsidies. The latest deadline for signing the EPA is October 2014. If we fail to sign it, Europe will impose sanctions on Africa. Civil society organisations – such as the Southern and Eastern African Trade and Information Institute (SEATINI) and the human rights organisations in the region - have been carrying out a sustained struggle against the EPAs and have so far succeeded in holding back their governments to signing the EPAs. Should they stop doing their campaigns?
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