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Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Copper in Zambia: Charity for multinationals - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...73742

zimbabwe mugabe agribusiness agriculture security foodsecurity development africa international industry news governance pambazuka world bank zambia copper

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Despite the apparent ‘success’ of the privatisation of the Zambian copper industry, the true picture is one of systemic multinational exploitation, national assets sold ‘for a song’ and persistent tax dodging, writes Khadija Sharife.
  • It has been almost two decades since Zambia's ailing copper industry, beset by low commodity prices and skyrocketing debt, was privatised. The process was described by the New York Times in 1996 as, 'Westerniz[ing] the economy with a combination of help and arm-twisting from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the lead lenders for the $6.3 billion in external debt the country is carrying.’
  • Provisions granted to multinationals included stability periods extending for up to 20 years, rendering multinationals exempt from legislation implemented by parliament and other national and legal alterations; the right to carry over losses throughout the 'stability periods'; 100 per cent foreign currency retention, remittance and provision for capital investment deductions; zero withholding tax; and various other fiscal and para-fiscal exemptions ranging from customs duty to environmental pollution and penalties; pension schemes, and contracting of casual workers – accounting for 45 per cent of the workforce, amongst others.
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  • Stated former finance minister Edith Nawakwi: ‘We were told by advisers, who included the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that … for the next 20 years, Zambian copper would not make a profit. [Conversely, if we privatised] we would be able to access debt relief, and this was a huge carrot in front of us – like waving medicine in front of a dying woman. We had no option [but to go ahead].’
  • In 2004, UK-based corporation Vedanta Resources acquired 51 per cent of shares in KCM, known as the largest copper mine in the world, for $48 million cash. In the three-month period that followed, the company registered profits of $26 million from KCM.
  • The World Bank's IFC (International Finance Corporation) reported that, thanks to corporate incentives, effective tax rate for mining companies was 'effectively zero'.
  • Despite being the world's copper powerhouse, Zambia is now one of the world's 25 poorest nations. Though copper provides about 80 per cent of foreign exchange earnings, mining employs just 10 per cent of salaried workers, contributes just 2.2 per cent of revenue to the government's tax agency (ZRA – Zambia Revenue Authority) and 9.7 per cent to GDP (gross domestic product). The drastic increase in price was primarily due to China's increased copper needs, rising to US$10,000 per tonne. The bulk of copper in Zambia is exported to Switzerland – on paper, that is.
  • Glencore International AG, based in Baar, Switzerland (the world's leading secrecy jurisdiction), controls over 50 per cent of the world's global copper market.
  • Comparative analysis reveals that Mopani’s costs are much higher than those of comparable mining companies operating in Zambia.
  • Extensive revenue analysis revealed cobalt extraction rates twice inferior to other producers of the same area - a difference deemed unlikely by the auditors and which indicates that some of the ore extracted by Mopani could remain undeclared.
  • Transfer pricing manipulation and breach of the Arm’s Length principle: The company’s production is sold, both locally and internationally, via its main buyer Glencore International AG, who also happens to be Mopani’s parent company. After careful revenue analysis, it appears that the sales from Mopani to Glencore fail to comply with the OECD “Arm’s Length” principle: minerals are sold to Glencore under conditions that would not apply to a third-party buyer… According to the audit, Mopani seems to prefer selling its production to Glencore whenever prices are at their lowest, something a buyer, not a seller, would be likely to do.'
  • This is, of course, a common script for Africa: the bulk of the illicit flight (estimated by Global Financial Integrity at 60 per cent) is often siphoned not by rogue regimes but instead by corporations through 'underpricing, overpricing, misinvoicing and making completely fake transactions, often between subsidiaries of the same multinational company, bank transfers to offshore accounts from high street banks offering offshore accounts, and companies formed offshore to keep property out of the sight of the tax collectors. According to a survey assessing the economic practices of 476 multinational corporations, 80 per cent acknowledge that transfer pricing remains central to their tax strategy.
  • And though prices increased, Zambia’s revenue actually decreased, by 50 per cent from 1.4 per cent (2003) to 0.7 per cent (2004). The government introduced a 25 per cent windfall tax, raised mineral royalties to 3 per cent and corporate tax to 30 per cent. But soon after, mining houses engaged in intensive lobbying. Current Zambian President Rupiah Banda claims that the windfall tax will not be implemented again. In fact, soon after introduction, it was scrapped.
Arabica Robusta

The Growing Relationship Between China and Sub-Saharan Africa: Macroeconomic, Trade, In... - 0 views

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africa china development governance

shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 24 Apr 08
     
    China's economic ascendance over the past two decades has generated ripple effects in the world economy. Its search for natural resources to satisfy the demands of industrialization has led it to Sub-Saharan Africa. Trade between China and Africa in 2006 totaled more than $50 billion, with Chinese companies importing oil from Angola and Sudan, timber from Central Africa, and copper from Zambia. Demand from China has contributed to an upward swing in prices, particularly for oil and metals from Africa, and has given a boost to real GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa. Chinese aid and investment in infrastructure are bringing desperately needed capital to the continent. At the same time, however, strong Chinese demand for oil is contributing to an increase in the import bill for many oil-importing Sub-Saharan African countries, and its exports of low-cost textiles, while benefiting African consumers, is threatening to displace local production. China poses a challenge to good governance and macroeconomic management in Africa because of the potential Dutch disease implications of commodity booms. China presents both an opportunity for Africa to reduce its marginalization from the global economy and a challenge for it to effectively harness the influx of resources to promote poverty-reducing economic development at home.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Pollution: Africa's real resource curse? - 0 views

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development africa international industry governance news pambazuka world bank pollution environment cyanide

shared by Arabica Robusta on 12 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Currently, corporations subscribe to the standards of the voluntary International Cyanide Managament Code. Yet one aspect that the code fails to rigorously address is that of closure.
  • Kabwe’s rehabilitation is part of the broader Copperbelt Environment Project (CEP), largely funded by the World Bank.
  • Describing the Environmental Council of Zambia as ‘very weak’, the CEP revealed that: ‘Existing regulations are seldom enforced. The regulatory dispositions for the mining sector are currently so weak that they do not deter polluters…Identification and monitoring of environmental risks resulting from mining activities is often inadequate.’ Mining corporations operating in Zambia post-1994 were allowed to adhere to the Environmental Management Plan (EMP), taking precedence over national legislation, with little penalties save for on the spot fines of £17 and letters of warning. Like Tanzania, Zambia’s mining contracts remained secretive.
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  • e Villiers said the body appointed to look at the problem favours neutralisation as the best solution to the problem of AMD. ‘Certainly, it will be an economically viable solution, if logistics such as the reservoirs needed for the neutralization to be carried out in (continuously over a very long period of time) can be sorted out, which seems unlikely at the moment. ‘The proposals by corporations to step in with their proposed solutions have apparently been shot down, because they wanted to sell the cleaned water back to Rand Water, making a profit in the process. ‘I’m not sure why mining houses are allowed to pollute while making a profit, and corporations who want to clean up are apparently expected to do so without the benefit of making a profit,’ she said.
  • In an interview with The Africa Report, Turton said that not only will mines evade the legal minimum requirement of the ‘polluter pays principle’ but also profit from it. ‘What’s more, that profit is all but guaranteed, because it will be underwritten by the state in the form of a mooted Public Private Partnership (PPP),’ he said. The deal allows for mining houses to access a R3.5-billion deal with no tendering process, as well as select ‘treatment’ that was described by Turton as the ‘least cost option’ via a process shrouded in secrecy, enabling the WUC to act as both consultant and reviewer.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - From 'how could' to 'how should': The possibility of trilateral cooperation - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...74884

africa china development intervention economics news human rights pambazuka international

shared by Arabica Robusta on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • According to the subject-title itself, the presumption is that there is a possibility for US–China cooperation in assistance to Africa. However, to turn that possibility into reality needs a lot of work. The reason is simple: how could two parties discuss an important issue concerning the third party without the third’s knowledge? How could the two parties carry out this kind of cooperation without the third party’s participation at the very beginning? How could we start the cooperation without much understanding, let alone agreement, of each other’s concept of the issue?
  • The status of China and Africa is equal, not a relation of superior and inferior. Although the relation is strategic, it is equal and friendly. Both China and Africa appreciate each other and cooperate with each other.
  • The principles guiding China–Africa relations can be summarised as equality and mutual respect, bilateralism and co-development, no-political strings attached and non-interference of domestic affairs, and stress on the capability of self-reliance.
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  • The best example of this development assistance is the building of the Tanzania–Zambia Railway (TAZARA), ‘one of the lasting monuments to its former presence’. China helped Tanzania and Zambia build the railway of 1,860km for US$500 million during 1968–86 with about 30,000 to 50,000 Chinese involved (64 people died). As Jamie Monson points out: ‘… the Chinese had articulated their own vision of development assistance in Africa throughout the Eight Principles of Development Assistance … these principles reflected China’s efforts to distinguish its approach to African development from those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Several of these principles had direct application to the TAZARA project.’[6]
  • Recent collaboration between China and Nigeria to launch a communications satellite, NigSat I, is a groundbreaking project where China has provided much of the technology necessary for launch and on-orbit service and even the training of Nigerian command and control operators. While Nigeria acquired satellite technology, China also gained from the collaboration by burnishing its credentials as a reliable player in the international commercial satellite market.[8]
  • In January 1963, China was the first to express its willingness to provide medical assistance to Algeria, marking the beginning for China to provide medical aid other countries.[9] Since then, Hubei Province has been in charge of the dispatch of the Chinese Medical Team (CMT) to Algeria. Up to 2006, Hubei had sent out more than 3,000 medical personnel/times (p/t) to Algeria and Lesotho. The latter started to receive CMT in 1997.
  • The great advantage of CMT is the Chinese traditional medical treatment, especially acupuncture. The reputation of CMT has spread to neighbouring countries. In Mali, while the climate and living conditions cause many cases of rheumatism, arthritis and psoatic strain, acupuncture is the most effective cure for the cases.
  • CMT’s service was noticed by David Shinn, the US former ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. He said: ‘China received praise in Liberia for its medical teams because they prioritise the transfer of knowledge and technology. They sent specialists and general practitioners, who upgraded and built the professional skills of local heath workers. In the case of war-torn Liberia, this is a critical medical need.’[14]
  • Cotecxin, the most effective anti-malaria drug produced in China, and acupuncture have won a great reputation in Africa. In certain areas, life habits and the abuse of medication cause serious disease. In Mali, malaria is very common and people have to take Quinine for treatment and many people suffer from limb hemiplegia caused by the overuse of Quinine.
  • Two of my students are Africans. Although the content was interesting, two of my African graduates complained when they were talking about their assistance to Africa that there was no African present except the two of them. This situation is by no means particular. I have attended some of the workshops with the same peculiar characteristic: talking about important African issues without Africans’ participation. Can we decide the issue for others? That is the key question.
  • The World Bank official asked the official of the ministry, ‘Do you know why you Chinese are more successful in the aid issue?’ The answer was negative. Then the World Bank official explained. ‘Let me tell you why. It’s just because we know what aid we can provide in Africa while you don’t know. Since you are not clear, you ask the Africans about this and they told you what they exactly need. That is the reason you are more successful.’ Can we decide what others need? This is another key question.
Arabica Robusta

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

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mandela neoliberalism

shared by Arabica Robusta on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • 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

The Mandela Years in Power » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

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mandela south africa neoliberalism us intervention

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • As his health deteriorated over the past six months, many asked the more durable question: how did he change South Africa? Given how unsatisfactory life is for so many in society, the follow-up question is, how much room was there for Mandela to maneuver?
  • But it was in this period, alleges former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, that “the battle for the soul of the African National Congress was lost to corporate power and influence… We readily accepted that devil’s pact and are damned in the process. It has bequeathed to our country an economy so tied in to the neoliberal global formula and market fundamentalism that there is very little room to alleviate the dire plight of the masses of our people.”
  • Nelson Mandela’s South Africa fit a pattern: a series of formerly anti-authoritarian critics of old dictatorships – whether from rightwing or left-wing backgrounds – who transformed into 1980s-90s neoliberal rulers: Alfonsin (Argentina), Aquino (Philippines), Arafat (Palestine), Aristide (Haiti), Bhutto (Pakistan), Chiluba (Zambia), Dae Jung (South Korea), Havel (Czech Republic), Mandela (South Africa), Manley (Jamaica), Megawati (Indonesia), Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Museveni (Uganda), Nujoma (Namibia), Obasanjo (Nigeria), Ortega (Nicaragua), Perez (Venezuela), Rawlings (Ghana), Walesa (Poland) and Yeltsin (Russia).
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  • This policy insulation from mass opinion could only be achieved through the leadership of Mandela. It was justified by invoking the mantra of “international competitiveness”, and it initially peaked with Mandela’s 1996 Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy. Obeisance to multinational corporations helped shape the terrain on the platinum belt that inexorably generated the Marikana Massacre in 2012, for example. In the South African case, it must be stressed, the decision to reduce the room for maneuver was made as much by the local principals as it was by the Bretton Woods Institutions, other financiers and investors.
  • Ending the apartheid regime was one of the greatest human achievements of the past century. However, to promote a peaceful transition, the agreement negotiated between the racist regime and Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) allowed whites to keep the best land, the mines, manufacturing plants, and financial institutions, and to export vast quantities of capital.
  • there had been only two basic paths that the ANC could have followed.
  • One was to mobilize the people and all their enthusiasm, energy, and hard work, use a larger share of the economic surplus (through state-directed investments and higher taxes), and stop the flow of capital abroad, including the repayment of illegitimate apartheid-era debt.
  • The other, which was ultimately the one chosen, was to trudge down the neoliberal capitalist path, with merely a small reform here or there to permit superficial claims to the sustaining of a “National Democratic Revolution.”
  • The white ruling bloc’s political strategy included weakening the incoming ANC government through repression, internecine township violence, and divide-and-conquer blandishments offered to leaders by way of elite-pacting.
  • The unbanning of the ANC allowed many of the pacting processes to come above ground, through methodologies such as “scenario planning” promoted first by Shell Oil and then Anglo American, Nedbank and a variety of other corporates during the critical 1990-94 period.
  • So even without going through the process of lending to transitional South Africa, until the IMF’s $850 million loan in 1993, the Bretton Woods Institutions had enormous influence. The Bank carefully recruited ANC officials to work with them in Washington during the early 1990s, and also gave substantial consultancies to local allies in South Africa. But notwithstanding all the political maneuvers associated with the rise and fall of personalities, blocs and ideas during the 1990-94 era, perhaps the most important fusion of the old and new occurred on the economic terrain five months prior to the April 27, 1994 democratic election, when the “Transitional Executive Committee” (TEC) took control of the South African government, combining a few leading ANC cadre with the ruling National Party, which was in its last year of 45 in power.
  • The loan’s secret conditions – leaked to Business Day in March 1994 – included the usual items from the classical structural adjustment menu: lower import tariffs, cuts in state spending, and large cuts in public sector wages.
  • This was justified to an adoring society desperate for reconciliation, because highly creative vote tallying gave the National Party just over 20 percent and Inkatha 10 percent of electoral support and denied the ANC the two-thirds which Mandela himself had stated would be an adverse outcome, insofar as it would dent investor confidence to know the Constitution might be alterable.
  • By mid-1996, with neoliberal economic policy in place, the elite transition was cemented and only provincial power shifts – from Inkatha to ANC in 2004 in KwaZulu-Natal, and from ANC to the Democratic Alliance in 2009 in the Western Cape – disturbed the political power-balance arrangements established in 1994. The ANC continued to receive between 60 and 67 percent of the national votes, and Mandela continued to be venerated after he departed the presidency, for having guided the “miracle” of a political solution to the surface-level problems of apartheid.
  • However, seen from below, the replacement of racial for what we might term “class apartheid” was decisive under Mandela’s rule.
  • Along with Tito Mboweni and Maria Ramos (his future wife), Manuel ensured that a small group of neoliberal managers were gradually brought into the Treasury and SA Reserve Bank.
  • The Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) and SA Communist Party (SACP) offered similar pragmatists who – no matter their personal predilections and internecine conflicts – could be trusted to impose neoliberal policies, including future trade minister Alec Erwin, Reconstruction and Development Programme minister Jay Naidoo, housing minister Joe Slovo, transport minister Mac Maharaj, and minister-at-large Essop Pahad. This politically-fluid group of change managers within the ANC-Cosatu-SACP Alliance had become trustworthy to the Afrikaners and English-speaking businesses.
  • Without capital controls, the Reserve Bank lost its main protection against a run on the currency. So when one began 11 months later, the only strategy left was to raise interest rates to a record high, resulting in a long period of double-digit prime interest rates.
  • The most important post-apartheid economic decision was taken in June 1996, when the top echelon of ANC policymakers imposed what Finance Minister Manuel termed a “non-negotiable” macroeconomic strategy without bothering to properly consult its Alliance partners in the union movement and SACP, much less its own constituents. The World Bank contributed two economists and its econometric model of South Africa for the exercise, known as “Growth, Employment and Redistribution” (GEAR).
  • The document, authored by 17 white men using the World Bank’s economic model, allowed the government to psychologically distance itself from the somewhat more Keynesian RDP, a 150-page document which in 1994 had served as the ANC’s campaign platform, and which the ANC’s civil society allies had insisted be implemented. An audit of the RDP, however, showed that only the RDP’s more neoliberal features were supported by the dominant bloc in government during the late 1990s.
  • by the late 1990s, mainly through disinvesting from South Africa, the major Johannesburg and Cape Town conglomerates found overseas avenues and reversed the downward profits slide. By 2001 they were achieving profits that were the ninth highest in the industrialised world, according to a British government study.
  • There was a steady shift of the national surplus from labour to capital after 1994 (amounting to an eight percent redistribution from workers to big business in the post-apartheid era), with the major decline in labour’s share – a full five percent fall – occurring from 1998-2001. These processes confirmed the larger problem of choiceless democracy, in which the deal to end apartheid on neoliberal terms prevailed: black nationalists won state power, while white people and corporations would remove their capital from the country, but also remain welcome for domicile, and enjoy yet more privileges through economic liberalization.
  • In the controversial words of one observer, “I am sure that Cecil John Rhodes would have given his approval to this effort to make the South African economy of the early 21st century appropriate and fit for its time.” That was Nelson Mandela in mid-2003, when launching the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation in Cape Town. “Fit for its time” meant the Minerals-Energy Complex and financial institutions at the South African economy’s commanding heights were given priority in all policy decisions, as had been the case over the prior century and a third, along the lines Rhodes had established.
  • the context was stagnation, for overall GDP/capita declined in the late 1990s, and even in 2000 – a growth year after a mini-recession in the wake of the Asian crisis – there was a negative per person rate of national wealth accumulation recorded by the World Bank (in its book Where is the Wealth of Nations?) if we subtract non-renewable resource extraction from GDP so as to more accurately reflect economic activity and net changes in wealth;
  • The transition is often said to be characterized by “macroeconomic stability,” but this ignores the easiest measure of such stability: exchange rate fluctuations.
  • These moments of macroeconomic instability were as dramatic as any other incidents during the previous two centuries, including the September 1985 financial panic that split big business from the apartheid regime and paved the way for ANC rule. Domestic investment was sickly (with less than 2 percent increase a year during the late 1990s GEAR era when it was meant to increase by 7 percent), and were it not for the partial privatization of the telephone company (disastrous by all accounts), foreign investment would not have even registered during Mandela’s presidency. Domestic private sector investment was net negative (below replacement costs of wear and tear) for several years, as capital effectively went on strike, moving mobile resources offshore as rapidly as possible.
  • Recall the mandate for “Growth, Employment and Redistribution”. Yet of all GEAR’s targets over the period 1996-2000, the only ones successfully reached were those most crucial to big business: reduced inflation (down from 9 percent to 5.5 percent instead of GEAR’s projected 7-8 percent), the current account (temporarily in surplus prior to the 2000s capital outflow, not in deficit as projected), and the fiscal deficit (below 2 percent of GDP, instead of the projected 3 percent). What about the main targets?
  • The “E” for employment was the most damaging initial result of South Africa’s embrace of the neoliberal economic approach, for instead of employment growth of 3–4 percent per year promised by GEAR proponents, annual job losses of 1–4 percent characterized the late 1990s. South Africa’s official measure of unemployment rose from 16 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002.
  • Finally, the “R” – redistribution – benefited corporations most because a succession of finance ministers lowered primary company taxes dramatically, from 48 percent in 1994 to 30 percent in 1999, and maintained the deficit below 3 percent of GDP by restricting social spending, notwithstanding the avalanche of unemployment.
  • The big question was whether a variety of social protests witnessed after apartheid by civil society – many groups associated with what was formerly known as the Mass Democratic Movement – would shift social policy away from its moorings in apartheid white privilege and instead towards a transformative approach empowering of poor people, women, youth, the elderly, the disabled and the ill.
  • Mandela had already, in 1992 after the Bisho massacre and in 1993 after the Hani assassination, taken upon himself to cork the anger building below. At the opening of parliament in 1995, Mandela inveighed, “The government literally does not have the money to meet the demands that are being advanced.” As for social policy, “We must rid ourselves of the culture of entitlement which leads to the expectation that the government must promptly deliver whatever it is that we demand.”
  • the Interim Constitution permitted veto power over planning and budgeting with just a third of a council’s seats, again reinforcing residual white power and making rapid change impossible. These compromises of the Interim Constitution, approved by Mandela, meant that prospects for a genuinely democratic local government were reduced to an even lower-intensity level than earlier.
  • The neoliberal critics of progressive block tariffs correctly insisted that such distortions of the market logic introduced a disincentive to supply low-volume users. For them, the point of supplying any good or service was to make profits or at minimum to break even in narrow cost-recovery terms. In advocating against the proposal for a free lifeline and rising block tariff, a leading World Bank expert advised the first democratic water minister, Kader Asmal, that privatisation contracts “would be much harder to establish” if poor consumers had the expectation of getting something for nothing. If consumers weren’t paying, the Bank suggested, South African authorities required a “credible threat of cutting service”. This was the logic that began to prevail during Mandela’s years in power.
  • the size and orientation of social grants were not particularly satisfactory, for according to University of KwaZulu-Natal researchers Nina Hunter, Julian May and Vishnu Padayachee, “The grants do not provide comprehensive coverage for those in need. Unless they are able to access the disability grant, adults are largely excluded from this framework of assistance. It is only possible for the Unemployment Insurance Fund to be received by the unemployed for a maximum of six months and then only by those who were registered with the Fund, for the most part the formally employed.” There were other problems: means-testing was utilized with the inevitable stigmatization that comes with a state demanding proof of poor people’s income; cost-recovery strategies were still being imposed, by stealth, on recipients of state services; the state’s potentially vast job-creating capacity was never utilized aside from a few short-term public works activities; and land and housing were not delivered at appropriate rates.
  • structured superexploitation was exacerbated by an apparent increase in domestic sexual violence associated with rising male unemployment and the feminization of poverty. Women also remained the main caregivers in the home, there again bearing the highest burden associated with degraded health.
  • The most severe blight on South Africa’s post-apartheid record of health leadership was, without question, its HIV/AIDS policy. This could be blamed upon both the personal leadership flaws of presidents Mandela and Mbeki and their health ministers, and upon features of the socio-political structure of accumulation. With millions of people dying early because of AIDS, and approximately five million HIV+ South Africans by 2000, the battle against the disease was one of the most crucial tests of the post-apartheid government. Pretoria’s problem began, arguably, with Mandela’s reticence even before 1994. As he told one interviewer regarding hesitation to raise AIDS as a social crisis, “I was very careful because in our culture you don’t talk about sex no matter what you do.”
  • If Mandela was too coy, and prone to accepting quack solutions like the industrial solvent Virodene proposed by local researchers – and apparently financed with Mbeki’s assistance – then Pretoria’s subsequent failure in the early 2000s to provide medicinal treatment for HIV+ patients led to periodic charges of “genocide” by authoritative figures such as the heads of the Medical Research Council (Malegapuru William Makgoba), SA Medical Association (Kgosi Letlape), and Pan Africanist Congress health desk (Costa Gazi), as well as leading public intellectual Sipho Seepe
  • It is important to add that the government’s regular claim of “insufficient state capacity” to solve economic, social and environmental problems was matched by a willingness to turn resources over to the private sector. If outsourcing, corporatization, and privatization could have worked anywhere in Africa, they should in South Africa – with its large, wealthy markets, relatively competent firms and advanced infrastructure. However, contrary evidence emerges from the four major cases of commodification of state services: telecommunications, transport, electricity, and water.
  • Racial apartheid was always explicitly manifested in residential segregation, and after liberation in 1994, Pretoria adopted World Bank advice that included an avoidance of public housing (virtually no new municipal or even cooperatively-owned units have been constructed), smaller housing subsidies than were necessary, and much greater reliance upon banks and commercial developers instead of state and community-driven development. The privatization of housing was, indeed, one of the most extreme ironies of post-apartheid South Africa, not least because the man taking advice from the World Bank, Joe Slovo, was chair of the SA Communist Party. (Slovo died of cancer soon thereafter and his main ANC bureaucrat, who was responsible for designing the policy, soon became a leading World Bank functionary.)
  • For example, poet-activist Dennis Brutus and Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane founded Jubilee South Africa in 1998, and argued that the $25 billion in debt that the Mandela government allegedly owed Western banks should be repudiated. They made the case for default on grounds of “Odious Debt”. Yet on that point, and many others, post-apartheid foreign policy did not return the favour of anti-apartheid solidarity.
  • The state soon turned to the task of systemicatic demobilisation of community groups that had played such an important role in destabilizing apartheid. One example was the SA National Civic Organisation (Sanco), which the ANC began to fund by the late 1990s, leading to a much denuded institution. After all, it was in the urban sphere where most such struggles unfolded (although in 2001 a “Landless Peoples Movement” briefly arose).
  • The solution to the problems that Mandela left behind will only come when a democratic society votes for a political party – probably the one after the ANC fully degenerates and loses power, perhaps in 2019 after six more years of destruction under Jacob Zuma’s rule – to overturn all these inheritances of apartheid capitalism. And then, an eco-socialist and feminist perspective within a strong but loving state will be vital.
  • No one said it better than Mandela himself, when in January 1990 he wrote to the Mass Democractic Movement: “The nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC, and a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable. Black economic empowerment is a goal we fully support and encourage, but in our situation state control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable.”
  • Ironically, though, to transcend the society he has left us, the memory of Nelson Mandela will inspire many. And in one way or another they will always ask, when reminded of the problems caused by the “devil’s pact,” was he pushed or did he jump? Perhaps he did both.
  • To understand why requires combining analysis of the changing structure of capital – especially its worsening unevenness and financialisation – with study of divisions within the subordinate classes.
  • Along with International Monetary Fund (IMF) visits and a 1993 loan, the Bank’s Reconnaissance Missions fused with neoliberal agencies’ strategies during the early 1990s to shape policy framings for the post-apartheid market-friendly government. These were far more persuasive to the ANC leadership than the more populist ambitions of the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP).
  • Bank promotion of “market-oriented” land reform in 1993-94, which established such onerous conditions (similar to the failed policy in neighbouring Zimbabwe) that instead of 30 percent land redistribution as mandated in the RDP, less than 1 percent of good land was redistributed
  • the Bank’s participation in the writing of the (ultimately doomed to fail) Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy in June 1996, both contributing two staff economists and providing its economic model to help frame GEAR
  • In addition, Michel Camdessus, then IMF managing director, put informal but intense pressure on incoming president Mandela to reappoint the two main stalwarts of apartheid-era neoliberalism, the finance minister and central bank governor, both from the National Party.
  • The behind-the-scenes economic policy agreements forged during the early 1990s meant the Afrikaner regime’s own internal power-bloc transition from apartheid “securocrats” (e.g., defense minister Magnus Malan and police minister Adriaan Vlok) to post-apartheid “econocrats” (such as finance minister Barend du Plessis and Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals).
  • A few weeks after liberation in May 1994, when Pretoria joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on disadvantageous terms as a “transitional” not “developing” country, as a result of pressure from Bill Clinton’s White House, the economy’s deindustrialization was guaranteed.
  • finance minister Manuel let the capital flood out when in 1999 he gave permission for the relisting of financial headquarters for most of the largest companies on the London Stock Exchange. The firms that took the gap and permanently moved their historic apartheid loot offshore include Anglo American, DeBeers diamonds, Investec bank, Old Mutual insurance, Didata ICT, SAB Miller breweries (all to London), and Mondi paper (to New York).
  • the most profitable, fast-growing sectors of the SA economy, as everywhere in the world during the roaring 1990s, were finance, insurance and real estate, as well as communications and commerce, due to speculative and trade-related activity associated with neoliberalism
  • instead of funding new plant and equipment in this stagnant environment, corporate profits were redirected into speculative real estate and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange which by the late 1990s had created the conditions that generated a 50 percent increase in share prices during the first half of the 2000s, while the property boom which began in 1999 had by 2008 sent house prices up by a world record 389 percent (in comparison to just 100 percent in the US market
  • The “G” for growth was actually negative in per capita terms using GDP as a measure (no matter how biased that statistic is in a Resource Cursed society like South Africa).
  • The driving forces behind South African GDP were decreasingly based in real “productive” activity, and increasingly in financial/speculative functions that are potentially unsustainable and even parasitical.
  • Most tellingly, the category of “financial intermediation” (including insurance and real estate) rose from 16 percent of GDP in 1994 to 20 percent eight years later.
  • Meanwhile, labour productivity increased steadily and the number of days lost to strike action fell, the latter in part because of ANC demobilization of unions and hostility to national strikes undertaken for political purposes.
  • average black African household income fell 19 percent from 1995–2000 (to $3,714 per year), while white household income rose 15 percent (to $22,600 per year).
  • The income of the top 1 percent went from under 10 percent of the total in 1990 to 15 percent in 2002, (That figure peaked at 18 percent in 2007, the same level as in 1949.) The most common measure, the Gini coefficient, soared from below 0.6 in 1994 to 0.72 by 2006 (0.8 if welfare income is excluded).
  • In sum, the acronym GEAR might have more accurately been revised to Decline, Unemployment and Polarization Economics.
  • Notwithstanding advertisements by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, its failure coincided with rapid increases in water and electricity prices that were required by the 85 percent cut in central-to-local state operating subsidy funding transfers, leaving municipalities bankrupt just at the stage they were taking on vast numbers of new residents.
  • Thanks to the compromised Interim Constitution of November 1993, 50 percent of the municipal council seats were allocated to that odd combination, while 50 percent went to African townships, serving to break the unity of combined “black” politics.
  • Reflecting the cost-recovery approach to service delivery and hence the inability of the state to properly roll out and maintain these functions, the category of GDP components known as “electricity, gas and water” fell steadily during the Mandela years, from 3.5 percent of the total in 1994 to 2.4 percent in 2002.
  • This would have consciously distorted the relationship of cost to price and hence sent economically “inefficient” pricing signals to consumers. In short, the RDP insisted, poor people should use more essential services (for the sake of gender equity, health and economic side benefits), while rich people should save the environment by cutting back on their hedonistic consumption.
  • FBW ended up being delivered in a tokenistic way and, in Durban – the main site of FBW pilot-exploration starting in 1997 – the overall real cost of water ended up doubling for poor households in the subsequent six years because the FBW was so small, and because the second bloc of water was priced so high. This price hike had the direct impact of causing a decline in consumption by poor people, by one third, during that period’s pandemics of cholera, diarhhoea and AIDS when more water was needed the most, especially in the city with the world’s highest number of HIV+ residents.
  • There were some who argued that these shifts were profound, including Stellenbosch University professor Servaas van der Berg. He insisted that between 1993 and 1997, social spending increased for the poorest 60 percent of households, especially the poorest 20 percent and especially the rural poor, and state subsidies decreased for the 40 percent who were better off; together by counting in non-pecuniary support from the state, Pretoria could claim a one-third improvement in the Gini coefficient. Hence the overall impact of state spending, he posited, would lead to a dramatic decline in actual inequality. Unfortunately, van der Berg (a regular consultant to the neoliberal Treasury Department) made no effort to calculate or even estimate state subsidies to capital, i.e. corporate welfare. Such subsidies remained enormous because most of the economic infrastructure created through taxation – roads and other transport, industrial districts, the world’s cheapest electricity, R&D subsidies – overwhelmingly benefits capital and its shareholders, as do many tax loopholes.
  • Women were also victims of other forms of post-apartheid economic restructuring, with unemployment broadly defined at 46 percent (compared to 35 percent for men), and a massive late 1990s decline in relative pay, from 78 percent of male wages in 1995 to just 66 percent in 1999.
  • One reason was that contemporary South Africa retained apartheid’s patriarchal modes of surplus extraction, thanks to both residual sex discrimination and the migrant (rural-urban) labour system, which is subsidized by women stuck in the former bantustan homelands. These women were not paid for their role in social reproduction, which in a normal labour market would be handled by state schooling, health insurance, and pensions.
  • Life expectancy fell from 65 at the time of liberation to 52 a decade later. Diarrhea killed 43,000 children a year, as a result mainly of inadequate potable water provision. Most South Africans with HIV had, until the mid-2000s, little prospect of receiving antiretroviral medicines to extend their lives.
  • And there was indeed some progress to report because most importantly, perhaps, the national Department of Health committed in 1994 that Primary Health Care (PHC) would be free for pregnant women and children under age six, and in 1996 expanded the commitment to assure all South Africans would not pay for “all personal consultation services, and all non-personal services provided by the publicly funded PHC system”, according to government’s Towards a National Health System statement. Indeed there was a major budget shift from curative care to PHC, with the latter projected to increase by 8.3 percent in average real terms annually. Closures of hospital facilities in several cities were anticipated to save money and allow for redeployment of personnel (although they also affected access, since many consumers used these in lieu of clinics).
  • But of great concern was the difficulty in staffing new clinics (particularly those in isolated areas). There were serious shortfalls in medical personnel willing to work in rural South Africa, requiring two major programmatic initiatives: the deployment of foreign personnel (especially several hundred Cuban general practitioners) in rural clinics; and the imposition of a two-year Community Service requirement on students graduating from publicly-subsidised medical schools.
  • Yet if the personnel issue remained a barrier to implementation, regrettably the Department of Health was ambivalent about mobilising civil society in areas where Community Health Workers could have supported service delivery.
  • ne reason was the pressure exerted by international and domestic financial markets to keep Pretoria’s state budget deficit to 3 percent of GDP, as mandated in GEAR.
  • “That mother is going to die and that HIV-negative child will be an orphan. That child must be brought up. Who is going to bring the child up? It’s the state, the state. That’s resources, you see.”
  • The second structural reason was the residual power of pharmaceutical manufacturers to defend their rights to “intellectual property”, i.e., monopoly patents on life-saving medicines.
  • The third structural reason for the elongated HIV/AIDS holocaust in South Africa was the vast size of the reserve army of labour in South Africa. This feature of the socio-political structure of accumulation allowed companies to readily replace sick HIV+ workers with desperate, unemployed people, instead of providing them treatment. In 2000, for example, Anglo American Corporation had 160,000 employees. With more than a fifth HIV+, the firm began planning “to make special payments to miners suffering from HIV/AIDS, on condition they take voluntary retirement.”
  • Aside from bribing workers to go home and die, there was a provisional hypothesis that “treatment of employees with anti-retrovirals can be cheaper than the costs incurred by leaving them untreated.” However, in October 2001, a detailed cost-benefit analysis showed the opposite. As a result, “the company’s 14,000 senior staff would receive anti-retroviral treatment as part of their medical insurance, but the provision of drug treatment for lower income employees was too expensive.”
  • so much of post-apartheid South Africa’s approach to poor and working-class people: human expendability in the face of corporate profitability.
  • As for the electricity sector, Pretoria announced in 2004 that 30 percent of the Eskom parastatal (the world’s fourth largest electricity producer) would be sold. That position shifted after a Cosatu protest, and soon state policy was to allow 30 percent of generating capacity to come from new Independent Power Producers. Meanwhile, still anticipating deeper institutional privatisation, a corporatizing Eskom fired thirty thousand electricity workers during the 1990s.
  • the state expanded spending on nuclear energy research. This occurred first through pebble-bed reactor technology in partnership with US and British firms and then after that investment (in the range of $2 billion) was written off, ordinary nuclear reactors were authorized that were estimated to cost $60 billion or more.
  • lthough water and sanitation privatization applied to only 5 percent of all municipalities, the South African pilot projects run by world’s biggest water companies (Biwater, Suez, and Saur) resulted in a number of problems related to overpricing and underservice: contracts were renegotiated to raise rates because of insufficient profits; services were not extended to most poor people; many low-income residents were disconnected; prepaid water meters were widely installed; and sanitation was often substandard. It was simply not in the interests of Paris or London water corporations to provide water services to people who could not afford to pay at least the operations and maintenance costs plus a profit mark-up.
  • Cost-recovery policy applied in northern KwaZulu-Natal led to the continent’s worst-ever cholera outbreak, catalyzed by mass disconnections of rural residents in August 2000, for want of a $10 per household connection fee, which forced more than a thousand people to halt consumption of what had earlier been free, clean water.
  • With privatization came more intense class segregation. By 2003, the provincial housing minister responsible for greater Johannesburg admitted to a mainstream newspaper that South Africa’s resulting residential class apartheid had become an embarrassment: “If we are to integrate communities both economically and racially, then there is a real need to depart from the present concept of housing delivery that is determined by stands, completed houses and budget spent.”
  • Unfortunately it was the likes of Geffen, the commercial bankers and allied construction companies who drove housing implementation, so it was reasonable to anticipate no change in Johannesburg’s landscape – featuring not “quality houses” but what many black residents term “kennels.” Several hundred thousand post-apartheid state-subsidized starter houses were often half as large as the 40 square meter “matchboxes” built during apartheid, and located even further away from jobs and community amenities.
  • For example, in spite of water scarcity and water table pollution in the country’s main megalopolis, Gauteng, the first two mega-dams within the Lesotho Highlands Water Project were built during the late 1990s, with destructive environmental consequences downriver, and the extremely high costs of water transfer deterred consumption by poor people in Gauteng townships. One result was the world’s highest-profile legal case of Third World development corruption.
  • Rural (black) women still stand in line for hours at communal taps in the parched former bantustan areas. The location of natural surface and groundwater remained skewed towards white farmers due to apartheid land dispossession, and with fewer than 2 percent of arable plots redistributed by 2000 (as against a 1994-99 RDP target of 30 percent), Pretoria’s neoliberal land policy had conclusively failed.
  • Thanks to accommodating state policies, South African commercial agriculture remained extremely reliant upon fertilizers and pesticides, with Genetically Modified Organisms increasing across the food chain and virtually no attention given to potential organic farming markets. The government’s failure to prevent toxic dumping and incineration led to a nascent but portentous group of mass tort (class action) lawsuits. The victims included asbestos and silicosis sufferers who worked in or lived close to the country’s mines.
  • Indeed by 2012, South Africa was recognized as the fifth worst environmental performer out of 132 countries surveyed by Yale and Columbia University ecologists. Moreover, the South African economy’s contribution to climate change was amongst the world’s highest – twenty times higher than even that of the US – when carbon intensity is measured (CO2 equivalents emitted each year per person per unit of GDP).
  • A 2011 edition of Changing Wealth of Nations calculates a 25 percent drop in South Africa’s natural capital mainly due to land degradation. By 2008, according to the ‘adjusted net savings’ measure, the average South African was losing $245 per person per year.
  • There were other examples of Pretoria’s anti-solidaristic foreign relations, in which democrats and social justice activists suffered because of elite links between the ANC and tyrants: the Indonesian and East Timorese people suffering under the corrupt dictator Suharto, Nigerian democracy activists who in 1995 were denied a visa to meet in Johannesburg, the Burmese people (thanks to the Myanmar junta’s unusually friendly diplomatic relations with Pretoria), and victims of murderous central African regimes which were SA arms recipients.
  • Pretoria’s support for tyrants in Swaziland and Zimbabwe were the most extreme cases, especially after Mbeki took power in 1999 and democrats rose to challenge tyrants.
  • The occasional exception – his outrage at the execution of Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa – proved the rule; the unanimous backlash against Mandela by other African elites convinced Pretoria not to side with democratic movements.
  • By 1995, Mandela pronounced, “Let it be clear to all that the battle against the forces of anarchy and chaos has been joined,” referring to the rumble of mass actions, wildcat strikes, land and building invasions and other disruptions. Thus, while often dismissed as Mandela’s honeymoon period, the 1994-99 phase of post-apartheid capitalist consolidation included anti-neoliberal protest by trade unions, community-based organisations, women’s and youth groups, Non-Governmental Organisations, think-tanks, networks of CBOs and NGOs, progressive churches, political groups and independent leftists.
  • There, capital began to earn a status as the ANC’s ally of deracialisation. The most important voice of business was the Johannesburg-based Urban Foundation, later renamed the Centre for Development and Enterprise, which attempted to win civics to their position. One of its leading strategists, Jeff McCarthy, had argued that winning civics over to a “market-oriented” urban policy would “hasten the prospect of alliances on broader political questions of ‘vision’.” In other words, a consensus on urban issues would then form the basis for a new post-apartheid political order.
  • Until 1994, the civics were resolutely anti-capitalist but after demobilisation began in earnest in the wake of the country’s May 1994 liberation, Sanco turned to a corporatist relationship with the ruling party, leading in the late 1990s to a revival of the civics under a new guise, more commonly referred to as the “new social movements”.
  • ritical civil society of this sort was meant to be nurtured, according to official documents such as the 1994 RDP: “Social Movements and Community-Based Organisations are a major asset in the effort to democratise and develop our society. Attention must be given to enhancing the capacity of such formations to adapt to partially changed roles. Attention must also be given to extending social-movement and CBO structures into areas and sectors where they are weak or non-existent.” This did not happen, as an enormous funding boost meant for civics and other CBOs in late 1994 was diverted by Roelf Meyer and Valli Moosa of the Ministry of Constitutional Development into advertising (by Saatchi&Saatchi) the state’s unsuccessful Masakhane campaign, aimed at getting poor people to start paying for state services they had boycotted payment for during apartheid.
  • erhaps the most charitable interpretation of the state-society relationship desired by the ANC can be found in an important discussion paper circulated widely within the party. Author Joel Netshitenzhe insisted that, due to “counter-action by those opposed to change,” civil society should serve the ruling party’s agenda:
  • When “pressure from below” is exerted, it should aim at complementing the work of those who are exerting “pressure” against the old order “from above.”
  • Still, as the first Mandela moment of post-apartheid South Africa passed, something bigger began to jell around 1999, when social movements emerged to offer radical challenges to the status quo, including the Treatment Action Campaign with their stunningly successful single-issue concerns about AIDS medicines, and the new urban social movements with their much broader potential but much greater disappointments. It is, in their wake, that the traditions of Mandela can best be recalled: full liberation, even if as President there was less socio-economic and environmental progress than there should have been.
  • What is Mandela’s legacy, if not cementing the worst features of these systems, aside from beginning to undo their correlation with racism?
brian R

Student Uses Faith to give Voice to Forgotten Children - 0 views

www.hks.harvard.edu/...gotten-voices-ryan-keith-feb10

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  • brian R on 19 Feb 10
     
    "As I held her frail hand, I saw her two children, Peterson and Prudence, watch their mother die," said Keith "These kids had already lost their father to AIDS-related illnesses … what would happen with them? Who would advocate for them and make sure they didn't slip through the cracks? Who would make sure their voices were not forgotten?"
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The invention of the indigène - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...70061

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  • The violence in Congo may seem unintelligible but its roots lie in institutional practices introduced under colonialism, which 50 years of independence have only exacerbated. At their heart is an institution known as the native authority. Since the colonial period, native authorities have had jurisdiction over ‘tribal homelands’. As a system of power, the native authority claims to represent age-old ethnic identity. But ethnicity refers to cultural difference, and there is no necessary link between culture and territory.
  • The colonial system thus rested on a dual system of institutionalised discrimination dressed up as cultural difference: by race in the cities and tribe in the countryside.
  • Ethnic cleansing is rarely spontaneous; it requires elite conspiracies and methodical popular organisation.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 16 Jan 11
       
      "Elite conspiracies ... methodical popular organization" and ethnic cleansing.  Why is it so difficult to draw a bead on the ethnography of these elite conspiracies, the co-opting of the vulnerable, and the planning of "spontaneous violence"?
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • In Katanga, where the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga – a partnership formed in 1906 between King Leopold II, the Société Générale de Belgique and British interests – demanded a flow of cheap labour to exploit the region’s mineral resources, the government obliged with a series of decrees, in 1906, 1910 and 1933, requiring that each ‘tribe’ be identified, separated and resettled in its own ‘homeland’, supervised by its own native authority. One district commissioner complained of his duties that some ethnic groups were ‘totally jumbled’: ‘It will be very difficult to organise them.’ The separation was accomplished between 1925 and 1930, by means of ethnic cleansing.
  • When they confronted the militant Luba trade unions in the mines of Katanga, the Belgians forged an alliance with the indigenous Lunda, and proclaimed a coalition of ‘civilisers’ and ‘authentic Katangans’.
  • The government of the newly independent Congo responded to the secession in Katanga by sending in troops. Ordered to also put down the South Kasai secession on their way to Katanga, the Congolese National Army went on a rampage, slaughtering civilians. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, the Congolese political historian, has argued that the prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, committed his ‘first major political blunder’ when instead of seeking to heal the rift in a ‘bitter inter-ethnic conflict’ between ‘indigènes’ and ‘non-indigènes’, he chose to side with one group against another. His political enemies held Lumumba responsible for the ensuing political violence; on 5 September 1960 Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary general, described it as ‘genocide’. On the same day, the president, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, dismissed Lumumba.
  • A census tagged every villager as a ‘native’ of a particular tribal homeland. ‘Forced relocations,’ Johan Pottier writes, ‘were the norm.’
  • Part constitutional conference, part transitional government, the CNS was meant to be the mechanism that took Zaire into the post-Cold War world of multiparty democracy.
  • The proceedings of the CNS were televised throughout urban Congo, inspiring the growth of civic organisations and strengthening the opposition, but as it prepared to deal with two of the most sensitive dossiers on its agenda – ill-gotten gains and political assassinations – the conference was abruptly closed in December 1992 and never reconvened. This was a sign of the regime’s continuing strength, and the fragility of the opposition. The key weakness of the opposition was that it failed to move away from nativist definitions of political belonging, which fragmented it again and again, to an inclusive understanding of citizenship, which might have appealed to immigrants who had come to Congo at different periods and united them in a single movement.
  • The existence of the Hutu camps, armed and funded, and home to two million refugees or more, had a devastating effect on civilian life in Kivu. It led to the dollarisation of the economy and price rises (including rents) well beyond the reach of local people. As the Interahamwe unleashed a regime of terror against Congolese Tutsi, another wave of younger men moved across the border to enlist in the RPF. Among them was Laurent Nkunda, the future commander of the notorious Banyamulenge militia (Tutsi), wanted for war crimes in Congo and now detained in Rwanda. The anatomy of political life in Kivu began to resemble that of Rwanda just before the genocide, where every political party had its own militia: in Kivu, every native authority began to acquire one.
  • Two conferences have been held to try to halt the conflict in Congo, the first in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1999, the second in Sun City, South Africa, in 2002. The Lusaka agreement required the foreign forces to withdraw and the local militias to disarm under UN auspices. Sun City, by contrast, bore a recognisably South African imprint: opposition groups would participate in the transitional government, the national assembly and the senate, while the militias – numbering anywhere between 50,000 and 300,000 men – would be integrated into the new national army along with former rebels, in a process known as ‘brassage’.
  • Why lump rebels and local militias together when the first were organised along ideological lines as a supra-local army and the second were largely a local phenomenon tied to specific communities?
  • The supreme difficulty in Congo, as I’ve said, is the persistence of the native authority, which, for all the complexities of ethnicity, is still in place as an organising principle. It is now the terrain on which new forms of political authority, flaunted by young men bearing arms, confront older forms steeped in patriarchal tradition. (This same confrontation has also unfolded in Northern Uganda and Sierra Leone, where youth-led rebellions have eroded older kinds of authority.)
  • Even the worst perpetrators of violence in Congo must be understood as human actors caught up in a conflict that started with the colonial conquest a century ago. That means shifting the focus from individual acts to the cycle of violence, from atrocities to the issues that drive them. Instead of recognising and facing the real challenge – to reform the native authority so that local militias can be held politically accountable – the ‘international community’ has chosen to induct them into a ballooning, dysfunctional colonial-style army, leaving the native authority to grind along unchanged.
brian R

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  • brian R on 17 Feb 11
     
    Providing sustainable, holistic care for AIDS orphans in southern Africa
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