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A Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW) research team visited three communities resettled by Vale and Rio Tinto – Mualadzi, a Rio Tinto resettlement compound located about 40km from the original Capanga village; Cateme village, a Vale resettlement compound with 720 families from the villages of Chipanga, Mitete, Malabue-Gombe and Bagamoyo; and 25 de Setembro, another Vale resettlement compound housing people from the same four villages. Vale deliberately divided the communities in two with employed villagers moving to 25 de Setembro since it is closer to Moatize and the mine. The unemployed were sent to Cateme, 40 km from the town.

Vale has also used the resettlement process to divide communities into those with formal and those with no formal work. The impression that this model gives is that uneducated and unemployed members of a community can be dumped anywhere.

Communities fear that if they continue to be relocated in small groups before all the construction work is done, their legitimate demands will never be met. As they have learned from the people who have already been resettled in Cateme and Mualadzi, the companies are reluctant to complete projects once communities have been relocated.  Rio Tinto moved people to Mualadzi before it had finished building key infrastructure such as school and clinics – and they have still not been built.

A Cameroonian child seeking admission into a state school, a student wishing to enter a university, a college graduate seeking employment in the public service, a businessman or woman tendering for a contract, a citizen applying for a national ID or passport, or seeking access to any of the avenues controlled by the state, will sooner or later fill out a form which requires him to confess his tribe (or less crudely and more hypocritically, his region of origin).

to debar anyone from working anywhere in their country or from participating in the social, political and economic life of the community in which they choose to live on the basis of tribe is another matter altogether. Our constitution outlaws it. Yet prejudice against ‘outsiders’ or ‘strangers’ is an attitude one finds everywhere in Cameroon.

Cameroon is not totally unredeemable. Our situation is critical but not hopeless. But we should not lose sight of the fact that every single day of neglect brings Cameroon closer to the brink of collapse. The task of pulling Cameroon back and turning it around is clearly beyond the contrivance of the mediocre leadership that we have today. It calls for greatness and selflessness, two qualities that our leaders sorely lack. Cameroonians are what they are today only because their leaders are not what they ought to be. Cameroon has been less than fortunate in its leadership. The young republic emerging out of a dual colonial contraption found Ahmadou Ahidjo, a benighted semi-illiterate, as their first president. The rest is history. Today, we have a sanctimonious megalomaniacal hypocrite, Paul Biya, as head of state. A basic element of this mishap is the conspicuous absence of intellectual rigor in the political thought of our leaders — a tendency to pious materialistic woolliness and self-centered pedestrianism.

‘virtues’ like ‘patriotism’ and ‘unity’ are not absolute but conditional on their satisfaction of other purposes. As Achebe points out, ‘Their social validity depends on the willingness or the ability of citizens to ask the searching question’ (33) [5]. This calls for some degree of mental rigor, a quality for which Cameroonians, unfortunately, are not famous. In spite of much loose talk about patriotism from those at the helm there is no doubt that Cameroonians are among the world’s most unpatriotic people. This is not because Cameroonians are particularly evil. In fact, they are not. It is rather because patriotism, being part of an unwritten social contract between citizens and the state, cannot exist where the state or its leaders renege on the agreement (Achebe, 1983). It is indisputable that the ideal of patriotism is unattainable in a country as badly run as Cameroon is today.

He grieves over the fact that Cameroon is a country where tribalism has been raised to the pedestal of a national culture that pervades every discourse, controls the way people think and defines what they oppose or support.

During my recent stint in Burkina Faso, a country often touted as the poorest in the world, I noticed to my dismay that there was no power failure throughout my stay in the capital city Ouagadougou; the taps in the hotel room ran all the time with the kind of pressure one sees in Western hotels. My hotel room was modest but impeccably clean.

Cameroon is a country with an eccentric minority who can restrain themselves and an overwhelming majority who just cannot. This leaves the minority of reasonable Cameroonian citizens feeling like a bunch of sane people trapped in a dangerously rowdy mental asylum. This conundrum is compounded by corrupt practices.

Mr Biya condones corruption because his tribesmen are the biggest looters. Cameroonians have grown accustomed to his silly interrogation où sont les preuves? [13] This is the way the president dismisses cases of wanton looting of the national coffers brought to his attention.

We are living witnesses to the failure of the executive branch of government to stem the tide of rampant corruption that now threatens to paralyze our nation in every sinew and limb. There is no question that it will take some time to correct this irksome situation that has built up over the years, assuming we want to correct it. But to initiate change the president of the Republic must take and be seen to take a decisive first step toward ridding his administration of all persons on whom the slightest whistle of corruption and scandal has been blown. If he would summon the courage to do that then it will dawn on him that he ought to be Cameroon’s leader; not just its president. More importantly, Biya must learn to deal fairly with all citizens, including the troublesome Anglophones.

Some critics have compared the frictional co-habitation between the two distinct linguistic communities in Cameroon to the attitude of two travelers who met by chance in a roadside shelter and are merely waiting for the rain to cease before they continue their separate journeys in different directions. This metaphor captures the mutual distrust and animosity that distance Anglophone Cameroonians from their Francophone compatriots. All too often, the perpetrators of this malicious game of divide and conquer are the political leaders on the French-speaking side of the national divide who take delight in fishing in troubled waters. Francophone politicians love to stoke the flames of animosity, thereby whipping up sentiments of mutual hatred on both sides of the Mungo River at the expense of nation-building. Many Francophones make statements intended either to cow Anglophones into submission or incite them into open rebellion.

Our inaction or cynical action constitute a serious betrayal of our education, of our historic mission and of succeeding generations who will have no future unless we do battle now to preserve it for them.

State-building and nation-building in Liberia cannot be fully operationalized without an interrogation of the meaning of citizenship, given that the nation-state of Liberia is fundamentally de-territorialized, with a sizeable number of Liberians scattered throughout the globe, yet still fully engaged as transnational beings. My article scrutinizes the markers of citizenship, narrowly defined in Liberia’s current Aliens and Nationality Law.

Of course, Liberia’s history predates black settlement, with Liberian academics like Dr. Carl Patrick Burrowes challenging secondary sources that paint the country as a nation muddled in dichotomies without references to primary sources about indigenous life (Burrowes, 1989: 59).

Liberia was ruled from 1847-1980 by the True Whig Party (TWP), an oligarchy of descendants of black settlers. During this time, the country flourished as an outpost for black migration, with migrants from other parts of Africa and the Caribbean flocking to the ‘land of liberty.’

President Doe generated a hefty aid package of US$500 million between 1980 and 1988 from the U.S. government in exchange for Cold War loyalties (Huband, 1998: 35). Liberian exiles in the United States, led by former Interim Government of National Unity (IGNU) President Amos Sawyer and current Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, lobbied against Doe’s authoritarian rule through the Association of Constitutional Democracy (ACDL), but their cries for regime change fell on deaf ears (Huband, 1998: 47).

From 2003-2005, an interim government was established to pave the way for elections in 2005 in which Africa’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was elected. It is worth noting that the leading three presidential candidates—Johnson Sirleaf, George Weah, Charles Brumskine—were all once diasporic Liberians (Liberian National Elections Commission, 2005).

It is rumored that many high-level political appointees hold foreign passports, though Liberia’s Aliens and Nationality Law is very clear about the automatic revocation of citizenship status upon naturalization elsewhere (Sieh, 2012).

The fact that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has been the only African head of state to publicly welcome AFRICOM is indicative of her transnational loyalties to the United States that some argue was born out of her experiences in the high-powered walls of institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations.

Despite public relations campaigns and the forecasts of transformation, most of Johnson-Sirleaf’s first-term development milestones have been mired by challenges and critiques, one of which is the overemphasis on state-building at the expense of nation-building.

African governments have increasingly factored diasporas into domestic development projects, state-building, and nation-building exercises. This explicit acknowledgment of diasporas as transnational communities has manifested in legal instruments such as dual citizenship. Within the last decade alone, over one third of African countries have expanded constitutional reforms to grant dual citizenship to their diasporas, including, but not limited to: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Uganda. Liberia introduced its own dual citizenship legislation in 2008.

Although Liberia did not experience European colonialism, it can be proven empirically that black settler colonialism mirrored the direct rule policies of the French or the Boers. That indigenous males and female Liberians were not granted citizenship until the mid-20th century illustrates how citizenship within Liberia has always been a tool of exclusion and privilege rather than an automatic entitlement.

Denying a person citizenship because his/her father did not reside in Liberia prior to their birth discriminates against children whose fathers fled Liberia during the civil war, a major point of contention for Liberians abroad who advocate for dual citizenship.

Rapid international migration and mobility, coupled with globalization, have ruptured state-centric conceptions of citizenship, identity, and belonging (Sassen, 2005; Jacobson, 1996), with legal scholars now asserting that dual citizenship (or multiple citizenships) are becoming the rule rather than the exception in the 21st century (Spiro, 1997; Rubenstein & Adler, 2000). Therefore, an interrogation of Liberia’s proposed dual citizenship legislation and the renewal of debates about diasporic involvement in post-conflict state-building and nation-building cannot be meaningful without an analytical review of how the concept of citizenship has evolved in the modern world over time.

Using case studies from Senegal, Ghana, and Kenya, Whitaker argues that increased claims for dual citizenship in Africa may be driven as much by self-serving political interests as it is by concerns about national reconstruction, economic development, or security, especially with the advent of multi-party competition, the involvement of emigrants in homeland politics, and the need for African politicians to establish constituencies abroad for support and funding (Whitaker, 2011: 756).

There is no empirical basis for claiming that dual citizenship necessarily enforces homeland-emigrant ties, rather dual citizenship simply enables “external populations to secure citizenship in their places of external residence without relinquishing the material and sentimental advantages of retained original citizenship” (Spiro, 2012: 319).

Scholars who examine post-conflict reconstruction projects place a high premium on state-building, but less of an emphasis on its distant analytical twin, nation-building. A number of features defining state-building and nation-building position the two in binary trajectories. While nation-building is ‘people centric’ and domestically driven, requiring national agency, ownership and resources, state-building is ‘institution centric’ and externally driven, often soliciting international resources and involving some form of social engineering through a ‘one-size-fits’ all approach. Although both state-building and nation-building have their advantages and disadvantages, the two processes cannot be transformational if they are pursued in isolation. The Liberia case study has shown that policy makers must consider state-building and nation-building as mutually constitutive.

ive major contributions supporting the need to strengthen state institutions and governance structures in war to peace transitions were proffered in 2004 by authors such as Francis Fukuyama, Simon Chesterman, James Fearon and David Laitin, Stephen Krasner, and Roland Paris, which transformed state-building into a growing topic of concern in peace-building scholarship (Paris and Sisk, 2010: 7-10).

Legislation introduced in Liberia and other emerging countries in the Global South to extend citizenship to nationals abroad is a trend that has far reaching implications beyond the modern nation-state. Given that citizenship has been a site of contestation in Liberia because of its multiple meanings and contemporary manifestations, it is important to critically analyze how the enactment of dual citizenship legislation might reconcile or exacerbate age-old fissures within Liberia’s national fabric, further replacing the indigene vs. settler divide with the homeland Liberian vs. diasporic Liberian divide. Coupling state-building and nation-building as mutually constitutive elements in an an

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hutus interviewed by Anuradha Chakravarty expressed feelings of sympathy, regret and shame for the genocide against ordinary Tutsi, but they were also suspicious of elite Tutsi. In general, they felt that they were victims of a new period of injustice under elite Tutsi rule. Clearly, attempts to “de-ethnicise” Rwandan society aren’t working, and the result has been to emphasise rather than de-emphasise ethnicity.

Graduates of these camps saw them as efforts to exercise social control over adult Hutu men: “instead of being re-educated, these graduates have merely learned new forms of ritualised dissimulation and strategic compliance”. Legislation on “divisionism” and “genocide ideology” serves a dual purpose: it shields the RPF’s views on history, and on national unity and reconciliation, while enabling the regime to silence political dissent. These vaguely formulated laws conflate criminal defamation and other lesser offences, and even the legitimate expression of opinions, with genocide ideology. Apart from legislation, “shadow methods” such as harassment, disappearances and killings are used to foster self-censorship.

Rwanda is not unique in having a dominant ideology that is not—entirely—based on reality, whether historical or contemporary. Nor is it unique in having a dominant ideology that is not shared by many people in society whose lives it wishes to affect, and that is challenged publicly or clandestinely, at home and abroad. The problem with the RPF’s ideology is that it goes against the grain: many Rwandans do not share it, instead seeing it as a weapon of oppression. A wealth of field research has shown that there is a wide gap between the government’s official version of history and the versions told in private in Rwanda. This is a major challenge to the validity of the RPF’s ambitious reconciliation project.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meles Zenawi ripped the final EU EOM election report as “trash that deserves to be thrown in the garbage”. He said, “The report is not about our election. It is just the view of some Western neo-liberals who are unhappy about the strength of the ruling party. Anybody who has paper and ink can scribble whatever they want.” Of course, Meles was legendary for his mastery and exquisite delivery of gutter language in political discourse. He could out-tongue-lash, out-mudsling, out-bully, out-vilify and out-smear any politician on the African continent. Meles also called the 2005 EU EOM Report a “pack of lies and innuendoes”.

Since he believes civil society is the core of a democratic process, President Obama should use his leverage to ensure civil society institutions function freely in Ethiopia before the 2015 "election". What is President Obama’s leverage? Aid money. The hard earned tax dollars of the American people. American tax dollars given to African dictators in the name of helping Africans but end up in African dictators’ offshore accounts. Aid money talks and is heard loud and clear by the tone deaf TPLF bosses. As Dambissa Moyo documented in her book Dead Aid, the TPLF regime got a whopping 97 percent of its budget from foreign aid. Simply stated, the TPLF regime will not survive a single day without aid transfusion from the pockets of hardworking America taxpayers into its blood stream. President Obama needs to wag the annual welfare aid check in the faces of the salivating TPLF panhandlers and tell them what he told Africans in Accra Ghana in 2009:

The foremost ethnographer of Somalia, I.M. Lewis, penned a letter in 2007 criticising the European Union’s ‘astonishing, and imperialistic behavior … in completely ignoring Somali public opinion and its overwhelming rejection of [the TFG]’.[6]

A recent International Crisis Group (ICG) report on al-Shabaab describes the Ethiopian invasion as the event that turned the loosely organised Islamic courts coalition into a much more centralised and extremist organisation.[8]

the Kampala bombings must be seen as what they are, a baiting of the bear. By bringing the Somalian fight to the international community so crudely, al-Shabaab is counting on an aggressive international response. More civilian deaths at the hands of AMISOM soldiers will close off the renewed possibilities for moderate leadership to seize the reins from al-Shabaab and discredit the transitional government. Similarly, the rampant anti-Islamic rhetoric of the US war on terror will alienate the moderate elements of Somalia’s Islamist movements. Once bombs begin falling in earnest and fighting intensifies, the Somalian struggle will once again align with the script that poses national patriots against foreign aggressors, and the al-Shabaab will have already won the ideological struggle for the Somali people’s support.

The United States and the African Union must leave off nation-building in Somalia. Effective solutions to the Somalian civil war will not be cooked up in Kampala, Washington DC or Addis Ababa. One of the key lessons of Somaliland’s experience is that effective government must come from within. In the words of the former Somaliland president Dahir Rayale Kahin, ‘you can’t be donated power… We built this state because we saw the problems here as our problems. Our brothers in the South are still waiting—till now—for others.’[9]

Most importantly, Somaliland has secured a treasured peace on its own terms and by its own efforts. In the past 20 years Somaliland’s struggle has been for world recognition. Yet, ironically, it is precisely the country’s isolation from the international community that has allowed it to develop home-grown peace and stability. Without the dubious direction of international experts and unable to rely on international economic assistance, Somaliland has reconstructed itself with self-reliance, accountability and local investment as its touchstones.

[9] Jeffry Gettleman, ‘Somaliland is an overlooked African success story,’ The New York Time, March 6, 2007