How Successful is the Rwandan PRSP? Growth, Poverty & Inequality
An Ansoms
This Briefing looks at the achievements of the first Rwanda Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). It examines the recent evolutions of growth, poverty and inequality to assess the extent to which the PRSP has been truly pro-poor. It further explores the lessons to be learned for new poverty-reducing policies, such as the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS – PRSP2).
Cet article analyse les réalisations du premier Document Stratégique de Réduction de la Pauvreté (DSRP) du Rwanda. Il examine les évolutions récentes au niveau de la croissance, la pauvreté, et l'inégalité pour évaluer à quel degré les politiques du DSRP ont effectivement eu un effet ‘pro-pauvre’. Ensuite, il argumente quelles leçons l'on devrait tirer pour des nouvelles politiques de réduction de la pauvreté, comme la Stratégie de Développement Economique et de Réduction de la Pauvreté (DSRP2).
Rwanda entered the PRSP process in 2000, first with the elaboration of an interim PRSP, then transformed into a final PRSP-1 document that was endorsed by the IFIs in 2002. The PRSP policy built upon the government's ‘Vision 2020’ (2000), and was implemented from 2002 until 2005. The joint staff assessments of the IMF largely praised the Rwandan policy document as well as the PRS progress reports describing the policy's implementation process (IMF, 2004a; 2005a; 2006a). In early 2006, the Rwandan government started to elaborate a follow-up PRSP policy, which will become the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy' (EDPRS/PRSP-2). This document is to be finalised in 2007 and implemented in the five years to follow.
At the end of the implementation period of the first PRSP, the Rwandan experience allows us to propose preliminary conclusions regarding the results of this strategy. To what extent has Rwanda met the three main challenges it faced over the previous years, 2001–2006 (Ansoms, 2005).
1) Has economic growth been sustainable and self-reliant?
2) Has growth led to substantial and sustainable poverty reduction?
3) Has the country been able to escape the vicious circle of increasing in equality?
Has Growth Been Sustainable & Self-reliant?
In keeping with the general trend, Rwanda's PRSP identified economic growth as the essential condition for poverty reduction. Growth projections aimed for in the PRSP policy were ambitious: ideal percentages of around 4 to 5% per capita growth were set as a target over the next 15 to 20 years. They imply a 7 to 8% overall real growth (GoR, 2000), and have been slightly lowered towards growth projections between 6 and 7% for the PRSP-1 implementation period 20022005 (GoR, 2002). Also in subsequent PRS progress reports and IMF statistical documents, growth projections were typically set at around 6%.
Such ambitions seemed realistic given the positive image of Rwanda's post-war economic recovery. After an initial postwar boom, average annual growth between 1996 and 2001 remained high at 8.56%. However, this average reflects exceptional growth figures in the first years, moderated a few years later. Looking at the larger picture, it took until 2000 to reach GDP per head levels comparable with the pre-genocide period, and the economy has still not reached its performance of the early 1980s. Moreover, Rwanda has benefited from substantial aid funds, largely exceeding the sub-Saharan average. It seems likely that the aid-factor and resulting capital inflows partly explain Rwanda's economic recovery (Ansoms, 2005).
The major issue is whether growth has been self-reliant and sustainable over the last six years – the PRSP policy implementation phase. With respect to selfreliance, Rwanda is still extremely dependent on aid money: in 2004, aid funds represented $53 per head, almost 50% more than the sub-Saharan average (World Bank, 2006). To answer the second question, growth has indeed been sustained, but clearly failed to comply with projections of around 6%. Average annual growth between 2001 and 2006 amounts to 4.6%, which represents 2.7% in per capita terms (IMF, 2005b, 2006b).
For several years, economic performance fell far below the target (2002–03, 2005–06) (see Graph 2). This trend indicates that the first PRSP has not been able to achieve high and stable growth. Rwanda's economy is still extremely vulnerable to its structural limitations, being confronted with a combination of overpopulation, resource scarcity and a limited potential for economic diversification away from subsistence agriculture. For the coming years, overall growth targets are lowered from the initial 6% to the IMF projections between 4 and 4.5%. This would temper per capita growth to a quite modest 2.1 to 2.6%,1 far below the 4 to 5% per capita growth portrayed as ideal in the first PRSP document.
Has Growth Led to Poverty Reduction?
A second main issue is to determine how growth has been translated into poverty reduction. This can be roughly done by comparing the Rwandan growth elasticity of poverty with cross-country averages. The average growth elasticity of poverty is estimated to be within the interval − 2 and − 3. This means that a positive economic growth rate of 1% leads to a 2% to 3% decrease of poverty, measured as the percentage of poor living below the poverty line of $1 PPP per head (Ravallion & Chen, 1997; World Bank, 2000; Ravallion, 2001; Adams, 2004).
In comparison with those cross-country averages, the growth elasticity of poverty for Rwanda's post-conflict period was − 0.37 during 1994–2000, indicating that each percentage of economic growth only led to a 0.37% decrease in poverty incidence (Ansoms, 2005). These calculations were based on a poverty line of $1 PPP per head per day. For Rwanda, however, to compare poverty incidence for 2001 and 2006, we use a different poverty line,2 equivalent to 175 Franc Rwandais (Frw) per adult equivalent per day for 2001 prices, and 250 Frw per adult equivalent per day for 2006 prices. Based on this line, incidence of poverty has decreased from 60.3% to 56.9% over the last six years (GoR, 2006a). Overall, this results in a growth elasticity of poverty of −0.40. We could thus conclude that the pro-poor character of Rwandan economic growth is still exceptionally low in comparison with cross-country averages.
Moreover, poverty incidence is measured in percentage terms and hides the evolutions in absolute numbers. Given the high population growth of 3,5% per year, the absolute number of people living in poverty has increased from 4.8 to 5.4 million over the period 2001–2006 (GoR, 2006a). These data show the importance to look beyond relative figures.
A second approach to measure the impact of growth on poverty reduction is to look at the elasticity of connection between the income of the poor and the mean income. Generally, writers situate this elasticity at around − 1 which implies that the incomes of the poor rise or fall at the same speed as the average income (Roemer & Gugerty, 1997; Gallup et al. 1999; Dollar & Kraay, 2002; Foster & Szekely, 2002). Ansoms (2005) could only estimate the elasticity for the period 1985–2001, due to a lack of data on the distribution of consumption in between those years. Overall, income decreased during this period, but disproportionately affected the poor, who saw their incomes decline with 4.6% for each average income loss of 1%. This implies that as people generally experienced a fall in income, the poorest sufferest the greatest falls.
As highlighted by Ravallion (2001), there is again an important difference between distributions evaluated in relative and absolute terms. With an elasticity of 1, relative distribution between rich and poor is assumed to remain constant (distribution neutral growth) but the absolute gap between rich and poor increases in a phase of growth. This means that if the relative distribution of consumption had remained equal in Rwanda between 2001 and 2006, the absolute gap between the poorest and richest quintile would widen. More concretely, the additional amount for each percentage of growth would be almost ten times higher for the richest quintile in comparison with the poorest quintile. Exact distribution data are still unavailable for 2006. However, a first examination of the Lorenz curve (displayed in GoR, 2006a) indicates that the elasticity of connection is below 1 for all quintiles except for the richest. This implies that the poor have benefitted far less from growth in comparison with the richest quintile, both in relative and in absolute terms.
We could conclude that the impact of economic growth on poverty reduction has been extremely weak in comparison with cross-country evidence. The period 2001–2006 thus perfectly illustrates the limitations of a growth-reliant strategy for poverty reduction in Rwanda.
Has Inequality Fallen?
The impact of growth on poverty depends largely upon initial inequality levels: Adams (2004) found for example lower growth-poverty elasticity rates for countries with initially higher inequality (Gini < 40.0).3 Rwanda seems to be a perfect illustration of this. By 2001, inequality had become a very serious problem with a Gini coefficient of 0.47, which hugely contrasts with the situation of the mid-1980s when Rwanda qualified as a low-inequality country (with a Gini of 0.289). Moreover, inequality has further increased over the period 2001–2006 as the Gini reached 0.51. A preliminary report of the Rwandan Government that discusses evolutions over this time period, admits that ‘Because growth over this period has been accompanied by increasing inequality, this has reduced its impact on the reduction of poverty levels’ (GoR, 2006a:7).
The rising levels of inequality are mainly due to an increasing gap between poor and rich in the rural setting, while urban inequality and the rural-urban gap decreased. The reduction of urban inequality can be explained by several policy measures that prevent or discourage the poor to live in the capital city. The Government is blamed for forcibly removing street children from the streets of Kigali, gathering them in detention centres in or outside the city (BBC, 2004; HRW, 2006). Furthermore, categories of the poor and powerless are also discouraged to live in Kigali city in less starkly coercive ways. Durand-Lasserve (2005) illustrates how current formalised urban land and housing policies create a bias against poorer groups, and result in an increase in the number of expropriations and evictions. He states:
At present, restrictive planning and development standards are directly responsible for the exclusion of 75 to 80% of households from legal access to land and housing. Evictions of these households can be deemed necessary both for public and private needs. The city itself displaces households to engage in urban renewal projects and infrastructure works. But also private investors can take the initiative to develop a particular site occupied by informal settlements with an approval of the City Hall (Durand-Lasserve, 2005 :10).
Somewhat more surprising is the decrease in rural-urban disparities. There are two hypotheses that could explain this phenomenon. A first tendency, linked to the decentralisation policy, is for educated civil servants at lower levels to move to local centres in the countryside and occupy a post in the local administration that has become more elaborate and has received increased decisionmaking power. A second, more significant factor is the tendency for land and agricultural policy (see GoR, 2005, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c) to enhance the opportunities for larger-scale farmers to become active entrepreneurs in a professionalised and modernised agricultural sector. These measures work at the expense of small-scale subsistence farmers and tend to increase the gap between the rural rich and poor (Ansoms, 2007). The result of this is that the rural-urban differential in Gini coefficients has decreased between 2001 and 2006.
The observation of increased inequality in rural areas between 2001 and 2006 is a symptom of the fact that agricultural growth mostly accrues to the already better-off. Indeed, the translation of agricultural growth into poverty reduction has been extremely low over this period. The growth elasticity of poverty of the agricultural sector (see Table 1) is measured as the ratio between the log average annual change in poverty and the log average annual change in primary (agricultural) GDP per capita (see Christiaensen & Demery, 2006). In Rwanda, for the period between 2001 and 2006, this elasticity is extremely low at − 0.84.4 This figure is not so much different from the growth elasticity of poverty for the secondary (− 0.52) and tertiary (− 0.61) sectors. For this calculation, we have used poverty incidence based on the national poverty line, not based on the $1 PPP per day line. Therefore, it is difficult to compare the elasticity of the agricultural sector with the SSA average of − 6.22 and the already low Rwandan elasticity of − 2.17 for the period 1994–2000 (based on $1 PPP poverty line). Nonetheless, it is clear that the pro-poor character of agricultural growth is extremely limited.
| GDP share (%) (1)* | Growth elasticity of poverty (2)** | Participation effect (1) × (2)** | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agr. | Ind. | Ser. | Agr. | Ind. | Ser. | Agr. | Ind. | Ser. | |
| SSA, low-income | 32 | 23 | 45 | − 6.22 | 1.31 | − 1.09 | − 1.99 | 0.30 | − 0.49 |
| Rwanda 1994–2000 | 45 | 19 | 36 | − 2.17 | − 1.17 | − 0.66 | − 0.98 | − 0.22 | − 0.24 |
| Rwanda 2001–2006 | 41 | 21 | 38 | − 0.84 | − 0.52 | − 0.61 | − 0.35 | − 0.11 | − 0.23 |
| * GDP shares for Rwanda are based on the average between 1994 and 2000, and the average between 2001 and 2005). ** The growth elasticity of poverty and the participation effect for Rwanda 2001–2006 is not comparable with the other figures given that a different poverty line has been used to calculate these figures. Source: For SSA-low GoR; 2002 and GoR, 2006A. |
How Pro-poor were PRSP Policies?
Taking all into consideration for the period 2001–2006, growth has fluctuated and on average not met the target of 6%, the translation of growth into poverty reduction has been low, and Rwanda is confronted with ever further increasing inequality. Overall, the success rate of the first Rwandan Poverty Reduction Strategy is thus very limited.
A first question is whether the priorities in the first PRSP were wrongly defined. The six priority areas, ranked in order of importance, were identified as: ‘rural development and agricultural transformation, human development, economic infrastructure, governance, private sector development, and institutional capacity building’ (GoR, 2002:6). These choices were largely encouraged by the international community, for example, in the Joint Staff Assessments of the International Monetary Fund.
However, although each of these priorities could indeed be an important action point for poverty reduction, a lot depends upon how policy measures are formulated and which public they target. In their independent evaluation of the PRSP, Evans et al. (2006) touch upon this problem, stating that:
while the poverty analysis is clearly valueadding, relatively little analysis is provided of the specific risks and vulnerabilities facing different groups in different localities in Rwanda (Evans, 2006 :5).
When looking at budgetary commitments (see Table 2a, b), overall poverty prioritised spending has strongly increased over the last six years from 25 up to 50% between 2001 and 2006. However, the pro-poor character of several of those spending items can indeed be questioned.
| B: Budget A: Actual | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| % | A2001 | B2002 | A2002 | B2003 | A2003 | B2004 | A2004 |
| Total Priority expenditures | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| -of which education | 62.9 | 22.9 | 21.5 | 21.4 | 24.8 | 22.2 | 24.1 |
| -of which tertiary education | 19.7 | 15.5 | 14.2 | 13.3 | 13.8 | 12.8 | na |
| -of which health | 13.0 | 7.1 | 6.8 | 7.6 | 8.9 | 8.9 | 8.7 |
| -of which internal affairs (police, prisons) | 8.8 | 8.2 | 8.0 | 7.9 | 9.1 | 7.1 | 6.1 |
| -of which infrastructure | 1.7 | 9.1 | 8.9 | 12.1 | 10.4 | 11.6 | 6.6 |
| -of which local government* | 4.4 | 44.2 | 46.1 | 43.0 | 42.1 | 34.9 | 33.1 |
| -of which agriculture | 4.6 | 4.6 | 5.2 | 4.7 | 2.3 | 3.4 | 2.2 |
| -of which commerce / export promotion | 1.1 | 1.5 | 1.3 | 1.3 | 0.9 | 9.7 | 5.2 |
| -of which energy** | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 12.8 |
| -of which others | 3.5 | 2.4 | 2.2 | 2.0 | 1.4 | 2.2 | 1.1 |
| Priority expenditures as % of total exp. | 25.3 | 32.1 | 35.8 | 28.4 | 30.5 | 35.6 | 35.7 |
| B: Budget A: Actual | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| % | B2005 | A2005 | B2006 | A2006 | B2007 |
| Total Priority expenditures | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| -of which education | 23.8 | 38.2 | 39.7 | 41.3 | 36.9 |
| -of which tertiary education | na | na | na | na | na |
| -of which health | 10.6 | 12.9 | 12.3 | 12.8 | 12.3 |
| -of which internal affairs (police, prisons) | 6.9 | 6.8 | 6.3 | 6.4 | 5.4 |
| -of which Infrastructure | 8.3 | 17.0 | 10.6 | 13.8 | 17.7 |
| -of which local government * | 32.5 | 4.8 | 6.3 | 9.2 | 10.0 |
| -of which agriculture | 3.4 | 4.9 | 4.7 | 6.4 | 11.5 |
| -of which commerce / export promotion | 4.2 | 6.0 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 3.1 |
| -of which energy** | 6.3 | 0.0 | 2.6 | * | * |
| -of which others | 4.1 | 9.5 | 12.8 | 5.5 | 3.8 |
| Priority expenditures as % of total exp. | 32.5 | 35.9 | 42.0 | 49.8 | 54.2 |
| * For actual 2005, budget 2006, actual 2006 and budget 2007, no data are available on provincial programmes and these funds are not included in this post. ** For Actual 2006 and Budgeted 2007, energy expenditures are included in infrastructure expenditures. Sources: Purcell et al., 2005; GoR, 2006b and GoR, 20 |
Tertiary education for example received over half of the priority budget spent in education. Similarly, tertiary health received 1 billion Frw extra in 2004, while primary health care came 1.5 billion Frw short (Evans, 2006). Even more striking is the comparison of the share destined for tertiary education (over 12%) with the share for the entire agricultural sector (less than 5%). And within this sector, the impact of growth on poverty reduction is low as shown in previous parts of this briefing. Despite the fact that the first Rwandan PRSP did indeed provide some decent policies for enhancing development and growth, many of its strategies were less suited to target the poorer categories of the Rwandan population. The major underlying problem is the marginal attention in the first PRSP to the problem of inequality. Unequal distribution was not seen as a major issue as illustrated the following quotation from the PRSP:
Growth can be accompanied by increased or reduced inequality. However, economies which have followed an agricultureled strategy have seen much more pro-poor growth than those where growth has been concentrated in the other parts of the economy. Because Rwanda's growth strategy is based on agriculture, it is specifically designed to be pro-poor (GoR, 2002 :31).
Lessons for Future Poverty Reduction Policies
By way of conclusion, we could say that Rwanda is still facing the challenges it was facing in 2001. Sustained and stable growth figures will not be easy to achieve. But far more important is the poor translation of growth into poverty reduction. To reach this objective, the pro-poor character of Rwandan development policies has to increase. In line with this, policies should refocus on inequality reduction and redistribution policies.
Many people identified as ‘poor’ have a high productive capacity but are confronted with institutional constraints that prevent them from taking part in profitable income-generating opportunities. PRSP policies should involve the large mass of such impoverished people. A crucial exercise lies then in differentiating between various population groups; defining institutional access gates or barriers for those divergent groups; and analysing how specific policies can remove those barriers. This would result in a more equitable distribution of growth and could pro-actively prevent households from falling into the vulnerability trap.
The ambition of the future EDPRS policy is to ‘refocus on equitable growth, sustainable development, and poverty reduction’, with again rural development as an important priority.5 Striving for pro-poor growth can however not be confined to ‘looking for growth in the sector where the poor are located’. The major challenge for policy makers and international donors is to shift their attention from a purely output-led logic towards more integrating distributionoriented development policies. In other words, it would require reconciling efficiency with equity, and even to put equity first.
An Ansoms , Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Antwerp, Belgium; e-mail: an.ansoms @ua.ac.be
Democratising Nigerian Politics: Transcending the Shadows of Militarism
Cyril I. Obi
One of the paradoxical features of the political transition(s) to democracy in Nigeria is that they have all been imposed by hegemonic bloc(s) within the military elite. Nigeria has inherited democracies from military Generals. Such transition(s) have provided legitimacy for the political elite to monopolise State power, gain international credibility and control access to vast providential petroleum resources. These elite pacts that underscore Nigeria's political transitions have undermined democracy, precisely by adopting its platform and appearance to gain legitimacy, while blocking genuine democratic forces from participating in politics or limiting them to voting without choosing.
Militarism includes, not just military rule, but its political legacy, a culture steeped in impunity, a deep loathing of opposition or criticism and a reliance on force, rather than persuasion. As noted elsewhere, ‘militarism forecloses debates, discussions, bargaining and compromise. Instead it elevates force, intimidation, compulsion and control’ (International IDEA, 2000:10). In the Nigerian context, as the ‘practitioners of violence,’ the military were placed at a position of ‘advantage’ in the political arena. Given the visibility of such individuals and the top positions they occupy in post-military democratic institutions, their politics and actions have far reaching implications for democratic politics.
It must be emphasised that militarism is not the exclusive preserve of the military-in-politics, for civilian politicians feature prominently as their partners. The mix of militarism, state power, oil and class formation is such a combustible mix that it suffocates the prospects for any real democratisation of social relations. In this ‘petrolised’ context, political parties particularly the one favoured by the state, or the incumbent leadership, perceive of themselves as political combat units contesting elections – electoral wars, to be won at all costs. Party leaders or political entrepreneurs/‘godfathers’ were akin to war generals or contractors that could mobilise the resources and forces necessary to deliver complete or ‘landslide’ victories.
Between Militarism & Democracy in Nigeria
Since the return to democratic rule in 1999, Nigeria has witnessed an escalation of violent political conflict. The lines of conflict are complex and diverse. On the one hand, the democratic opening has created an opportunity for hitherto repressed groups agitating for a redistribution of power, social justice and resources to pursue their interests, while on the other, the persistence of militarism has all but closed the prospects for political participation, dialogue and democratisation, and deepened existing tensions.
These conflicts have largely been identity driven: communal, ethnic and religious. The process of discriminating against or excluding ‘other’ Nigerian citizens on the basis of their being ‘nonindigenes’ or belonging to ‘other’ religions or ‘other’ communities can be gleaned from conflicts that have ravaged the Northern and Central parts of Nigeria (Best & Kemedi, 2005), as well as the oil-rich Niger Delta region where violence has reached alarming levels (Obi, 2004, 2006; Human Rights Watch, 2005; Peel, 2005). These developments also underscore why the initiative in organising identity-driven political agitation has been taken up by well-armed youth militia or vigilante groups engaged in acts of violence as responses to alienation from the state, economic decline, unemployment, and the militarisation of society by decades of military rule. Some of these groups include the O'Odua Peoples Congress (OPC), Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB); Arewa Peoples Congress (APC), and the Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force (NDPVF).
Violence was also a feature of the run-up to the hotly disputed 2003 elections. This was particularly pronounced in the Niger delta region where there were reports of the widespread use of armed groups to intimidate political opponents and voters and ensure victory for the PDP candidates (Human Rights Watch, 2005; Okonta, 2005). As the 2007 elections draw nearer, there is an escalation of violence in the Niger Delta, including an incipient insurgency by the new militia group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), seeking to control oil. The fractionalisation of the leading political parties, particularly the President's PDP has intensified as the party leadership seeks to control the politics of succession, and various individuals jostle to become party candidates in the April elections.
The Defining Issues
The promise of a return to democracy constituted an important platform for the legitimacy of military intervention in Nigerian politics. This can be gleaned from the legitimacy crises that General Gowon's military government faced in spite of winning a war of national unity, when it became clear in the early 1970s that a return to democracy was nowhere in his regime's agenda. This was in sharp contrast to the respect that the Murtala-Obasanjo military regime earned when it announced a transition programme and successfully handed over power to an elected government on schedule in 1979. This trend was however muddied by what Diamond et al. (1997), aptly described as ‘ transition without end’ of General Babangida's regime, which postponed the handover date several times, and annulled the 12 June 1993 Presidential elections, widely regarded as being free and fair. Babangida foisted an unelected Interim Transition Government (ING) on the country just before being forced from power by popular protests against the annulment. Apart from denying the alleged winner of the elections Chief M. K. O. Abiola (a Yoruba millionaire businessman from South-West Nigeria), his victory, it also denied the majority of the Nigerian electorate their choice as clearly expressed at the polls.
The military in power was a complex political network driven by two logics: the central control of power over resources, and the control of state power by a small group led by the Commander in Chief. Both logics were antithetical to the notions of sharing power and popular consent. After seizing state power in 1966, the hegemonic faction of the military elite became highly politicised, but more fundamentally, it militarised politics and society. The military as a more cohesive national institution in the absence of a counterweight in terms of national cohesion in civil society, was able through its capture of state power and resources to establish an authoritarian form of governance.
The obsession with power has outlived formal military rule in Nigeria. Fortunately, there are signs that there are social forces within Nigeria albeit in an uncoordinated form sustaining the struggle for democratisation. This was evident in the way some principled democrats, the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP) and the National Civil Society Coalition Against Third Term Agenda (NACATT) effectively mobilised the media and the public to block the attempt to change the constitution to prolong the President's tenure. They have found the new democratic opening as a veritable framework to defend existing democratic gains. But a lot more has to be done to advance these modest gains in a sustained manner.
The Nature of the Nigerian Petro-State
The oil-state nexus defines Nigeria as a petro-state. According to a recent study, oil accounts for 40% of its GDP, 70% of government revenue and 92% of foreign exchange earnings (Wurthmann, 2006). It is however paradoxical that in spite of its oil wealth, about 70% of Nigeria's 140 million people lives below the poverty line. It is however important to note that, the oil on which the state and economy are dependent is mainly produced by foreign oil multinationals and companies: Shell, Chevron Texaco, Exxon Mobil, Total and ENI (Agip). These companies are very sophisticated and powerful, and the relations of oil production tends to concentrate more power and resources in their hands, often at the expense of the poor oil producing communities of the Niger Delta. It is difficult for the weak state institutions to effectively regulate them.
The nature of the Nigerian Petro-state is such that since the prize of controlling and distributing oil wealth is so high, democracy is a somewhat problematic prospect. The only form of democracy allowed only serves in real terms to ‘disempower’ the people (Ake, 1994). The fact that Nigeria's oil boom coincided with military rule also meant that the petro-state and its ruling elite became militarised. In this context therefore the military faction of the ruling elite may well leave office, but continues to exercise power both as individual actors in the new (post-military) democratic political programme, and by virtue of the accumulation of vast wealth with which to fund the militarisation of politics.
The Nature of the Nigerian Political Elite
The Nigerian political elite is a product of Nigeria's tumultuous political history. The elite has been described as a hybrid of sorts reflecting Western values against a Nigerian background (Ayandele, 1974). When it became clear that independence was imminent this elite mobilised ethnicity to canvass for support for its ascension to power. This laid the foundation for the politicisation of ethnicity and religion, and the intense rivalry (and division) between ethnic groups and geopolitical regions (later states) in Nigeria.
The opportunism of the political elite and the ways it has often manipulated political structures and processes to promote selfish and narrow ends is well known. Two issues are however fundamental, the deep divisions within the elite along personal, ethnic, religious, and factional lines, and the lack of a clear vision or common ideology for a broad social project (Olusanya, 1986). The first suggests an incoherence of the elite leading it to engage in acrimonious internal rivalry and conflict, and the second promotes political opportunism, lack of principles and poor leadership. These explain why certain elements and forces within the political elite colluded with the military faction to subvert the democratic ethos for selfish gain, and why the political class cannot reach a consensus on how it will define a national basis for Nigeria's democratic project.
An important development is the integration of the ruling faction of the military into the political elite via a process of retirement and ‘civilianisation’. This development has two sides. It is positive to the extent that it signals the acceptance of the military faction of the supremacy of civil and democratic authority, but it also raises the risk that the political process would be subject to the survival tactics of these (very wealthy) erstwhile practitioners of organised violence who may be dictatorial, impatient or dismissive of the complex and slow workings of the democratic process. Also relevant is the way in which they seek to crush all opposition, and the manner in which they perceive and approach elections.
The implication of the nature of the dominant faction of the political elite is that it sees democracy more as a means to an end, rather than an end itself. Its politics also tends to be excessively personalised and connected to the allknowing wisdom and benevolence of the ‘big man’ or political ‘godfather’, whose word is law, and demands absolute loyalty from all. This creates several problems, not least in the clan of ‘big men’ all jostling for power. Also it forecloses debates, bargaining and negotiation that are so vital to building democracy in a multi-ethnic country such as Nigeria.
The Economic & International Dimensions
The Nigerian political class has tapped into the international legitimacy and recognition given to democratic governments. At the present time, the basic assumption of the government is that market-led economic reforms and neoliberal (multiparty) democracy cannot be questioned. It has done a lot in the area of market-led economic reforms, which is also targeted at winning the approval and support of the international community for the government and its apparently market-friendly policies.
This has raised some issues. The first is what Abrahamsen (2000), refers to as ‘exclusionary democracy’, in which economic reforms are not subjected to any thorough going national debate, and actually exclude, disempower and impoverish the people, dashing their hopes for a better quality of life. Conforming to the global ‘ideological moment’ the government has imposed economic and political policies from above directed more at satisfying the conditions laid down by external constituencies: the international financial institutions and the donor community. However, a lot lies beneath the veil of market-led reforms, suggesting the privatisation of state enterprises, most times at give away prices to vested personal, local and foreign interests. The process has been less than transparent, fostering crony capitalism.
It is not possible to understand the postmilitary anti-democratic currents in Nigeria outside of the global political economy of oil. Although these oil companies are in ‘partnership’ with the Nigerian State, which theoretically gets a larger share of profits from crude oil sales, they enjoy a considerable leverage over the petro-state that lacks oil technology, and the sophisticated management capacity of the oil companies. It is well known that oil multinationals have played interventionist roles, covertly supporting corruption and violence in States all over the third world in its insatiable quest for cheap stable sources of oil, and huge profits (Cummins & Beasant, 2005; Watts, 1999).
The foregoing suggests that the global political economy of oil favours centralised political forms that make the oil business less complex and highly profitable. Reactions to the Niger Delta crisis clearly show an international preference for strong (coercive) measures to guarantee uninterrupted supplied of cheap high quality Nigerian crude to the world market. Apart from the expropriation of their lands, the pollution of their fragile ecosystems and destruction of the ecological basis of their livelihoods, amidst growing impoverishment and high rates of youth unemployment, the Niger Delta is the most militarised region in the country, with frequent incidents of violence and military campaigns against communities that threaten oil company interests (Human Rights Watch, 2005; Best and Kemedi, 2005). Given the high level of insecurity in the Niger Delta as a result of the activity of youth militia attacks on the oil industry in the context of the growing importance of West Afri-ca's oil in a post-9/11 world to US and global energy security (Klare & Volman, 2004; Valle, 2005; Obi, 2006), the militarisation of the region is most likely going to continue.
Beyond Militarism: Will Democracy Thrive in Nigeria?
The foregoing shows that the militarisation of politics is the antithesis of democracy, which thrives by seeking to close the political space, disempower and depoliticise the citizens so they can no longer freely participate in decisionmaking, or contest for access to power and resources. Indeed the militarisation of politics cannot be separated from the disempowerment of democracy. This implies that a critical aspect of the deepening of democracy or democratic consolidation must involve the demilitarisation of politics in Nigeria. The challenge is how to transcend militarism. Will the ruling elite voluntarily loosen its tight grip on power and resources, and empower the people to take decisions that touch upon their collective wellbeing? Do possibilities exist for a broad democratic alliance to effectively organise a transformation of the existing inequitable power relations? These are difficult questions.
A modest starting point is to forge a new impetus for Nigeria's democracy on the basis of a new political culture built on the values of inclusiveness, open participation, respect for the rule of law, the spirit of give and take, trust and consensus-building through dialogue. It would also involve a lot of work in civic education, coalition building and the mobilisation of people to struggle for the right to participate in democratic politics. At the international level, it would require making the forces of economic globalisation recognise the right of the people to define the content of the type of participatory democracy that would best promote their dignity, and liberation from both internal and external domination and oppression. A new democracy from below, rooted in the people and a developmental state, representing and reflecting a new social contract, and their quest for social justice, equity, welfare and freedom offers brighter prospects for empowering the people and advancing the democratic project in Nigeria.
Cyril Obi; e-mail: cyrilobi@123456hotmail.com.
The Evolution of British Trade Justice Campaigning
Tom Sharman
Trade justice campaigning has come a long way in just a few years. In the words of one NGO colleague, the ideas of trade justice have moved from the lunatic fringe to the mainstream faster than we thought possible. As NGO campaigning on trade has matured it has also evolved from an initial focus on agricultural subsidies and the World Trade Organization to include a much broader range of issues and institutional targets. It is not only the issues, the campaign terrain, that have changed but campaign tools have become more varied too. After discussing the different phases of trade justice campaigning I will give a few examples of how different campaign tools work to effect change.
‘Trade Justice’: An NGO Definition
Trade justice is realised differently at different levels. For example, an African country realises trade justice when its government secures the right to choose the best policies to end poverty, protect the environment and empower women without impediment from international institutions, donors or other powerful global actors. An individual or community in sub-Saharan Africa realises trade justice when they secure the right to participate in local or international markets and are able to make a decent living from this participation.
British NGOs (or, as in ActionAid's case, the UK offices of international NGOs) have focused on the international dimension of trade justice – what western governments must do in order that Africa is able to benefit from the global trading system.1 The rationale has been that while western NGOs influence western governments and institutions, African NGOs influence their own governments in order that gains in international fora actually make a positive impact on the ground.
Trade Justice or ‘Fairtrade’?
The ideas of trade justice are intimately associated with those of fairtrade. Indeed the origins of trade justice campaigning can be directly traced to the birth of the fairtrade movement. Some fairtrade producers, such as Traidcraft, have added trade justice campaigning to their list of activities. Fairtrade began as a response to the low wages that tea and coffee producers received, particularly stark given the high mark-up when the finished products were sold on British supermarket shelves. Given that many poor countries continued to depend on a handful of commodities for foreign exchange earnings and employment, it seemed logical to start by addressing the situation of commodity producers themselves.
Since the launch of the official fairtrade mark in the UK in 1994 sales have grown massively, albeit from very small beginnings, from £16.7 million in 1998 to £195 million in 2005.2 By 2005 there were 1,500 fairtrade retail and catering products available to British consumers.3 Yet despite its success, fairtrade remains largely confined to a small number of food commodity products such as coffee, tea and chocolate. Furthermore, it is estimated to benefit 1 million producers worldwide, or 5 million people if dependents are included.4 While this is impressive, it falls a long way short of the estimated 300 million people living on less than $1 a day in Africa. For deeper, structural changes to the global trading system it had become clear to development NGOs that additional measures were needed.
A Brief History of NGO Mass Campaigning on Development
With the public visibility of 2005s ‘Make Poverty History’ coalition still fresh in many minds, it is easy to forget that large-scale NGO campaigning on development is a relatively new, but welcome, phenomenon. For many NGOs, engaging supporters' minds as well as their wallets and purses only began in the late 1990s. Prior to this, while some NGOs might have engaged in some insider lobbying, the energy of the development sector was primarily directed towards funding and expanding their own projects and programmes in Africa and elsewhere.
The first big development coalition campaign was Jubilee 2000, founded in October 1997 with strong roots in the churches and focused exclusively on the need for debt cancellation.5 The international coalition fell apart when rich governments started to provide a partial response, which many of the Southern groups felt was inadequate. As 2000 was reached the sustained, mass-level campaigning came to an end.
Into the vacuum NGOs began to turn their attention towards trade, specifically because of the campaigning opportunities presented by the launch of the new Doha Round negotiations of World Trade Organization in November 2001. Trade replaced debt as the major NGO issue of the day and the Trade Justice Movement coalition was born.6
In the run up to 2005 and throughout the year, three issue coalitions were responsible for ‘Make Poverty History’ policy demands: the Trade Justice Movement on ‘trade justice’; the Jubilee Debt Campaign on ‘drop the debt’, and the newlyformed UK Aid Network on ‘more and better aid’. After ‘Make Poverty History’ was formally wound up as a coalition campaign in early 2006, the development sector was left with the three feeder coalitions and the emergence of Stop Climate Chaos as a crossover develop-ment-environment NGO coalition.7
The Changing Campaign Terrain: Four Overlapping Eras
Trade justice campaigning can arguably be divided into four overlapping eras: agricultural subsidies; no new issues at the WTO; stop forced liberalisation; and the emergence of corporate accountability and regulation as a trade justice issue.
The initial focus on agricultural subsidies was down to the dual opportunities presented by the review of the Common Agricultural Policy in 2003 and the WTO Ministerial conference in Cancun in the same year. Campaigners demanded a complete end to export subsidies which enable Northern transnational corporations to export their food products at below cost of production. The main aim was for the British government to use its political clout to push for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy with other EU members. A secondary goal was for subsidies to be pushed up the agenda of the WTO negotiations with the specific intention of parallel reductions in US subsidies. NGOs anticipated reductions to Northern subsidies which would lead to reductions in dumping into African markets.
On this plank of the trade justice agenda (freeing developing countries from the impact of western market distortions), the British government has been consistently supportive, yet the limits of this kind of campaign soon became apparent. Rather than the government seeing it as a spring-board to push for the wider trade justice agenda, it was sometimes even presented in opposition to it as part of a general agenda for global trade liberalisation. Furthermore, the campaign lacked power in other key EU member states, notably France and Germany, which could have made a major difference to the EU's subsidy regime.
The limitations of a farm subsidies campaign became apparent in some of the comments of its supporters, both from within NGOs and outside them. Some chose to present it as a free market agenda and appeared to suggest that they did not care if French farmers became unemployed as a result. This helped to wrongly frame the issues as Britain vs. France or urban vs. rural when the message that the majority of the campaigners wanted to convey was one of justice for poor farmers in Africa. It seems perfectly possible to design a subsidy regime in the EU and the US that supports small-scale farmers in those countries without having a negative impact on poor farmers in Africa and elsewhere.
With the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy in 2003 failing to deliver the changes that campaigners had been calling for, the next big opportunity was the WTO ministerial in Cancun in 2003. The launch of the Doha Round in 2001 presented both poor countries and campaigners with an opportunity and a threat, a recurring theme to the present day. Many African countries saw the purpose of the Doha Round as rebalancing the global trade system after the previous Uruguay Round (concluded in 1994) which set up the WTO had largely left them with a set of obligations which were having a negative impact on their home constituency rather than opportunities for economic development. In contrast the major rich countries, particularly the EU and US, saw the Doha Round as a means to greater multilateral trade liberalisation and an extension of the liberalisation agenda into new areas. The result was a broad list of issues covered by the label of ‘Doha Development Agenda’ in order to give it credibility with poor countries.
This tension, between rebalancing the multilateral trading system for the benefit of poor countries and pushing for ‘faster, further’ trade liberalisation, first came to a head at the Cancun Ministerial. By this time British trade justice campaigners had aligned with Southern governments with a demand to drop the ‘new issues’ – international agreements on the liberalisation of investment, competition policy, government procurement, and trade facilitation. This annoyed the British government because for the first time, the NGOs were united in opposing a part of their liberalisation agenda. Eventually, if not belatedly, the then Trade Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, tried to persuade the then chief EU negotiator, Pascal Lamy, to drop the demand for agreements on these new issues or risk the collapse of the Ministerial. Lamy's response was that his negotiating mandate came from all EU member states and that he could not bow to the demands of the UK alone. The result was that the Ministerial collapsed.
It took a further year for the WTO negotiations to be put back together. When WTO members agreed the 2004 July Framework the price was that three of the new issues – the liberalisation of investment, competition policy and government procurement – were dropped from the negotiations; only the fourth new issue – trade facilitation – remained.
As the 2005 ‘year of Africa’ came into focus – with the British Government using its Presidency of the G8 and the EU to ‘do something for Africa’, the UN World Summit and the WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong – the profile of trade justice campaigning moved up several gears. It was agreed that the priority demand was that the British Government should fight to stop forced liberalisation at the WTO and elsewhere.
The initial government position was one of hostility. The starting point, as illustrated in the 2004 DTI White Paper, ‘Making Globalisation a Force for Good’, was the ideology of ‘same destination, different speeds’ – ‘the removal of trade barriers is just as important for developing countries as for developed’.8 Liberalisation is a sound objective and the only discussion should be how long a country should take to liberalise. The reason used to justify this is, ‘The evidence shows that those countries which have achieved the biggest reductions in poverty in recent years have been those which have been open to international trade’.9 The NGO response to this is that China, India, Vietnam, South Korea and Taiwan before them did not develop as a result of opening their own markets on an indiscriminate basis.
The idea that African countries should be able to choose their own paths to development gained currency in the British government in the run-up to the G8 summit. It was clear that in order for NGOs to be positive about Tony Blair's ‘Commission for Africa’ report it would have to signal a change from existing British policy. On trade, the ‘stop forced liberalisation’ position was articulated in two key statements:
Development must be the priority in all trade agreements, with liberalisation not forced on Africa.10
Attempts to dictate policies, as we have argued throughout, are not only unacceptable as behaviour towards a partner and sovereign nation; they are also likely to be ineffective in generating real commitment and reform, let alone deliver the right solutions.11
One of the reasons was disagreement as to what exactly ‘forced liberalisation’ entailed. I have always been clear that ‘unforced liberalisation’ refers to national policy decisions taken without external pressure; ‘forced liberalisation’ meant market opening under pressure, either directly from donors and international institutions or through trade negotiations that would result in new obligations on developing countries. In contrast, the government's preferred interpretation was to accept the arguments on aid conditionality but reject the trade position: ‘forced liberalisation’ meant only underhand coercion at WTO ministerials – for example, threats to withhold aid money or debt relief unless poor countries signed on the dotted line.
The era of ‘stop forced liberalisation’ campaigning coincided with the move to a broader agenda that looked beyond the WTO. Many NGOs had begun to look to bilateral trade agreements and the International Financial Institutions as sources of trade injustice. While the US had long pursued a strategy of negotiating Free Trade Agreements with strategic partners, in parallel to the WTO negotiations, the EU had been more hesitant. But when negotiations on new Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) with the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group began in earnest, NGOs in Europe and Africa began to step up their campaigning. In the UK, the opportunity of the EU Presidency in 2005 pushed EPAs up the trade justice agenda. NGO demands crystallised around two major areas: the reintroduction of the ‘new issues’, rejected by developing countries at the WTO through the backdoor, and the EU push for rapid and deep trade liberalisation by the ACP countries.
Whilst the European Commission negotiates trade agreements on behalf of the EU's member states, NGO discussions with Commission officials had come up against a brick wall. The standard response was that a) the new EPAs had to include rapid and deep trade liberalisation to conform to WTO rules; b) that trade liberalisation was in any case ‘good for development’ and c) that the EU's member states had already given the Commission a mandate to negotiate these deals which could not be undone.
As covered above, NGOs would dispute the idea that trade liberalisation is automatically good for development, especially if it is externally imposed to an arbitrary timescale, as the EU was proposing. Second, if WTO rules were the problem, then the EU should be pushing to reform them to ensure developing countries' rights were protected. Third, if the largely uninterested EU member states had made a mistake in granting the Commission powers to negotiate unfair deals, that was all the more reason to undo such powers.
The initial EPA campaign in the UK therefore focused on pushing the British government to work with other EU member states to change the Commission's negotiating mandate and ensure that whatever deals were put to ACP countries did not require extensive liberalisation or include the ‘new issues’ against their will. After some argument, the British government moved in the NGO direction and issued a position paper a few days after the ‘Commission for Africa’ report in March 2005: negotiations on new issues should be dropped unless specifically requested by the ACP, and ACP countries should have up to 20 years to liberalise rather than the 10 years being promoted by the European Commission. At the time of writing (February 2007), Brussels has made little progress on either of these points but ACP countries are being more vocal in their criticisms of the negotiating process and anticipated outcome. It looks far from certain that agreements will be reached by the end of 2007.
The corporate accountability dimension of trade justice began to gain momentum towards the end of 2005. A number of NGOs, notably ActionAid from the development sector and Friends of the Earth from the environment camp, saw the Company Law Reform Bill as a major opportunity to improve the behaviour of British companies overseas.
The British Government had spent more than seven years preparing the ground for a major review of company law in order to both make it easier to set up and run businesses and to do so in a responsible manner. While business lobby groups and NGOs had long been excited about the legislation, it was far from being at the forefront of the minds of the thinking public. This changed after Gordon Brown's intervention at a speech to the Confederation of British Industry on 28 November 2005. The Chancellor appeared to have unilaterally decided to scrap the Operating and Financial Review (OFR) which was due to come into effect from April 2006. Of interest to NGOs was the fact that the OFR would have required companies to report on their environmental and social impacts.
Given that an NGO coalition was being assembled to campaign to strengthen the OFR, this could have proved a major setback. But the decision proved seriously embarrassing for the government over time. The Department for Trade and Industry had not been consulted and the decision ultimately proved to be unlawful, thanks to a court challenge by Friends of the Earth. The public row between the Government and NGOs put the issue of corporate accountability much higher up the political agenda than it would have been.
Over 2006 as the Company Law Reform Bill moved through the parliamentary process, the Corporate Responsibility Coalition (CORE) and the Trade Justice Movement (TJM) pressed the Government and MPs to amend the legislation. Three areas were identified: proper reporting of companies' social and environmental impacts, a new duty on directors to minimise negative impacts, and the ability of affected communities overseas to gain ‘access to justice’ by being able to take action against a British company in a British courtroom.
Despite being a hugely technical area of law, the NGO coalition could point to real gains when the Bill finally gained royal assent and became the Companies Act. The Chancellor's OFR decision was effectively reversed, companies and their suppliers had to report on their social and environment impacts, directors had to take into account their companies' social and environmental impacts and ministers began to consider the concept of access to justice.
A major reason for the NGO successes was the party political nature of the debate on the Bill. Despite the new Conservative leader David Cameron's professed readiness to ‘stand up to big business’,12 his party acted as a mouthpiece for the Confederation of British Industry in opposing all of the NGO demands. The partisan nature of the fight emboldened Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs to support the CORE/TJM proposals and the Government to defend and improve its Bill. Boris Johnson MP gave NGO campaigners further credibility with his response to the CORE/TJM campaign: ‘I'm savagely hostile to this kind of bollocks’.13
NGO campaigning on corporate accountability is set to increase post-Companies Act. The new strategy is likely to be predicated on picking off particular business sectors and using official processes to influence the outcome. The Competition Commission's inquiry into the practices of UK supermarkets (especially Tesco), provides the impetus for Action Aid's campaign to strengthen the position of supermarket suppliers and their employees.
With a move into supermarket campaigning NGOs can rediscover their links to fairtrade. This brings NGO work on trade justice almost full circle – a return to micro and meso-level issues while the macro-level political changes needed remain unresolved.
Paradigm Change?
The ultimate goal of all trade justice campaigning is to break governments out of the predominant ‘free trade’ paradigm and into the ‘trade justice’ one. The challenge is to organise campaigns which nibble at the edges of the former without undermining the case for moving to the latter. The British government, for all its rhetorical changes to its position on international trade negotiations and improvements to national legislation, remains broadly stuck in a proliberalisation stance. The near-mantra of ‘more trade means less poverty’ will continue to come under fire from NGOs, especially given that climate change has moved up the political agenda. It will become less sustainable to argue that trade in goods, which inevitably requires carbon emissions from transport, should be completely unfettered and free from any barrier. When the this becomes a majority view amongst policy-makers, the free-trade paradigm will be dead and buried.
The Changing Campaign Tools
Lobbying as a Necessary Evil: From an early stage in my NGO career I have been sceptical towards ‘lobbying’ as a useful instrument for changing policy-makers minds. I think this is largely because I have predominantly worked on trade issues where the gap between policymakers and NGOs is much wider compared to, for example, aid. I also think my scepticism stems from my early meetings with civil servants from the Department for Trade and Industry, traditionally a voice for big business in Government and less interested in development issues.
NGOs share some responsibility for unproductive lobby meetings. The understandable desire for everyone to be at the table leads to set-piece affairs, with maybe ten NGO representatives on one side and ten civil servants on the other. If everyone is to say their piece it becomes a fragmented exchange with little time to develop a proper conversation. Such meetings rarely lead to anything useful: civil servants are there to defend the government's approach, NGOs to argue for change.
So why bother with such meetings at all? First, to show that you are still working on the issue in question; second, out of politeness. I also think that if you have just attacked government policy in the media then you should give the govern-ment's representatives a chance to respond.
Media as the way to win change on trade: Much more productive for both gaining Government attention to an issue and in changing policy is judicious use of the media. It is a truism that the Blair administration is particularly ‘mediaaware’ and is sensitive to public criticism. Journalists, as ever, are interested in a good story, particularly one that exposes government claims.
In 2005 the obvious pitch was to say that the government's trade policy was an odds with its proclamations that this was to be the ‘year of Africa’. Three media successes on trade spring to mind. The first, in December 2004, put EPAs into the mainstream media for the first time. Covering the release of ActionAid's first report into EPAs, the UK's Financial Times (FT) lined up a number of independent critics including the Overseas Development Institute and the Mauritian trade minister behind ActionAid's argu-ments.14
By September 2005, it had become clear that the European Commission and its trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, had become closed to further argument. For ActionAid's second report, into possible alternatives, the target had become policy-makers in the EU's member states and the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. Because Mandelson himself had been dismissive of the possibility of alternative trading arrangements, despite a clause in the EU-ACP treaty that certain ACP countries could ask for alternatives if they were not satisfied with an EPA, we investigated the possibility that Mandelson was breaking international law. A legal opinion from a lawyer at Matrix Chambers provided us with the ammunition we needed and we made this the story.15
It is always frustrating when a good story is not given the coverage you think it deserves. For me, ‘Mandelson in “illegal” trade move’ is much more interesting than ‘Bullied Africa in Mandelson poverty threat’, which was the headline in the first ActionAid EPAs report press release.16 Whilst we did make it to the front page of the Morning Star and the top politics story on BBC news online,17 it would have been great to have had a piece in the FT or the Guardian.
The final case is an example of one of those times when NGOs should expect the unexpected. With no obvious warning, Tony Blair had decided to make trade the focus of his annual foreign policy speech at Mansion House. The first I knew of it was when it was trailed in the papers, and even then I suspected that the Downing Street ‘spin machine’ had made trade the focus when the speech was actually more likely to focus on terrorism. The Prime Minister was trying to cajole other world leaders to agree to a new WTO deal at the ministerial in Hong Kong in December 2005 but I felt his approach was totally wrong.18 It seemed clear from the outline deal emerging that an agreement would leave most African countries worse off and require poor people in Brazil, India and elsewhere to pay the price for it. The day of Blair's speech remains my biggest media success personally. Not only did I write the quotes which the Guardian used19 but I also did a live interview on Channel 4 News with Jon Snow.
Conclusion
Trade justice campaigning in the Britain has evolved rapidly over a short period of time. From its origins in the fairtrade movement, NGO campaigning on trade has moved trade justice from a marginal to mainstream position in policy debates. From an early concern with farm subsidies that cause dumping overseas, campaigners have broadened the trade justice agenda to encompass a range of challenges including policy space for developing countries and robust rules to hold transnational corporations to account. The challenges moving forward will be to maintain the link to the idea of fairtrade, which the public understands and supports, while establishing the relevance of regulating British business for the fulfilment of pro-poor goals in Africa.
Tom Sharman was a Trade Policy Officer at the international development NGO ActionAid UK. He is now their Policy Coordination Officer. He writes in a personal capacity; e-mail: sharman. tom@123456googlemail.com
40 Years is Enough!
In the last issue of ROAPE (No. 111, March 2007), we published a briefing – ‘South Africans Urge Sanctions Against Israel’ – announcing that COSATU, representing 1.8 million workers, was calling on the South African government to recall the Ambassador to Israel and to implement sanctions against Israel.
The momentum is continuing as Salim Vally writes from South Africa: ‘a few supermarket unions here have started a process toward the non-handling of produce from Israel … they will be part of a massive campaign to coincide with the global call on 9–10 June issued by the following statement from the International Coordination Network on Palestine and the World Social Forum in Nairobi’ (January 2007).
Global Day of Action, 9–10 June 2007: The World Says NO to Israeli Occupation!
June 2007 marks the 40-year anniversary of Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights. On 9–10 June 2007, the people of Palestine and people of the world will join together to say NO! to Israeli occupation.
For 40 years Israel has constructed illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land. For 40 years Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians, demolished 12,000 Palestinian homes, arrested 650,000 Palestinians, destroyed more than a million Palestinian olive trees.
Since 2002 the Apartheid Wall built on occupied Palestinian territory aims to encircle the Palestinian population, squeezing Palestinians into truncated Bantustans and cementing Israeli expansionism. The Wall divides farmers from their land, students from their schools, workers from their jobs, and people from their communities. Despite the International Court of Justice ruling it illegal, the Wall now encircles Palestinian towns and cities in the most massive land-grab in 40 years. In its recent war against Lebanon, Israel's unilateralism and militarism have been exposed to the world. Israel continues to establish ‘facts on the ground’ to maintain strategic control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and to annex land and get rid of the non-Jewish population.
For 40 years of occupation Israel has continued to deny Palestinians in the occupied territories their internationally guaranteed human rights to food, water, education, livelihood, and health care; imposes a system of checkpoints, closures, military fences, sieges and curfews that deny Palestinians freedom of movement within and between their own communities; and, again in violation of the Geneva Conventions, Israel imposes collective punishments on the entire Palestinian population. Mass arrests have included dozens of democratically elected Palestinian parliamentarians and government ministers. Since the year 2000, Israel's ‘targeted’ killings, often carried out by US-provided F-16 bombers or Hellfire missiles have resulted in more than 337 dead Palestinians; 129 of them were not the ‘target’ at all, and many of those killed were children.
In Jerusalem and inside Israel, Palestinians since 1948 face institutionalized discrimination and are denied equality and their full rights as citizens. And Israel continues to deny Palestinian refugees, who were forcibly exiled from their homeland in the 1947–48 war, their internationally guaranteed right of return.
Thirty years ago, the United Nations recognized, condemned and committed itself to oppose the international crime of apartheid wherever it appeared. Today, 12 years after the end of apartheid in South Africa, Israel continues to practice a system of apartheid. We call on the United Nations once again to join with us to identify, condemn and commit ourselves to opposing these heinous crimes. As we were in the past, we are again determined that the perpetrators of that crime be brought to justice.
Throughout its years of occupation, Israel continues to stand in violation of dozens of international laws and scores of UN resolutions. And the international community bears much of the responsibility for those violations. Led by the United States, many governments around the world have actively collaborated in providing support for Israel's occupation and its denial of Palestinian rights. Others have stood mute, or spoken too quietly, failing to mobilize a serious global challenge to Israel's global violations.
We are building nonviolent global campaigns of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions, and we will work on a wide range of educational and cultural campaigns.
At their Annual Delegate Meeting from 12–15 April 2007, the UK's National Union of Journalists (NUJ) passed the following resolution:
The ADM condemns the savage, preplanned attack on Lebanon by Israel. ADM notes that the vast majority of those killed in 2006 have been Lebanese together with Palestinians in the Israeli occupied territories. This ADM condemns the slaughter of civilians by Israeli troops in Gaza and the IDF's continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hezbollah. This ADM calls for the end of Israeli aggression in Gaza and other occupied territories. This ADM calls for a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions and the TUC to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government and the United Nations. This ADM instructs the NEC to support organisations including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding and continue supporting the programme of safety training and union building set out by the IFJ with its affiliate, the Syndicate of Palestinian Journalists.
ADM encourages branches to find ways to support their Palestinian colleagues, noting as an example the ‘Reporting under Occupation’ meeting organised by the Oxford branch, which gave a platform to Al Hayat's West Bank correspondent to explain the dangers, restrictions and limitations faced by Palestinian – and to a lesser extent non-Palestinian – journalists operating in the West Bank and Gaza.
You suggest that, in voting to boycott Israel, the NUJ has strayed too far from its legitimate business. We do not think such arguments apply to our grave concerns as doctors about the health-related impact of Israeli policy on Palestinian society. Persistent violations of medical ethics have accompanied Israel's occupation. The Israeli Defence Force has systematically flouted the fourth Geneva Convention guaranteeing a civilian population unfettered access to medical services and immunity for medical staff. Ambulances are fired on (hundreds of cases) and their personnel killed. Desperately ill people, and newborn babies, die at checkpoints because soldiers bar the way to hospital. The public-health infrastructure, including water and electricity supplies, is wilfully bombed, and the passage of essential medicines like anti-cancer drugs and kidney dialysis fluids blocked. In the West Bank, the apartheid wall has destroyed any coherence in the primary health system. UN rapporteurs have described Gaza as a humanitarian catastrophe, with 25% of children clinically malnourished.
The Israeli Medical Association has a duty to protest about war crimes of this kind, but has refused to do so. Appeals to the World Medical Association and the British Medical Association have also been rebuffed. Eighteen leading Palestinian health organisations have appealed to fellow professionals abroad to recognise how the IMA has forfeited its right to membership of the international medical community. We are calling for a boycott of the Israeli Medical Association and its expulsion from the WMA. There is precedent for this: the expulsion of the Medical Association of South Africa during the apartheid era. A boycott is an ethical and moral imperative when conventional channels do not function, for otherwise we are merely turning away.
A Tribute to Archie Mafeje 1937–2007
A Giant Has Moved On
Adebayo Olukoshi, Executive Secretary, Codesria
Tuesday, 27 March 2007 will go down as a sad day among social researchers all over Africa and beyond: It was the day Professor Archie Monwabisi Mafeje passed away in Pretoria in what was a most quiet exit that has left the very many among us whom he touched directly or indirectly in a state sadness and anger. Archie Mafeje, the quintessential person of science and one of the most versatile, extraordinary minds to emerge from Africa was, in his days, a living legend in every sense. His knowledge was as vast as his grasp of issues – almost all issues – was breathtaking. His discourses tran-scended disciplinary boundaries and were characterised by a spirit of combative engagement underpinned by a commitment to social transformation.
As an academic sojourner conscious of the history of Africa over the last six centuries, he rallied his colleagues to resist the intellectual servitude on which all forms of foreign domination thrive. He was intransigent in his call for the liberation of our collective imaginations as the foundational stone for continental liberation. In all of this, he also distinguished himself by his insistence on scientific rigour and originality. It was his trademark to be uncompromisingly severe with fellow scientists who were mediocre in their analyses. The power of his pen and the passion of his interventions always went hand-in-hand with a uniquely polemical style that was hardly meant for those who were not surefooted in their scholarship.
This then was the Mafeje who left us on 27 March 2007 to join the other departed heroes and heroines of the African social research community: a great pan-African, an outstanding scientist, a first rate debater, a frontline partisan in the struggle for social justice, and a gentleman of great humanitarian principles. We will surely miss his thoughtful insights, his strident rebukes, his loyal friendship, his companionship, and – yes, his wit, humour and expert culinary skills that included an incomparable knowledge of foods and wines from all corners of the world.
Archie Mafeje has fought the battle and run the race successfully; for those he has left behind, especially those of us whom he inspired, the challenge before us is clear:
In the meantime, our thoughts and solidarity go to the members of his family, including his wife Shahida El-Baz and their daughter, Dana.About Archie Mafeje
Professor Archie Mafeje was South African by birth. He completed his undergraduate studies and began his career as a scholar at the University of Cape Town, in his home country but, like many other South Africans, he was soon forced by the Apartheid regime to go into exile where he spent the better part of his life. He obtained a PhD in Anthropology and Rural Sociology from Cambridge University in 1966. In 1973, at the age of 34, he was appointed Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Development at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague by an Act of Parliament and with the approval of all the Dutch universities, becoming the first African scholar to be so distinguished in the Netherlands. That appointment bestowed on him the honour of being a Queen Juliana Professor and one of her Lords. His name appears in the prestigious blue pages of the Dutch National Directorate.
Archie Mafeje's professional career spanned four decades and three continents. From 1969 to 1971 he was Head of the Sociology Department at the University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania before moving to the Hague as a visiting Professor of Social Anthropology of Development and Chairman of the Rural Development, Urban Development and Labour Studies Programme at the Institute of Social Studies from 1972 to 1975. It was here that he met he met his wife and life-long companion, the Egyptian scholar and activist, Dr. Shahida El Baz. In 1979, he joined the American University in Cairo as Professor of Sociology. Thereafter, he took up the post of Professor of Sociology and Anthropology and Director of the Multidisciplinary Research Centre at the University of Namibia from 1992 to 1994. Mafeje was also a senior fellow and visiting or guest professor at several other universities and research institutions in Africa, Europe and North America. He is the author of many books, monographs and journal articles. His critique of the concept of tribalism and his works on anthropology are widely cited as key reference materials. He also did pathbreaking work on the land and agrarian question in Africa.
Mafeje returned to South Africa several years after the end of apartheid where he was appointed a Research Fellow by the National Research Foundation (NRF) working at the African Renaissance Centre at the University of South Africa (UNISA). In 2001 Archie Mafeje became a member of the Scientific Committee of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and in 2003 was awarded Honorary Life Membership of this Council. In 2005, Professor Mafeje was appointed a CODESRIA Distinguished Fellow in conjuction with the Africa Institute of South Africa, in Pretoria. Professor Mafeje is survived by his wife Shahida and their daughter Dana.
Early Tributes from some CODESRIA Members
Archie, our comrade, teacher and friend, hear the voices of some of the members of our community as they digested the breaking news of your transition:
Jimi Adesina , 28 March, 2007: It is with an inconsolable sense of grief and outrage that I write to inform you that Tandeka Nkiwane confirmed this morning the passing away of Archie Mafeje. He would have been 71 years old tomorrow. Inconsolable sense of grief because of the loss of a man of incredible presence of mind, intellect, and generosity of spirit. Outrage because after decades in exile, Archie returned home to exile in South Africa. In our last conversation he spoke of his isolation and loneliness in South Africa (at home, in a place of his birth, in a land that gave us one of the finest minds in the global community of the social sciences).
He was on holiday in his home region of the Transkei in December/January and experienced the sense of community that was so crucial to him, among the ‘ordinary’ people in his home region. When we last sat together in Pretoria a few weeks ago, he was in the best condition in which I had seen him in four years. Archie was to be with us on 13 April when Thandika Mkandawire receives his D.Litt (earned from the assessment of TM's works, NOT honorary); and now we're never going to see him alive again – warts and all; his incredible brilliantmind, quirky sense of humour, and that subdued almost guttural chuckle that comes from the deep part of his throat when he is tickled by something; arms flapping, with his index finger extended to emphasise the point. For a people and generations that come through this way, let it be said he lives in our hearts, in our memories, in our thoughts because there will never be another like him; never another like our Archie Mafeje.
Mahmood Mamdani , 28 March, 2007: Over the past few years, we have had to bear the experience of loss, and accept, however painfully, that death is a part of life. As we mourn the loss of our dear colleague and comrade, Archie, the important point is to memorialize the meaning of his life and work in a way that makes it accessible to the younger generation, those who did not have the opportunity to know him personally as we did.
I have a suggestion for a start. Given the artisanal way in which Archie operated and given the isolation of his circumstances, I think it important that CODESRIA take a formal decision to commit resources to gather his papers with a view to deciding whether they should be archived at CODESRIA or are substantial enough to be archived in a library, most likely in South Africa, with the understanding that these would be available to all scholars. After this, we should consider forms of memorialization that underline his substantial contribution to the development of knowledge on the African continent.
Issa Shivji , 29 March, 2007: It is devastating (news). We have lost a great African intellectual. As we would say in Kiswahili hakunyumbishwa katika msimamo wake. He could not be shaken from his stand. What more can one say.
Archie Mafeje
Lionel Cliffe, Peter Lawrence & Katherine Salahi
Archie was closely associated with ROAPE from its very beginning as a member of the Editorial Working Group, then an overseas editor and then contributing editor until 1984. Those of us who worked with him in those days have vivid memories of the intellectual rigour, no-nonsense manner and wide knowledge of both southern and East Africa that he brought to the journal. That was a period when southern Africa was at the forefront of attention for all concerned with the struggle for liberation. This was reflected in the pages of ROAPE, which devoted Issues 7, 9 and 11 to either South Africa or the region. The movements in Mozambique and Angola had just won their independence from Portugal; the armed struggle in Zimbabwe had been ratcheted up to what was to become the decisive stage; and Namibia's struggle on the ground and in diplomatic negotiations entered a new phase. (Archie was to spend time working in Namibia when it eventually became independent before he went back to South Africa.) And South Africa itself also entered a new stage of intensified struggle with the uprising that emerged from the student protest in Soweto in 1976. In an article for ROAPE in that year Archie applauded those heroic confrontations, and characteristically probed their broader significance. He was critical of the main liberation movements, especially the ANC, ‘leaving the youth unsupported and exposed’, and in turn related that initial paralysis to what he saw as shortcomings in their strategies.
In those days, ROAPE had a second very respected and prominent South African editor, Ruth First. The rest of us considered that having two such people, associated with different movements, was a strength and a symbol of commitment to open debate among those on the left. However, two such feisty and outspoken individuals did not always make for cosy editorial meetings. Of course Ruth, as a staunch member of the ANC and the SA Communist Party, could not leave Archie's review of Soweto and the broader strategies uncontested. But in hindsight it is interesting to note that, amidst the intense polemic of the two contributions, Ruth, in an almost throwaway remark, made a basic concession to Archie's position, stating that it was perhaps a mistake to stick to the SACP's classic formulation of the need for a ‘twostage revolution’ in South Africa – a distinct national liberation before a socialist revolution. Historians and analysts of the current South African neo-liberal strategy might want to look back to Archie's vision of 1976 and the debate with Ruth and with other ROAPE contributors.
Archie's involvement in the journal resulted from the personal contact some of us had made with him in East Africa. His book on Uganda, based on his doctoral research and some applied fieldwork, was a major landmark – one of the first serious anthropological texts by an African in a field until then dominated by whites. He was to make a further notable contribution when he returned to the region to become head of Sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam, then in the midst of its most intellectually invigorating period. Over and above what a serious intellectual of his calibre could contribute to the debates, he had a strategic position as leader of one discipline in actually operationalising the new radical thinking through changes in the curriculum. He was staunch in promoting such initiatives against the professional interests mounted against interdisciplinarity and against those who sought to divert ‘radical’ studies into nationalistic rather than socialist approaches. Thus it was more than a personal tragedy when Archie's contribution was cut short by a horrific car accident, from which he only recovered after many months of hospitalisation, repeated operations, his unflagging courage and determination, and the support of his future wife and lifelong soulmate, Shahida el Baz, and his friends around the world.
Archie went on to make a significant lifetime contribution to radical scholarly analysis of African societies and the next issue of ROAPE will include tributes to his life and work and a commentary on his debate with Ruth First and its significance for South Africa today.
