Now that the fanfare and euphoria surrounding what has been called Tony Blair's passionate denunciation of impoverishment in Africa as ‘a scar on the conscience of the world’ (Lone, 2007), the ‘development buzz’ (Collier, 2007) generated by rock stars and the ‘make poverty history campaign’ has all died down, it seems quite a good time to reflect on the ‘achievements’ to date. These campaigns were preceded by the UN millennium development goals on poverty alleviation, which in turn were followed by the Report of the Commission for Africa. More than a third of the way towards the 2015 goal, it is clear as Salim Lone suggests, that the developed world is falling behind on its commitments to African countries and the plight of many Africans is getting worse. According to Lone, no sub-Saharan African country has met the criteria on poverty alleviation and it would have been unthinkable
that Western Governments, which gleefully presided over the creation of new classes of supersuper rich, would use their considerable influence to push African leaders to pursue policies which would shift resources away from the rapacious national elites towards the poor … Nor was it likely the west would permit Africa to stray from the neo-liberal orthodoxies prescribed for the continent by the World Bank and the IMF.
Readers of this journal would be familiar with the challenge and critical engagement, which the Editorial Working Group has posed to the new orthodoxies of ‘neo-liberalism’ and, in particular, the World Bank and IMF-sponsored structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in Africa. ROAPE, as a collective, has been in the forefront in challenging the assumptions and the ideological underpinnings of SAPs by pointing to the devastating effects it has had on the life of ordinary Africans, their economies and societies in general. These policies that have generated wealth for the elites and created economic growth in a few countries, have brought misery to a billion people for two decades. Furthermore, we have pointed to the fact that neoliberalism does not constitute a single coherent ideology, but a hotchpotch of economic and political diktats which in turn have weakened the state in Africa as more and more of its functions are outsourced to NGOs, creating ‘less order, less peace and less security’ for the mass of the African people (Ferguson: 2006:39).
‘Democracy’ was dangled as a carrot to the African masses only to be negated as their votes became worthless as the powerful nations supported comprador elements within the political classes regardless of how power was achieved – as is the case in the recent elections in Nigeria. The journal has also drawn attention of the real struggle of the African people against structural adjustment programmes and the attempts by the comprador classes to intensify their oppression through the conditionality embedded in SAPs. ROAPE has published articles on African people's attempt to create autonomous political and economic spaces (such as the parallel or informal markets) – free not only from a kleptocratic state, but also from the worse excesses of SAPs which has rendered the state a ‘political monument’. This journal has also catalogued examples of the anti-SAPs struggles waged by various groups and communities, such as anti-SAP revolts and ‘IMF riots’. Other features of these struggles include: smuggling of commodities across national borders; constructing a system of multiple modes of livelihood; and direct challenges to the state through support for social movements challenging state hegemony.
The triumphal arrival of neo-liberals, steeped in anti-dirigisme and the privileging of the market, accompanied the very manifestation of SAPs as the prognosis of African economic ailments in the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. Neo-liberal market driven ideology was based on a one-dimensional prognosis to what is a complex problem facing African leaders, but reduced simply to ‘market failure’. The mantra of ‘whatever your economic ailment, deflate’ demonstrates confidence in the market at the expense of public institutions (Stiglitz, 2002). The latter point is particularly true of political institutions which had to bear the brunt of challenges from Paul Collier's ‘Bottom Billion’ (Collier, 2007; Lawrence, 2007:169-176) in their quest to survive SAPs. Writing about the Fund, Stiglitz (2002) has argued that it has moved away from its original purpose, which was:
to put international pressure on countries to have more expansionary policies than they would choose of their own accord. Today, the Fund has reversed course, putting pressure on countries, particularly developing ones, to implement more contractionary policies than these countries would choose of their own accord.
Neo-liberals demanded the rolling back of the state, which was demonised as a ‘lame leviathan’, a ‘vampire’, whilst as Bjorn Beckman has been at pains to warn in the pages of this journal: ‘the neo-liberal project seeks to de-legitimise the state as the locus of nationalist aspirations and resistance’ (Beckman, 1993:20), by drawing on theories of ‘rent-seeking’, ‘patrimonialism’ and state autonomy, whilst obscuring the massive role of state power in the economic domination of imperialism of transnational corporations. The African state was crudely contrasted with the developmental states of Asia as being too interventionist, thereby producing a soporific civil society, whilst in fact the problem is not the depth of the intervention, but the quality.
Given this perceived pathology of the African state, the idea of a ‘developmental state’ was treated with disdain. What was required as far as the IFIs were concerned was a surrogate state, which was manifest in a number of ways. The first potential route was by strengthening the grip of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) (originating from within the imperialist centres) on African societies, which would increasingly appropriate the role and functions of the dysfunctional state. Second, the state could be captured by direct intervention by external powers, as was the case in Somalia by the US in 1993 with disastrous consequences, or more positively by Britain in war-torn Sierra Leone in May 2000. A point which this journal has continued to stress is that imperialist designs are always dynamic and ever changing, with the sole objective of making the world safe for capital. Thus, in his contribution in this issue, Nikola Kojucharov takes a critical look at the World Bank supervised Chad-Cameroon pipeline project, pointing to the way the World Bank tried to appropriate a major function of the Chadian state, namely the ability to levy taxation, what Kojucharov calls, ‘foreign interference in the economic sovereignty of a nation’. Clearly, the ability of the state to levy taxation is crucial for its survival: not only to deliver social citizenship and the social contract, but also to placate retainers and others who are in the service of the state. Indeed, much of the conflict in contemporary Africa stems from the inability of the state to provide social citizenship and to finance the patron client network or ‘shadow state’. To deny the state access to taxation directly is to put obstacles to socio-political reproduction and to threaten stability and the very existence of the system.
Whilst interrogating the concept of ‘resource curse’, that is, the tendency for resource wealth to impair the economic and political development of a resource endowed country, Kojucharov shows that oil has not improved the standard of living of the Chadian people, with the majority continuing to live on less than $1 a day. In order to discipline the state, the Bank stripped the Chadian state of its sovereignty, which became a major source of conflict between the political class and the officials from the Bank. Kojucharov argues that underlying the unsuccessful conversion of oil revenues into poverty reduction was not simply the World Bank's policy choice (as most critics have suggested), but that the project was hindered more by the external nature of the World Bank's policy intervention than by any particular design flaws. In his view, for the project to achieve its goal of poverty reduction, a policy rethink is called for to do away with the complex regulatory frameworks, which hinder the strengthening of institutional capacity.
The case of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline points to the transmogrification of imperialism: not only was the policy designed (like SAPs) to hem Africa even more closely onto the accumulation needs of global capitalism as producers of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods from the imperialist centres, but the agreement was specifically set up to ensure that oil continues to flow to reduce Western dependence on supplies from the conflictual Arabian Gulf and to ensure capital flow to the multinationals, like Esso, that invest in Chad's oil industry.
In the era of the ‘war on terrorism’, Africa and her natural resources have now assumed major importance, not least because the imperialist centres now have to find an alternative to the perilous Arabian peninsular. Furthermore, the arrival of new players and new markets for African raw materials – namely the Chinese and Indian markets – have helped to valorise African raw materials in the eyes of the imperialist nations. These new actors, in particular the Chinese, have little time for the ‘niceties’ of economic and political conditionality, a major weapon in hemming Africa onto the web of imperialist design. In short, the presence of the Chinese in the ‘new scramble for Africa's resources’ has forced the IFIs to rethink the policy of conditionality in its old format and to reconstitute neo-colonialism. The case of Chad points to this new design in neo-colonial solutions, which now poses a direct threat to the sovereignty of resource rich states.
Autesserre's article is a serious critique of the mono-causal explanation for African conflict offered by Collier and his associates (2000:91-112) that ‘conflicts are far more likely to be caused by economic opportunities than by grievance’ (p. 91). Sierra Leone is often quoted as the example par excellence of this thesis with access to blood diamonds seen as the major cause of the war. In reality, the scramble for the country's diamonds came much later in the history of the war, whilst the underlying causes had to do with poor governance, political and social exclusion and an inept political leadership (Zack-Williams, 1999:143-162). Similarly, Autesserre argues that ‘violence in the Congo, although motivated in part by “greed“ (the exploitation of natural resources), (also), it is motivated by grievances: issues related to social status, identity and political power.’
She identifies three main reasons for Rwanda's intervention in the Congo: the threat posed to Rwanda's sovereignty by the Rwanda Hutu militia in the DRC; the problem of ethnic hatred against Congolese Rwandophones; finally the appeal of the Kivus’ mineral resources, which attracted a large number of Congolese and non-Congolese alike. But she goes on to argue that the greed not grievance argument is too mechanistic and economistic, without looking at the various levels of grievances: the regional, national and local. Whilst regional, national and local dimensions to conflicts are often closely interlinked, yet to ignore local causation or local resolutions tantamount to sewing the seeds for future conflicts.
The Chad experiment raises the thorny question of the future of the nation-state in Africa, which is also the issue discussed in Jacob's briefing on the poor in a developmental state such as South Africa. As Ferguson (2006) has observed, there is a departure from the ‘thick’ Zambian (developmental) model that failed in the 1980s, towards a private model of the state that is emerging across the oil states. This he refers to as:
the ‘thin’ Angolan non-nation-state developing natural resources, but enclaved mineral rich patches efficiently exploited by flexible private firms, with security provided on an ‘as need’ basis by specialised corporations, while the elite cliques who are nominal holders of sovereignty certify the industry's legality and international legitimacy in exchange for a piece of action
(Ibid. p.207).
Furthermore, in discussing the ‘non-governmental’ states, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo which he sees as the extreme of the principle of deregulation, Ferguson points out that in weakly governed African states, the question of sovereignty is not one about effective control of national borders or the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, but the ‘ability to provide contractual legal authority that can legitimate the extractive work of transnational firms’ (Ibid.).
The deregulation mentioned above is partly the result of neo-Liberal attack on the African state, which led to the call for privatisation, an important conditionality designed largely to privilege metropolitan capital in its quest for horizontal and vertical integration. It is also highly functional in creating and sustaining a comprador class, which will continue to defend the interests of its class ally, the ruling class of the metropolis. Mayher and Macdonald's article draws attention to the nature of the discourse on privatisation in South Africa, in particular, the way the media deals with these issues. Unlike many other countries in Africa, there has been relatively little outright privatisation with Public Private Partnership (PPP) being the most popular form of privatisation. Under this system, the state typically owns the service assets, with the service being wholly or partly delivered by a private company. One can only speculate as to the popularity of PPP in South Africa, a country with a well-developed infrastructure and a good crop of technocrats and professionals. One should not lose sight of the racial divide in South Africa, even in the post-apartheid era as the ANC Government embarks on a policy of social engineering to rectify historical disadvantages. Clearly, the outright sale of state assets will reduce the state's ability to deliver equity, as only the economically privileged would be able to buy such assets, thus strengthening the economic-colour divide; the existence of a strong labour movement that emerged out of the liberation struggle and a very vibrant civil society may have acted as a brake on any swift, outright privatisation.
The paper by Hansen and Bradbury and the briefing by Usman Tar and Zack-Williams examine new democracies in Somaliland and Nigeria respectively. The first on Somaliland's tentative steps towards democratisation raises questions about the gerrymandering and succession of ‘freely’ elected leaders. The authors note that the future challenges for democratic renewal in Somaliland include the shift from clan-based forms of political representation and competition to one based on political parties as forums of political representation and competition in a predominantly rural society. Somaliland is often seen as a mono-ethnic society and as such able to avoid the exigencies of politics in multi-ethnic society as the rest of the continent.
The briefing on the Nigerian elections raises some similar questions. It points to the machination of the outgoing President to get his chosen candidate elected amid widespread intimidation, violence and the stuffing of ballot boxes with papers and other electoral irregularities. The level of violence and fear is reflected in the dramatic drop in the price of machetes following the end of voting. Many foreign observers condemned the manner in which the elections were conducted and called for a rerun, but despite these allegations, Britain and the United States welcomed the election of Musa Yara’ Dua, a conservative politician from the North and the handchosen successor of outgoing President Olusegun Obansanjo. The new President represents ‘a safe pair of hands’ who would co-operate with the US and the former colonial power, Britain in the ‘war on terrorism’ externally, and domestically. Furthermore, his ‘Godfather’ (a concept that the Nigerian Left have appropriated to refer to wealthy sponsors of patrons), former President Olusegun Obasanjo, could rest assured that he would not be called to account for his stewardship by his successor. This recent development supports Lubeck, Watts and Lipschutz's (IPR, 2007:1) argument that:
Nigeria has been a particular target of this shifting energy policy, not only as a strategic ally in the region but also as a ‘front line’ state in the Global War on Terrorism.
The crisis in the oil rich Delta region, where fighting has been continuous, with foreign oil workers and members of their families being captured as hostages by various rebel movements, has raised major concerns about the security of oil supplies from the region. Thus, whilst Obansanjo never got approval from the US or Britain for a third term in office, had they questioned the outcome of the elections more strongly, it may well have encouraged rebels in the Delta region to step up their campaign against the Federal State. Furthermore, Nigeria is an important member of the West African Oil Triangle, which also includes Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, accounting for about 15 per cent of daily imports into the United States (Ibid. p.4), the figure is expected to rise to 25 per cent by 2025 (NIC, 2000). As Ferguson has observed, such findings challenge the assumption of Afro-pessimists that Africa is defined by its marginalisation and its irrelevance, but is defined by its irrelevance. What is being played out on the continent of the ‘bottom billion’ is a new form of imperial neo-liberal engagement.