Much has already be made in the post-Africa Commission years of the over-weening optimism regarding growth and development in Africa. The continent, we are now regularly reminded, can indeed claim the 21st century. After all, isn’t average per capita growth improving, trade in raw materials once more booming and stability returning to a once unstable and violent continent? Yet despite the pop-star hype and the G8 announcements of policy for Africa, we know all too clearly that the Millennium Developments Goals (a much used but inappropriate measure of ‘development’) will not be met in the poorest of continents. The real overall gross domestic product rate of growth of 5.7 percent in 2006 may have been better than that recorded in Latin America. Yet continued external debt of about $250 billion remains. It is like a rock around the necks of Africa's poor and the conditionality it engenders prevents even the few enlightened governments from reducing poverty and promoting sustainable and autonomous development. The reality that the whole of sub-Saharan Africa has an income of not much more than Belgium, blights prospects for human development now and prevents any opportunity to generate growth with social justice from domestically available savings and investment.
Forty-five percent of the continent live on less than $1 a day with a target for 2015 of just 22 percent living in such misery. Would that continued suffering be something to be proud of? One-third of Africa's people are undernourished and rates of stunting are around 40 percent. The West's repeated mantra to ‘save’ Africa is to try and integrate the continent more fully into the world economy – an economy that has generated the uneven incorporation of the continent in the first place. One thing is clear, the handwringing by western leaders and by African politicians intent on capturing the crumbs of aid, debt relief and expanded trade will not, under the circumstances of existing capitalism, deliver sustained growth and justice in Africa.
Many in Africa realise this. The smoke and mirrors of NEPAD, the AU and failure to promote poverty reduction, justice and redistribution of scarce resources for sustainable development is well known. And the struggle against western donors and African officials is expanding dramatically. Of course just what this opposition means, how it can oppose capitalist development and promote an alternative that is not barbarous is often mute. Yet the resistances that are evident and the struggles that do shape political programmes and economic alternatives need to be explored more fully, in Africa and beyond.
Resistance is at fever pitch in the Niger Delta. It is opposition to international oil companies and Nigerian state collusion with exploitation in the region. It is opposition to corrupt local politicians and leaders and it is driven significantly by the youth. The young in Africa are so much neglected in debates about the continent's future and about their felt needs rather than those of ‘traditional’ leaders intent on seeking benefits of spoils and proximity to the agents driving exploitation – companies, donors and officials.
Michael Watts in this issue of ROAPE explores the many different dimensions to Nigeria's oil complex, directing us to a close examination of the Nigerian state's role. Elsewhere this issue examines the way in which the ‘development state’ in South Africa is making a comeback, although this is without the active involvement of the majority of black South Africans able to set and enforce an agenda around justice and equality. Instead, as Freund documents, while the ANC's embedded elite have many records of important achievement they are unable, or unwilling, to deliver radical improvements in the life chances and opportunities of South Africa's poor and historically dispossessed.
Freund uses comparisons with Malaysia to examine the efficacy of policies in South Africa that drive ‘Black Economic Empowerment’. While he concludes that different sectors of the black population have clearly benefited from BEE the majority have not. It is an important time to ask questions of the developmental state. Just what might it mean in the contemporary period? What might its new social base look like, might there even be an ‘African model’ to drive alternatives to existing capitalism in the 21st century? Can progressive forces prevent the state from being hijacked by neoliberal advocates, many of whom are now at least rhetorically keen to revisit ‘poverty’ and ‘the poor’ using a human face? It is clear that the familiar declarations by international agencies, donors and others that Africa is set for sustained growth, cautiously embrace the need for state social safety netting – as long as the developmental state does not impede private capital accumulation.
There is political space here for resistance, to mount campaigns revisiting what it is that the state can, and should deliver and how decisions about state intervention are decided upon democratically. It is also important, of course, to open up the agenda of whether, and under what circumstances, the state can match the power of international capital in determining national strategies for development with justice. Nielsen in this issue asks important questions of just how such opposition or resistance to ‘dysfunctional’ states might emerge. In a challenging debate about neopatrimonialism, or the pathologising of African politics, Nielsen argues that poor and ineffectual or incoherent state practices do not automatically mean that states lose their legitimacy. They can moreover, remain vehicles for socialism. He notes how people in Mozambique generate their views of the state to define their entitlements to it and to evaluate the efficacy of state and donor driven agendas. This has the consequence, he argues, of establishing opportunity for critique of the mainstream, as ideas about the state can become the basis for social action and form elements of the critique of the state itself and also donor policy and intervention.
Zimbabwe may be viewed as a dysfunctional state par excellence in terms of the damage that Mugabe's regime has brought in its wake. Alternatively it has been effective in securing the interests of high ranking military commanders, party henchmen and other clients. It has done this by strategies of capital accumulation locally and in the southern African region with intervention in Congo. Henning Melber's short briefing in this issue raises fundamental issues at the heart of struggles in Zimbabwe for the reintroduction of the rule of law, human rights and the ability to promote criticism and political debate. Denied the right to deliver his briefing in person to a meeting in Zimbabwe, Melber demonstrates why criticism of Mugabe and his regime is neither nor necessarily part of an imperialist agenda. Instead he reminds us that the struggles for basic rights in contemporary Zimbabwe are similar to the struggles fought during national liberation. This is because they are struggles around, and conflicts between those with power and wealth and those without it. Views on struggles internal to the state, factional conflict within the ruling party and attempts locally to develop a post-Mugabe development agenda cannot be dominated by the regional superpower, South Africa, or imperial forces of the UK/EU, US or China. A major struggle in Africa will inevitably be how to ensure that the outcome of local struggles in Zimbabwe do not create conditions for the demise of sovereignty and opportunity for development agendas shaped by local democratic struggles.
One line of resistance to Mugabe has been the exodus of Zimbabwe's citizens. Many have gone to South Africa and many as farm workers to the South Africa's northern border with Zimbabwe. The changing position of these farm workers is documented here by Rutherford and Addison. Their work also exemplifies one of the dimensions of social and economic policy that confronts the ANC government in South Africa. They look at the harsh conditions that Zimbabweans escape to in northern South Africa. While the neo-liberal restructuring of agriculture and paternalistic rule is harsh and arduous, the labour regime in the border zone also creates a ‘state of exception’ where farm workers establish new patterns of survival and resistance. The question nevertheless needs to be raised: how effective is this ‘exit resistance’? What is learnt and mobilised politically, as well as economically through the lifeline of remittances, and how do experiences in ‘exile’ serve to generate progressive political consciousness about reform and transformation inside Zimbabwe?
These patterns of survival and resistance in southern Africa and the forms that they may take elsewhere on the continent need to be recorded and understood in terms of the relationship between opportunities for struggle and transformation on the continent. This theme is central to this journal. We welcome contributions that explore the dynamics of contemporary resistance and the character of obstacles and opportunities that protagonists in struggle have. This also involves the importance of theoretical and empirical analysis to ascertain which struggles in Africa are progressive and which struggles might be defended and promoted by workers, peasants and intellectuals in Africa and elsewhere? How can the counter hegemony so necessary for revolutionary transformation of relations of production in Africa, while promoting the growth in productive forces (in some cases perhaps introducing rather rudimentary production facilities in the first instance) be promoted by what Gramsci identified as such a crucial link in the revolutionary chain of action – the organic intellectual?
African leaders seem to have universally met the definition of what Gramsci had called the traditional intellectual – those who regularly and rhetorically claim independence of thought from ruling classes and ideas yet fail, many actively, to redress inequality and poverty, promoting instead the so-called benefits of late capitalism. Thus strategies of NEPAD and governments clamouring for debt relief through increased conditionality, the dominance of neo-liberal hegemony of donors and corporations shamelessly determines state policy. Yet there remains, alongside the struggles of the dispossessed, of workers and peasants, and of worker-peasants who straddle town and country, a role for intellectuals who challenge authority, the hegemony of neo-liberalism, and forge strong living links with those in struggle for justice and equality.
There are many different types of struggle and resistance in Africa. Many are organised and structured by leaders in political parties and trade unions but many are informal and unstructured. These seek to deliver often quite small but significant resources for the poor. Struggles over access to electricity, water, housing, land, irrigation and so on do have a cumulative impact in the struggle for rights and power. Here, the poor are clearly agents for social change rather than just categories of vulnerable. Their struggles may not always be against the state although they are mostly against injustice. We need to pursue an evaluation of everyday struggles for survival to see how they form part of a broader struggle for socialist development. And what value is there in these struggles? In addition to the crucial capture of daily survival, itself the most important aspect of struggle, do informal and ‘ordinary’ struggles have an impact on the struggle for socialism and the struggle against commodification of every aspect of social life? And if they do not, what agencies exist to help transform struggles from classes-in-formation to classes-in-action, developing strategies to challenge authority sufficiently to generate social movements that confront and challenge state bureaucracies? Or perhaps the challenge to states is not what is important at the moment for the development of alternatives to existing capitalism? Do unstructured and informal struggles inform a debate about the efficacy and possibility for the promotion of a developmental state? Indeed, does the ‘idea’ of the developmental state feature at all in those whose daily crises for survival must always take precedence over grandiose programmes of political action?
It is time to again revisit the role of social class in promoting agendas for transformation in Africa. The essay in this issue by Michael Watts on ‘Petroinsurgency or Criminal Syndicate?’ detailing conflicts in the Niger Delta is instructive here. Watts goes beyond the sterile debate about the ‘resource curse’ to look at, amongst other things, the dynamics of opposition and resistance in Nigeria, the world's ninth largest oil producer and one soon to account for at least 25 percent of petroleum imports into the US. Watts thus goes beyond not only the resource curse and Paul Collier's recent pot boiler, The Bottom Billion, to examine the interrelationship between strategies for accumulation, the global war on terror and local struggles to capture local wealth to address local poverty and patterns of impoverishment.
We will return in early 2008 to the debates about resources and mining as we retain momentum in the struggle of ideas against the neo-liberal barrage. Blair commissions and musical concerts and the idea we should buy ‘red’ to help Africa, seem to hold sway amongst Western commentators on Africa. This sloganising ignores a fundamental concern raised here: underneath the language of transparency, stakeholders, partnerships and responsibility, inextricably linked to the hype about potential for resource development in Africa lie economic processes of capital accumulation, dispossession and continued uneven incorporation of Africa's economies into the world economy. This is a continued process of dispossession that is not the result of the absence of the continent from the world economy, or globalisation as many prefer to say; Africa's poverty is the outcome of the continents’ differential incorporation into economic and political processes.
Neo-liberal bias in debates regarding African development, whether mineral or petroleum-fuelled is accompanied by a new rhetoric of corporate responsibility. This claim implies that corporations will now deliver what they promise and together with host governments will form partnerships to improve community well-being destroyed by international corporate activity.
Neo-liberalism wrongly asserts that markets can be accessed equally between people and the state, and workers and consumers, that markets are neutral arenas to facilitate the efficient allocation of resources and that the state can at best help facilitate the smooth running of markets – but must not regulate them. But neoliberalism is quiet about understanding the prior exclusion of communities and categories of ‘the poor’ in Africa, in oil producing areas, agricultural estates and those beyond. Neo-liberalism is short on the need to understand how African men and women, young and old remain impoverished and are increasingly impoverished as a result of amongst other things, relations with resource companies and their agents. We are told that the unfortunate ‘externalities’ of oil and mining, agriculture or other resource driven strategies can be addressed through ameliorating palliatives, alternative livelihood strategies, environmental monitoring and the like.
While donors and philanthropists assume globalisation, and the role of mining companies and the extractive industries sector more generally can work for the poor, there is overwhelming evidence that the poor are working instead for globalisation. Globalisation of course means the use of systematic state power to impose financial market imperatives but many in Africa search for and demand local impulses and pressures from advocacy groups and communities on the ground rather than externally driven models of development and progress. This journal wants to explore these themes further: they go to the heart of oppositional politics in all its guises.
There has, of course, been a mushrooming of advocacy groups in Africa and outside that have tried, amongst other things, to maximise the potential of knowledge as a vehicle for the poor to use as critique, and as resistance. And it is clear, as Watts demonstrates beyond doubt in the case of Nigeria, that resistance to existing globalisation, where oil companies are identified as exploiters of local rights and resources, can be a catalyst for agendas for social change and action against the state. Such action becomes pervasive, directed not only against particular externalities of mineral extraction but also against government neglect, inefficiency and collusion with petroleum companies and the US. Here we might note that if oil companies and their workers are indeed part of a particular type of uneven capitalist development in Africa, where commodification of land and labour is partial and restrictive rather than universal and generalised, what strategies are available to counter the poverty generating consequences of mining on a world scale? We need also to note that there is a ‘dark’ side to many militia's, and gangs of youth who may not use their positions of power to redress inequalities and corporate exploitation: they may just be gangsters. They sometimes operate at the behest of state officials but they also go beyond that control. And where lawlessness does nothing to challenge sources of power and injustice, gangs clearly do not hold the answers for the emergence or even the catalyst of socialist organisation reinforcing instead the inequalities and injustices, exploitation and dispossession, that is at the core of contemporary imperialism.
If mining companies are now keen to embrace social responsibility, is this embrace merely to retain passive community consent to land loss and denial of access to crops and dispossession at the local level that is matched by African marginalisation globally? And is the struggle around social responsibility all advocacy groups are left with in bargaining with states and companies in the contemporary period? In addition, and something we will look at in more detail in a future 2008 edition, if the concern has historically been how to manage western capital in mining, what is the likelihood of managing Chinese investment with a ‘human face’. And where emphasis has often been on the rhetoric of companies and states, we now need to detail the character of social movements, social class, labour unions, advocacy groups and gender-based movements that struggle daily against dispossession and the accumulation strategies of companies and ruling classes.
It is important to heighten the discussion of alternatives to the current global situation, what Ngugi Wa Thiong’o has recently noted as
a world shaped by the imperative of capitalist fundamentalism with its quasi-religious ideology of privatisation and imperial requirements for the unfettered movement of capital across national borders – poses a special challenge to social science and the organisation of knowledge in Africa today. Fundamentalism, secular or religious, is a belief, or claim and assertion that there is only one way to organise reality – it demands that all conform to that idea or else be excommunicated from the temple of true believer, and in some cases be hauled to hell (Wa Thiong’o 2005:155).