At the time of writing, Scotland has just hosted the COP26 UN Climate Change conference in which the contradictions of the climate emergency were once more exposed, especially at the last minute. China and India demanded amendments to the final declaration which gave them more leeway on eliminating coal production, potentially making the global objective of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 impossible to achieve. The central problem for countries of the global South has been the unequal distribution of global resources, such that they will need considerable help from the richer parts of the world to develop renewable sources of energy so that they can make a positive contribution to achieving the net zero target and maintain life on the planet as we know it. Although in the GDP league table we have seen in recent years many countries of the global South moving up from low- to middle-income categories, thus seemingly reducing the degree of inequality between nations, this has disguised the extent to which inequality has increased because of the growth in income and wealth of the global North. For example, in 1960, the top 25 countries had an average GDP per head 32 times that of the 25 lowest. In 2019, that multiple was 52. The top and bottom changed little: 20 of the 25 countries with the highest GDP per head in 1960 remained in that position in 2019. Of the bottom 25 in 1960, a group that then included China and India, 18 remained in 2019, China having moved 53 places up the table and India 20, both now in the middle-income group, the former at the top end, the latter near the bottom. Inequality within countries has mainly worsened, with the rich getting much richer and the poor stagnating or becoming better off at a much lower rate than the rich (Lawrence 2021). The rise of a global plutocracy based on global financial corporate wealth has not only resulted from the casino capitalism of the money markets, but fundamentally from the corporate capture of the state which, with its espousal of ‘liberal’ economics, has legislated to reduce the possibilities for worker resistance and generally depressed wages.
The Covid-19 pandemic has further increased inequality, worsening the position of the countries of the global South and of the poor everywhere. Lower levels of economic activity in the global North resulting from lockdowns and other measures restricting consumer spending, especially on travel, have impacted adversely on the global South, especially in respect of its exports and tourism services. The latest forecasts from the International Monetary Fund expect African growth rates to average 3.7 to 3.8% over the next two years, which would be the slowest recovery of all the regions of the world and will increase the gap between the global North and Africa (IMF 2021). How far any of this projected growth is compatible with mitigating climate change and reducing inequality is itself a serious question. The target of transferring US$100 billion of climate finance to developing countries annually by 2020 has been missed and may not be reached until 2023, further depressing African countries’ prospects of growth that mitigates the climate emergency. Who benefits from the programme of emissions reduction is a key question (discussed in the first article in this issue). Failure to reach the climate finance goals quickly, especially given the effects of the pandemic, is not going to convince poorer countries dependent on fossil fuels to switch to renewables, especially as the global North leads in renewables technology. If the benefits accrue to the global North’s corporates and there is an insufficiently large transfer of climate finance from the prosperous global North, countries burning non-renewables will have little capacity or incentive to change.
In this issue
Five of the six articles in this issue are concerned with various aspects of developments in South Africa, and especially issues related to distribution of income and wealth, while the final article on the Nigerien state leadership connects with many of the issues raised in the first five. The first article is highly relevant to the issues surrounding COP26 and the climate emergency. In the transition from non-renewable to renewable sources of energy, the key question, as always, is who benefits from the mechanisms used to effect such a transition. Franziska Müller and Simone Claar examine the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP) introduced in 2011, and in particular the effects of using an auction instrument (which invites domestic and foreign companies to bid for projects within a fixed bidding window) on the degree of local participation and distribution of socio-economic benefits. These are important questions if very necessary energy transitions are to be ‘just’ – especially given that, as the authors point out, 1.6 billion people worldwide do not have access to a public energy supply, while their lives are adversely affected by the non-renewable energy pollution from accessible energy supply. They review earlier research on the REIPPPP, noting findings which show this as a successful niche innovation but one which comes with consequences, some unintentional. The financialisation of the renewable energy sector may be an inevitable consequence derived from the attraction of global corporates, but the inequitable access to renewable energy sources may not be intended.
Müller and Claar reflect on the 82 renewable REIPPPP energy projects they survey and the relation of these projects to a just energy transition in respect of three aspects of justice: distributive, recognitional and procedural. Their findings reinforce other research that identifies financialisation and transnationalisation as one of the main consequences of the programme, with global firms seeing investment in South Africa as a springboard to investment in other parts of the continent. Their ability to produce energy at lowest cost puts them at an advantage over national enterprises and also militates against establishing any local supply chain or technology capability, all effects reminiscent of early findings on transnational corporations’ investment in Africa featured in ROAPE issue no. 2 (1975). In terms of recognitional justice, which is concerned that vulnerable groups benefit from the programme, there has been less success in job creation and technological transfer that would compensate communities negatively affected by a transition to renewables, such as coal mining communities. The authors find that procedural justice has not been demonstrated by levels of local participation in decision-making, with top-down procedures being dominant. On the other hand, there has been greater attention paid to involving local communities in skills training, women’s empowerment and long-term job creation. The authors conclude with practical policy recommendations to effect a greater level of transitional justice in the greening of South Africa, recommendations that will surely apply to other parts of the continent that are engaged in confronting what the authors rightly identify as ‘difficulties in combining the competing goals of market competition, energy access for all and civil society participation’ (346).
A different kind of transition and even transformation is the subject of our second article, in which Ricardo Reboredo argues that under Jacob Zuma the South African state was being transformed into a developmental state. Reboredo, taking a Gramscian perspective, and especially the concept of a ‘passive revolution’, sees this process as an attempt by the ruling bloc in the African National Congress (ANC) to rebuild its hegemonic position in a way that is consistent with a system dominated by capitalist social relations. Reboredo focuses on what he sees as three transformations: new alliances within the state apparatus, state intervention to shape accumulation processes and a greater role for Chinese and global South capital. This suggests a move away from the earlier neoliberal policies, with state power employed in the service of the ANC and the shift of tensions at the centre to local and provincial governments.
Reboredo uses the case of South Africa’s steel sector to illustrate his argument. This sector is a critical part of the minerals–energy complex which itself is central to the South African economy and its stability. He tracks the sector’s evolution by analysing Sino-South African cooperation in building the Energy and Metallurgical Special Economic Zone (EMSEZ). Reboredo contrasts the developmental state of Thabo Mbeki with that of Zuma and his successor Cyril Ramaphosa, arguing that there was a shift after Mbeki to a more interventionist and directive industrial policy. The EMSEZ project is seen as a form of state capitalism, while the author argues that the strategy of privileging capital investment from the global South, and especially from China, is another break with the orthodox approach of seeking investment from the global North. The author concludes that this ‘passive revolution’ has yet to yield significant results in terms of employment generation or in increasing political support for the ANC. Projects such as EMSEZ may strengthen the ANC’s legitimacy if they are successful and also enable the government to engage in redistributive measures to ease political pressures and generate capital accumulation necessary for further investment in socially progressive measures, as well in further industrial investment.
Reboredo refers to the corruption of the Zuma administration weakening the ANC’s legitimacy through its failure adequately to satisfy its core support in the population. In our third article in this issue, Nomtha Gray, in an examination of corruption in government procurement, argues that anti-corruption measures have been implemented to the extent that individuals have been disciplined for fraudulent activity. However, this does not apply in ‘wider systems of corruption’ (370) as disciplinary processes are sidestepped or avoided. For these reasons, stronger and more robust measures will not in themselves succeed in combating corruption.
Corruption is not new to South Africa, with Gray referencing previous studies that show corruption was widespread under the apartheid regimes, constituting a system which carried over into the post-apartheid era. Gray argues that the phenomenon of state capture, highlighted in the case of the Gupta brothers, has diverted state procurement resources to the extent that there is reduced or no funding available for investments to provide or improve basic services, thus militating against a redistribution of resources in favour of the poor, a theme running through the previous two articles in this issue. Gray systematically considers what is meant by corruption and procurement and describes a bureaucratic order of weak oversight. In her interviews with procurement practitioners and researchers, she elicits explanations of the tolerance of fraud and corruption based on feelings of entitlement: that people who suffered under apartheid had a ‘right to prosper’ (377) and that defrauding state-owned enterprises was defrauding the elite since the poor would not be serviced anyway. These findings recall some of those in Sarah Bracking's article in ROAPE issue no. 161 on Black Economic Empowerment policy (Bracking 2019). Gray sees no simple solutions such as strengthening anti-fraud measures, but rather the more difficult solutions in building relationships with stakeholders so that procurement becomes a partnership with trusted partners. However, it should also be remembered that state capture and corrupt practices are not exclusively to be found in South Africa, or indeed other parts of Africa, as events in the UK have recently illustrated with the awarding of government contracts to cronies of the governing party (Transparency International UK 2021). We should also not forget the long-standing practices in the USA of extensive funding of politicians by private capital in order to secure federal and state contracts. State capture has been a feature of the capitalism of the global North for a long time.
One effect of the kinds of corruption that have occurred in procurement in South Africa has been its strengthening of upper echelons of the petty bourgeoisie and the capitalist class it services. The increased inequality that this process has caused has given rise to much protest from below which has been historically the major force for social change in favour of the oppressed peoples throughout the world. In our fourth article, Julian Brown shows how the socio-economic rights given in the post-apartheid constitution – rights to housing and rights protecting against eviction – have enabled activists to use constitutional tools to frame urban housing policy through popular action, rather than through rulers and technocrats. Further, he argues that they have forced the state to change its policy towards economic inequality and exclusion, thus challenging the country’s neoliberal path.
Brown reviews the extent of poverty and inequality in South Africa and concludes that the rich have got richer while the poor are unevenly better off because of welfare payments. In addition, growing inequality has worsened the position, but generated a new politics, of the urban poor. He looks at three cases where urban communities have been mobilised to protect their security of tenure and shows that the most effective of the actions taken by the communities has been taking local authorities to court basing, their case on the socio-economic rights laid out in the constitution. The effects of these court cases have been not only to protect housing tenure but also to influence the development of local state policies to protect tenure and build housing for the homeless. Courts have even intervened when municipalities have failed to develop such policies as ordered by the courts. Brown concludes by asking important questions about how far guaranteeing rights to housing – but not necessarily ownership and the right to trade housing in the market – is a palliative to the worst effects of market capitalism or a challenge to the capitalist order by taking housing out of the market. That these challenges to the inequality of the system are coming from below is perhaps the most important message of this story.
Our fifth article in this issue looks at action from above rather than below in the creation of worker cooperatives in the South African clothing industry as a way of protecting levels of employment and making clothing production a viable enterprise in a period when the industry has gone into decline in the country. Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings argue that part of the reason for that decline has been wage regulation and the push by the South African state for the clothing industry to adopt more capital-intensive high-labour productivity techniques of production in an environment of high unemployment. As a consequence, employers in the industry have created partnerships with worker cooperatives as a way of circumventing the regulations, while maintaining production and income for the cooperative members. In these cooperatives members share their net income and the former employers provide the equipment.
The authors are well aware of the left critique of these kind of cooperatives: they invoke Marx’s comments on them being ‘a sham and a snare’ as well as a ‘cloak for reactionary humbug’ (406). He was more favourable to cooperatives formed from below. The authors map out the many contradictions of both the cooperative arrangement and the position taken up by the industry’s dominant trade union, now deprived of workers’ subscriptions as they are of the cooperative members. Nattrass and Seekings recognise that these members may not be financially better off than they were as workers, but that they do have employment and their products are competitive domestically and with producers of basic items of clothing in Asia. The challenges in the courts to the genuineness of the cooperatives have generally failed and the government has shown no inclination to disband them as a sham. Members themselves may also feel that they have more control over their labour supply decisions. In the short term these cooperatives are a way of preserving incomes for clothing workers, but in the longer term the strategy of a high-wage high-productivity, capital-intensive clothing sector is, like everywhere else, the future reality. As the authors note, the South African government wants to see a high-productivity high-wage clothing sector but is prepared to see the low-productivity low-wage cooperatives as an acceptable way to preserve jobs and livelihoods in a situation of high unemployment.
Most – if not all – of the articles discussed so far in this issue have referenced the South African state, whether captured or developmental. In the final article in this issue, Jannik Schritt examines the case of Niger and, through an account of the history of colonial and postcolonial Niger and the speeches of successive presidents, discusses whether the Nigerien state can be characterised as neopatrimonial, neocolonial or dependent, the three categories which he sees as covering the characterisations of African politics in the literature. Schritt employs the concept of extraversion to show how Nigerien presidents have recognised that while the country depends economically on its exports of natural resources and on its inflows of aid and investment, its presidents have exhibited agency by using its possession of uranium and oil reserves to achieve better deals for the country, in particular by employing the rhetoric of neocolonialism to blackmail Western governments into channelling more financial resources to Niger. Following the later work of Bayart, Schritt sees the dependence of countries like Niger as a dependence on access to the rents that flow from natural resources such as uranium and oil. Taking up an extraverted position also means demonstrating to Western governments that even after military coups, the political objectives are to follow Western constitutional norms of democratic government, including introducing measures to deal with corruption, even if they are, as seen earlier in this issue in the case of South Africa, ineffective.
On the other hand, successive Nigerien regimes have taken up introverted positions to enable access by domestic interests to a share of the rents from natural resource exports by getting political positions, entry into public markets or simply offering or taking bribes. Schritt shows how adept Nigerien leaders have been at facing both ways to satisfy external interests, especially those of France, and internal forces which need to be incentivised to vote for them in elections or not to mount a coup. Schritt argues that this analysis of politics in Niger questions analyses of African regimes as neopatrimonial, lacking good governance, or neocolonial. He argues that African states do have agency, and are able to play a game that blackmails the global North into increasing financial flows through aid and investment in natural resources, which enable African governments to gain greater room for manoeuvre in satisfying domestic interests and therefore to stay in power.
Our first Briefing, by Ernest Toochi Aniche, Victor Chidubem Iwuoha and Kelechukwu Charles Obi, reports on the implementation of measures to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic in Nigeria. The authors focus on the continuing and worsening conflictual fiscal relationship between the federal government and the states, and between the states themselves, relationships which have undermined the fight against the virus. They argue that this fight has exposed the structural and systemic flaws of federalism in Nigeria, a country almost entirely dependent on revenues from oil, and has strengthened the argument for new political structures, a fiscal federalist system and control over resources to ensure that there is agreement on what functions are best decentralised and that states then get a fair share of federal revenues. The second briefing in this issue also concerns Nigeria and in particular the effect of piracy in the Gulf of Guinea on the artisanal fishing industry in the South South zone of the country. The authors, Samuel Asua, Michael Ugwueze and Vincent Onah, see the inability of the Nigerian state to deal with piracy and protect the fishers' economy demonstrates the fragility of a country that, according to the Global Terrorism Index 2020 (Institute for Economics and Peace 2020), is the third most terrorised country in the world with nearly half its population living in extreme poverty and its unemployment rate at over 50%. Both Briefings suggest a dysfunctional federal state and propose policies for change, with the likelihood of their implementation difficult to predict.
In a contribution to the Debate section, Gabriel Ozekhome Igechi asks whether Nigeria should join the European Union’s economic partnership agreement with the other ECOWAS states. Nigeria has so far refused to join the partnership on the grounds that small manufacturers and other small businesses need to be protected against partnerships like this one that allow substantial foreign investment, which is seen as impeding the growth of domestic manufacturing. Igechi analyses the partnership agreement with the EU and concludes that Nigeria needs to establish a strong and internationally competitive manufacturing sector before joining the agreement. From the Briefings in this issue, it would seem that Nigeria has some way to go before this becomes a reality.
Also in this issue, directly following this editorial, we celebrate the most recent winner of the ROAPE Ruth First prize, which is awarded for the best article in a given year by an African author published in ROAPE for the first time. The prize was awarded to Lawrence Ntuli for his article ‘The strategies and tactics of fighting against precarisation of work: a comparative study of precarious workers’ struggles in two South African municipalities’, which was published in March 2020. Other items include a review article by Felix Mantz, ‘Bendix and Ndlovu-Gatsheni in dialogue’, in which the author focuses on ‘the relationship between knowledge, memory and education in the context of decolonisation and on the imperative to (re)centre and revitalise non-Western knowledges’ (473). This is followed by book reviews and a round-up of the online blog posts, articles and interviews that have featured on Roape.net over the last quarter.