Tag: Economics

In his book, ‘Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation’, aspects of which we have been reflecting on for the last two weeks, the South African political economist, Professor Patrick Bond, exposes the sheer intellectual laziness, mental lethargy, ideological bankruptcy and shameful hypocrisy of contemporary African leadership. Reading this book, it becomes obvious that unless there is a radical change in the nature and character of African leadership; the emergence of thinker-leaders who can break out of the underdevelopment-generating mould of intellectual dependency on western imperialism, the Continent’s presumed desire for positive transformation will remain a mirage. The current crop of African leaders certainly do not measure up to the high standard of mental rigour and independence of thought exhibited by the immediate post-independence leadership such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kenneth Kaunda, Sekou Toure, Obafemi Awolowo, or Jomo Kenyatta to name a few. Of course, this does not excuse the weaknesses of many of these earlier leaders, which, in any case could be blamed on the continuing after effects of centuries of brutal slavery and colonial imperialism on the most abused people in history – the black race.

Not even the venerable Nelson Mandela and the supposedly progressive leadership of the radical anti-apartheid political movement – the African National Congress (ANC) were spared the scathing critic of Professor Bond. A party like the ANC, whose history of anti-racist and imperial struggle should have positioned it to show the light for Africa to find the way to true mental, political and economic liberation turned out to be just as intellectually famished and ideologically sterile as others across the continent. For instance, according to Bond, Nelson Mandela in 2003 was unsparing in his condemnation of George Bush’s decision to attack Iraq. In Mandela’s words at the time “All Bush wants is Iraqi oil…Their friend Israel has weapons of mass destruction but because it’s (the US’s) ally, they won’t ask the UN to get rid of them…Bush, who cannot think properly is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust. If there is a country which has committed unspeakable atrocities, it is the United States of America”.

Other ANC leaders like Kgalema Motlanthe and Thabo Mbeki echoed Mandela’s vitriolic sentiments but it all turned out to be empty posturing and pointless hot air even if Mandela was more sincere than his ANC colleagues on the issue. Bond calls the rhetoric of the ANC as nothing but “talking left but walking right”. How does Professor Bond prove his point in this respect? In his words “…in early 2003, at the same time as Mandela’s outburst, the ANC government permitted three Iraq-bound warships to refuel in Durban, and the state-owned weapons manufacturer, Denel, sold US$ 160 million worth of artillery propellants and 326 hand-held laser range-finders to the British army, and 125 laser-guidance sights to the US Marines”. Despite strident protests by a coalition of over 300 Anti-war organizations in South Africa against these arms sales, “Pretoria refused the Coalition’s demands to halt the sales”.

Of course, it is pertinent to wonder if any other army in black Africa could muster the capacity to manufacture and sell such sophisticated weaponry to the military of such world powers as the US and Britain. Is there, one must ask again, a racial tinge to the debilitating technological dependency of Africa? Is there a link between the industrial/technological capacity of South Africa relative to other parts of the continent and the several years of white supremacy rule? But then, that is just an aside. Professor Bond’s point is that South Africa plays a crucial role “as Washington’s sub-imperial African power”.

Professor Bond contends that once the ANC elevated self-interest above principles compatible with genuine African liberation, then its leaders like Mandela and Mbeki were drawn close by western leaders and South Africa itself was enabled to play key roles in major international bodies like the UN Security Council, the board of governors of the IMF and the World Bank and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development etc. Perhaps because he is South African, it is understandable that Professor Bond focuses especially on South Africa’s complicity in the subversion of Africa’s interests in the contemporary global political economy.

It is through his scathing critique and exposure of the utter hypocrisy of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), which pretends to be a home-grown policy platform for the transformation of Africa, that Bond demonstrates the hypocritical collusion between the African leadership and the neo-liberal global elite for the persistence of a mutually beneficial but undesirable present condition of Africa. Incidentally, the major architects of NEPAD included Thomas Mbeki and Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo who ran administrations pathetically enslaved to neo-liberal policies that have failed in Africa for over three decades now. As a policy document, many believe that NEPAD is infinitely inferior to the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) drawn up by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1980.

Bond shows that rather than the African people, it is actually international finance capital that gains from NEPAD through “large construction opportunities on the public-private-partnership model, privatized state services, on-going structural adjustment, intensified rule of international property law and various of NEPAD’s sectoral plans, all coordinated from a South African office staffed with neo-liberals and open to economic and geopolitical gatekeeping”. Among other limitations of NEPAD identified by Bond include its neo-liberal economic policy framework, the complete alienation of the African people from any part in its conception, design and formulation, social and economic measures that contribute to the marginalization of women, its overdependence on foreign donors and its under-emphasis on the external conditions fundamental to the creation and sustenance of the African crisis.

In the same vein, Bond is critical of such Civil Society Groups as The Global Call To Action Against Poverty (GCAP), Make Poverty History and Live 8 campaigning which simplistically assume that the G8, World Trade Organization (WTO), Bretton Woods institutions and Third World state elites can be part of the solution to the African crisis when they constitute a fundamental part of the problem. Thus, he decries the illusory perception of such groups that the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), for instance, can make any appreciable dent on the gargantuan problem of poverty in Africa.

He quotes approvingly the following devastating gender-centric critique of the MDGs: “I do not believe in the MDGs. I think of them as a Major Distraction Gimmick. There is evident widespread awareness of their limitations: their inadequate targets and indicators; their restriction to indicators that are quantifiable, when much of what is most important – such as Women’s Equality and Empowerment – is not easily quantifiable…In fact a major problem of the MDGs is their abstraction from the social, political and economic context in which they are to be implemented – the ‘political economy’ of the MDGs”.

But what are the alternative grassroots initiatives that Bond believes can truly help make poverty history in Africa? That will be the focus of our concluding part next week.