As this volume was being put together, President Barack Obama, the first African American to hold this high office paid his first official visit to sub-Saharan Africa – to Ghana – where he made a major policy statement on US–Africa relations. So Africa is no longer to be treated with benign neglect, or is that just cunning? The feverish expectation of the speech was not unlike Harold Macmillan's ‘Wind of Change’ Speech of February 1960 to the South African Parliament, and the message was just as candid. This time it was not an old colonial coming to ‘talk down’ to the rulers of modern Africa, but a son of Africa, who happens to hold the most powerful office in the world.
Ghana was chosen for this visit ostensibly because Washington sees that country as a beacon of democracy in a continent that has had more than its share of autocrats and military dictators. However, some critics have questioned this explanation, pointing to the fact that Botswana's democracy has been much more durable, and for a long time was one of the fastest growing economies in the world. One critic has drawn attention to ‘the sinister hand of oil’ (Zeleza 2009, p. 5); with leaders of American oil companies already swarming through the corridors of Osu Castle1 like flies over fresh fish. Critics also point to the fact that the US is becoming increasingly dependent on West African oil and that by 2015 some 25 per cent of US oil import is expected to come from the Gulf of Guinea. The growing importance of West Africa to US global strategic interests and the need to find a ‘local home’ for Africa Command (currently based in Europe and which has been opposed by African governments and civil societies with bitter memories of previous military interventions) must have been influential in the decision to chose Ghana for the ‘inaugural’ visit to sub-Saharan Africa.
These points aside, it must be also noted that Ghana holds some cultural and historical significance for African Americans: Ghana was the source of millions of slaves who entered the United States to form the Old Diaspora; and it is also the destination of thousands of African Americans returning to their roots. Furthermore, Ghana was in the vanguard of both the anti-colonial struggle and the Pan-African Movement, which included Diasporic figures such as African American stalwart W.E. Dubois, who moved to Ghana to work with the post colonial pioneers under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, the man who led sub-Saharan Africa's first country to independence in March 1957. Furthermore, thanks to good marketing, African Americans have appropriated much of Ghanaian culture and cultural artefacts, such as the Kente cloth, which by now has become an item of cultural significance in African American communities.
In his speech to the Ghanaian House of Representatives, the President emphasised the role African actors have to play in shaping twenty-first century development, but this, he argues, will only happen if the continent can establish ‘sustainable democratic governments’, ‘good governance’, ‘strengthen public health’ and put an end to wars and conflicts. Furthermore, in an implicit rejection of the Afro-pessimists, who see Africa as an irrelevant continent marginalised from the global capitalist system, the President observed that he sees ‘Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world – as partners with America on behalf of the future that we want for all our children … That partnership must be grounded in mutual responsibility …’
The main theme of the President's address was that ‘Africa's future is up to Africans’. In valorising African agency, President Obama was not pointing to anything new, as contributors to this journal and others have emphasised the dialectical insertion of African formations within the global capitalist system, which structurally impel African underdevelopment and the need for collective African responses. In noting the widespread cynicism and despair that has engulfed much of the population of sub-Saharan Africa, the President observed that: ‘… the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants’. The President drew attention to the role of corruption, poor governance, poor public health and conflicts have played in setting back economic and political development in Africa. Kenya, the land of his father, had a higher GPD per capita than South Korea in the early 1960s, yet has been outpaced by South Korea since. Whilst GDP is not a very satisfactory index of progress for a number of reasons (Clower et al. 1966), it is important to note that Kenya, like most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, has failed to engage with globalisation, and as a consequence has slipped down the development ladder. To compound the problem, functioning bureaucracies inherited from the departing colonialists were transformed into fiefdoms, leading to the increasing haemorrhaging of educated labour and capital (Collier 2007). The critical mass of cadres and technocrats who should take their countries forward has been forced out, or decided to vote with their feet to foreign land.
That Africans need to live under regimes of good governance is not in dispute (Zack-Williams 2001). Democracy has always been dangled as a carrot to the African masses, and they are fully aware that in the end their votes matter less than the will of the incumbent to power who can win the elections (as opposed to the popular votes) by unopposed (preventing others from filing in nominations) or by announcement (because they control the major communication organs). In fact, what Africa needs is democratic developmental states in order to strengthen the infrastructure and improve the material conditions of the masses.
As one critic of the President has noted, ‘Africa's contemporary structural and institutional systems reflect complex intersections of the legacies of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and the deformities of postcolonial political cultures’ (Zeleza 2009, p. 2). Indeed, African rights and citizenship need to be protected, defined and guaranteed by those who lead them. The issues of rights and citizenship have been key issues in the struggle of African people under colonialism and in their long struggle against post-colonial oppressors. In the case of the struggle against post-colonial dictators, African people have found little support among the democratic governments in the West, who have tended to bolster dictators, as long as Western interests can be protected. For example, on numerous occasions when the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo stood up against the kleptocratic demagogue, Mobutu Sese Sekou, the dictator's friends in the West did not stay neutral, but French (and towards the end of the Cold War, Moroccan) paratroops were flown in and dropped in Kinshasa and other locations to quell the popular uprising. Mobutu maintained the support of his Western masters, until he became an embarrassment at the end of the Cold War, by which time he had transformed the Zairian Treasury into his personal bank to siphon state resources to banks in the West. In this way it can be seen that corruption in Africa is not always structurally unrelated to the shenanigans of Western multinationals, as the recent conviction of a US official in the Halliburton $180 million bribe scandal in Nigeria shows.
In the then Belgian Congo and Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been accused of being culpable in the overthrow and death of the patriot Patrice Lumumba and the Kwame Nkrumah respectively. The case of Mobutu in Zaire was repeated throughout the continent. For example, British Prime Minster, Edward Heath was one of the first leaders to give recognition to Idi Amin's monstrous regime that brought carnage to Uganda before he was removed from power by Tanzanian forces; similarly, autocrats in Central African Republic, Togo and Gabon remained in power with support from the Elysee Palace. Perhaps one historical decision that the President could have instituted, is the return of illegally held assets in foreign banks by African leaders in a similar manner to that which off-shore tax havens are being pursued by the American authorities.
The President spoke about supporting development in Africa and went on to criticise dependence on single export commodities. Here we note three points. First, the effects of structural adjustment programmes, which have tended not only to reinforce agricultural production in Africa, but also monocultural economies, as each country is directed to continue production along traditional lines, with the result that this creates gluts in the world market for primary produce and there is a subsequent fall in prices, detrimental to the exporter, but favourable to the production cost of the importer.
Second, since many of the industrial enterprises in Africa were either government owned or joint ventures, the anti-dirigist nature of adjustment programmes has left the economies denuded of an industrial base, with infrastructure collapsing as the state was discouraged from investing in this sector. The private sector continues to avoid the sector as a plague. Marketing boards – which could have provided an infrastructure for agrarian support and more developmental export strategy – have been abolished or weakened under structural adjustment conditionality (van der Laan 2002).
Finally, African exports have been squeezed out of the market of the developed economies through tariff escalation and agricultural subsidies to farmers, making it harder for farmers in poor African countries to diversify their exports, by processing them before export. Thus Collier (no critic of the market) has noted that rich-countries trade policy is part of the problem, describing it as ‘policy of incoherence’ and that some aspects of the policy are indefensible. He observed: ‘It is stupid to provide aid with the objective of promoting development and then adopt trade policies that impede that objective’ (Collier 2007, p. 160). Thus even if good governance is addressed, Africa's dysfunctional integration into the world capitalist order cannot provide the basis for convergence, but divergence. Africa needs inward direct investments in order to diversify export in labour intensive manufacturing and services, in order to provide jobs for the millions, in order to avoid ‘Afrosclerosis,’ the equivalence of Krugman's ‘Eurosclerosis’, i.e. ‘the persistence of high unemployment rates, especially among the young, even during economic recoveries’ (Krugman 2009, p. 29).
The Articles
Roger Southall's article on the fall of Thabo Mbeki analyses the repercussions of the complex denouement of his premiership in terms of the politics of the ANC. Of course, this requires an analysis not simply of a ruling party but of a coalition; not just within the party but also through a range of provincial governments, a broader civil society, and the decisions of important individual power brokers. Southall advances seven explanatory narratives that explain the ascension of Jacob Zuma to power which range from the most reactionary to possibly more progressive prognoses. This complexity in itself is interesting; it suggests that government politics in South Africa is not entirely ‘shut down’ as some accounts of the rise of the ANC party-state suggest. Nevertheless, there are serious concerns raised by Southall's article regarding the future of the ANC and its internal politics: the highly contested and ultimately opaque nature of the legal actions against Zuma and the suggestions of malpractice and corruption within various ‘camps’ of political fealty do not augur well for the ANC's immediate future. Reflecting the multiple (and sometimes contradictory) vectors of change, Southall argues that the current political fluidity within the ANC challenges our understandings of the class politics that contained by – and to some extent mediated by – the broad infrastructure of the ANC.
Susan Willett analyses recent anti-corruption measures that have focused on military expenditure. ROAPE has carried a number of analyses of the double standards of international good governance regulations, in which African states are subjected to various forms of discipline and incentive concerning malpractice whilst international capital remains almost entirely outside of any remit to ‘tidy up’ acts of bribery, fraud, laundering, or illicit behaviour. Looking closely at DFID's TIDE initiative, Willett shows how the ‘demand’ side of corruption is focused on at the expense of the ‘supply’ side. Beyond this, she also convincingly suggests that foreign investment is replete with shady practice, often intertwined with the support of Western politicians. This is particularly prominent in the arms industry – a ‘sector’ that is morally repugnant in its entirety for anyone who does not swallow the euphemisms of ‘security’ and ‘stability’ – but it is also prominent in mineral deals, the purchase of privatised utilities, infrastructure development, and many other investments.
The themes of disciplining and incentives are continued in Sophie Harman's article on World Bank involvement in HIV/AIDS policy. A consideration of AIDS/HIV has been mainstreamed in most bilateral development policy, as well as World Bank operations, and in East Africa this has generated a regional policy raft underpinned by substantial amounts of donor/creditor money. Of course, substantial inflows of external finance into well-designed policies to tackle the spread of AIDS and to ameliorate the effects of HIV are to be welcomed. But even in the most ostensibly praiseworthy areas of development funding there reside questions of power. This is already well known with regard to the US policy of promoting a moral agenda based in Christian monogamous matrimony. In Harman's article, we see how East African states are shaped by World Bank (and others international agencies') ideas about how AIDS/HIV policy should be ‘governed’: how institutions should work, what types of political ideas should underpin policy, and of course the proper role for international organisations. Harman identifies a politics within the Multi Country Aids Programme that is similar to that ensconced within macroeconomic and development policy more generally: liberal, market-conforming and integrated into international architectures of development regulation.
In his detailed study of northern Uganda, Issaka Souaré identifies a tension in peace-making efforts between the requirements to maximise moves towards a cessation of war and the risks involved in providing amnesty to combatants – and especially those in positions of command. Amnesty might provide a means to bring LRA fighters out of the bush, but this does violence to concepts of justice and also provides a possible ‘incentive’ to fighters that might be able to act with impunity under the LRA mantle. These tensions are only increased by the cross-cutting agendas of the bodies involved: the LRA, Ugandan military and state, international human rights organisations and, of course, the International Criminal Court. Souaré advocates a rather hybridised approach to peace making, based in vernacular notions of justice, a pragmatic approach to amnesty provision, and an emphasis on economic rights/restitution as well as criminal and punitive ones.
Asma Halim provides a detailed and fascinating account of the ways in which religious texts and practices can be maintained at the core of progressive political projects. Looking at two women's organisations in Sudan – the Sudanese women's Union and the Republican Sisters – Halim shows how they have not only drawn on aspects of Islamic jurisprudence and authority but also contested the meaning of Islam in Sudan's public life, and especially the terms upon which gender relations are negotiated. Of course, both organisations have faced turbulent political waters, especially as a result of the increasingly authoritarian nature of the state and its evocation of conservative formulations of Islam. But, there has also been an awkward set of relationships with the resolutely secular ideas of Communism. Halim concludes by emphasising the importance of ‘nego-feminism’ – a feminism of negotiation between women's groups and other social agencies, an approach which she argues is also more amenable to find a way through the possible problems with the adoption of feminist theories which derive almost entirely from Western experiences.
Boku Tache and Gufu Oba seek out the historical roots of inter-ethnic conflicts in southern Ethiopia. At the heart of tension and conflict between Borana and Somali groups is rights of access to land. These rights have proven to be unstable and contested since colonial projects aimed to establish state boundaries which are always statements (and often partially realised projects) to create differentiations in law and rights. Tache and Oba focus on the post-Derg period, revealing how decentralisation, ethnic federalism, and the capture of local state authority by different claims to land have fuelled enmity between the two groups – indeed it seems as if these aspects of state policy ‘contribute’ to the construction of these groups in that particular setting. The case study shows how ethnic politics is produced through changing state policies and land politics – a political economy of ethnicity that is more substantive than one derived simply from a concern with cultural identities and their construction. Tache and Oba suggest that the key to reducing ethnic tensions lies in a more flexible understanding of rights to land and especially a reconciliation of law with pastoral understandings of rights.