EDITORIAL: Structural transformations in Africa today: interventions from the left
Introduction
This introduction to the Accra workshop on ‘Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa’, held on 13–14 November 2017, explains the rationale behind the initiative to have three Africa-based ROAPE meetings, why they are important and how they relate to historic socio-economic transformations, the most significant of which remains the great Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whose centenary month coincided with the Accra workshop.
Industrial transformation has been pivotal to such large-scale change. As Ghana's experience underlines, when industrial change has failed or faltered, societies and polities have paid a steep price, certainly in terms of overall development that transforms the lives of all their peoples and, it seems, in terms of sovereign or autonomous economic development and freedom from foreign domination of their economies. That the workshop also coincided with Ghana's 60th anniversary of independence made the reflections in Accra doubly important, focused as they were on strategies of industrialisation and Africa's non-dependent development broadly defined. It was also the appropriate starting point for the trilogy of meetings: the upcoming meetings in Dar es Salaam in April and Johannesburg September 2018 will explore alternative development strategies and the politics and character of resistance and change respectively.
ROAPE has historically convened large formal conferences. These included, to name a few, ‘The transition to socialism’, Leeds, 1982; ‘The world recession and food crisis’, Keele, 1984; ‘State, mining and development’, Leeds, 2007. In 2016, however, the journal's Editorial Working Group (EWG) decided to adapt this approach and to help convene and establish a series of dialogues of enquiry and interrogation of issues over a longer time frame with activist and other non-academic actors in Africa. Our website initiative of www.roape.net has certainly increased accessibility and range of material from Africa with a modest view of trying to be more engaged in Africa. The series of three workshops is intended both to build on this initiative generated by the new website and to extend and deepen ROAPE's grounding in Africa.
Industrialisation and structural transformation
In thinking about industrialisation we have been keen to have a sense of how debates about Africa's industrialisation have changed over time, and how these relate, in contemporary times, to international as well as local and regional dimensions of ‘structural transformation’ (as industrialisation and broader, industrially centred transformation is currently termed). Most salient within this ambit are considerations regarding, inter alia, diversification of economies, boosting of industrial output by transforming the capabilities of/returns to domestic economic producers, the adapted application and incremental endogenous generation of technique and technology, the ability to retain value added and its productive accumulation within historically extraverted economies.
Structural transformation has regained currency in African development debates, but what it means and requires are strongly contested. For the international financial institutions (IFIs) (World Bank 2017), in affirmation of the policies they have pushed over the past three decades, structural transformation is heralded by the perverse changes currently taking place in many African economies – a declining contribution from agriculture (which still has the biggest share of the labour force), deindustrialisation, and a services sector bloated by the precarious low productivity work of the millions fleeing poverty in the countryside for ever-growing urban slums but whose most profitable areas – in finance, telecom, transport, trade etc. – are controlled by transnational corporations (TNCs).
Despite the acclamations of ‘Africa rising’, the inadequacies and perverseness of this model have been brought into sharp focus by the decade of commodity-export-fuelled growth, whose main beneficiaries were TNCs, which deepened the dependence of Africa's economies on primary export production, with all its attendant vulnerabilities. This reality, and the pressures of popular struggles and demands, explain why leading African policy centres such as the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the African Union speak of ‘structural transformation for inclusive and people-centred development’ (UNECA 2014a). This perspective on structural transformation informed a raft of policy frameworks on industrialisation and minerals and development and others. But these policy proposals are yet to find expression in the choices of most African governments, which remain unwilling or unable to break decisively with the ruling neoliberal orthodoxies, which they simultaneously rely on and chafe against.
Whilst it is difficult to identify a coherent African left perspective on structural transformation several elements are central to radical orientations and objectives. These include ending Africa's subordinate insertion into the global economy as a raw material commodity exporter and also the dominance of finance; industrialisation and agrarian transformation which build national and regional intersectoral linkages, centred on meeting national and regional demand; health; transition to climate-friendly energy; secure and remunerative jobs across the economy and the valuing of hitherto unpaid domestic work. The transformation of the state into a democratic and accountable state, which assumes a leading role in the economy and transformation processes, is a central component of this perspective as is the democratic public and collective ownership and control of key economic resources. Across the African continent many ongoing citizens' struggles and some victories express elements of this platform.
The realisation of this agenda, however, has to confront the persistence of structural features of the world economy, of unequal trade, where aid serves external and not local, democratically determined need, and of course new expressions of cross-border financial flows and unprecedented capital flight: net outflow of capital from a continent that cannot or does not under current conditions access resources locally for local needs based upon principles of justice and equality (UNECA 2014b; Boyce and Ndikumana 2012). We also need to ask the extent to which a strategy for industrialisation can be promoted in the context of shifts in the sources of economic growth, and of profits, away from investment in real productive sectors as opposed to financial assets and speculative activity globally. In Africa, this unprecedented penetration by financial interests and actors into commodity chains, land grabs, monopoly rents on technology and intellectual property – and from what were, hitherto, discrete domestic financial circuits – expresses itself as a particularly pernicious persistence of regimes of extreme primitive accumulation, pervasive asset-stripping and multiplication of sources and channels of financial value extraction and monopoly rents.
Meanwhile, as the dislocations and limits of this rapaciousness multiply and loom more starkly, further bouts of speculation are fuelled. As Jason Moore and others have argued, the contemporary period is characterised by the demise of the four ‘cheaps’ – energy, raw materials, labour power, and food – and this has a consequence (maybe opportunity) for radical transformation in Africa (Moore 2015; Patel and Moore 2017).
The revival of interest in industrialisation and structural transformation, at a time when the apparent chasm between need and possibility suggested by these deep systemic and structural brakes on Africa's transformation, also informed why ROAPE wanted the Accra workshop to mark the impact and consequences of the great Bolshevik revolution for Africa, and more generally for the debates about how to transform the economies of semi-colonial or imperialised formations. This opened a wonderful Pandora's box of themes that were debated by activists and researchers – not least the debate about what does development mean and how has it been frustrated on the continent. Debating industrialism and rural transformation involved asking a series of questions in the context of combined and uneven capitalist development on the continent. It raised questions that were general across different country case studies about strategy and techniques, the role of technology and access to it in the strategy to raise productivity where there remained high dependence upon TNC access and delivery of machinery and technical inputs.
Among the many different themes raised by the Bolshevik revolution, and its evolution, were the lessons from forced industrialisation (as opposed to ‘fast-tracked radical transformation from below’); accelerated surplus extraction from the Russian countryside that offered a model for African states, not least in Ghana, the possibility of an alternative model for development, the opportunity to catch up and move away from the inherited colonial parsimony. There was also the recognition that the debate about accelerated industrialisation, development more generally, was highly contested within the left. Was the fast track possible alone, as a single-country experience? What are the prospects for regional approaches in an African context of small, weak and extraverted national economies? Or was it only desirable, possible, as an international and economic project from which all industrial and agrarian possibilities would or could be resolved?
The Bolshevik revolution raised the prospect that there could be an alternative to capitalist expansion to the highest level. The creation of the Soviet Union, as well as the revolutions in China and Viet Nam, delivered a multipolar world in which African struggles had examples and solidarity within which to base their own projects. The lessons now included the rapid modernisation of the Russian economy, the forced surplus extraction from Russian peasants, over a short time period, that ensured the presence in development theory, and among activists, of the gains to be had from possibility of auto-centred development. The seduction of being able to move quickly from the inherited colonial parsimony offered real hope across Africa.
The leading and driving role of the state and organising framework of a multi-year Plan in the transformations in the Soviet Union were features of the Bolshevik legacy that many African newly independent countries sought to emulate. In addition, support for African liberation and the promise of being able to emulate the Soviet Union's accelerated industrialisation to overcome backwardness proved attractive to many African states. Alongside this one of the major difficulties, we argue, that underpinned the Soviet failures was the absence of working-class democratic control of economic decision making. So, while there may have been admiration for moving so quickly from semi-feudalism to the sputnik in just 40 years, a democratically organised industrial strategy driven by working class and peasant initiative may not have chosen the space and arms race for the use of valued wealth creation. We can also see however that even where there was a social constituency for radical transformation – Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, for example – the mechanisms for driving it were less than democratic. The consolidation of the petty bourgeois fractions in post-colonial political leadership and the speedy marginalisation of the working-class component of the anti-colonial alliance were not dissimilar to the suppression of the leading political role of the proletariat in the Soviet Union.
The relevance of such questions remains deeply and acutely expressed in relation to the specific different country cases as well. How do the mass protests in Burkina Faso against a military regime with roots in a previous phase of authoritarian progressive populism speak to these issues? What different projects or processes are available and immanent in the routes that different agencies of social mobilisation offer – for example, as might be seen in the respective roles and leaderships of a limited but militant working class in Burkina – or how it was that rural struggles initiated the Tunisian uprising of 2010–2011?
What are the relative weights and interconnection between change ‘in’ and ‘for’ Africa within the highly uneven, hierarchical and unequal global order, wherein Africa lies at the very bottom, imposed and put upon, it would seem, by all. Is autonomy not primary as perhaps implied by the ideas of autocentred development being reborn by Samir Amin, among others (Amin 2017; 2013). Autocentred development may be initially an inward-looking development option that is indispensable to promote a form of delinking understood as a strategy for a sovereign popular project. In raising the possibility for developing sovereign national/regional projects it will be necessary to assemble a strategy to confront what Amin has called ‘apartheid at the global level’ – the ways in which Africa is persistently and systematically deindustrialised – or, in Ferguson's terms, abjected (2006). Indeed, for countries of the global South ‘delinking’ from the world economy seemed to be the chief export from the Soviet Union.
Rather than just offering a knee-jerk response to this as again fanciful in the context of globalisation and the power of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that sanctions and restricts national development alternatives, there was an attempt, although not fully realised, to investigate concretely just how realistic such a strategy might be in the 21st century.
Activists were invited to reflect on the existing configuration of class and social forces – locally, regionally and internationally – that was articulating agenda for social transformation in Africa and also what was still necessary in programmatic terms and was evident in real historical struggles to promote an alternative to existing globalisation. Discussions about such a sovereign popular project, its validity, strategy and organisational base were debated in Accra.
These issues were at the heart of why ROAPE organised the series of workshops and raised the debate about the possibilities of the extent to which the journal could help promote radical agenda. This begs the question, of course, what does a radical agenda look like?
Answering that question perhaps used to be easier than it is now. The journal began based in Sheffield but always had the idea it would become embedded and produced from Africa. In the early 1970s there was optimism that liberation movements in lusophone Africa and South Africa would generate not just national liberation but convert armed struggle into socialist reconstruction. It was perhaps easier, although contentious, which movement a journal like ROAPE would advocate for. The ‘second wave’ of national liberation, it was believed, would promote a radical agenda of socialist transformation based explicitly on a critique of the ‘first wave’ of negotiated independence in the early 1960s. This earlier period of decolonisation led Ruth First, one of ROAPE's original members, to comment that independence had been little more than ‘a bargaining process with cooperative African elites. The former colonial government guarded its options and … the careerist heirs to independence preoccupied themselves with the “Africanisation” of the administration’ (First 1970, 57–58).
At the time of its inception in 1974 the founders of the journal intended relocating it to Africa – that has largely faded though not disappeared. The production link with Taylor and Francis, but also the considerable autonomy the journal has within that corporate journals empire, and the partnership with Third World Network-Africa based in Accra helped facilitate and fund the workshop and the next two meeting scheduled in 2018.
But what transformation agenda and goals, what types of research, policy and strategic projects about struggle and change would or should ROAPE editors advocate for now? What is the role of or links that are possible to be forged between activists and academics in the journal? In the mid 1970s thanks to a vibrant community of activists and solidarity networks around African national liberation movements more than half of the EWG were non-academics, but in the changed circumstances of 2018 all are or have been academics. How does the journal, in the current context amid the increasing ‘audit culture’ of academia as labelled by university managers, continue to help bridge the divides between the worlds of academia and activism? The activist, as Jun Borras has noted, is one who is ‘irreverent, subversive and passionate’ while the academic is ‘prim, respectful and clinical’ (2016, 32). For academics there is an incentive to fit intellectual work to the dominant trends in the academic disciplines and funding rather than determining and defining the questions of importance for promoting radical transformation. But for ROAPE, as Lionel Cliffe among others noted, its remit must combine the highest academic excellence which simultaneously shows emancipatory commitment to enhancing and equipping, and thereby helping to elevate, activism against ‘inequality, exploitation and oppression’ in and for Africa and her transformation.
It is worth revisiting the first editorial of the journal in 1974 that refers to ‘the task of understanding, and countering, the debilitating consequences of a capitalism which stems from external domination and exploitation and is combined with internal underdeveloped and equally exploitative structures’ (ROAPE 1974, 7). Crucially that editorial argued the need for a Marxist method that explores
changing patterns of production as holding the key to changes in all societal relationships … [analysis of] changing relations of production and the role of state power in reproducing them in order to identify the emerging contradictions. Identifying these contradictions indicates not only the essential character of the social formation requiring to be changed, but equally the opportunities that will have to be seized in order to transform society. (ROAPE 1974, 2–3)
The Accra workshop and those planned for Dar es Salaam and Johannesburg show a strong commitment by the EWG to reconstruct and reinvigorate the links between radical scholarship on Africa and activism for radical transformation on the continent. Yet there remains an important question as to what constitutes radicalism. What is the role of those who study Africa and advance the understanding of popular struggles, and want to engage with and promote opportunities for transformative collective action? How do they respond without being just defensive and reactive in offering critiques of the claims made for ‘Africa rising’, the power of the new youthful generation, the amazing liberatory powers of the middle class, and the immense optimism that Facebook and Twitter bring to radical politics? Among this we also need to be cautious to determine what political interventions are ‘emancipatory’ and which are ‘regressive’ in promoting the struggle for a better society.
The journal cannot call for a blueprint, a one-size-fits-all emancipatory politics, but we do need to understand which functional, substantive and relational dimensions of social struggles we analyse and highlight. What, for example, are or were the relationships between everyday struggles of the ordinary people (Bayat 2010) around food, transport and services that helped drive the uprising in Egypt in 2011 which was also founded upon more traditional working-class struggles in the textile factories of Mahalla (Beinin 2016)? Or we might include Burkina Faso's decade-long struggle against Compaoré's regime which involved shifting fronts and locales encompassing rural struggles, rebellion against mining interests, and urban struggles – but perhaps whose fragmentation or limited framing of projects for democratic struggle and an alternative future, as noted by the now late ROAPE contributor Lila Chouli, effectively handed power back to the ‘good’ generals (Chouli 2015).
These workshops, and this first Debate Special Issue, are a modest attempt to try to provide a platform for chivvying along a debate and a role for exploring the relationship, among other things of centring class forces and productive, transformative capital accumulation in the illustrations and case studies relating to contested development strategy, industrialisation, rural transformation and resistance to capitalism in Africa. This is frankly more than ROAPE has done for a very long time.
It is clearly not enough, but important to do nevertheless, to say as Adhaf Souef did recently that ‘There's clearly a struggle taking place on a universal scale between a system that has the world in its clutches and something that's trying to be born.’ To what extent can individual struggles resolve the gargantuan crisis, and can the pressing issues that underpin and advance inequality like trade, migration, environmental poverty and persistent marginalisation of gender issues and the relationship between these and war and violence, be resolved on a global scale? What role does international solidarity play in the struggle for global justice and equality? For example, Palestinians showing unity with black rights in the US, the Occupy movement in Europe and the US showing solidarity with Tahrir and the Tunisian struggles. Yet we must ask, what good did these considerable acts of solidarity achieve? Global solidarity did not prevent the consolidation of the most repressive regime Egypt has ever seen.
There is nevertheless a global questioning of the 1%, a questioning that must extend to an interrogation of the wealth disparity of the top 25%. In Africa calling into question the legitimacy and survival of corrupt and repressive governments intensifies. In the global North we have seen not just the rise of Trump but, more significantly, many Americans voting for a socialist candidate in Bernie Sanders; there have been strong leftist politics in Greece, notwithstanding the immense suffering imposed on Greeks; and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn is a prime minister-in-waiting. However, the might of global markets and their institutions (in Europe in the shape of the ‘Troika’ of the European Commission [EC], the European Central Bank (ECB], and the International Monetary Fund [IMF]), has been a persistent brake on radical governments and programmes. For decades, the IMF played the same role on the African continent, as this journal has documented. In Europe, and elsewhere, far-right and right-wing populist parties have grown. We hope that this Debate Special Issue, based on the ROAPE/TWN-Africa workshop in Accra, sharpens analysis, provides a forum for debate and addresses issues concerned with the action needed to bring about the radical transformation of Africa.
Finance and development: what is to be done?
This and the following Connections workshops reflect many of the objectives of those of us who started ROAPE, especially combining rigorous research and scholarship with activism in the service of progressive organisations on the African continent. The range of participants in this workshop too reflects those objectives. As a ROAPE founding editor, it is very exciting for me to be able to participate in the workshop and especially to stand in for Sarah Bracking whose latest book, The financialisation of power (Bracking 2016), would have formed the basis of her presentation and has indeed informed my own.
Here we are, four and a half decades since the journal was conceived. The world wasn't supposed to be like this. In the 1970s we had a world in which US imperialism was challenged by the existence of the socialist bloc which, while its socialism was defective in many areas, still gave some hope to socialists in the ‘West’ that capitalism could be overthrown and with it imperialism, indeed its highest stage. Some African countries tried to develop socialist policies or elements of them with some help from the ‘socialist bloc’. Today this bloc has gone and US imperialism rules directly or through its client states. One of the former challengers to US hegemony, the USSR, now the Russian Federation, is economically weak, though still rich in raw materials, while the other large socialist power, China, has adopted a form of ‘state socialism’ with a strong capitalist orientation. The world economy is no longer dominated by any one group of nation states, but by the global, mainly financial, corporates who, to borrow from The Communist manifesto (Marx and Engels 1962), have truly turned states into their executive committee.
Theorisation of the role of finance in development has also changed. As Bracking puts it in her book, we have moved from ‘financing development’ to ‘developing finance’ (2016, 13). When I studied development economics, financing development was concerned with issues such as how to mobilise domestic savings through institutions such as banks, and even post offices, for investment in domestic economic activity. Indeed the textbook we used argued that there was no need for new financial institutions to channel savings to lending institutions, since credit could be extended to the same degree as cash was being hoarded by existing institutions and there should be strict credit controls by central banks (Higgins 1959). Banks could create lending resources subject to keeping a safe proportion of deposits as reserves. Development investment as part of government expenditure could also be financed out of taxation, import and export duties, and the surpluses generated by state marketing boards. Financial institutions were often state owned or, as in the case of the successful industrialisation of South Korea, the commercial banks were nationalised so that investment could be directed to priority sectors (Gilbert and Wilson 1998).
A target growth rate required a commensurate level of investment which exposed the gap between required investment and domestic savings which were low because incomes were low and savings institutions were relatively underdeveloped, especially in the poorer rural areas. Foreign investment and foreign aid would be sought not only to cover the savings shortfall, but also the gap between foreign exchange earnings, largely from primary products, and the foreign exchange expenditure on the inputs required for investment in manufacturing and other industrial and infrastructural projects. This ‘two-gap’ framework underpinned economic and financial strategy for development.
Control over the financial and monetary system by the government was seen by many African countries as a way of ensuring savings were directed to investments which would generate the growth required by the plans and targets that many countries published for the following three or five years. Of 45 countries surveyed, those with explicit policies of socialist development nationalised the commercial banks, having already established a state-controlled central bank. Many countries without an explicit socialist orientation either nationalised or took controlling stakes in their commercial banks. Some countries allowed foreign banks to operate and provide competition to the small number of national commercial banks; in some cases there was only one of these (Africa south of the Sahara 1991).
In the 1970s, development theory began to stress the importance of ‘financial deepening’, arguing that developing economies were subject to ‘financial repression’ characterised by rates of interest that were too low to attract savings and not high enough to ration borrowers so that the limited amount of loan capital would go to those with good connections rather than to projects which would generate the highest rate of return (McKinnon 1973; Shaw 1973). Hence what was required was the liberalisation of financial sector institutions so that the market would set competitive interest rates at a level which brought supply and demand into equilibrium, thus raising savings and ensuring investment in projects with returns high enough to cover the borrowing costs. In developed countries these ideas led to an expansion of financial institutions and a deregulation of their activities with the calamitous consequences we all witnessed in 2007–08.
Following the shift in financial and monetary economic theory towards emphasising the development of financial institutions and products, empirical studies conveniently emerged to show that financial deepening caused economic growth. The problem with these studies was that although tests were made on the direction of causation to show that it was always in the direction from financial development to growth, some later studies did show that causation went in the other direction, that is economic development generated greater financial activity and institutional development to go with it. Some others found bi-directional causality depending on the time period chosen or the original conditions. It is not difficult to see economic development generating the expansion of financial institutions as greater economic activity demanded more investment financed by banks and, in turn, this expansion of finance generating more investment and growth (Lawrence 2006).
However, financial deepening also meant the development of money and stock markets with institutions playing in the global casino with a myriad of ‘products’ and techniques with no obvious purpose other than to make money for the gamblers, but certainly with no useful social and economic purpose. So from generating financial resources for investment in productive activity, financial development became associated with the growth of the financial sector, misleadingly retitled the finance industry, for itself, earning returns from investing in financial products either directly or indirectly and reinvesting in the same financial products – literally playing the market. One result of that shift in policy in most African countries was the privatisation of the nationalised banks or at a minimum partial state divestment and certainly the loss of state control (Africa south of the Sahara 1991).
For all countries, financial liberalisation and ‘deepening’ has increasingly meant the ‘financialisation of everything’ (Harvey 2015, 33) with all assets being turned into financial products which generate other products derived from the original. So housing morphs from being an asset that provides a roof over people's heads to being a financial asset the purchase of which is funded by a mortgage loan which itself can be traded between financial institutions at prices which reflect a bet on whether the mortgage will be repaid. The bets can also be traded. More than that, and especially because these financial bets can earn colossal returns, other investments in, for example, long-term infrastructural or manufacturing projects have to demonstrate that they can match the returns from financial ‘investments’ such that public sector institutions and even social enterprises1 have to show that they can match, and play, the market – the ‘financialisation of everything’ in action. As Bracking notes, the average return to firms involved with ‘private finance initiatives’ (PFIs) or ‘public–private partnerships’ (PPPs) to fund infrastructure projects is 29%, with the ‘profits made on derivatives more significant than those on the fixed assets’ (2016, 199).
Financialisation, as the dominance of finance capital, is nothing new and was a development in capitalism that was observed by Marx and more famously and in greater depth by Hilferding (2007) a century ago. Financialisation now can be seen through the network of corporate control – 45 of the 50 global corporates which control 75% of core capital are from the financial sector and in turn these powerful institutions capture the state to ensure that public policy is made to their advantage (Vitali, Glattfelder and Battiston 2011). State capture suggests that financial power determines state policy – Bracking refers in her book to this ‘political connectivity’. It is not surprising then that no institution has been punished for the activities which caused the financial crisis and only one was allowed to go bankrupt (Rakoff 2014). Why weren't banks allowed to go bust with deposits guaranteed? Instead, government increased money supply and banks could restore their capital base. Now they do what they always did and play the casinos.
But this does not necessarily mean playing local capital markets whether they are well developed or not. Playing in other markets means moving capital to tax havens or major capital markets both legally and illegally as well as using some old techniques of transfer pricing2 (overpricing imports and underpricing exports between branches of the same global corporate) so as to reduce or increase local profits depending on tax regimes in different jurisdictions where there are branches of the corporates, or simply to avoid capital controls. As now more than 50% of world trade is between branches of the same corporate, such transfer pricing activities are rife and very difficult to detect. This is one aspect of the increasingly important phenomenon of ‘capital flight’. Another is unrecorded remittances from migrants in African countries from other parts of the continent and from outside Africa. A third way in which capital flows out of African countries is through debt repayment but there is also evidence that as aid or debt relief increases so does illegal capital flight (Boyce and Ndikumana 2012).
Boyce and Ndikumana estimate that total capital flight from the 33 African countries they cover totalled US$814.2 billion in constant 2010 dollars, almost 25% of which was lost in the last five years of that period. The main nine oil-exporting countries dominate capital flight comprising 55% of the total, with Nigeria well in the lead with 38% of the total for the 33 countries. The Paradise Papers3 suggest that vast funds from African and other countries are flowing out to tax havens. For example, US$3bn of Angola's sovereign wealth fund was managed by a company owned and controlled by a Swiss-Angolan friend of President José Eduardo dos Santos, Jean-Claude Bastos, who then invested the funds via offshore entities in Mauritius. Some of them went to companies in which he had personal interests to the benefit of these companies and himself. After the revelations in the Paradise Papers, he was sacked by his old friend (Pegg 2018).
Bracking notes that
the dominant political parties of Angola (MPLA), Zimbabwe (ZANU-PF), Botswana (Democratic Party [BDP]) and Namibia (SWAPO) as well as Equatorial Guinea's Obiang dynasty all have corporatised financial structures offshore. In the minerals sector, the dominant parties draw revenue from key strategic partnerships with resource-seeking multinationals – for example, Namibia's Namdeb (with De Beers), Angola's China Sonangol (with China International Fund), Botswana's Debswana (with De Beers) and Zimbabwe's Anjin (with China Anhui); as well as international oil companies invested in Angola and Equatorial Guinea. (Bracking 2016)
Making money out of Africa's natural resources extends into agriculture and is also associated with well-connected politicians and business leaders. It is both an example of land grabbing and of the way in which a myriad of entities is created such that it is hard to discover who is controlling whom. For example, there is the case of AgroMoz in Mozambique, a joint venture between the Grupo Américo Amorim of Portugal, a holding company of Portugal's richest man Américo Amorim, and Intelec, the former President Guebuza's investment vehicle. AgroMoz is part of AGS Moçambique, S.A., a Mozambican company owned by two Portuguese subsidiaries of Grupo Amorim (Solfim SGPS and Sotomar – Empreendimentos Industriais e Imobiliários, S.A.) and ESF Participaçoes, a subsidiary of ESF Investimentos. This latter is owned by Intelec and SF Holdings and Guebuza's main business partner Salimo Abdul heads both of them. Through those connections the company quickly acquired land rights from the authorities with the result that more than a thousand peasants were evicted from their lands thus potentially creating a source of supply for company workers. The company expanded from the initially stated 200 ha to over 2000 ha a year later, and later an extension to 11,000 ha (while Guebuza was still President) with little compensation for those losing their land (UNAC and GRAIN 2015). In this case the land was used for the cultivation of soyabeans and rice but the potential of mineral wealth beneath the surface has been the motivation for other land grabs across the continent (Borras et al. 2011).
Alongside these tendencies to greater political control by the major financials, there are other changes especially in technology. Increasing automation is changing the nature of work such that investment especially in manufacturing creates fewer jobs than before, a contradiction of capitalism predicted by Marxists. One of the effects of some of the new technologies in communications is to create a social network which results in different kinds of social action from the traditional way of doing politics. The old way of organising politics through the traditional political parties is being challenged worldwide with new movements spanning social classes as for example in various parts of Europe and communicating effectively and speedily through the social media. Increasingly the struggle will be between global elites and their subordinate social classes versus the growing precariats, in which the subordinate classes will have to decide where ultimately their interests lie given that a substantial proportion of them are starting to come perilously close to the precariat. In the US, for example, the concentration of large amounts of capital in the hands of a global political and economic elite has generated huge inequalities such that 0.1% of the US population holds as much wealth as the bottom 90%, while 1% of the global population holds 50% of global wealth. Similar levels of inequality have been found for Africa, which
is even more concentrated at the bottom end of the wealth spectrum: more than 40% of African adults belong to the lowest two global wealth deciles. At the same time, wealth inequality is so high in Africa that some individuals are found among the top global wealth decile, and even among the top percentile. (Shorrocks, Davies and Lluberas 2017)
Another recent and major study of inequality in Africa finds that the more unequal African countries, also rich in minerals, became even more unequal while the less unequal countries became slightly less unequal (UNDP 2017). This emphasises the connection between mineral wealth and personal wealth through financialisation.
The key question is what is to be done and by whom? Challenging financial power and the sector's ability to move capital abroad at an instant will require both national and international action. The prevailing orthodoxy of liberalised markets and movements of capital and labour will be very difficult to challenge as it has become embedded in the thinking of key government and political figures everywhere. For example, 20% of the finance ministers of the 47 African countries being aided in 2012 by the World Bank had previously worked for the Bank or the IMF (Bretton Woods Project 2014), after which they returned to their countries to implement policies that would pursue orthodox strategies – privatisation and the alienation of land for prospecting for minerals or for growing industrial or high-value food crops (the ‘land grabs’), policies directed to encouraging foreign investment and maintaining aid flows. But even if they wanted to pursue different policies, they would come up against the power of corporate capital and its handmaids, the international financial institutions (IFIs). African economies are still heavily dependent on exports of raw materials. They are still part of global value chains over which they have little control. Most importantly as the cornerstone of the orthodoxy is to diminish the role of the state, then government intervention to diminish capital flight, for example, requires a strong and well-trained bureaucracy to ensure some degree of control and regulation.
So how can this systemic barrier to changing anything be broken? As Bracking (2016) observes, there is the possibility of coalitions between global civil society, the philanthropy sector, political parties, civil society organisations, trade unions, churches and faith organisations, and citizens groups. This is particularly feasible in the context of the revelations of the Paradise Papers. These social movements could pressurise governments to engage in global action against tax havens which reduce state income and enrich the few, and this could be the beginning of a lengthy process to reignite of the struggle against global capitalism. A start would be to reinstate the full regulation of markets, especially separating regular and casino financial activities, to regulate and license financial ‘products’, and therefore largely to return to a relationship between finance and development which emphasises investment in productive activities rather than in speculation.
Coalitions within countries need to combine with those in other countries both in the global South and North to force global corporates to change direction and to expose corrupt activity such as that revealed by the Paradise Papers. For Africa, there is a need to developing alliances between countries, to stop allowing global corporates, IFIs and the G8 to divide and rule, and to move more rapidly to regional and continental integration and in as many ways as possible to reduce linkages with global financial and industrial corporates. This is unlikely to happen without substantial pressure from below and will depend on the degree to which such pressure can overcome the state's security apparatus, one of the few areas from which the state does not seem to have retreated.
Note on contributor
Peter Lawrence is a founding editor of ROAPE and Professor Emeritus of Development Economics at Keele University, UK. Email: p.r.lawrence@123456keele.ac.uk
Contract farming in Uganda and Tanzania: inclusive development or adverse incorporation?
Land grabs and agricultural modernisation
The phenomenon of large-scale land and agricultural investments and acquisitions, which we discussed at the ROAPE/TWN workshop in Accra in November 2017, emerged with the financial, food and energy crises, and has captured the attention of development agencies, governments, media, civil society and social movements (Borras and Franco 2012; White et al. 2012). The international financial institutions (IFIs) have welcomed the opportunities that these investments provide for economic development. Critical scholars and activists, however, have been concerned with the dispossessing and/or displacing effects of land enclosures. They also pointed to the fact that these investments transform existing land use patterns, namely from food generally produced for local and national markets to cash crops mostly sold on the international markets including the conversion of forested lands into large-scale commercial plantations (Borras and Franco 2012). Africa and especially East Africa has been the epicentre of large-scale land and agricultural enclosures (Martiniello 2015). Africa is persistently characterised by the interests of global capital as a continent endowed with abundant under-utilised or empty land, reiterating colonial views of terra nullius. Many of the land deals are speculative. They emerge from the impetus of finance capital to ensure a secure outlet to store (and eventually increase) value as a result of growing expectations of rising land prices. The substantial part of the deals, however, involve actual agricultural production mostly around key crops suitable to African environments. Crops such as maize, soya, cotton, cassava and sugar were identified as high commercial potential cash crops by the World Bank (2009), which has represented a global call for investors to exploit the emerging economic opportunities in global agricultural value chains.
Yet behind this call for Africa's ‘awakening’ and development, there is a glaring attempt at consolidating an international division of labour, in which African countries keep playing the role of provider of agricultural commodities for international markets, or, when processes of value addition take place in situ, largely foreign multinational companies often appropriate it. Large-scale land and agricultural investments, and their diverse economic and political drivers, have been variously conceptualised as: a form of foreignisation of space (Zoomers 2010); a new scramble for African land resources driven by imperialism (Moyo, Yeros and Jha 2012); a signal of deepening contradictions of the corporate food regime (McMichael 2012); an expression of the rapidly expanding dominance of agribusiness on the continent (Amanor 2012); and a practice of domination and commoditisation of nature (green grabbing) through green economy narratives (Fairhead et al. 2012). However, despite the richness of these debates, some crucial issues have been missed. Among these are the lack of attention to the micro, meso and macro levels of analysis and their connections (Peters 2013), the epiphenomenal (Martiniello 2017b) and ahistorical (Wily 2012) character of a substantial part of the literature; the need to re-centre labour in land grab debates (Li 2011) and the agrarian struggles that opposed and challenged the implementation of these deals (Borras and Franco 2012; Hall et al. 2015; Martiniello 2015).
From land enclosures to inclusive development?
The nefarious consequences of land enclosures have triggered vigorous and diversified practices of resistance and responses from below among the affected communities. Transnational agrarian movements, peasant organisations, civil society and community-based organisations have in many cases opposed the grabbing of the land and other common resources through multifarious repertoires of resistance including community uprisings, peaceful mobilisations, women-naked protests, and legal battles against land dispossession. This is because in prevalently rural societies where agrarian livelihoods heavily depends on access to vital natural resources, land represents, a form of social security, which can make a difference between life and death (Federici 2004). Yet responses and practices from various social constituents have been of a different character because the implications of land enclosures have not been uniform across social groups and classes (Borras and Franco 2012). Agrarian struggles in the countryside have been of fragmentary and often defensive character, and heavily hit by the repressive apparatus of the state, which included attempts to silence the voices of critical researchers, engaged journalists and committed lawyers. However, their cumulative effect, coupled with social movements and civil society campaigns, succeeded in putting significant pressures on (agribusiness) capital, donors and states. Overall these repertoires of resistance contributed in exposing the abusive conduct of agribusiness including human rights violations by African states often acting against existing legal frameworks or revising them according to capital requests and exigencies. Moreover, conflicts over land jeopardised the security of profit flows and contributed to destabilising the overall environment. That made land deals increasingly difficult to be implemented on the ground.
It is in such a context that we have witnessed a resurgence of interest, debates and policies about agricultural commercialisation, contract farming and outgrower schemes in Africa and the suggestion that they are a less harmful and more inclusive development model and farming system (Cotula and Leonard 2010). Contract farming is not new. First attempts to establish formal farmer–corporate capital agreements to foster the integration of agricultural producers within the commercial circuits of colonial economies date back to the 1920s and the Gezira Irrigation Scheme in Sudan in which farmers were contracted to grow cotton under a land tenancy agreement (Gaitskell 1959). More recently the renewed emphasis on agricultural commercialisation and contract farming seems to emanate from a wider set of discourses. These frame agricultural commercialisation as a key policy instrument for poverty alleviation and food security by both global development agencies and African states. Corporate agribusiness, the fastest growing sector in Uganda in the last decade, is often portrayed in political rhetoric as playing a key role in helping kick-start the ‘take-off’ of the modernisation process. Farmers' commercialisation policies have been one of the rallying cries of the Museveni government, which has praised the virtues of agri-business, large, and medium-scale farmers as the social actors that could mostly benefit from periodic hikes in the price of agricultural commodities. These have been aimed at capturing the opportunities derived from the global market anchored into the logic of comparative advantage. To do so, the whole agricultural sector needs legislation and policy that creates a viable business environment where inputs (seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, energy, agricultural implements, land and water) and outputs (agricultural and forestry commodities, biomasses) freely circulate in the market. Pressures of competitiveness and productivity are seen to be beneficial as they generate the (natural?) selection of the most efficient farmers in the countryside. Indeed, dominant discourses generally converge and agree upon the claim that rural populations are poor because they do not produce or market enough produce, thereby portraying their ‘uneconomic’ behaviour as the cause of their poverty. At the core of this developmental discourse there is also an argument about a needed change in mind-set that instils the entrepreneurial spirit into peasant populations, radically transforming social and cultural norms and values; this is presumed to be beneficial to all stakeholders involved (World Bank 2011; 2012).
In the mainstream development discourse, contract farming has been variously interpreted as: an arrangement to expand land investments to the poor (World Bank 2011); a collaborative (FAO 2013) and inclusive business model (Sulle 2010). According to its proponents, it provides an alternative to land grabbing as it leaves smallholders in control of their land while simultaneously delivering the required output to the investor (Braun and Meinzen-Dick 2009). They also maintain that it improves the productivity and income of farmers because of risk minimisation, market access and enhanced circulation of productive inputs (Oya 2012). Despite these optimistic win–win narratives, the question as to whether contract farming can represent a possible avenue to promote rural development and sustain local economies remains very much debated. The problem of pro-inclusion, donor-driven and policy-oriented analysis is that is has mainly been driven by a pragmatic preoccupation with how to make markets work for the poor, silencing the ways in which markets have been historically and asymmetrically constructed. Moreover such literature stresses the significance of connecting households in global value chains as the panacea to farmer problems. This fails to understand the vertical and hierarchical character of value-chains and the power relations which shape the ways in which value is created, realised and appropriated. Mainstream development episteme ignores that rural poverty, undernourishment and food insecurity in places such as Busoga, for instance, result, in many ways, not from the absence but from the presence of (farmers' links to) commodity chains.
The very metaphor of chain upon which the literature on global agricultural commodities is built, is based on the assumption of linear and sequential relations. That ignores the ways in which struggles among social actors affect the redistribution of value along global production circuits. The managerial approach to value relations also assumes that contracts are signed among equal partners resulting in the free choice of the contracting parts. Yet such an approach gives priority to legal relations, reiterating the 19th century rhetoric of free contracts. That ignores the view expressed by Marx that contracts are a legal fiction that mask the domination of labour by capital (Banaji 2003). The following sections provide a critique of the managerial approach to contract farming mostly grounded in neo-institutional economics and its focus on transaction costs, governance and institutional design, presenting empirical evidence from two sugarcane contract production schemes at Kakira Sugar Works (KSW) in the Jinja district in Uganda and Kilombero Sugar Company (KSC) in the Kilombero district in Tanzania. The selection of these two case studies is based on the striking similarities between their modes of operation and farming system (nucleus estate plus outgrower schemes), acreage directly cultivated by the company (10,000 ha), the number of outgrowers participating in the scheme (9000–10,000) and the participation of the state in the company shares (20–30%). The issues that I raise were central to many debates in the Accra workshop. They focus on understanding contemporary Africa struggles around what is meant by modernisation, rural development and food sovereignty. They relate to the need to dissect and reconstruct the ways in which rural class struggles are characterised as mechanisms for creating radical transformation and the structural and political obstacles to peasant and farmers empowerment.
Contract farming: a view from the past and present
As we have seen, contract farming schemes were introduced during the colonial era as an instrument to integrate petty producers into international markets. In some cases, these schemes were meant to bring producers into productive arrangements under close supervision of the interested company or the colonial state. That was in a context in which political mobilisations were at their climax as in the case of kulak agitations in Uganda in the 1940s (Mamdani 1975) or popular resistance against large-scale commercialisation schemes and development initiatives in Tanzania in the 1950s (Cliffe 1972). It is interesting to notice that the reinvigoration of contract farming schemes coincided with neoliberal agricultural restructuring and reforms of the 1980s–1990s. These saw the elimination of state parastatal institutions and the emergence of very powerful international forces pressuring to restructure African economies through structural adjustment. Simultaneously, structural adjustment programmes had also the effect of reinforcing the power of agribusiness capital in Africa by removing the limitations to its operations and facilitating its access to land and water resources. In parallel, market-based land reforms, based on titling, formalisation and privatisation, promoted the transfer of land from poorer rural social strata to large-scale and well-off commercial farmers or urban investors including transnational agribusiness (Lahiff, Borras and Kay 2007). This wave of liberalisation and deregulation spearheaded a violent process of reorganisation of rural social structures of property and production that enhanced agrarian crises and jeopardised rural livelihoods.
Market's rhetoric of ‘getting the price right’, paraded by IFIs as the main reason for the adoption of measures of restructuring of agriculture, did not produce the intended results and farmers' income remained significantly low. Early and foundational studies which interrogated the evidence of contract farming in Africa in the 1990s had already pointed to very complex dynamics underpinning their success or failure and to the social, political and economic circumstances which produced increased income and development and those that resulted in increased dependence and impoverishment (Little and Watts 1994, 216–217). Critique began to interpret contract farming as an instrument inspired by the political aim of undermining the organising principles and functioning of existing agricultural cooperatives (Founou-Tchuigoua 1990). Agricultural cooperatives were tied to the modes of surplus extraction from the countryside orchestrated by the newly independent states. They also had also the merits of extending services and inputs to farmers, harnessing significant collective power towards developmental aims. Cooperatives in Uganda and Tanzania had played an important part in the reorganisation of agricultural production after independence, with significant results in terms of economic growth. Contract farming entered the development debates with the purpose of representing an alternative to agricultural cooperatives by disaggregating them and bringing in more individualist, entrepreneurial mindset, attitudes and practices.
It is also worth noticing that as a result of structural adjustment the power of labour forces had simultaneously been eroded as reforms had weakened the labour, health and environmental regulations making labour and nature cheap and flexible to the expanding imperatives of capital. In the 1990s both countries have in fact experienced trade union mobilisations such as in the case of the National Union of Plantation and Agricultural Workers in Uganda, which initiated a series of strikes at sugar plants, which jeopardised continuous production. From the perspective of sugar companies, expanding contract farming schemes was meant to overtake some of the problems connected to labour agitations by reducing the number of permanent workers and acreage under the company's control and externalising some of the market risks onto outgrowers. In this way the sugar companies attempted to shift the class conflict between (agribusiness) capital and agricultural workers towards a less confrontational terrain, newly reframed along agribusiness-outgrowers' (whether large, medium or small) antagonisms, whose organisational structures and activities had already been undermined by the disassembling of autonomous farmers' organisations. Farmer organisation leaders have in fact been transformed into managers of the new relations between companies and farmers. This activity of cooptation tended to undermine the political solidarity that had existed before, dismantling the cooperative and replacing collective or communal modes of land tenure and farming with more individualised, utlitaristic and profit-oriented patterns of social and labour organisation. Outgrowers' associations have in other words smoothed the conflictual and potentially antagonistic relations between the company and the producers, by working more as manager and coordinators rather than as political leaders.
Petty-commodity producers' adverse incorporation
I have documented elsewhere the dynamics of organisation and functioning of outgrower schemes in Morogoro (Tanzania) and Busoga (Uganda) regions (Martiniello 2017a, 2017b). I want here to use some of the key findings to make some critical reflections about the major features characterising these schemes. A key feature of sugarcane outgrower schemes in the two regions is the extremely asymmetrical power relations between the companies, that detain a monopsonistic position, and outgrowers. In both cases, companies provided inputs (seeds, fertilisers and herbicides) and machinery on credit for the preparation of the fields and the implementation of production, and deducted the due amount at harvest time when sugarcane is delivered to the mill. Sugarcane price per tonne paid to the outgrowers is established by the company once the sucrose content is measured and the quality of the cane assessed. Yet a crucial aspect of outgrower schemes is that the final price for sugarcane to the producer varies according to the market price at the moment of sale. In this way price oscillations reverberate on producers, putting them at the vagaries of market volatility, rather than providing them with secure and profitable market outlets as argued by its advocates. For example, KSC in the years from 2011 to 2015 paid a decreasing price per tonne of sugarcane, which meant decreasing revenues for farmers that had to simultaneously face rising costs of production especially for fuel and fertilisers. This similarly happened at KSW in the years 2013–2014–2015. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly in order to understand uneven power relations embedded in these schemes, in the same years, KSC refused to harvest significant portions of sugarcane produced by registered outgrowers as previously agreed with outgrowers' associations. The company justified this on the grounds that the Tanzanian sugar market had been saturated by illegal sugar exports from Brazil and Indonesia. Despite outgrowers' complaints and because of uneven (legal) power relations, the company succeeded in delaying harvesting sugarcane to more remunerative moments pushing farmers with little option than to leave mature sugarcane deteriorating in the fields for months and simultaneously losing sucrose content and reaping lower harvests. I argue that outgrowers represent the weak rings in vertically structured and buyer-driven chains which have been (adversely) incorporated as an instrument to optimise the capacity utilisation of mills and as a buffer against the risks of underproduction (Martiniello 2017b, 642–643).
As an industrial agro-commodity, sugarcane has little or no usage beyond industrial circuits of processing and distribution making problematic shifting produce to other markets or competitors. This in part explains the low bargaining power of outgrowers vis-à-vis agribusiness companies despite outgrowers providing in both cases 60% (KSC) and 74% (KSW) of total sugarcane to the mills. The price–cost squeeze is a common challenge faced by producers who engage in global agricultural commodity circuits. In the case of Busoga, it has been estimated that transport costs of sugarcane to the mill, which grows in proportion to the distance, can absorb up to 30 to 40% of total revenues, making the business unviable in absence of autonomous transport services. Such networks that integrate farmers in agricultural markets exponentially expand the costs for farmers' participation in these networks. This enhances agribusiness capacities of capturing a growing share of value created by outgrowers.
Financialisation of smallholders’ everyday farming
Since the 2007–2008 spike in food prices and ensuing food riots (Bush and Martiniello 2017), financial actors have been playing an active role in food retailing, food processing, commodity trading, the determination of prices and the distribution of agricultural risks, the provisioning of agricultural inputs and the ownership and control of farmland. Yet the line between finance and food provisioning has become increasingly blurred with financial actors taking a growing interest in food and agriculture and agro-food enterprises increasingly involved in financial activities (Fairbairn 2014). On the assumption that rising prices would attract farmers to expand production, financial actors have made significant investments in seeds, agrochemicals and other farm equipment (Isakson 2014), which have increasingly become more expensive with the abolition of state subsidies. In this technology treadmill (Amanor 2018) farmers experience growing costs in order to stay in business. Yet behind the discourse of integrating farmers in agricultural markets, an attempt to convert farmers into consumers of agribusiness products and contractors with processors, is concealed. Small-scale farmers have been especially hard hit by financialisation as their livelihoods have become even more uncertain and their market power has eroded in the agro-food supply chain.
Such pressures contributed to the spreading and penetration of debt relationships between companies and outgrowers. In Busoga, commercial banks in collaboration with agribusiness companies, extend credit to outgrowers to kick-start and implement productive activities on sugarcane fields. Once the first sugarcane harvest is ready generally after 20–22 months, the outgrower is already fully indebted with the bank which charges interest rates for credit of between 18 and 22%. Focus groups with outgrowers in the area revealed that over 2000 farmers had asked for credit in 2015, and of these approximately 900 were in default. These accounts point to the pervasiveness of new financial services and farmers' indebtedness, and to the ways in which finance capital extracts surplus produced by outgrowers. Recently the FAO proposed new forms of contract farmers' insurance schemes as a shield against the natural risks involved in farming (FAO 2012), adding a further burden to their financial challenges. As is the case today in Busoga, there is a clear trend by the KSW to progressively disengage from the excessive risks involved in assimilating further land and direct farming, while significantly concentrating on more value-generating activities upstream (like seed provision, equipment and other inputs) and downstream (trading, processing and retailing food). In doing so it has left farmers to absorb the risk of agricultural production while controlling crucial knots of value addition. The financialisation of farmers' operations also results from the increased demands that standards and codes pose on farmers, pushing them to further strive to respect the commercial parameters imposed by the market.
Class dynamics of contract farming
Both outgrower schemes have been major incubators of class differentiation among producers by enhancing a pyramidal agrarian structure with large-scale outgrowers at the top, medium outgrowers in the middle and smallholders at the bottom. Contract farming creates socially differentiated agrarian classes. This is because not every social group benefits in the same way from these. In our cases, we witnessed the crystallisation of three social groups: 8000 small-scale commodity producers (1–5 ha); 12% middle farmers (6–10 ha); 3% large-scale farmers (10–50 ha); and 0.2% very large-scale farmers. However, these kind of scheme are not without losers, despite dominant win–win narratives that tend to argue otherwise. In particular these areas become highly attractive for all sorts of farmers who end up aggressively competing for available land resources. Such competition generates enormous pressures for the already existing smallholders in the area who, under pressure from commercial farmers, tend to rent or sell the land to the new incomers. In these schemes the World Bank's social Darwinian dream of the ‘survival of the fittest’ becomes reality through the selection of the most productive farmers and the expulsion of all the others who do not have the means, or do not wish, to engage in fully fledged commercial agriculture. Far from being natural, this selection is heavily politicised, i.e. marked by state intervention and support of the politically affiliates or sympathetic capitalist farmers. Proponents of contract farming in fact often argue that outgrowers are better off than non-commercial farmers. What they ignore as we have explained before is that the wealth of the former accrues at the expense of the latter, rather than the latter being unable to adopt particular farming practices and mentality.
Yet in both cases there is increasing evidence of the emergence of a group of petty capitalist farmers from the ranks of petty commodity producers (see also Pérez Niño 2016) as well as the expulsion of less competitive producers from the scheme, in what Kojo Amanor (2012) labels dispossession from below through debt dependency, or resulting from pressures from more aggressive sugar tycoons which push them to leave commercial areas in exchange for meagre rents. However, here class differentiation does not result only from positioning in the division of labour according to the control of means of production such as land, and the access to inputs and farming system. Class is in fact only one of the many social determinants which shape the course of social reproduction. In this case class differentiation also emerges from a variety of processes, which include: 1) gender relations within the household especially in the form of unpaid agricultural family labour on sugar fields, and socially reproductive labour; 2) demography trends which can enhance or diminish the capacity of family labour to engage in self-exploitation at key times of the agricultural cycle (Boserup 1965); and 3) the existence of diverse livelihoods (off farm labour) or pluri-activity (Van der Ploeg 2008), which shape the social reproduction of agrarian classes.
Appropriation of nature and food insecurity
In both regions serious environmental concerns have been raised. The most obvious is related to deforestation as in order to make space for the increasing demand of land in the region, forests have been cut, further contributing to the change in rainfall patterns with grave consequences for smallholders who rely on rainfall for farming. Deforestation in this context is not only caused by the expansion of company estates, it is also driven by the attempt of large and medium-scale farmers to carve out space for sugarcane plantations, thus contributing to the devastation of the environment. Yet capital does not simply devastate nature, it also harnesses its forces to its own advantages and uses (Moore 2010). This is striking in the case of water usage, as sugarcane requires significant amounts of water for irrigation and in the process to extract sucrose from sugarcane. In the case of KSW in Busoga the company has the right to access 459,000 cubic metres of water per month at no cost. In the case of Kilombero there have been serious concerns among the residents about the lowering of the level of the Ruaha river, which provides water to almost a million smallholders in Tanzania, thus jeopardising agrarian livelihoods beyond sugarcane cultivation itself.
As a result of changing landscapes, environments and eco-systems, a worrying state of food insecurity is gradually emerging in the agro-industrial areas as farmers are tempted to maximise land devoted to sugarcane cultivation at the expense of food crops. In the Kilombero valley this has pushed smallholders to travel long distances in order to produce the needed food, as gardens alone are insufficient to satisfy the consumption needs of rural households. Busoga, a region previously known as the food basket of the country where surplus maize production was used to tackle food emergencies in Somalia and Sudan, has been turned into a sugar belt. Such food crisis has been turned into an opportunity for the few large-scale producers who can exploit the market demand for food crops reinvesting the revenues of sugarcane cultivation in rice, maize and other food crops production far away from the sugar agro-industrial complex. Diminishing food production has produced severe implications for households' nutritional security. The sugarcane districts around Jinja in particular but Busoga more generally have become notorious for the highest rates of (youth) malnutrition in the country. In Busoga we have noticed several instances of sugarcane intercropped with maize in an attempt to maximise the utilisation of land across the entire agricultural cycle. Such a pattern of intercropping however produces optimal results only in presence of massive irrigation, while in its absence it only contributes to further exhaustion of soil fertility.
Conclusions
This Debates essay has explored key questions surrounding the growing interest by many different agencies in the incorporation of smallholder producers in global agricultural value chains. The debate has engaged with some of the postulates of value-chain economics proposing a revisitation of past and present examinations of contract farming as an entry point into the controversies over its efficacy as a potential tool for rural development. Understanding endurance and change in new capital–smallholder assemblages provides us with new insights into the character of agricultural commercialisation and the implications of agrarian change in East Africa. The resurrection of contract production schemes expresses an increase in corporate agribusiness (and finance capital) control and the reach of smallholders' productive and marketing activities, which paves the way to new forms of integration within the circuits of agribusiness accumulation not simply as commodity providers but as purchasers of commodities/services. The paper also maintained that the expansion of large-scale agricultural initiatives and contract schemes in sugarcane cultivation in Uganda and Tanzania stimulated the consolidation of a class of small- to medium-scale commercially oriented smallholders adversely incorporated within vertically organised and corporate-driven transnational value circuits. Such reflections point to the significance of agrarian questions in export-dependent and systematically deindustrialised African countries as analytical frames that help to advance our understanding of the dynamics of capital accumulation and everyday struggles over control, access and use of land. They also open a terrain of convergence and possible links between scholars and activists to rethinking alternative agricultural strategies to the corporate/finance capital large-scale modernisation drive. Rural political agency and thought, too often (mis)interpreted and stigmatised in development and academic circles as (allegedly) driven by religious beliefs or anchored to ethnic motivations, remain paramount to the (radical) political and economic transformation of the continent, though increasingly repressed and fragmented by state's disciplinary violence and weakened by pressures of de-peasantisation and urbanisation without industrialisation.
Note on contributor
Giuliano Martiniello is Assistant Professor of Rural Community Development in the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Email: gm43@aub.edu.lb
Industrial policy for Africa in context of Russian revolution and the post-apartheid transition
I did my best to decline the invitation to address this topic in Accra, to be delivered in 20 minutes or so to a combined audience of academics and activists. But, despite my misgivings, I was firmly persuaded to oblige. The difficulty for me, time constraints apart, is that, whilst I have worked on industrial policy, my expertise on Africa is confined to South Africa (with a guilty conscience over lack of anything other than continental drift – can you know South Africa without knowing Africa, and vice versa?) For South Africa, I can claim some expertise after more than 30 years of academic and other engagement as a political economist. But, as a political economist, I depart from the vanities of my colleagues in mainstream economics who seem to believe that a few abstract principles along the lines of whether the market does or does not work efficiently in equilibrium will suffice as analytical framing. This is complemented by models in which more or less sophisticated econometrics is deployed to explain all relations and variation across them.
I return to mainstream later, but acceptance of the invitation to speak and then write this Debate piece based on my contribution at the workshop in Ghana, set me upon the gargantuan task of engaging with Africa beyond the very special case of South Africa, and how many other special cases are there on the continent? Why not draw upon Ethiopia's industrial success was suggested to me as a lever for understanding prospects and their generalisability. As chance would have it, I soon came across a paper by Ben Martin entitled ‘Twenty challenges for innovation studies’ (2015). This seemed to offer an overview of what might need to be addressed on this one aspect of industrialisation in the context of Ethiopian industrial policy and beyond to ‘Made in Africa’. As indicated, though, innovation is just one aspect. When I present on industrial policy, I do myself add a dozen or so other considerations, ranging across generic or horizontal, intersectoral factors and vertical, intra-sectoral issues. If each of these commanded a dozen or so things to know, we are already into the hundreds of considerations.
And that's just industrial policy. I have recently co-authored a paper with Alfredo Saad Filho (2017) called thirteen things you need to know about neoliberalism. One of these is financialisation, on which I have also pointed to a dozen or so things to be known. Ha-Joon Chang (2010) tells us 23 things we need to know or, more exactly, that they don't tell you about capitalism. I am myself guilty of the things-you-need-to-know syndrome on other occasions, not least 10 or so for material culture (including for the cultures of industrial policy making), a dozen things wrong with social capital (the erstwhile missing link for development according to the World Bank, including African entrepreneurship for Paul Collier and others), and 10 or so features of the developmental state paradigm that need to be known and, to a large extent, corrected.
And that's just me. Let's turn to other topics – how many things do we need to know about agriculture; labour markets; structural change; health, education and welfare? – quite apart from globalisation, corruption, empowerment and so on. And as another index, upon accepting the invitation, I took seriously the need to ratchet up my contemporary knowledge of Africa, so starting to pay attention to news feeds. Even these blare out things you need to know from the latest cases of corruption, imprisonments, fiscal deficits, international financial institution (IFI) loans or manipulations, politicians travels abroad for health treatment, Moody's rating, and so on, including the coup (or not) in Zimbabwe during the course of the workshop! So, to command development, African or otherwise, we need to know thousands of non-trivial things, all subject to wide ranges of contested scholarships and histories. And, of course, across Africa they are equally differentiated in cause and consequence by context.
Well, I think I have given a pretty good case for not being able to write this Debate piece, and indeed, the difficulties for anyone to do so, but I have done it nonetheless. How have others managed the syndrome? There are two common extreme responses. One is to silo yourself in the detail of a single topic for a single country. This has two drawbacks – one is how generalisable are your results?; and the other is, of course, that it adds to the syndrome without resolving it. The other response is to rely upon grand theory but this also does not appear to get to grips with the variegated detail involved other than to read it off deterministically – this is the consequence of globalisation, capitalism or whatever.
The mainstream economics literature on Africa now tends towards the holistic approach in its own way. Hopefully, thanks to Morten Jerven's sterling efforts perhaps, we have got past relying on an African dummy as the explanation for putative failure (neatly and conveniently overlooking unevenness of performance across countries and, indeed, over time). Orthodoxy increasingly relies upon a number of features which I see as comprising the fourth phase of mainstream development economics, which started with the old or classic, degenerated into the new (most closely associated with the Washington Consensus), was rescued by the newer development economics (and the market imperfections approach of the post-Washington Consensus) and is now in its newest phase, of throwing in whatever variables we want into a so-called model which is estimated to reveal the truth of things. I could spend much time on this and its rapidly changing fashions within and between contributors. But, suffice to say, as far as industrial policy is concerned, and its supposedly being back on the agenda, this is in a sense the exact opposite of the truth. The newfound interest in industrial policy by the mainstream is best seen as seeking to constrain rather than to promote it, to limit it to marginal market (i.e. private capital) supporting measures with equally limited attention to industrial policy as a strategy for industrialisation, itself embedded within much the broader economic and social transformation we call development (the notion of which has surreptitiously disappeared from the mainstream as opposed to methods of achieving it through reliance on market, non-market or whatever is the flavour of the month).
Let me shift gear at this point and refer to one of our organising themes, the significance of the Russian Revolution for Africa, in conjunction with my own much narrower expertise, South Africa. Here, two moments stand out: October 1917, and April 1994. By the latter time, the Russian Revolution in terms of its prospects for socialism had passed into tragedy. However we interpret the intervening trajectory, it is one that brought industrialisation and, not least, the transition from a predominantly agrarian and peasant society to one based on wage labour. South Africa's own transition over the much shorter period of just two decades is no less dramatic and, to coin Marx's turn of phrase, best seen as a complementary, secondary event and bordering on the farce to Russia's tragedy: ‘all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice … the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’ (Marx 1995/1999a, my emphasis).
It is surely worth recalling the revolutionary optimism with which the prospective end of apartheid was anticipated. As chance would have it, I have just finished co-editing a book reflecting on the lessons from the work of Harold Wolpe, whose concern in the early days of the post-apartheid regime was over whether revolution would be sacrificed for reform for failing to transform the apparatus of the state. How wrong he proved, not least with neoliberal policies (through the non-negotiable GEAR – the Growth, Employment and Redistribution plan) explicitly adopted within a couple of years and implicitly/secretly accepted even before the elections in the transitional negotiations.
This all raises a number of issues, not least in light of what I tend to term the last throw of the 20th century revolutionary dice. For South Africa seemed to offer a dream ticket: colonial liberation struggle; international solidarity; triple alliance of trade unions, broad democratic party and Communist Party; internal mass democratic movement. That this should dissolve into farce, and so quickly, needs to be explained if lessons are to be learned for the rest of Africa.
To do so, and to characterise the post-apartheid trajectory, it is necessary to locate the contemporary period of capitalism in general and its relationship to the specific South Africa conditions.
First up is globalisation. Whilst this is known to all, it is subject to varying interpretations with equally variable content. On the one hand, as in Marx's notion of world economy, the world has always been global. On the other hand, as indicated, what this means and how to understand it is contested. From my perspective, it involves the following elements, drawing upon, expanding and updating Lenin's Imperialism (2005). Specifically, I begin with an abstract understanding of the economy/means of production, drawing upon Marx's Capital (1995/1999b) and the corresponding accumulation, production, circulation and distribution of (surplus) value and its consequences. There has successively been the increased global intensification of commodity, financial and productive capital, dovetailing with the production of absolute and relative surplus value and, within the post-war boom, with extensive state intervention in economic and social restructuring (and the internationalisation of production in the form of multinational corporations). This has given rise to different stages of capitalism.
This has all continued to yield various forms of production, from the factory system through to domestic industry, whether sweated, for example, also comprising varieties of relations within agriculture and the relationship between ‘town and country’, a highly unsatisfactory terminology for the configuration of relations in and around the rural/urban divide and integration at local, national and global scales.
There can be no doubt that Marx is correct in emphasising that the most advanced forms of capitalist development display future prospects, but this does not necessarily mean the decline of other forms other than at most in relative terms. The factory system, for example, displaces, draws upon and expands sweated industry throughout the world, if specifically within what is now called global production networks, with the developing world at their rough end.
Second, then, is to specify the current stage of capitalism as neoliberalism. This has variously been understood across ideology and policy as pro-market and anti-state; as an assault on the working class; and as authoritarianism. These are important elements, if mistaken first in seeing these conditions as unique to the current period, and second in conflating neoliberal ideology with practice, as state interventionism has remained extensive and favouring private capital in general and finance in particular. And it is this that has defined the nature of neoliberalism; the phenomenal rise of finance, aka financialisation, over the past 30 years so that it has come to predominate over the regulation of economic and social restructuring, with ratios of financial assets to GDP growing three times (why do we need so much more finance to make something and how can it be in any way efficient, say, by comparison with the reduced input content of mobile phones and telephony?). This is all indicative of the intensive (speculative) and extensive (more applications in social reproduction, notably but not confined to housing and mortgages, and credit cards).
Third is to acknowledge there have been two, possibly three, phases of neoliberalism. The first has been appropriately dubbed shock therapy, most notable around the Soviet transition and Latin American adjustment programmes but equally notable in the Washington Consensus, promoting private capital in general and finance in particular. It gave way to the Post-Washington Consensus from the mid 1990s onwards, with state intervention to address the worst excesses and dysfunctions of the first phase whilst sustaining continuing financialisation and globalisation. The third phase, in wake of the Global Financial Crisis, has been to extend state intervention even further: deploying the state's resources to provide for private financial participation in private provision of infrastructure as well as unevenly to bring together private finance and productive capital in unevenly spread patterns of accumulation (and, ironically, use of state's resources to sustain the belief that the private is superior to the state sector).
Fourth, crucially, this division of neoliberalism into three phases is first and foremost an historically grounded but, nonetheless, logical exercise in which history or, more exactly, chronology, can play tricks – just as the Russian revolution to socialism was precocious given its level of capitalist development. More specifically, these three phases of neoliberalism can be leapfrogged, reversed, concertinaed and articulate with one another across time and place.
Fifth, neoliberalism is extraordinarily dysfunctional – lower rates of growth and ultimately leading to the Global Financial Crisis etc., despite unimaginably favourable conditions; the Cold War has been won, neoliberalism has triumphed, the balance of class struggle has shifted enormously in capital's favour with decline of strength and organisation of the working class (in trade unions and otherwise) and the weakening of anti-imperial struggle with neo-colonialism, the unprecedented availability of new technologies, moderation in economic and social wages, austerity more or less on demand as and when required, and huge increases in the global labour force not least through the unmistakable shift to capitalist development within China. Indeed, capitalism has had everything its own way and yet it has experienced the greatest, and irresolvable crisis beyond living memory. It is precisely because of financialisation.
This offers important insight into questions raised previously. How did the South African transition, revolution even, so readily and rapidly leapfrog tragedy and descend into farce – farcical tragedy or tragic farce, with detail upon detail of corruption unfolding during the workshop? Part of the answer is to observe just how much the three phases of neoliberalism have been embraced and overlain one another, in specifically South African conditions.
This has involved three interrelated elements. Catch-up on globalisation, neoliberalisation and financialisation given the lethargy attached both to apartheid and its crisis (although from this perspective it is possible to discover that such movement was not as limited as might be presumed). Specifically, South African conditions in which the global and financial restructuring of what I have long called the South African Minerals–Energy Complex has been to the fore, together with both Black Economic (read Elite) Empowerment (BEE) and illegal capital flight, with corresponding implications for four lows, low investment, low productivity, low employment and low (economic and social) wages, reproducing and even consolidating and not just inheriting the vast inequalities characteristic of apartheid. Neoliberalism's hollowing-out not so much of state interventionism but of progressive influence upon it, reflected in centralised control of resources (most notably in Treasury and subsequently Presidency as well). Such centralisation of control and its detachment from progressive influence marked the Mandela/Mbeki presidencies. They laid the foundation for the capture of the state characteristic of Zuma, where farce turns into high farce, and the elements within and between the Triple Alliance (of the African National Congress, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party [SACP]) have been subject to what I term an unravelling.
Now I need to draw more general lessons for Africa and industrial policy! I reiterate that conditions for progressive transformation could not have been stronger than in South Africa in the early 1990s, and yet tragedy/farce has played out. This points to the extraordinarily powerful internal and external momentum behind the troika of globalisation, neoliberalism and financialisation, in economic and political arenas, as well as what is better termed material cultures than ideology. This is not to deny dissent, only to point to the extent to which it is fragmented and disorganised with limited mechanisms for formal expression. Outcomes are highly variegated depending on how these forces interact with one another. By its nature, neoliberalism is highly differentiated, and not homogenised according to some abstract market logic.
Clearly, there can be successes in industrial policy, in particular economies or sectors, for particular periods, but there must be doubts about sustainability and transformative capacity in absence of strong, progressive movements to bring these about – relatively easy to formulate industrial policy as has happened in South Africa through its Department of Trade and Industry, but implementation is another matter. Industrial policy requires combination of horizontal and vertical factors ranging from, respectively, finance for investment, to appropriate choice of technologies and markets. But as important are the forces underpinning commitment to implementation.
As mentioned, the supposed revival of industrial policy within dissenting mainstream economics is nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it is at least implicitly designed to constrain state interventionism, whether Justin Lin, Dani Rodrik, or Joe Stiglitz. In addition, more rounded treatments, such as Varieties of Capitalism, Developmental State Paradigm, Welfare Regime Approach (for social policy), are marked by their deep roots in the Keynesian period and hopes to revive it, by dilution, in compromise with the mainstream, and failure to acknowledge the powers previously highlighted in globalisation, financialisation and neoliberalisation – this is beautifully brought out by Rodrik's paper criticising neoliberalism by more or less accepting its latest phase lock, stock and barrel (by virtue of framing by, and seeking to improve on, leaving to the market).
Acutely aware that I have yet to mention the new kid, teenager even, on the block, China (against which the other BRICS1 are mere wannabes – and don't forget that other new kid on the block, the environment) – in a word, China tends to reflect and to consolidate existing barriers to industrial policy as transformative development within Africa rather than be transformative in and of itself. Its own development and transformation exhibit the conditions within which industrial (and other) policy can be successful in the age of neoliberalism, namely, heavy state interventionism that is insulated from (global) financialisation as the necessary if not sufficient condition. And that is the major lesson to be drawn from South Africa; you cannot even begin to think about alternative policies until the issue of finance (for industry in case of industrial policy) is addressed including speculation, (illegal) capital flight, and idle financial holdings that are, however, deeply entrenched within the political economy of the elite and economic and social transformations that have marked the post-apartheid period.
Let me finish by reflecting on, or more exactly through, the reading that was recommended from ROAPE by the workshop organisers, diligently read (without specific reference here). First, two extreme views on role of Russian revolution – it had a good effect, or it had a bad effect, but highly influential either directly through material support or indirectly through political and ideological posturing. Of course, Post-Apartheid South Africa arose just as the USSR collapsed, undermining the confidence of the relatively orthodox SACP. Nonetheless, my assessment is that the impact in South Africa of the Russian Revolution on developments, whilst uneven and contradictory, can only be exaggerated and, of course, we have nearly 30 years of post-Soviet lack of influence to assess where things have hardly got better but are not worse for its absence (other than, not to be sniffed at, counterbalance to US imperialism).
Second, again difficult to assess and uneven, but the role of IFIs, and the World Bank in particular, are arguably more influential not only through aid policy but through its command of training African economists, within a framing that is both subservient and, to be blunt, generally useless. Third, much more broadly, neoliberalism has created a material culture through institutions and ideas that undermines the emergence of alternatives and constrains their performance and sustainability where they do manage to emerge.
Fourth, specifically for industrial policy, the Developmental State Paradigm has tended to place focus on latecomer, catch-up industrialisation, drawing attention away from agrarian, newcomer early industrialisation that is most relevant to much of Africa – how to industrialise with attention to the classic problems of increasing productivity in agriculture as a surplus for raw materials and urban workforce as opposed to fitting piecemeal into a global division of labour.
No doubt the neoliberalisation of Post-Apartheid South Africa could be designated in Thermidorean terms, and maybe even the Greek tragedy at a stretch – but the era of betrayal of colonial and neo-colonial struggles seems to have passed for the worst of reasons, that revolutionary defiance, let alone success, has failed to emerge other than in the most fleeting of forms. You cannot betray what has not, as yet, been achieved, with South Africa standing shoulders above all else as the last great disaster for progressives. As observed, dissent has become diluted and fragmented, raising two tasks for wannabe revolutionaries – to seek to strengthen and unite such struggles as do arise through building organisational capabilities, and to keep revolutionary ideas alive around the past, present and future.
Note on contributor
Ben Fine is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom, and a Visiting Professor in the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. Email: bf@123456soas.ac.uk
Post-dependency perspectives on agriculture in Tunisia
Introduction
Oil, war, sectarianism, and Islam dominate discussion on the swathe of states stretching from the Arabian Sea to the Atlas Mountains. We seldom see them as countries that confront the same questions of agrarian reform and industrialisation that dominated the global South in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, few scholars look to this region to address contemporary questions of climate change and ecology. Yet the politics of this region is rife with formative struggles. Its intellectual history and the theory which has emerged through and animates the practice of those struggles adds to our understanding of the agrarian and national questions. Indeed, they make clear that developmental debates, including those on the degree and intensity of industrialisation, are intertwined with agrarian issues and cannot be posed without taking the latter into consideration, or as the foundation for any possible national industrial base.
In this Debate essay I argue that Tunisia's array of experiments in food sovereignty1 and the environmentalism of the poor have contributed crucial elements to regional resistance to national and international exploitation. Post-2011 movements have re-raised the agrarian question in an Afro-Arab context, and thus raise critical questions for the continental debate around food and agrarian issues. Against notions of ‘sovereignty’ which reduce it to formal and mutual recognition in the international state system, I suggest, following Amilcar Cabral, that ‘national liberation exists when, and only when, the national productive forces have been completely freed from all and any kind of foreign domination’ (Cabral 1979, 130). Since the goal of national liberation is sovereignty, it follows that sovereignty extends from narrower matters of economic self-management to broader attempts to remaster rural productive matrices. To attend to the agrarian question of land is also to answer, or is one answer to, the national question – since the best guarantor of a nation's sovereignty is a strong rural sector. In addressing these issues, I show how Tunisia's post-revolutionary experience has sought to staunch the haemorrhage of sovereignty which accompanied post-colonial ‘interiorised dependence,’ or the national economic and political structures which ensured reliance on foreign production and capital (Gouia 1988, 13). I thus illuminate how post-colonial planners were forced to build imperialism into the structure of the post-colonial economy. Today's struggles against dispossession can be traced back to earlier decisions about who was excluded from and included in the social pact, and how the latter group came to help enfold Tunisia into capitalist modernity.
In this Debate essay based on a contribution to the ROAPE/TWN workshop in Accra, I first present the historical landscape of production, power, and powerlessness in the Tunisian countryside. I suggest that Tunisian social scientists, especially Habib Ayeb and his students, have reinterpreted Tunisia's Arab Spring by writing the agrarian question into it. Second, I discuss pre- and post-uprising experiences and struggles around seed sovereignty – the attempts to break Tunisian dependency on foreign seed monopolies. Third, I touch on the degree to which post-2011 resistance can be understood as the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (Martínez-Alier 2003). Fourth, I use Tunisian struggles to examine questions of the nation and imperialism, framed by the hierarchical nature of the world-system. I conclude by suggesting the ensemble of these experiences articulates around a ‘recuperation of the concept and value of sovereignty’, based on a political project oriented to ‘the concept of the sovereign nation’ (Gilbert 2015).
Historical background
An unsettled agrarian question marred Tunisia's birth as an independent state. Although in an important sense the Tunisian peasantry was ‘capable of overcoming its vices to channel its energies towards the national revolution’, in Tunisia the movement's leadership did not reach the point of ‘embracing the peasantry, intellectually and organizationally’ (Moyo, Jha, and Yeros 2013, 110). Peasants made liberation, but not just as they pleased. The post-colonial leadership rejected the peasantry as a historical subject and frustrated producer. Intoxicated on the ambrosia of modernisation theories, it interpreted the peasant world as the residue of a shameful past (Akkari 1993). As a result, for some years after independence, significant parcels of land still lay in colonial hands, and land redistribution was subservient and secondary to the goal of gathering Tunisia's many social sectors under the Bonapartist, semi-corporatist and productivist orientation of the Neo-Destour – later, in 1964, to become the Socialist Destour Party (Elloumi 2014). Rather than an agrarian reform, starting in the early 1960s the government initiated a cooperative experiment. It dispossessed the smallest farmers of their working capital. When it failed, it entrenched rather than excised the unequal distribution of land.
Within a decade of its 1956 independence, Tunisia was having the continent's first encounter with the Green Revolution. Semi-dwarf wheats with their familiar imported technological package arrived in the Tunisian North and spread unevenly across the country. Yields were uncertain, and even with subsidies, peasants could scarcely afford costly inputs. Uneven access to them led to rural differentiation. Soon, a massive irrigation enterprise spread over much of the country (Perennes 1993). In some years up to half of the country's agricultural budget went into dams, equipment for irrigated plots, and canals. This technology, too-centralised, bleeding with cost overruns, has remained far below capacity (Hassaïnya 1991).
Modernisation in the rural sector has continued. Seed variety has plummeted. Tunisia now uses just a fraction of its wheat and barley bequest (Ajl 2017; Ayeb 2017a). Cows have replaced camels in the North. Imported feed for the cows and a ‘self-subsistent’ poultry sector weigh heavily on the country's balance of payments (El-Amami, Gachet, and Gallali 1979). Irrigation has continued to spread, albeit it in a decentralised manner. Wells pock the country's steppes and the South, and drain reservoirs dry (Fautras 2017). This landscape informs my analysis of post-uprising perspectives on the agrarian question, agriculture, and agronomy.
Rewriting the rural
The need to reinscribe rural revolt into the narrative of Tunisia's socio-political struggles is an old one. Nationalist historiography–hagiography turned Habib Bourguiba's calculated political manoeuvring into a tall tale of world-historical negotiating acumen. In this story, the national strikes and metropolitan demonstrations at the hands of the National Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) and the Neo-Destour were the spear-tips of the national liberation struggle (Kraiem 2011). After the toppling of Zineddine Ben Ali and the resulting room to research, write, and think more freely, a torrent of work has emerged on the Fellaga. This rural armed rebellion ensured that the French occupier agreed to cede substantial amounts of immediate sovereignty to the Tunisians.2 Such scholarly revisions certainly predated the 2010–11 events – although not by much. But the 2011 bourgeois revolution opened political and intellectual space for a flourishing inquiry into the Fellaga's role in liberation, as well as the ins-and-outs of the Habib Bourguiba-Salah Ben Youssef split over control of the Neo-Destour. During that schism, the former opted for a satellite relationship with the West, and the latter oriented to Nasserism and Arab nationalism. When Bourguiba defeated the Youssefites in their struggle for control of the state, Tunisia's Western orientation was set.
Because liberation rested on an oddly throttled mass mobilisation, it did not lead to revolutionary change or the immediate and unalloyed reacquisition of every kind of sovereignty – over-colonised land, the fiscal and banking systems, and the expulsion of military bases. Instead, the slow reacquisition of internal productive assets often occurred through government compensation (Bistolfi 1967). In that sense, Tunisia did not enjoy a ‘“revolution bonus,” free of negative sovereignty externality,’ and therefore paid the costs of a pacted transition rather than enjoying the fruits of immediately reacquired sovereignty (Tsui et al. 2013, 250). In turn, the government opted for a techno-productivist path, rather than creating a stable endogenous base for accumulation by freeing the land for Tunisia's most immiserated people (Fetini 1981).
Because the intellectual atmosphere has slightly opened under capitalist liberalism, we can better trace the historical continuity from the destitute regions which fought for freedom in the 1950s and have again fought for dignity since 2011. For these most dispossessed denizens and municipalities in modern Tunisia, independence was in many ways chimerical, while development has been a mirage.
Of course, dictatorship or revolution, liberal imaginaries still prefer stories without peasants. For a variety of reasons, the revolts were presented to the world as primarily urban, stories of masses in squares making claims on the state. Some Marxisant accounts have focused on vague notions of ‘developmental blockage’ associated with the deterioration of the secondary sector (and an industrial teleology going along with it) as the proximate ‘cause’ of revolution. They sidestepped the primary sector and thus silenced the agrarian question.
But post-revolutionary rural sociologists have been able to quickly vivisect prevailing narratives and rewrite the rural into accounts of the Arab revolts. A more fine-grained look, developing from a variety of researchers, argues that the agrarian question – of labour, especially – was never really settled in Tunisia (Ayeb 2011; Fautras 2015). It simply took on a different form, as the unemployed moved from country to city. Official statistics on unemployment were perpetually goosed by bureaucrats and statisticians eager to whitewash Tunisia's authoritarian post-developmentalism. They covered up the ruling model's inability to provide enough jobs, or fairly distribute incomes to the country's people.
This new sociology of the revolts places the agrarian question front-and-centre as a question of the fundamental basis of democratic and equitable social change. Indeed, the relational and spatial aspect of poverty and plenty has been nowhere more marked than in verdant and highly irrigated Sidi Bouzid, the birthplace of the revolution. It is one of the country's richest agricultural districts, even while its city is the site of serial immolations as people perish amidst a hopelessness and despair. The story of Sidi Bouzid as the birthplace of the Alfa Grass Tunisian revolution is not only the tale of a desiccated and dilapidated city with jobs only in a hypertrophied tertiary sector. It is also, crucially, an account of a widespread shared experience of rising debt on small farms and rising prices on needed inputs, which gave rise to communal sodality. That shared experience of suffering created the tinder of revolt. The immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi became, then, not just another death but the making of a martyr and the spark for social upheaval (Ayeb 2017b).
Such a map mirrors analytically what in large measure occurred politically in 2008–2011 – that last year one in which revolt and photogenic rallies hit the large cities last, not first. A rural-centric historiography of revolt forces us to see the agrarian question as at the core of contemporary patterns of power and powerlessness.
Seed sovereignty
Both older state efforts and local experiments to reassert control over the country's literal seedstock raise the question of sovereignty. Both seek to safeguard what Tunisia had inherited from the dominant biological makers of the last millennium – the first and most brilliant innovators of civilisation, namely, our farmers. Colonial-capitalism began the process of robbing Tunisia of this gift from the past to the future. Oases farmers were forced to supply the Deglet Nour date for European export markets. This led to the slow shrinking of the ‘extraordinary genetic capital’ of the indigenous date-palms, with different sub-species suitable for dry years and wet (Attia 1983, 372).
Parallel processes began as European wheats took the place of indigenous ones. They accelerated after the Green Revolution arrived in the Tunisian Tell, especially in the late 1960s as Tunisia established its own laboratories to cross-breed Mexican semi-dwarfs. Still, the country continues to be an important repository for both barley and wheat germplasm (Amine et al. 2011). And there are efforts to conserve this treasure, amidst a growing sense of a need to rehabilitate the local patrimony of seeds. One such initiative, born under Ben Ali, was the creation of the National Gene Bank (BNG), part of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. Its agricultural technicians have ventured out into the mountains and other peripheries where the tendrils of the Green Revolution only barely extended. The BNG has recovered landraces from farmers and has urged them to plant and preserve them in situ. Such a programme also pushes back against any easy separation of state and society. The state programme rests on farmer practices. But it also supports them, using state resources to coordinate and scale up seed sovereignty. As the agricultural attaché Amine Slim notes, the BNG attaches great importance to such in situ on-farm living seed vaults. The programme has enlisted more than 50 farmers in 14 of the country's governorates, seeding and harvesting barley and hard wheat landraces on over 80 hectares of land. Such varietals, well-suited to rougher climactic and soil conditions than ‘improved’ varieties, also vegetate in demonstration plots in a variety of bioclimatic zones. The BNG uses those plots in order to try to make farmers more aware of the importance of Tunisia's ‘local genetic heritage’ (Amine 2015). Such landraces have traits which may be needed in the future amidst anthropogenic climate change's perturbing and warming effect on the local climate.
The state also offers infrastructure and resources for experiments on the barley and durum wheats stored in its open-field warehouses. Some durum landraces have a far higher protein content than the semi-dwarf hybrids, and more importantly better resist drought and disease (Trad et al. 2014). Lower protein percentage is the trade-off for higher yield. Tunisians get less protein from nutritionally deficient cereals. At the same time, the state has subsidised a cattle and poultry sector. Tunisian meat production relies on large amounts of genetically modified soy and corn, often imported from the United States. Because the protein sector is neither internally articulated, nor a closed metabolic cycle, the protein question – of feeding Tunisia's people enough of it for their needs – manifests as a dependency question, and, like most dependency questions, is a class question. Red meat, especially, is primarily the food of the small middle and upper classes. Currently, Tunisia uses a combination of domestic and imported cereals to feed its people, both directly, and indirectly, via animal consumption. In the productivist paradigm, protein is fungible and thus even if the Tunisian population greatly prefers products made from landraces, this does not matter (the neo-classical fetish of consumer preferences goes out the window when inconvenient for high-tech agrarian capitalism!).
Can this trade-off of protein for yields be reversed, or rather overcome, through breeding programmes with different targets? On a shorter time-horizon, could a more rational planting programme achieve different results? The question deals with whose rationality is at stake, a question of class, power, and the social agent directing development. A more egalitarian, ecological, and auto-centred planting programme would, perhaps, use the lower yielding but more nutritious native wheats and barleys in combination with vegetable protein – chickpeas, for example – to feed Tunisia's people and end import dependency. Tunisian economists have proposed exactly this. It was also part of the Lagos Programme. We do not know if it is agronomically possible, because capitalist social relations dominate the production and use of agricultural technology, agronomic research, and experiments and plans regarding cropping patterns on a per-farm and perforce country level (Bedoui 1982).
The other primary effort to secure Tunisia's seed future is farmer-to-farmer seed sharing. In cooperation with the BNG, the Tunisian Permaculture Association has held three events focused on farmer-to-farmer seed-sharing and offered pedagogy on the importance of preserving the country's patrimony. This has also happened through organisations such as the L’Association de Sauvegarde de l'Oasis de Chenini, founded in 2005 – again, under Ben Ali. Associations in the oases have recovered Tunisian landraces of lettuce, onion, radish, turnip, parsley, celery, chard and garlic. To the extent that farmers produce their own seeds, they need not buy those from abroad. According to the Association for Sustainable Development in Medenine, a city in Tunisia's arid South, the use of imported hybrids has increased, going from 58% of seed use in 1994 to 75% in 2004 (Ben Naser 2015). This reflects Tunisia's loss of control over its internal domestic productive matrix through dependence on commodified genetic material and metropolitan and imperial trade links for producing its basic needs. We ought to see efforts for in situ preservation of seeds as moves towards shattering chains of dependency linking oasis production to hybridised imports, as moves towards more economic sovereignty, and finally as ‘social transformation developed in and through the practices of commoning’ (Wit 2017). In fact, the latter practice is the programme for the former goal.
Environmentalism of the poor
A third cluster of struggles orients to the reacquisition of ecological sovereignty that Tunisia's externally-oriented maldevelopmental model has surrendered. These come under the umbrella of the environmentalism of the poor, and the constitution of many Tunisians as an ‘environmental proletariat’ (Foster 2013, 49). Here we see a seamless move from environmental to economic to social to agricultural questions. In the Bay of Monastir, fishing beds have become cemeteries because the state cannot afford to treat water before it is dumped. There are two wastewater treatment plants which were intended to treat polluted water. But they are far over capacity. Textile manufacturers dump waste directly into the bay. Textiles are a major export industry in Tunisia. These industries mostly fall under the ‘offshore’ legal classification and therefore pay few taxes. Tunisia thus partially forgoes that basic element of sovereignty – government taxation capacity. The results of dumping this refuse are various skin conditions, and increasingly, a cancer plague for which people can hardly afford sufficient treatment. The number of fishers has decreased from 300 to 100, and those still able to fish do so farther from shore than the contaminated fisheries their fathers frequented, as did they in the past. Correspondingly, they must use more fuel to arrive at the new fishing beds, spending more time and burning more imported carbon dioxide-spewing fuel. Thus, not of the Tunisian poor's own accord, their own ‘contribution’ to national carbon dioxide emissions increases even as their lives get worse. Dispossessed fishers must find new jobs. Protein from the fish must be obtained elsewhere. The combination of spreading sickness and narrowing economic opportunities has produced protests, both under the dictatorship in 2006, and in 2011, 2012, and 2013 (FTDES 2013). What is clear is that the uneven stitching of Tunisia into ‘globalisation’ has meant that Tunisians lose sovereignty through state policy itself – if by that concept we understand meaningful internal control over production and their lives. Self-managed production systems such as fisheries have slowly given way to the literally toxic ‘development’ model of export-oriented textiles, with self-evident costs.
National questions by way of conclusion
The fourth element that this focus on Tunisia brings to the table is Tunisia's history as part of a North African-Arab region where sovereignty itself is constantly denied. Tunisian and other regional rural social movements have insisted that the national question and the agrarian question be confronted simultaneously, as two sides of the same coin. At the last Via Campesina conference, it was the Middle East delegations – the mistica of the Tunisians, Moroccans, and Palestinians – which placed the question of imperialism on the table most firmly. This is evident in the timbre and directness of the statement from the Middle East and North Africa delegation at the Via Campesina conference in the Basque Country, in 2017:
In the Middle East and North Africa, capitalism and imperialism are arming terrorist groups and are supported by reactionary states. This hegemony suffocates the people of nearly all the countries in the region. With a few exceptions, for example Tunisia (home of the Arab revolutions in 2011 which still provides a glimmer of hope), civil war is everywhere. (Via Campesina 2017a)
The general declaration from the 2017 convocation refers, in turn, to ‘bombing, military occupations and genocidal economic measures’ and their solidarity with ‘peoples who continue to suffer and resist against these impositions’ (Via Campesina 2017b).
We must dwell here on how Tunisia's experience, and the political consciousness emerging from it, clarifies many issues relevant to the agrarian question writ large. First, plainly: questions of agriculture, questions of development, de-development, and developmental alternatives must be posed, or juxtaposed, against the question of external aggression and its envelopment of the region. Meaningful development is impossible amidst war as a social whirlwind, cutting through societies and productive systems, factories, fields, and all the infrastructure which enables harmonised developmental planning. Second, we must rethink the revolts from the perspective of the rural periphery and the post-colonial states' decisions, amidst the allures, enticements, and pressures of the core, to build extraverted and dependent social formations rather than auto-centred ones. Auto-centred development was a comprehensive programme for national control over the poorer countries' productive forces, and submitting their relations with more powerful core countries to extremely stringent conditions so that trade did not become a vehicle for domination (Amin 1990). Third, and related to this previous point, extraversion in the agricultural sector has meant surrendering control over Tunisia's production processes through commodification and surrender to the seed monopolies. And fourth, such extraversion has created endless apertures for ecological imperialism to extract surplus and eject cost onto Tunisia's people. The common thread of these oppressions and resistances to them is precisely the struggle over sovereignty, or the locus of decision-making, and whether it is vested in the people and especially the popular classes, or whether it ends up in the hands of foreign states and the monopolies they serve.
Note on contributor
Max Ajl is a PhD candidate in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell University. Email: msa95@cornell.edu
How to be a Marxist: social mobilisation for radical transformation in Burkina Faso
Introduction
On 24 May 2017, one of the central personalities in the last two decades of social struggles in Burkina Faso, André Tibiri, passed away.1 When on that occasion I was telling a friend about the Burkinabé labour, student and youth movement of which Tibiri was a charismatic leader, my friend asked me what it means to be a Marxist in Burkina Faso today. This question came back to my mind when, a few months later, I was talking with Burkinabé activists about their activities and the challenges related to organising and mobilising in the countryside (where almost 70% of Burkina Faso's population lives). Thinking of Julius Nyerere's assumption that no ‘equivalent for the word “class” exists in any indigenous African language’ (Nyerere 1987, 10), I asked one friend and activist how he would explain in Mooré, one of the main languages spoken in Burkina Faso, what/who the ‘proletariat’ and the ‘bourgeoisie’ are.
I take these two episodes as a starting point for presenting social mobilisation in Upper Volta, or Burkina Faso (the country has been so named only since 1984), since its formal independence in 1960; and in particular the role that Marxist ideas play in the social struggles. In so doing, I aim to answer the question of what it means to be a Marxist activist in Burkina Faso today. In particular, I discuss whether, from the perspective of the activists involved, the recent popular insurrection in Burkina Faso can be claimed to be a ‘revolution’. I argue that the idea of the unity of the popular classes, building upon the assumption that organised labour and other exploited social groups are not distinct from one another, is fundamental to explain why social mobilisation in Burkina Faso has been so vibrant and enduring over the last decades.
At the ROAPE/TWN workshop in Accra on 13–14 November, 2017, several topics that were on the agenda are pivotal for current social struggles in Burkina Faso, in particular: how can mobilisation be organised so that intellectuals and the working classes, the urban and rural poor, can join hands? What kind of organisational structure is needed to include the diverse segments of the popular classes; and how should it deal with the variety of interests, aims and means of action of these segments, in order to transform this variety from an obstacle into a force? And as capitalism is persistently penetrating the countryside – which, in Burkina Faso as almost everywhere in Africa becomes obvious with the expansion of the extractive sector and agro-industries – what are the implications for social struggles that aim for radical transformation? Regarding the latter question in particular, Elisa Greco's contribution to the ROAPE blog on the workshop is insightful (Greco 2017). She points out that the various localised struggles in the rural zones all over the continent, overwhelmingly related to land control, ‘amount to resistance to primitive accumulation – the forceful and violent separation of producers from the means of production’. Theses struggles are thus about class relations, and they are by no means simply local ones, ‘but many national struggles of historical importance […] are firmly rooted in the agrarian question’. To bundle the variety of struggles, organisational structures are core that are able to link struggles to one another, to reveal potentially common structural causes of varying claims, and to facilitate identifying shared interests and articulating joint claims among different segments of the popular classes, including those from urban and rural settings.
Experiences from recent social struggles in Burkina Faso provide us with examples for how this could be done and what challenges social movements encounter in their endeavour for radical transformation.
Strikes, military coups and constitutional referendums after ‘independence’
Social movements have a long tradition in Burkina Faso, reaching back to colonial times. The first two decades in the history of Upper Volta following its independence in 1960 were characterised by a repeated alternation between strikes, military coups and constitutional referendums (Englebert 1996). The first president of Upper Volta, Maurice Yaméogo, was overturned in 1966 following mass demonstrations by the trade unions against the suppression of workers' rights, particularly the 1964 ban on strikes. A general strike in January 1966 was followed by a military putsch, after which Lieutenant Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana took over the office of president. A constitutional referendum in 1970 established the Second Republic. A further wave of strikes began in November 1975 right after Lamizana announced the creation of a single-party government. Other segments of the popular classes joined the strikes, and in January 1976 mass protests led to Lamizana's dissolution of the government and to a further referendum. A new government was formed in February 1976. In 1980, teachers throughout the country went on strike. This was followed by a military coup, the suspension of the constitution, and the formation of a military junta under Saye Zerbo. Zerbo was replaced by Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo following a further coup in 1982. Ouédraogo appointed Captain Thomas Sankara prime minister. When Sankara was arrested a few months after taking office, strikes by students and trade unionists forced his release (Hagberg 2002, 228–229). In the following year, Sankara led a coup; he was supported by Blaise Compaoré, among others, who was also an army captain at the time. Thomas Sankara was killed in a subsequent military putsch in October 1987. Following the putsch, Compaoré became president and held the office until he was forced to give it up in late October 2014 – again after massive popular protests.
Democratisation, ‘structural adjustment’ and the student movement
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, mass strikes and other protests – particularly by students and civil servants – urged formal political liberalisation in Burkina Faso and many other African states (Bratton and Walle 1992, 423). In the first multiparty elections in 1991, which were boycotted by the opposition, Compaoré was confirmed in office. The first ‘structural adjustment’ programme immediately followed formal political liberalisation and was accompanied again by strikes and protests against this liberal economic policy oriented towards the global market.
In the first half of the 1990s, the politics of international financial institutions included the liquidation of state-owned firms, wage and personnel cuts in the public sector, and the devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994, leading again to demonstrations and strikes in Burkina Faso, as in many countries in the global South (Walton and Seddon 1994). In Burkina Faso, the principal organisations in these protests were the federation of trade unions Confédération générale des travailleurs du Burkina (CGT-B), founded in 1988, and the student unions Union Générale des Etudiants Burkinabè (UGEB), the general student union for the country as a whole, and Association Nationale des Etudiants Burkinabè (ANEB), UGEB's branch at the University of Ouagadougou.
The CGT-B is the biggest trade union federation in Burkina Faso in terms of membership figures. It is oriented towards a Marxist-Leninist ideology, whereas the other federations are, all in all, oriented towards more reformist and social democratic ideas (for more details, see CGT-B 2013a; Kabeya Muase 1989). University and secondary school students' organisations also understand themselves as ‘trade unions’. Both the CGT-B and the student unions are Marxist-Leninist oriented and see themselves as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘progressive’.
Overlaps in personnel among civil society associations are commonplace; virtually all functionaries of the CGT-B and its member organisations were previously organised in the student movement, notably in the UGEB and ANEB, which are ideologically close to the CGT-B (Bianchini and Korbéogo 2008; Sory 2012). André Tibiri is a case in point. He was not only engaged in the student movement but also in human rights and labour movements. In the 1990s, Tibiri rapidly became a key figure in the student struggle in Ouagadougou, the Burkinabé capital. From 1995 onwards, he was president of ANEB, and from 1997–2001 he was president of UGEB. In 1996–1997, he led the massive protests to demand greater financial support for students.
Civil rights struggles following the death of Norbert Zongo in 1998
From the late 1990s onwards, social struggles in Burkina Faso were shaped by demands for human and civil rights. Protests were particularly triggered by the murder of journalist Norbert Zongo on 13 December 1998. Thousands took to the streets and demanded an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Norbert Zongo's death and an end to impunity. Trade unions, human rights organisations, students and political opposition parties joined forces in the Collectif d'organisations démocratiques de masse et de partis politiques (Collective of democratic mass organisations and political parties, or ‘Collectif’) in order to bundle their protests. The Collectif is led by the Burkinabé movement for human and people's rights (Mouvement burkinabé des droits de l'homme et des peuples, MBDHP). Although the MBDHP, the CGT-B and the student union UGEB had already been collaborating since the late 1980s, the Collectif's base was significantly larger, as it also included the other trade union federations and political parties.
Protest against the high cost of living from 2008 onwards
Since the early 1990s, organised labour in Burkina Faso had been mobilising against the disparity between increasing prices and stagnating incomes. These protests peaked in response to the global food and fuel price crisis that led to exorbitant price increases in Burkina Faso in January and February 2008. In late February 2008, within a few days, food riots occurred throughout the country. The trade unions immediately called for other civil society organisations to assemble, and on 12 March 2008 all major trade union federations and single unions, consumer and professional associations, human rights organisations, and the student and youth movements set up a new alliance: the Coalition nationale de lutte contre la vie chère, la corruption, la fraude, l'impunité et pour les libertés (Coalition against the high cost of living, corruption, fraud, impunity and for freedoms [CCVC], CCVC 2008). Since 2008, the alliance has initiated several mass rallies and general strikes (Engels 2015). Led by the CGT-B, the CCVC was (and still remains today) among the main forces in social mobilisation in Burkina Faso. The CGT-B, due to its ‘revolutionary’ agenda, places particular emphasis on political struggles that go beyond labour-related issues, and on collaborations with organisations beyond the workers movement, notably from the student and human rights movements.
Popular insurrection on 30–31 October 2014
Since the 1990s, the political regime in Burkina Faso has come under persistent pressure from trade unions and other oppositional organisations (Chouli 2012). In 2013 and 2014, tens of thousands of people took to the streets on numerous occasions, protesting against Compaoré's attempt to revise Article 37 of the Burkinabé constitution, which would have enabled him to run for a fifth term (Hagberg et al. 2017, 19–21). At the same time, the CCVC continued to mobilise: the alliance organised a mass demonstration on 20 July 2013 against the high cost of living and another one on 29 October 2014 against the disastrous conditions in the education system (Jeune Afrique, 20 July 2013; Sidwaya, 29 October 2014). The alliance of all trade union federations, Unité d'Action Syndicale (UAS), announced a 24-hour strike for 11 November 2014, and if the government did not agree to its substantial demands, another 48-hour strike for 25–26 November (UAS 2014). Both strikes were suspended, however, after Blaise Compaoré stepped down from the presidency on 31 October 2014 (Le Pays, 9 November 2014).
The National Assembly's proposal to revise the constitution was announced on 21 October 2014. The protests escalated on 28 October with a massive show of opposition, with demonstrations around the country. On 30 October, the vote for the constitutional amendment was scheduled in parliament and what had been protests turned into a popular insurrection (Chouli 2015). State security forces used tear gas, truncheons and guns against the demonstrators. At least 30 people were killed. Protestors occupied the parliamentary building and, shortly afterward, the national television station in Ouagadougou. Compaoré was forced to dissolve the government and, that same evening, withdrew his proposal to revise the constitution. At first he did not intend to resign from office, however the military forced him to do so the following day. Lieutenant Colonel Yacouba Isaac Zida, vice-commander of the presidential guard (the RSP), took over power on the evening of 31 October by assuming the role of the head of state. Two weeks later, continuous mass mobilisation, complemented by pressure from the ‘international community’, forced the establishment of a transitional charter signed by representatives of the military, political parties, traditional authorities and civil society (Hagberg et al. 2017, 22–25). On the basis of this charter, the former diplomat Michel Kafando was appointed transitional president on 17 November 2014. He immediately appointed Zida prime minister. National elections were planned for October 2015.
That the military took over temporarily after Blaise Compaoré was forced to resign frustrated many activists. They felt that the military had exploited the demonstrations. ‘The military are stealing our revolution’ said an activist on the day following Compaoré's resignation (personal communication with author, 1 November 2014). ‘Give the civilians what belongs to them’, demanded another activist on the news portal lefaso.net (5 November 2014). The army had conducted a coup d'état, declared MBDHP chairman Chrysogone Zougmoré, who is also vice-president of the CCVC, at a press conference on 2 November 2014. The military had ‘once again usurped the fruits of the heroic struggle of the people’ (CCVC 2014), and this ‘paves the way for antidemocratic endeavours, as the history of our country has taught us’ (Ibid.).
Civil society organisations continued their mobilisation. A general strike against high fuel prices was held on 17–18 February 2015, and a nationwide protest day was organised on 8 April 2015. In the view of many activists, a major achievement of the transition phase was the reopening of investigations into the assassinations of Norbert Zongo and Thomas Sankara. In so doing, long-standing grievances that had long been suppressed by influential elements in the military were finally able to be addressed. Until the time of writing, however, hardly any progress has been achieved in the investigations.
The CGT-B, MBDHP, UGEB, ODJ and related associations were very engaged in the 2013–2014 protests that led to the end of Blaise Compaoré's presidency. The base of these protests was, however, significantly broader than previous waves of protest. This is also due to the fact that the claims of the 2013–2014 protests, all in all, were focused on inhibiting the constitutional referendum and hindering Compaoré from running for a fifth term. Other than the struggles against neoliberal structural adjustment and the high cost of living, where the trade unions were at the forefront, in these more recent protests against the constitutional referendum more moderate actors, notably political (opposition) parties, also played a relevant role.
Among them was the Mouvement du peuple pour le progrès (MPP), a more or less social-democratic political party founded in January 2014 by leading politicians who quit Blaise Compaoré's Congrès pour la démocratie et le progrès (CDP) due to the conflict over his bid for a fifth presidential term. The most prominent were Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, Salif Diallo and Simon Compaoré: Roch (in the Burkinabé debate, he is usually referred to by his first name), who was elected president in November 2015, had previously been minister, prime minister, and chairman of the national assembly during the presidency of Blaise Compaoré. Diallo was vice-president of the MPP and, until his death in August 2017, was prime minister in the government that had been set up in 2015. Simon Compaoré was previously mayor of the capital city of Ouagadougou and is currently minister of security in Roch's government.
In the course of the protests against the constitutional referendum, a new civil society group came into existence in July 2013, the Balai Citoyen (literally ‘citizens’ broom'). The founders and front men of Balai Citoyen are the reggae musician Sams'K le Jah and the rapper Serge Bambara aka ‘Smockey’. Other civil society organisations accused them of having ‘sold the revolution’ (Hagberg et al. 2017, 23) to the army, as they assumed that the Balai Citoyen and their allies were close to the fractions of the RSP and the army that supported Zida (Ibid.).
Resistance against the RSP coup in September 2015
Presidential elections were initially scheduled for 11 October 2015. In early June, a law was adopted that demanded that military personnel quit the army before being allowed to hold political office. Furthermore, the transitional government decided that candidates who had previously come out in support of the disputed revision of Article 37 of the constitution should not be allowed to run for the office of president. This resulted in a coup d'état by the RSP on 16 September 2015, led by its commander, General Gilbert Diendéré. The news spread quickly and protestors mobilised immediately, via personal networks, mobile phones and the Internet, burning barricades in Ouagadougou and attempting to enter the presidential palace. The following day, Diendéré declared the transitional government dissolved and himself president (interview with France 24, 17 September 2015). Immediately, the trade unions declared a general strike and virtually all civil society groups mobilised to resist the putsch. In Ouagadougou, the RSP responded with brute force against the protestors. Between 16 and 23 September 2015, 14 protestors were killed and more than 250 injured. The RSP even destroyed the station of the national phone company in Ouagadougou so that phone and Internet access was temporarily unavailable, though this did not stop the protests. Finally, six days after the coup, on 23 September, Diendéré gave up and handed himself in.
In the aftermath of the popular resistance against the putsch, another social movement network came into being, the ‘Coordination of the committees to defend and consolidate the earnings of the popular insurrection’ (Coordination des comités de défense et d'approfondissement des acquis de l'insurrection populaire, CDAIP). It joins the ensemble of associations and alliances of the labour and popular class struggles, and mobilises, hand in hand, with the CGT-B, MBDHP and CCVC on occasions such as the anniversaries of the popular insurrection and the RSP coup, to demand an investigation into the killings of protestors, responsibility for the coup d'état, and the political crimes committed during the era of Blaise Compaoré.
Presidential elections were held seven weeks after their initial scheduling, on 29 November 2015. Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, Chairman of the MPP, succeeded in the first ballot and was officially inaugurated to office in late December. From the point of view of most observers, this did not imply any significant change in political orientation, given the fact that Roch and almost all key figures of his government had previously held high political office in the Compaoré regime. According to those that had hoped for a fundamental change after Compaoré's fall, the transition ultimately amounted to one fraction within the CDP succeeding against another. Currently, there is virtually no serious opposition to the MPP and their allies in the spectrum of licensed political parties in Burkina Faso. A principal slogan of the 2014 popular insurrection had been ‘Nothing will be as before’ (‘Rien ne sera comme avant’); until now, this has had hardly any repercussions in terms of Burkinabé state politics.
This brings me back to André Tibiri, who at the time of the popular insurrection was president of a nationwide youth association, the Democratic Mass Organisation of Burkinabé Youth (Organisation Démocratique de la Jeunesse du Burkina Faso, ODJ). Tibiri was not only engaged in the student movement but also in human rights and labour movements – as mentioned earlier, something quite typical for Burkinabé activists. On 7 December 2000, together with fellow militants, he created the ODJ, a cross-class movement defending the democratic and social rights of and promoting solidarity among youth – where youth is understood as a social rather than an age category.
Regarding the presidential elections of 29 November 2015, the ODJ called for their boycott: ‘What do promises count for if we know that the candidates are those who have helped Blaise Compaoré to seize power and to keep it for 27 years?’, Tibiri explained in an interview (lefaso.net 2013); activists should rather organise themselves to struggle to achieve substantial change, rejecting ‘the illusions of putschists and electoralists’ (Ibid.).
An African revolution?
It is not by coincidence that the CGT-B trade unions and several social movement organisations in Burkina Faso are so close to one another, regarding personnel overlaps, joint activities, networks and alliances, and shared claims and ideology: the CGT-B, UGEB, MBDHP, ODJ, the women's organisation Kebayina Association des Femmes du Burkina, the anti-corruption network REN-LAC, and the alliances – notably the Collectif, the CCVC and more recently the CDAIP – are all said to have some ideological and personal ties to the Revolutionary Communist Party of the Volta (Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire Voltaique, PCRV (cf. La Forge, 2014). The PCRV was founded in 1978, and emerged from the Communist Organisation of the Volta (Organisation Communiste Voltaique, OCV), which had been created by Marxist activists from the student union UGEB in 1971. The latter accused the African Party of Independence (Parti Africain de l’Indépendance, PAI), which up to then was the first and only Marxist-oriented party in the country, of being revisionist (Loada 1999). Ideologically, the PCRV is oriented towards orthodox Marxism-Leninism. Until today, the party is formally and in its self-understanding clandestine. Nevertheless, it is well-known in the Burkinabé political scene, and by now increasingly so since the popular insurrection of 2014, when PCRV letterings could be seen painted on the walls of Ouagadougou, on placards held up in demonstrations, etc. However, the party has not yet demanded authorisation, nor does it aim to run for elections – possibly due the assumption that it is only when mass mobilisation has reached a certain degree that the party can be sure of having the masses behind it, and thus that revolution can be realised.
Self-evidently, ‘revolution’ is a contested term, all the more so in the Burkinabé context where it is claimed by a variety of actors, organisations and movements. First and foremost, Thomas Sankara is referred to as a ‘revolutionary’, and the three-year phase of his presidency, in his own wording, was a ‘revolution’ (Harsch 2017). A glamorous and charismatic figure, Sankara rapidly became an icon comparable to Che Guevara – not only in Burkina Faso, but throughout Africa, Europe and the Americas (Harsch 2013). Among Burkinabé social movement activists, however, Sankara's role is contested. Some even remember the ‘revolutionary’ phase as an obstacle for social mobilisation, as people were intimidated and felt repressed by Sankara's local ‘committees of the revolution's defence’ (Comités de défense de la révolution, CDR). As Leo Zeilig observes, ‘Burkina Faso's recent, astonishing rebellions, strikes and revolution, fill out the real and popular character that was absent, or at best stifled, and sometimes repressed during Sankara's years’ (Zeilig 2016, 162).
The popular insurrection of October 2014 was and still is referred to by many people as a ‘revolution’, both in Burkina Faso and abroad (cf. Hagberg et al., 2017, 28–32), as has been illustrated in the titles of documentaries (e.g. ‘An African revolution’, Vink and Sangaré 2015) and press reports (e.g. ‘Burkina Faso: where does the revolution move on?’, Yahmed 2015). However, the vast majority of activists share the rather disappointed analysis of the revolution that has been ‘stolen’ by the military – a bitter experience for many of them. The PCRV, on 1 November 2014, in a promptly released statement declared: ‘Rapidly, the working class and the people become aware that the gains of their struggles are threatened and confiscated by the putschist clan of the neo-colonial army […] whose final objective is to stifle the ongoing revolutionary process’ (PCRV 2014).
A principal lesson that activists have concluded from the experience of the popular insurrection is that a revolution should be well prepared. In accordance with basic Marxist ideas, for many of them a constitutive element of a ‘revolution’, in contrast to an insurrection, is that the change of the political regime should be accompanied by the transformation of the fundamental political-economic structures – instead of a simple replacement of leaders (cf. Skocpol 1979; Tilly 1978). According to a member of ODJ's national board, ‘a revolution is an overthrow of the social relations, meaning that another class, that has another political programme, takes over power’ (Drechsel 2017). By contrast, following the 2014 popular insurrection, ‘neither the class nor the programme has been replaced. Even the same regime has stayed in power, and the same class of bourgeoisie. So far, none of the policy promises has been fulfilled. […] [But the population] has now understood that elections are not the only means to change something’ (Ibid.).
For most activists at the grassroots level, the aim of the mass mobilisation in 2013–2014 was, first of all, simply that ‘Blaise must go’. This was indeed achieved. By then, however, there had been hardly any systematic discussion within the social movement scene regarding what should happen in the aftermath once Compaoré had been overturned. Viewed in this light, on 31 October 2014, the seedling of the Burkinabé ‘revolution’ was an easy prey for the military leadership. It was not for the first time in Burkina Faso that the military took over after strikes and mass mobilisation had forced the president to step down; rather, such a course of events seemed natural to some of the military elites. Despite all of the strengths of the grassroots activities and mobilisations, both at the local and the national level, the ‘revolutionary’ and ‘progressive’ organisations have not yet reached a coverage of anchoring among the rural population and the urban working classes that would allow them to claim to have ‘the masses’ behind them; nor have they been organisationally capable of filling in the institutional vacuum that opened up when Compaoré resigned. The actors involved in the 2013–2014 protests were in large part focused on the single issue of the constitutional referendum; they were heterogeneous regarding their ideological views; and some among them were first and foremost pursuing their own power interests. Combined with the organisational shortcomings of many of the movement organisations, and the vagueness of the constitutional procedures in the case of a president's turnover, an opportunity was provided that a number of military officers could use in order to take centre stage.
Mobilisation ‘sur le terrain’: unity of the popular classes
A ‘revolution’ in the sense of a radical transformation of political–economic structures, including democratisation of decision making in core sectors such as control over land and subsoil resources, agricultural and industrial production, energy and communication, in the view of many Burkinabé activists, means overcoming the fundamental structures of capitalism and neo-colonialism. Obviously, this will not be achieved from one day to the next, but will rather be the result of a long-term process and the persistent demands of enduring social mobilisation and struggle. Several social movement organisations in Burkina Faso identify themselves as mass organisations that in one way or another pursue ‘revolutionary’ goals. The UGEB, for instance, in the words of its current leader, refers to itself as ‘a revolutionary union of class struggle. Our struggle is part of the general framework for achieving a revolution in Burkina Faso’ (lefaso.net 2013). The national board of the ODJ remembers their ‘martyr comrades’, five activists who were killed during the popular insurrections, who ‘have struggled, resisted, until the supreme sacrifice: giving one's life for an ideal, the revolutionary ideal; dying at the front of the struggle for the national and social liberation of one's people’ (Le Bureau Exécutif National 2015). The CGT-B, in its statutes, commits itself to being part of ‘the revolutionary and class struggle trade union movement’ (CGT-B 2013b, 1), and ‘link[s] its struggles and claims to those of the proletariat and the Burkinabé working masses for a national and social liberation’ (Ibid., 2), thus confirming its ‘revolutionary orientation’ (ibid., 5).
While many leaders and activists of the CGT-B, and the human rights, student and youth movements, adhere to a Marxist-Leninist ideology, at the same time they understand their movements as mass movements with quite autonomous decentralised structures. ‘In the context of Burkina, which is essentially characterised by imperialist domination, and by the struggles of our people for social liberation’, the president of ODJ explained, ‘every youth, whatever his or her ethnic origin, philosophical or political conviction or religious beliefs, can be a member of ODJ’ (lefaso.ne, 2013). Regarding all-day activities on the ground, mobilisation includes a broad range of social and cultural activities: meetings and public debates, demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins and the like; but also cultural festivities including popular and traditional performances (music, dance and theatre), or workshops on practical skills for income generation such as animal husbandry or manufacturing products such as soap or jam for both household consumption and to be sold at the local market. Consequently, these activities attract an equally wide range of social groups – including students, employees, small-scale farmers, self-employed informal workers, petty traders, artisanal miners, civil militia, elderly people, traditional authorities and others – and are by no means limited to those who principally share a common ideology and thus deal quite flexibly with the contradictions inherent to society.
From the perspective of the activists involved, this is not at all contradictory but rather fits perfectly, as almost all people in Burkina Faso, they argue, live under the same conditions, suffer from the same problems, and thus basically share common interests. This form of unity among the popular classes, which builds upon the idea that the working class is not limited to those who sell their labour either under formal contracts or in the informal sectors, is fundamental to understanding why social mobilisation in Burkina Faso has been so vibrant and enduring, and how, in October 2014, and not for the first time, it succeeded in overthrowing a head of state. This finally leads back to how my friend, the activist in Ouagadougou, responded to the question of how he would explain the ‘proletariat’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ in Mooré. His answer was simple: the ‘proletariat’ are those who are exploited; and the ‘bourgeoisie’ are those who enrich themselves by exploiting others.
Conclusion
What lessons can be drawn from the Burkinabé experience for recent social struggles and efforts for radical transformation on the African continent? Regarding the particular event of the turnover of Blaise Compaoré in October 2014, the advice is as simple as challenging: be prepared! For sure, a regime's end does not come out of the blue but builds upon years or decades of opposition and mobilisation. But the point in time is hardly predictable, and it might be quite sudden. In order not to risk losing the fruits of years-long activism to the military and other reactionary forces but rather drive them into long-term, durable and structural transformation of the institutions of democratic participation, of citizenship, and of the political economy, a political vision and programme is needed. This has to emerge from a long-term process of political consciousness-raising, articulation of interests, discussion and consensus building, based on the grassroots level instead of driven top-down. Such a process demands time and patience. Thus, it must proceed parallel to mobilisation work from the very beginning rather than be started once regime change seems to be near or has already been achieved.
Further, a remarkable experience from the Burkinabé popular insurrections in 2014 is the impetus it gave to social mobilisation. This became most obvious in September 2015, when thousands of people, also those who were not part of the various social movements and organisations, promptly took to the streets and, bare-handed, resisted the coup by the presidential guard, coercing the putschists to give in. This was clearly driven by the feeling that having succeeded in ousting Blaise Compaoré after 27 years in power, popular resistance could achieve more or less everything.
A strength of many Burkinabé social movements and their organisations is their relatively high grade of inclusivity: that many principal activists across movements share a joint ideology facilitates cohesion and enduring mobilisation; but the latter, finally, is only achieved by addressing all parts of society, across class and ideological lines. To bring radical change on the African continent about, broad alliances among the popular classes are needed, in particular linking poor people in the countryside and in the – in many cases fast-growing – cities. These linkages can be created by personal contacts, for instances via youth from the villages studying or working in the cities, but particularly by radical organisations that are engaged nationwide but organised decentrally, and thus adequately take into account and bring forward poor people's interests and claims. These, at a first glance, might differ; but examined more profoundly, various claims might turn out to refer to the same structural conditions. To change these conditions is, ultimately, what it means to strive for radical transformation.
Note on contributor
Bettina Engels is a political scientist at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Email: bettina.engels@123456fu-berlin.de
Militarisation and criminalisation of artisanal and small-scale gold mining: the state and the so-called ‘galamsey menace’ in Ghana
Introduction
Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASM) in Ghana is in crisis. In early April 2017, President Nana Akufo-Addo's government declared a moratorium on all small-scale mining, both legal and illegal, for six months, backed up by a joint military-police taskforce – Operation Vanguard – to enforce the ban. The moratorium was extended for a further three months in November 2017, and at the time of writing in late February 2018, no official statement had been issued that lifts the ban. This ‘war on galamsey’, as illicit ASM is popularly called in Ghana, was ostensibly a response to the widespread environmental damage to land and water bodies from the expansion in unregulated mining and, in the words of the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources, Mr John Peter Amewu, intended ‘to sanitise’ the sector (Taylor 2017). The moratorium was declared by the government in the context of a strong popular discourse about the ‘galamsey menace’, one that is mainly media-driven, though which has taken hold to some extent in society at large. In particular, Citi FM, an Accra-based private radio station has spearheaded an anti-galamsey campaign under the slogan of #StopGalamseyNow, using the language of the ‘fight’ against ‘the evils’ of galamsey, and describing galamsey as a ‘national cancer’ (Adogla-Bessa 2017). Quite remarkably, only days after Citi FM took its fight against illegal mining ‘from the studios to the streets’ on 3 April 2017, the government conceded to two of its main demands: the cessation of all small-scale mining for a period of six months; and the cessation of the issuance of new mining licences. Operation Vanguard was launched on 31 July 2017 with a taskforce of 400 military and police officers in the Western, Eastern and Ashanti regions, the main areas of alluvial ASM (Abissath n.d.). By late January 2018, Operation Vanguard has led to the arrest of 983 miners, including 12 Chinese and four Burkinabé miners, with large amounts of mining equipment and weapons seized and confiscated.1 This action has been taken in a sector that has expanded rapidly in recent years and now contributes over one-third of gold production (Table 1). Indeed, the ASM sector in Ghana, overwhelmingly gold mining, is the second largest in Africa, after Tanzania, with an estimated 1.1 million operators and 4.4 million dependants in 2011 (UN Economic Commission for Africa [ECA] 2011, 69), making it of importance to a large proportion of Ghana's 29.46 million population (World Population Review n.d.), especially its mainly poor rural dwellers.
| Year | Large-scale producers (oz.) | Small-scale producers (oz.) | Total Ghana production (oz.) | ASM contribution to total gold production (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | 1,913,534 | 225,411 | 2,138,945 | 11 |
| 2006 | 2,090,721 | 247,063 | 2,337,784 | 11 |
| 2007 | 2,239,696 | 388,594 | 2,628,290 | 15 |
| 2008 | 2,378,012 | 418,943 | 2,796,955 | 15 |
| 2009 | 2,564,095 | 555,737 | 3,119,832 | 18 |
| 2010 | 2,624,391 | 767,196 | 3,391,587 | 23 |
| 2011 | 2,697,661 | 978,611 | 3,676,272 | 27 |
| 2012 | 2,856,243 | 1,481,670 | 4,337,913 | 34 |
| 2013 | 2,820,419 | 1,576,478 | 4,396,897 | 36 |
| 2014a | 2,685,399 | 1,484,793 | 4,170,192 | 36 |
a. 2014 figures are provisional.
Source: Minerals Commission 2014.
This Debate piece, based on a contribution to ROAPE's workshop on radical transformation in Africa, explores the relationship between the state and galamsey in Ghana. It argues that the state has a deeply contradictory and hypocritical relationship with illicit ASM. On the one hand, the state tolerates and colludes with widespread illegal mining: state officials themselves extract private benefits from ASM operations through corrupt practices; while politicians rely on ‘kingpin’ galamsey operators for political support and finance for their electoral campaigns. On the other hand, when media and societal pressure intensifies on government to act against the adverse effects of illicit mining, then the state responds in an excessive and militarised manner in an attempt to conceal its erstwhile collusion in illegality, while low-income Ghanaians suffer the consequences. The argument here is mainly based on evidence from research into the preceding military task force against illegal mining established by former President Mahama in May 2013. This earlier task force was directed against the large numbers of Chinese migrant miners that had entered the ASM sector from 2008 onwards and were mining illegally, often in collaboration with Ghanaian miners. The state appeared to have ignored this significant migration phenomenon for some years. Yet research findings revealed not the absence of the state but its presence, albeit in negative self-enriching ways, with patterns of state collusion and corruption followed by criminalisation (and in this case deportation) of those same miners whose illicit activities it had previously tolerated and benefited from. This analysis is then extended to the current ban and military task force under President Akufo-Addo. The Debate piece concludes that the state should be putting its own house in order and focusing on regularising informal ASM, rather than criminalising artisanal miners, overwhelmingly low-income Ghanaians, and subjecting them to militarised crackdowns.
The Debate piece proceeds in six main sections. After this introduction, the second section provides background information on ASM in Ghana, its legal basis, reasons for its recent expansion, the role of the state, and the interlinkages with large-scale mining. The third section then examines the extraordinary phenomenon of the entry into ASM of tens of thousands of Chinese migrant miners from 2006 onwards, all illegal given that small-scale mining by law is reserved for Ghanaian citizens, and the eventual deployment of a military taskforce in mid 2013. This section looks at the impact that the Chinese presence had on the sector, and asks where was the state in this context. The fourth section then asks why military crackdowns were belatedly introduced by President John Mahama in 2013 and again by President Akufo-Addo in 2017. The penultimate section considers the potential for ASM to contribute significantly to socio-economic transformation, especially in rural areas, as has been advocated for some years by the African Union and Economic Commission for Africa, and how the state in Ghana could facilitate such change rather than obstruct it. The conclusion returns to the current crisis and military crackdown and offers a critique of the contradictory and hypocritical approach of the state towards illicit small-scale mining.
Background
ASM in Ghana has been an important means of livelihood for centuries and can be traced as far back as the 15th century. As in many African countries, it takes both legal and illicit forms. Until 1989, it was formally illegal, although widely practised. The Small-Scale Gold Mining Law 1989 (Provisional National Defense Council Law [PNDCL] 218) legalised and attempted to regularise ASM by introducing a licensing process. This was consolidated in the Minerals and Mining Act 2006 (Act 703), which enabled artisanal miners to apply for a concession of 25 acres in designated areas through the Minerals Commission, and then to obtain a licence to mine for a period of three to five years. Nonetheless, this process remains lengthy, bureaucratic and very expensive (Hilson, Hilson and Adu-Darko 2014, 297), with a range of official and unofficial fees, and little or no subsequent benefits due to an absence of state financial and technical support to licensed ASM operators. Therefore, most small-scale miners choose to remain unregistered, and it is estimated that 85% of ASM operations remain informal and illicit (Ofusu-Mensah 2016). Indeed, this percentage may be higher, given that currently there are only 1350–1400 licensed concessions (Hilson 2017, 113). Further, the difference in practice between legal and illegal miners is not so evident. One licensed concession holder admitted frankly that ‘all legal miners have been galamsey at some point in time’ (Interview 1, licensed small-scale miner/member of the Association of Small-Scale Miners, July 2014).2 Other analysts have noted similarly that, despite occasional crackdowns (Hilson and Yakovleva 2007), galamsey are able to operate relatively ‘freely and openly’ Andrews (2015, 11), at least outside of large-scale mining company concessions. Similarly, Teschner (2012, 312) observes that galamsey activities are so ubiquitous in places that ‘the casual observer may not believe that it could possibly be illegal’, leading him to characterise galamsey as ‘alegal’, in other words ‘intentionally tolerated by law enforcement’ (Ibid.). The state's failure to regularise ASM and to provide support to licensed miners, as well as its tolerance of illegality, is a key element of its overall neglect of the sector, what Hilson, Hilson and Adu-Darko (2014, 292) call its ‘perpetual informality’.
This neglect of ASM is the other side of the state's prioritisation of the large-scale sector, notably its efforts to attract foreign direct investment by transnational mining corporations. This has been evident since the mid 1980s onwards when the then military government under J.J. Rawlings opened up the mining sector under the World Bank/IMF-directed Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) (1983–1986). Very generous terms to transnational mining companies have been offered over subsequent decades, including low taxes and royalty payments, low import duties on equipment, high retention of revenue, and repatriation of profits (Akabzaa and Darimani 2001; Aryee 2001). Although such terms are highly favourable to the big mining corporations, successive governments have also relied heavily on the revenue gained from them, and have focused on expanding large-scale gold production through the provision of large concessions of land to mining companies for open pit mining, frequently more than companies can possibly utilise. Indeed, it is estimated that ‘up to 40 percent of the country … [is] in the hands of large-scale mining and mineral exploration companies’ (Hilson 2017, 113), notably transnational mining companies such as Newmont, AngloGold Ashanti and Gold Fields.
And here is a key link to ASM and its importance to local people. Such huge concessions of land to large-scale mining companies mean that rural dwellers have been dispossessed of their farmland by the state, and therefore increasingly have had to turn to ASM as an alternative or supplementary livelihood option to farming. Thus, the state's prioritisation of large-scale mining has conversely led to an increase in ASM activities, especially illicit ones. Such illicit mining has taken place both outside and inside the mining companies' concessions, with the latter resulting at times in conflict with both company and state security forces. This situation of land dispossession questions the concepts of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ in this context. By law, the state owns all mineral resources, officially vested in the hands of the President and held in trust for the people, and has the authority to give huge concessions of mineral-bearing land to large-scale mining companies, who then have a ‘legal’ right to mine despite depriving local citizens of access to land. Having lost their farmland to transnational mining companies, local people often have little or no option but to undertake ASM as a livelihood activity, yet are declared ‘illegal’. The class bias of the law, favouring international capital and criminalising low-income Ghanaians is evident.
The state does extract some revenue from ASM through sales of gold to the Precious Minerals Marketing Company (PMMC), a government agency which is responsible for gold exports. The government of Ghana takes 0.5% of the value of gold exported by PMMC as revenue (Interview 2, official from PMMC, August 2014). Licensed gold buyers in the field buy gold directly from ASM operators, and by law, then sell the gold to PMMC. Yet, crucially, there is no distinction between gold bought from licensed or unlicensed sources, and therefore the state has no incentive to regularise the sector in order to increase its revenue collection.
The role of traditional authorities (chiefs) is also pertinent in the flourishing of illicit ASM, and here we note the first instance of private benefits being extracted by an elite group from illicit activity. Whereas licensed miners receive a 25-acre concession of public land from a state agency (Minerals Commission), galamsey operators need to obtain land from those traditional authorities who control over 80% of land in Ghana (Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources 2011, 1, cited in Abdulai 2017a, 31). The role of chiefs in galamsey activities is well known, though mainly hidden and rarely acknowledged (Hilson, Hilson and Adu-Darko 2014, 301). Essentially galamsey operators acquire land from a local chief in return for a private payment, despite chiefs not having the authority to sell customary land. This practice was also highlighted in a recent Bureau of National Investigation report in May 2017, which reportedly identified the role of chiefs in facilitating galamsey activities through the provision of land.3
Similarly, the interests of politicians are perceived as playing a key role in the tolerance of galamsey activities, especially in the context of ‘competitive clientelism’ (Abdulai 2017a, 36), where elections are closely contested and campaigns increasingly expensive.4 Politicians thus depend on influential galamsey ‘kingpins’ in election years, not only for contributions to election campaign funds, but also to deliver the vote for them, especially in constituencies where galamsey activities are prominent and provide major direct and indirect employment. Clearly such dependence of politicians on illegal mining operators undermines any prospects for law enforcement.
The rise of ASM, Chinese miners and transformation of the sector
However, despite its neglect by the state, the small-scale sector has not stood still. In fact, a look at official figures (Table 1) shows an astonishing rise in gold production from ASM itself and as a proportion of total gold production.
Therefore, in the 10-year period from 2005–2014, gold produced from ASM has increased sevenfold and as a percentage of total gold production it has increased from just over 10% to over one-third. What accounts for this very substantial rise in small-scale production?
In seeking an explanation, we turn to the entry of Chinese migrant miners into the small-scale mining sector in Ghana from 2006 onwards, peaking in the period from 2010–2013 when small-scale production really soared. We examine the impact this had on ASM and what it tells us about the state and illegality in the sector.
A Chinese media source reported that approximately 50,000 migrant miners entered Ghana in that period, with the large majority coming from Shanglin County in Guangxi province, and known in Ghana as the ‘Shanglin gang’.5 On arrival in Ghana, Chinese miners integrated themselves into the small-scale gold mining sector and worked with both licensed and unlicensed Ghanaian miners (Crawford and Botchwey 2017; Hilson, Hilson and Adu-Darko 2014; Teschner 2012). Given such enormous numbers, there was a very visible presence of Chinese miners, yet their activities were illegal – by law, only Ghanaian citizens can engage in ASM (Minerals and Mining Act 2006). However, the state appeared to ignore this clearly visible phenomenon for a number of years, until finally pressurised into action by the media in mid 2013.
The impact of the Chinese miners on the sector came less from their numbers and more from the modern technology that they introduced. Despite some incidents of conflict between Chinese and Ghanaian miners, the relationship was characterised more by collaboration, precisely due to the Chinese miners bringing what successive Ghanaian governments had failed to provide – technology, know-how and capital. While artisanal miners in Ghana were still using traditional rudimentary methods to mine gold, using picks, shovels and pans, the Chinese miners introduced technology and mechanisation. Shanglin County has a long tradition of gold mining and miners there have developed their own specialist equipment, including ‘changfa’ rock crushing machines, ‘trommel’ alluvial washing plants, and water platforms, pumps and suction equipment to dredge for gold in rivers (Bansah, Yalley and Dumakor-Dupey 2016), as well as using other machinery such as excavators and bulldozers. The incoming Shanglin miners imported the machinery that they required. Thus, the arrival of the Chinese miners had a major impact on ASM in Ghana, with the mechanisation and intensification of production, and areas of land were now mined in weeks which previously had taken years. Using the Shanglin miners' specialist river dredging equipment, gold mining was also extended from land to water bodies, despite mining in rivers or within 100 metres of a river bank being illegal in Ghana. Many Ghanaian miners, both licensed and unlicensed, soon started to adopt the same techniques, including the use of water platforms for river mining. One consequence of the mechanisation and intensification of production on both land and rivers has been environmental destruction on a far greater scale than that associated with traditional techniques, including the new dimension of river pollution.
But where was the state while so much illegal mining was going on, especially with the added elements of foreign involvement in ASM and rising levels of environmental destruction? Initially, it appeared that the state was absent, or at least was tolerating the presence of illegal foreign miners in much the same way that it often tolerated local galamsey. At the peak of Chinese involvement in 2012 and 2013, when gold prices were at record high levels, it was the print media in particular that highlighted negative aspects of intensified and unregulated mining, and bemoaned the lack of government action. This despair was reflected in an article in early 2013 in the Daily Graphic under the headline ‘Deal with illegal miners now’, stating: ‘As we look on in helpless amazement, foreigners continue to degrade our lands and pollute our water bodies’.6 Eventually, on 15 May 2013, in a response that acted as a precedent for the current government's action, former President Mahama stated that ‘We do clearly have a problem’ and established an Inter-Ministerial Task Force to combat illegal small-scale mining, backed up with a military operation. This led to the deportation of 4592 Chinese nationals as well as smaller numbers of other foreign nationals, while many more Chinese miners fled the country, given the ferocity of the military crackdown, including the confiscation and burning of equipment. It is notable that no Ghanaian miners were arrested or prosecuted.
Yet, why did it take the government so long for President Mahama to act? Research by these authors demonstrated that the state had not been absent in previous years as the Chinese presence increased. Rather the state, as well as traditional authorities, had been present, albeit in a negative and corrupt manner, in an environment where very large sums of money were being made by some miners from illicit gold mining. Allegations of corruption amongst Ghanaian state officials and traditional authorities was a recurring theme in interviews and focus group discussions. We were told that chiefs had sold land to Chinese miners for significant sums of money for personal gain, despite their traditional role prohibiting this. We were informed that officials from various government agencies, including the immigration service, the Minerals Commission, the police, and local and regional government, had all turned a ‘blind eye’ to illicit mining in return for private payments. Ghana Immigration Service officials, for instance, were accused of providing entry visas and (false) work permits to Chinese miners in return for payments (Interview 3, acting managing director of small-scale mining company, August 2014). And such corruption allegations were not only at local level. Various sources indicated that corruption extended to high-ranking central government personnel, including members of parliament, who were involved in shielding Chinese miners in exchange for financial contributions, notably for electoral campaigns. One municipal-level official cited two instances in his direct experience that indicated high-level government complicity in illegality. First, he stated that Chinese miners had made phone calls when challenged by him and consequently he had been ‘threatened on the phone by [Ghanaian] big men’ and told ‘to lay off the Chinese’. Second, when trying to get some Chinese nationals to register their businesses for local taxation purposes, he stated that the local office of the Ghana Immigration Service had warned him to stop as ‘they [Immigration] had instructions’ (Interview 4, administration official at Municipal Assembly, July 2014). A licensed small-scale miner, who himself had worked with Chinese miners, confirmed these experiences. He stated that, if challenged, the Chinese would ‘threaten to call the Minister or police commander’. He further alleged that, ‘People here in […] can never arrest Chinese people as they have top guys supporting them; they just need to make a phone call’. He expressed the view that such ‘top guys’ were ‘collecting their money every week from the Chinese’ (Interview 5, licensed miner and member of local Small-Scale Miners Association, July 2014).
Further evidence came from a source close to Chinese miners – a Chinese national resident in Ghana who had advised incoming Chinese miners as business clients. He stated that Chinese miners had made payments to both high-level government officials and those at ground level. He alleged that ‘many [government] people were involved’, and his view was that Chinese miners were in fact ‘bullied by Ghanaian officials’ in their attempts to extract money. Yet post-Task Force, he noted that a fundamental shift had occurred, and Chinese miners were ‘no longer protected by the [Ghanaian] government’ (Interview 6, principal consultant at Chinese financial and legal consultancy firm, January 2015). This is a very interesting perspective. Evidence from these various sources all suggests that Chinese miners had actually been protected by government officials and enabled to undertake illegal mining, in return for private payments. We have a perverse situation where those whose responsibility is to enforce the law are actually benefiting from illegal activities.7 Yet, in May 2013, the situation shifted dramatically as the military task force was sent in and Chinese miners were astonished when, for instance, Ghana Immigration Service officers condemned as ‘fake’ the same work permits that they had themselves (falsely) issued (Interview 7, acting managing-director of small-scale mining company, August 2014). Paradoxically, as the body charged with law enforcement in this scenario, the military task force was also accused of profiting from its position. One local journalist who had reported on the Task Force's activities stated that Chinese miners made substantial payments to Task Force members to avoid arrest or gain their release, and that the Task Force members also helped themselves to items such as gold, vehicles and equipment left behind by fleeing Chinese. He stated that the Chinese miners who were arrested and deported were precisely those who ‘could not pay’ (Interview 8, radio journalist, 23 July 2014).
Why a military crackdown?
Why did President Mahama eventually establish the Inter-Ministerial Task Force and undertake a military crackdown on activities that had previously been tolerated? One explanation was the rising media pressure to do something, especially as the increase in environmental destruction from unregulated mining became more evident. A related explanation is that such widespread state collusion in illegality could not go on indefinitely, especially in the context of a public outcry and adverse media publicity. Yet it was also possible for the government to take action in a less heavy-handed and militarised manner. It is suggested here that the extreme nature of the measures taken is the other side of the coin from state collusion. Having privately benefited from covert complicity in illegality, authorities now seek to protect themselves against allegations of wrongdoing through a strong-arm approach which suggests their seriousness of intent in dealing with illegalities, while serving to conceal their erstwhile collusion.
It was a little unexpected that, shortly after coming to power, President Akufo-Addo should follow the precedent of Mahama by setting up another military operation against ASM. This surprise was partly because Akufo-Addo, in opposition, had been critical of this strategy. Indeed, while campaigning in the mining areas, he had promised to regularise and streamline small-scale mining to provide jobs for youth, and specifically criticised Mahama for sending in the soldiers: ‘When he won the election [December 2012], he rather directed soldiers to come and drive out all persons involved in galamsey in Obuasi’ (Ghanaweb 2016). Yet, within three months of coming to power, President Akufo-Addo was himself cracking down even more vigorously on Ghanaian galamsey operators. Why was this? One reason was the rapidly deteriorating environmental situation, especially of rivers from dredging mining, with a dire warning coming from the Ghana Water Company in March 2017 that the country risked having to import water for consumption by 2020 unless mining in rivers was stopped (cited in Abdulai 2017b, 1). Second, as with Mahama in 2013, media pressure was rising, notably Citi FM's #StopGalamseyNow campaign, with the ‘galamsey menace’ discourse becoming more established in the public mindset. And, as with Mahama, it was important for Akufo-Addo that his government was perceived as taking a hard line against illegal mining in order to deflect attention from accusations that party members were themselves colluding with galamsey activities, including with Chinese miners.8 Third, it is relevant that both President Mahama and President Akufo-Addo established military task forces in the first year of a new four-year term of office, when the political repercussions associated with ‘competitive clientelism’ (Abdulai 2017a: 36) are least. It is notable that Mahama's taskforce was short-lived and completely dormant by the time of election campaigning in 2016. Similarly, Akufo-Addo could take this action at the outset of his government, whereas he would probably have more concerns about alienating powerful galamsey operators later in his term of office as the December 2020 election looms.
Potential contribution of ASM to socio-economic transformation
The current crisis in ASM in Ghana stems partly from its success, but success achieved despite rather than because of government, with production increasing substantially in recent years. While the state has neglected the sector for decades, focusing rather on large-scale mining by transnational companies, Chinese irregular migrants have stepped into the vacuum and provided the stimulus to the sector that Ghanaian small-scale miners, registered and unregistered, have long been crying out for. ASM in Ghana, as on the continent more generally, has the potential to contribute significantly to a transformation of rural lives and livelihoods, including through interaction between local and foreign miners. This has been recognised for some years now, notably in the African Union's (AU) Africa mining vision, adopted by African heads of state and government in February 2009, and subsequently promoted by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) (2011). Such policy documents have acknowledged the significance of ASM to the improvement of rural livelihoods in Africa, with the key action plan component being to ‘formalize ASM and upscale programmes to upgrade knowledge, skills and technology in the ASM sector’ (African Union 2009, 32). Yet successive Ghanaian governments have failed to achieve this, with the sector remaining in this state of ‘perpetual informality’ (Hilson, Hilson and Adu-Darko 2014) where state officials collude in illicit mining for private benefit, followed by a military crackdown on those previously tolerated when pressure from the media and society emerges. In this penultimate section, we focus on the potential of ASM to achieve a degree of socio-economic transformation and, simultaneously, on what is required of government (and the state more broadly) to realise that potential.
Employment and income opportunities
In the context where ASM contributes one-third of total gold production, it clearly provides important employment opportunities for many relatively poor rural dwellers, both directly and indirectly. Youth unemployment is a big problem in Ghana, as in other African countries, with the African Centre for Economic Transformation, based in Accra, stating that statistics indicate a rate of 48% youth unemployment (Tarlue 2016, also cited in Hilson 2017, 110) and that jobless growth is Ghana's major challenge (Baah-Boateng 2018). ASM provides an opportunity for the huge bulge of unemployed youth, with many already involved in the activity. Further, if ASM is organised and regulated appropriately, then more youth could be employed in formalised mining, less subject to exploitation by galamsey operators as at present. While miners are predominantly young men, there is also a substantial proportion of women involved in mining, with Yakovleva (2007, 34) reporting that 40% of people on galamsey sites in the Eastern region were women, inclusive of direct participation in mining work as well as in indirect service-related activities such as catering. Again, appropriate regulation and educational training could reduce the unfavourable working conditions for women associated with the informal sector, as well as health risks and sexual exploitation (Yakovleva 2007, 38–39).
State revenue
The phenomenal increase in gold production from ASM to over 1.5 million ounces in 2013 can provide significant state revenue, which in turn could be used for the provision of public services, most notably in rural areas where health and education provision is most lacking. While the state does capture some revenue from both legally and illicitly produced gold through the network of licensed gold buyers and PMMC agents, this revenue source has been underemphasised for decades in comparison with the focus on revenue generation from large-scale mining. Further, the recent intensification of illicit gold production, often in association with Chinese miners, has gone hand-in-hand with reports of increased smuggling of gold, especially through the involvement of foreign buyers, resulting in lost revenue (Crawford et al. 2015, 50). There is a ready market for the minerals extracted, and the Ghanaian government, and likewise other African governments, needs to reorganise and regulate the market adequately in order to obtain increased revenue from ASM that can then be used for expenditure on public services. In addition, the state currently collects no income tax from the ASM sector. Yet our research indicated that some Ghanaian miners at the apex of the ASM hierarchy were earning significant amounts, with licensed concession holders working with Chinese miners, or using technology introduced by the Chinese, reporting earnings of GHC15,000 to GHC25,000 per week (£3000 to £5000 per week) (Crawford et al. 2015, 36), significantly higher than the President's official salary.9 Licensed miners could be required to report on gold production levels and pay royalties and taxes commensurate with such income levels.
License acquisition and formalisation
The core issue is the state's failure to regularise and formalise the sector. This key policy is highlighted in the AU's Africa mining vision (2009) and reiterated in the UN ECA's report on Minerals and African development, which recommends ‘regularizing informal ASM’ and ‘simplifying and decentralizing procedures for acquiring ASM rights’ (UN ECA 2011, 79). Yet the current licensing process in Ghana remains lengthy, bureaucratic and expensive, resulting in only a small minority of miners being registered, while the large majority simply remain unregistered. There are instances where miners submit a license application but cannot wait and simply begin operations. With mechanisation, the entire site may now be mined out in a relatively short period, often before the decision on the licence application is made by state institutions. Consequently, the sector remains overwhelmingly informal, with all the accompanying problems, most notably environmental destruction. The state urgently needs to simplify the process and reduce the costs of becoming licensed, and then to offer support to licensed miners, for instance in improved exploration and mineral processing techniques. The government's current moratorium on all small-scale mining, with military enforcement, inexplicably ignores the economic importance of ASM to a substantial proportion of Ghana's rural population, and flies in the face of the AU's Africa mining vision and its directive on formalising the sector.
New technology and environmental destruction
The technology to make ASM more productive and lucrative has actually been made available by the Chinese miners. Undoubtedly some of the new techniques have also led to substantial environmental destruction, but this can be addressed through legislation and monitoring by state agencies. The use of this technology is unlikely to be reversed, and the sooner the government comes to terms with this and address the problems associated with its use, the better. The challenge for government is to regulate the arrangements that are in place, especially between Chinese miners and locals, through legislation, including allocation of responsibility for environmental damage.
Foreign involvement
While the current law that restricts small-scale mining to Ghanaian citizens may make sense from a resource sovereignty and resource fairness perspective, the reality is that foreign nationals are heavily involved in ASM as financiers, equipment suppliers and repairers, in direct mining and buying of minerals, in arranging the migration of labour across borders, and so forth. Chinese miners in particular were welcomed on the whole by Ghanaian miners as they brought the finance, technology and know-how that the Ghanaian state had failed to provide. Would it not be better for the state to now recognise what has already happened and enable legal joint ventures as a way to regulate ASM activities, rather than organising military crackdowns with far-reaching consequences on employment and income for rural people?
Conclusion
It was a surprise to many when, in early April 2017, the new NPP (New Patriotic Party) government under President Akufo-Addo declared a ‘war on galamsey’, inclusive of a moratorium on all small-scale mining, and adopted a militarised approach, especially after his comments on the campaign trail in July 2016. While the destruction of land and water bodies through unregulated mining is a very real concern and requires urgent action, the government's approach is highly unsatisfactory in various ways. It indicates the contradictory and hypocritical approach of the state towards illicit small-scale mining. Despite being responsible for law enforcement, government officials, politicians and chiefs have all colluded with illegality in order to gain private benefits from such activities. When such collusion is exposed or comes under scrutiny, then a heavy-handed, militarised response to galamsey is taken, one that appears intended to convince Ghanaian society at large that the government is serious about tackling this issue and simultaneously to conceal its own complicity. Yet it is unacceptable to scapegoat and criminalise mainly low-income miners, who have little choice but to engage in illicit gold mining as a livelihood activity, and to undertake military operations against them. Victim-blaming comes to mind.
Conveniently, the government is not acknowledging the state's own role, by its action and inaction, in allowing unregulated ASM to flourish, leading to the emergence of unsustainable environmental degradation. First, for two decades at least, government provision of huge concessions of land to transnational mining companies for large-scale mining has led to local farming communities being dispossessed of their land, pushing many rural dwellers into ASM, mainly illicit, to supplement or replace farm-based incomes. Unsurprisingly, this has included encroachment by galamsey onto large-scale mining concessions, raising questions concerning the definition of what is ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, and exposing the class-based manner in which the law operates to legitimate the activities of transnational corporations and criminalise local citizens. Second, the failure by the state to formalise small-scale mining and to provide technical and financial support has led to the recent entry into the sector of tens of thousands of Chinese miners and entrepreneurs who have provided Ghanaian miners with the means to increase production that they had not received from the state. Third, for a period of years, the government and state agencies stood by and did nothing while Chinese miners transformed the sector through the introduction of heavy machinery and of mining in rivers, with officials and politicians content to extract bribes and sweeteners from the Chinese in return for their silence and inaction. The consequence of both lack of regulation and lack of law enforcement by the state is the intensified environmental destruction that is such a concern today, and for which (mostly) low-income artisanal miners are being scapegoated. Fourth, the failures to regularise ASM and to take action against mining by foreigners are not due to state weakness or state incapacity, but are quite intentional, with officials more interested in the opportunities for corrupt activities that stem from the sector remaining informal. The private interests of state officials, politicians and chiefs routinely take precedence over their public responsibilities and legal duties. The ‘perpetual informality’ of the sector, as aptly characterised by Hilson et al. (2014), is not simply due to state neglect, but has been purposely kept informal, as this serves elite interests. Finally, in banning all small-scale mining, the Akufo-Addo government ignores the economic contribution of the sector. It provides direct employment and income for over one million small-scale miners and their dependants, as well as indirectly for those involved in upstream and downstream economic activities. The sector can also provide a significant revenue stream for the state. As outlined by the AU and ECA, ASM has the potential to contribute to socio-economic transformation, especially in rural areas, but this requires ‘a developmental state that integrates the mining sector into broader social and economic developmental processes’ (UN ECA 2011, xiii). To date, the state in Ghana has not acted in such a developmental manner, but rather has acted as an obstacle to such transformation. The current military crackdown on illegal mining takes the relationship between the state and its mostly poor citizens to a new nadir, scapegoating them for the failings of successive governments of both main parties.
Yes, the current environmental issues need to be urgently tackled, and indeed government should never have allowed land degradation and water pollution to reach such severe levels. But the state in Ghana needs to put its own house in order before criminalising its citizens and subjecting them to military repression. Indeed, who are the real criminals? A situation where government officials, politicians and chiefs have all privately benefited from illegal activities is deeply troubling, and a far cry from the portrayal of Ghana as a model democratic state.
Notes on contributors
Gordon Crawford is Research Professor in Global Development at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University, UK. Email: ac1221@123456coventry.ac.uk
Gabriel Botchwey is a Lecturer and Ag. Head of the Department of Political Science, University of Education, Winneba, Ghana. Email: gkabotchwey@123456uew.edu.gh
Interviews
1. Licensed small-scale miner and member of the Association of Small-Scale Miners, 26 July 2014.
2. Official from PMMC, Accra, 13 August 2014.
3. Acting managing director of small-scale mining company, Accra, 14 August 2014.
4. Administration official at Municipal Assembly, Central Region, 28 July 2014.
5. Licensed miner and member of local Small-Scale Miners Association, Central Region, 26 July 2014.
6. Principal consultant at a Chinese financial and legal consultancy firm, Accra, 12 January 2015.
7. Acting managing director of small-scale mining company, Accra, 14 August 2014.
8. Radio journalist at FM station, Central Region, 23 July 2014.