In theory, all of us are vulnerable to coronavirus, but in practice how well we fare has to do with what you could call pre-existing conditions that are not only medical but economic, social, political and racial – and the pandemic, which is also an economic catastrophe, has made these differences glaringly clear. (Solnit 2020)
The pandemic may have come as a surprise for some, but it is perhaps far less a surprise to those who were already marked as surplus to the movements of power and capital and security, those already vulnerable people made doubly (trebly? more?) so in the pandemic: the disabled, the elderly, the poor, the immune-compromised, the homeless, the prisoner, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the colonized, and so on. (Ironstone 2020)
And this despite, or sometimes because of, high-level policy and other discussions about, and adoption of, frequently exceptional measures which aim to slow the transmission and spread of the virus (Ciakudia 2020; Richards 2020), and prevent the worsening of what is already considered by many as a global crisis of unprecedented threat, impact and uncertainty (Elliott 2020; Freedland 2020; Jayaram et al. 2020). In the process, as Bird and Ironstone (2020) note, ‘[p]ower structures are being radically re-arranged in our societ[ies] right now and if we lose our capacity to criticize the future may be beset by new, even more damning ones.’ It is thus vital that Theophanidis (2020) clarifies that his call for ‘distancing’ aims to create space for critical thinking and careful reflection, notably in a context in which digital, mostly social, media connectivity is helping to counter the isolation of ‘physical social distancing’. As numerous and varied examples of radical digital activism and solidarity which have emerged demonstrate, it would be regrettable if far-reaching lessons were not learned from crises precipitated by the pandemic and the varied responses to them (Giordano 2020; Zeleza 2020).1 And this must include lessons from the material and symbolic significance of the persistence of a digital divide in a time of rapidly expanding and intensifying digitalisation (Cline-Cole and Powell 2004; The Guardian 2020a).
Getting to know the pandemic?
So, where to start? With how little we do know for certain about the extent of the outbreak (or global pandemic since March), and not only because of that other ‘virus’ of dis- and misinformation (CDD 2020; Ibrahim 2020; Richards 2020)? Or, alternatively, the rapidly evolving nature and dynamics of the ‘crises’ to be understood and influenced (Elliott 2020; Freedland 2020; Hanage 2020; Scoones 2020)? Or, even whether, how and with what consequences individuals and groups might be coping with the threat of, prevention from, or actual coronavirus infection (Elliott 2020; Jayaram et al. 2020)? Or, maybe with how ‘extant neoliberal rationales and practices’ can be implicated as both cause and effect of Covid-19 (Short 2020)? And, equally importantly, how this ensures why, contrary to the political slogan du jour, we are not all in this together, either locally or globally, given that who and what/where we are (not) and the resources we (do not) have at our disposal would influence our respective experiences of the pandemic (Akumu 2020; Ciakudia 2020; Hanage 2020; Malik 2020; Wood 2020)? ROAPE is interested first and foremost in how Covid-19 is impacting African political economy, but also in what we can do in collaboration with comrades and solidarity networks on the continent, and elsewhere, to mitigate the worst effects of these impacts. We also want to continue to be an integral part of interventions aiming to fashion the contours of a progressive post-coronavirus future. To be able to achieve these goals we must, as de Waal and Richards (2020) recommend, ‘know [the] epidemic, know [the] response, and act on its politics’. In this editorial I concentrate on the opening two-thirds of this advice, while sometimes swopping ‘pandemic’ for ‘epidemic’; there will no doubt be plenty on acting on politics in future issues.
Starting, then, at the beginning and restricting ourselves to verifiable information, which comes with the caveats that such information is (1) widely believed to significantly underestimate the true extent of the pandemic on the continent, largely because of very low levels of testing and, possibly, reporting across the continent; (2) not necessarily strictly comparable between countries because of differences in national recording practices/conventions; and (3) often covers different time periods. In any case, by mid April, five more countries than a week earlier had reported confirmed cases of coronavirus, which then totalled in excess of 20,000 and a death toll of more than 1000 (African Arguments 2020). Within 14 weeks of the continent’s first confirmed case, every African country had reported confirmed cases and fatalities. By early July, confirmed cases and reported deaths on the continent totalled nearly 378,000 and just over 7700, respectively, out of corresponding global totals of just over 11 million confirmed cases and about half a million dead (Johns Hopkins University n.d.) The continental total of confirmed cases would pass the one million mark a month later in early August, according to the BBC Coronavirus Africa Tracker (BBC n.d.), at which time it still represented only 5% of reported global infections. About 80% of all reported cases have come from only 10 countries (WHO 2020c), with most fatalities and infections having undoubtedly come from a wide cross-section of society, although reports of the illness and deaths of the rich and famous – ex-heads of state or government and serving senior government officials, among other famous names in medicine, entertainment, media, public administration and business – have been the most widely reported (Democracy Now 2020; Nwaubani 2020; Shaban 2020). Reports of high-profile early casualties probably served to emphasise the seriousness of the threat to life and livelihood posed by Covid-19 to an initially sceptical public. But by calling attention to the vulnerability of a continental elite unable to access international specialist healthcare precisely because of travel restrictions imposed in the wake of Covid-19, these reports also highlight the often gross inadequacy of public healthcare systems across the continent to cater to the needs of ordinary citizens.
Nonetheless, transmission and mortality totals and rates have been and remain low, with the WHO (2020a) observing that cases ‘have not grown at the same exponential rate as in other regions and so far Africa has not experienced the high mortality seen in some parts of the world’. Consequently, these figures have been widely expected to (and might already be on the) rise, possibly significantly, with both expanded testing and an anticipated increase in community transmission (Akinwotu 2020; Burke and Akinwotu 2020), which has thus far being restricted largely to Northern and South Africa, as well as parts of coastal and inland West Africa (Mwai and Giles 2020). However, while acknowledging the undoubted existence of undercounting requiring improved surveillance, tracking, tracing and testing, and entertaining the possibility of the virus ‘smouldering’ in hotspots for the foreseeable future, the WHO Africa Regional Director is confident that it is unlikely that African countries are currently ‘harbouring a significant number of unrecorded coronavirus infections’, and concedes that it is entirely possible that the pandemic might be ‘taking a different pathway in Africa’ (Beaumont 2020). Deciphering such a pathway is proving predictably difficult, given the enormous variation in quantity, quality and coverage of available data, as well as the diversity of (and, sometimes, divergence in) emergent spatial and temporal patterns and trends they indicate (Mwai and Giles 2020; WHO 2020c). Thus, although Mauritius and Seychelles were two of the first three African countries to declare themselves free of Covid-19 starting in mid May (Business Today 2020), they would both report new cases by the end of June, leaving Tanzania’s coronavirus-free status both unclear and uncertain (WHO 2020c). To complicate matters further, it is often necessary, although not always easy, to distinguish the impact of attempts to prevent a coronavirus epidemic from the consequences of interventions to control one that is already under way; yet their often far-reaching implications for the evolution of the pandemic are closely intertwined. Not surprisingly, the Washington-based Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS) has recently cautioned against ‘a single African coronavirus narrative’, suggesting instead that we are witnessing the emergence of ‘several distinct COVID-19 experiences’ which reflect different levels and types of coronavirus risk (ACSS 2020c), and different social conditions within communities (de Waal and Richards 2020). I return to this later.
Does Covid-19 discriminate?
Available data on age–sex distribution of confirmed cases for the WHO African Region indicate that, overall, older men would appear to be disproportionately affected by Covid-19 (WHO 2020b), with a preponderance of males (1.7:1 male-to-female infection ratio) across all age groups and a median age of 36 years (range of 0–105) (WHO 2020c). Further instances of disproportionate impact based on religion, class, occupation or ethnicity will no doubt emerge in time, notably as readily available details on the demographics of coronavirus victims extend beyond the fundamentals of age, sex, nationality, residence and travel history. In the UK and USA, of course, such metrics have been invaluable in identifying the overrepresentation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) health and care workers and volunteers among coronavirus fatalities (Malik 2020; Marsh 2020). Similar racial and ethnic disparities characterise wider BAME community and hospital in-patient infection and death data from coronavirus (Hirsch 2020a, 2020b), with black people (four times), Bangladeshi and Pakistani (three and a half times) and Indians (two and a half times) more likely to succumb to Covid-19 than white people in England and Wales (The Guardian 2020b ). The phenomenon has attracted extensive media and other coverage which has focused on health inequalities and risk factors, deprivation, affluence and racial discrimination (Hirsch 2020b; The Guardian 2020b ), and in the absence of acceptable causal explanations for the overrepresentation (Cook, Kursumovic and Lenanne 2020). But it has been left to organised labour and popular mobilisation to extract hard-won concessions from state actors and the public–private healthcare complex to institute an official enquiry, provide adequate supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline health, care and allied workers and expand coronavirus testing opportunities for these workers and their families (NHS Confederation 2020). Special compensation programmes for families of NHS staff (and, in England, social care workers) who die from coronavirus have also been announced, although the level of compensation is considered inadequate by some, and labour unions, among others, have called for the scheme to be extended to cover all key workers who die from the disease. And yet, as tardy, reluctant, inadequate and reactive as these state interventions have undoubtedly been, it is social mobilisations which have ‘forced the state to take on its responsibilities’ (Cox 2020). These have included medical professionals and cross-party campaign MPs ‘breaking silence’ over Covid-19’s disproportionate impact on particular sections of society, which itself speaks to the promise of social action and emancipatory politics in influencing (post-)Covid-19 politics and realities (Swartz and Valeske 2020).
But as the coronavirus BAME casualties and fatalities include Africans and people of African descent whose remittances are often integral to the livelihoods and survival strategies of family at home (Einashe 2020), their existential struggles have not been lost on Africans at home and in the diaspora. Indeed, as social media exchanges were quick to indicate, for countries like Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe, among others, the earliest known coronavirus deaths were of their (often dual) nationals in the diaspora rather than at home, where the continent’s first fatality was a German tourist in Egypt (Kazeem 2020). For many, family, friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances would eventually succumb to the virus, in my case across three continents. Thus one of my acquaintances regretted what he saw as a ‘lamentable waste’ of African medical and health expertise which was going to be both sorely needed and badly missed on the continent, if the worst predictions of Covid-19 were ever realised. A second drew a comparison between these coronavirus deaths and the often tragic demise of undocumented migrants along trans-Saharan and Mediterranean routes to Europe, suggesting that both groups had paid the ultimate price in their respective attempts to escape the poverty of opportunity in Africa. Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe, frontline medical staff followed up on a protest strike which had been observed jointly by the Hospital Doctors Association (ZHDA) and Professional Nurses Union (ZPNU) in mid March to highlight the shortage of PPE for health workers in the country’s hospitals (Chingono 2020a). The Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) sued the government in the High Court in early April to compel it to provide adequate equipment and supplies to enable frontline medical practitioners and healthcare workers to tackle the Covid-19 crisis safely and professionally and, in the process, to significantly improve public access to functioning quarantine and isolation facilities (Mavhinga 2020).
Similar protests have been widespread across the continent, many representing a continuation of long-running dissatisfaction with public health provision predating coronavirus. In one of the more recent of these, coronavirus frontline workers in Sierra Leone who announced they were going on strike in early June were joined at the start of July by doctors refusing to treat coronavirus patients in quarantine or isolation facilities in protesting government failure to pay outstanding bonuses, ‘hazard pay’, promised as incentive to persuade health workers to agree to treat Covid-19 patients during the outbreak, often with inadequate PPE, diagnostic and therapeutic equipment and supplies (Al Jazeera 2020; BBC 2020c; Inveen 2020a, 2020b). Thus, a government with the foresight and presence of mind to draw up a Covid-19 response plan before the outbreak of the pandemic, and probably earlier than anybody else on the continent, stands accused of not only reneging on the memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed in April with the Sierra Leone Medical and Dental Association (SLMDA) to facilitate this Covid-19 response, but also of failing to renew the MOU before it lapsed three months later (Inveen 2020a). Recalling that disasters like pandemics are influenced by human ‘decisions, attitudes, values, behaviour, and activities’ (Kelman 2020), one cannot but wonder whether there is indeed merit to the SLMDA’s claim that the government does not appear to be particularly interested in resolving the dispute (Inveen 2020b), and if so what the political reasoning behind such a choice might be.
Clearly, the ZHDA/ZPNU, SLMDA and NHS struggles share more than just a generic similarity. There are recognisably Zimbabwean and Sierra Leonean names on published lists of NHS and care worker coronavirus fatalities. And in all three cases, albeit in noticeably different ways, the struggle to pressure the state to assume its responsibility in relation to public health and wellbeing is rooted in austerity, long predates Covid-19 and is fuelled by perceptions of official inefficiency, neglect and corruption. In addition, as recent SARS and Ebola epidemics have shown, potential risks and opportunities for corruption are significantly increased during major health crises, most commonly in drug and equipment procurement, leading to calls for increased oversight, accountability and transparency during the coronavirus pandemic (Transparency International 2020). Thus, a major grievance of the SLMDA, for example, is a perceived ‘misuse of funds for the coronavirus response’, a reaction to official procurement priorities which have seen 20% of Sierra Leone’s total coronavirus budget being spent on new SUVs and motorbikes, with only a tenth as much on medical equipment or drugs, leaving PPE in constant short supply and contact tracers seemingly unaffordable (Al Jazeera 2020). The national Coronavirus Response Team, for its part, justifies the delay in disbursing promised bonuses by citing the necessity to both establish the identity of frontline health workers and ensure that hazard pay went only to those entitled to receive it (Inveen 2020b). But as improperly disbursed hazard pay was one of several examples of mismanagement of funds by public officials during the Ebola crisis with its high health worker mortality rates (Dupuy and Divjak 2015), SLMDA impatience and suspicion do not appear entirely unfounded. And, at nearly 11%, Sierra Leone’s ratio of health worker infection to total reported infections is among the highest on the continent (WHO 2020c).
Meanwhile, Zimbabwean health professionals have also embarked on the latest in a series of strikes, partly to protest at the erosion of local purchasing power and living standards by hyperinflation and demand payment of their salaries in US dollars, but also to highlight both police harassment of striking nurses and the perennial shortage of PPE at a time of rising incidence of Covid-19 (BBC 2020d). But whereas SLMDA appear to be contending with seemingly misplaced procurement priorities, their Zimbabwean counterparts are confronted with alleged criminality, which has seen the sacking of the country’s minister of health, who has also been charged with corruption and abuse of office for the illegal award of a large contract (since revoked by government) for PPE, testing kits and drugs to a company which would deliver these supplies at hugely inflated cost (Chingono 2020b). The combination of a worsening economic crisis and sharply increasing coronavirus infection totals (including of health workers) has seen opposition politicians make common cause with the media and popular forces to decry corruption and demand greater accountability, while calling for a national day of protest against ‘corruption and political challenges’ at the end of July (Cassim 2020). The authorities refused permission for the 31 July protests to take place, on the grounds that it would be subversive, unconstitutional and anti-democratic (BBC 2020e), as well as violating Covid-19 pandemic regulations at a time when there has been a spike in coronavirus infections. As a result, they claimed, a dusk-to-dawn curfew and tighter restrictions on movement had to be imposed (BBC 2020e). It is presumably also in the common good that leading organisers/supporters of the proposed protest have been arrested, charged to court and refused bail (Reuters 2020). The example of state officials rewriting coronavirus reality to suit a favoured narrative is a recurrent and intensely political one, to which we return later.
Philanthro-capitalism in coronavirus times
An earlier prolonged doctors’ strike over pay and conditions in Zimbabwe had been called off only in January this year, when the ZHDA accepted an offer of funding for a fellowship programme for its members which would guarantee a monthly subsistence allowance of up to three times their salary for a period of six months from Strive Masiyiwa, the country’s wealthiest individual (BBC 2020c). Following the PPE protests in March, funding to cover the cost of PPE for doctors and other health workers was added to the original offer, which was also extended to all nurses, as well as doctors in non-state hospitals, and expanded to include health and life insurance cover with cash or lump-sum benefit in the event of ‘hospitali-[sation], … permanent disability or death from the virus’ (Ndlovu 2020). Although he is Zimbabwean born, Strive Masiyiwa presides over his Econet Group from London, where he currently lives and from where he has undoubtedly been monitoring the wide variety of local responses to the pandemic worldwide, or at least in those world regions in which Econet has a presence (BBC 2020a). But while nothing in the way of private donations to Sierra Leone’s coronavirus response effort is likely to have come anywhere near the sums certain to have been involved above, reports from Nigeria indicate that Masiyiwa’s fellow billionaires have also been making substantial donations to the (federal) Nigerian Private Sector Coalition Against COVID-19 (CACOVID)(Okwumbu 2020a) and their state equivalents (Okwumbu 2020b), as have corporate entities (often fronted by the same individuals). Is it likely, then, that we might have a case of transnational capital ostensibly contesting state in/action as part of a wider coalition while still acting in its own long-term interest (Cox2020)?
Masiyiwa’s conglomerate Econet, for example, combines telecom, mobile phone, fintech and power distribution enterprises which operate across large parts of Africa, but also in the Americas, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Europe (see Econet n.d.). The funding/fellowship programme for health workers is to be established and run by the Higherlife philanthropic family foundation (Higherlife Foundation n.d.), while Ecosure, the insurance arm of one of the Econet Group companies, will underwrite the insurance component of the offer (BBC 2020a; Ndlovu 2020). Similarly, Nigerian media reporting of the private coronavirus response donations by individuals and corporate entities gives as much prominence to the identities of donors and their net worth as to the size/purpose of their donations and sources of wealth, thereby fulfilling invaluable public relations and/or corporate social responsibility (CSR) functions, as well as playing a commercial advertising role. Consequently, while donor state of origin or residence tends to be the primary beneficiary of private philanthropy, corporate donations often favour populations and institutions in states and regions of direct commercial importance (Okwumbu 2020a). Thus Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest individual, has provided a fully-equipped and staffed Covid-19 testing facility, as well as part-funding a wide range of vital public interventions in coronavirus prevention and containment via private and corporate donations in his home state of Kano (and, to a lesser extent, Lagos State, where the Dangote Industries group has its head office). He also assumed shared national leadership of CACOVID’s quest to raise funds from private and corporate sources for federal and state Covid-19 response (Business Africa Online 2020); and, by making the largest corporate donation to the fund to date via the Aliko Dangote Foundation (ADF), triggered something of a ‘giving war’ of donations and pledges among his fellow billionaire donors (Business Africa Online 2020; Okwumbu 2020a and 2020b). He also made a further multi-million-dollar donation to the Nigeria UN COVID-19 Basket Fund which aims to provide support to individuals and households trying to rebuild livelihoods disrupted and/or undermined by the coronavirus pandemic (UNDP 2020). In the end he and his fellow donors are publicly thanked by President Muhammadu Buhari (who encourages other high-net-worth individuals – HNWIs – to follow their example). Dangote is also thanked by the governor of Kano State for his services to coronavirus prevention and response, with which his name becomes inextricably linked in media reports, which almost invariably also mention his equally sterling contributions during the earlier Ebola epidemic (Okwumbu 2020c). Like Strive Masiyiwa, with whom he earlier collaborated on regional and continent-wide Ebola response efforts, then, this enhances his reputation as one of Africa’s biggest philanthropists and, as CEO of ‘Nigeria’s most profitable company’ (Augie 2020), one of the continent’s most successful business people. Is this what capitalist philanthropy in a time of coronavirus looks like? And is it as accommodating in its business practices as it is in its public giving?
While philanthropy is not restricted to wealthy individuals and profitable corporations, their role can be strategic and decisive. UBS and TrustAfrica (2014), in a jointly published study, document and seek to analyse how and why this is the case for African philanthropists/philanthropy during ‘normal’ times. But as the Dangote and Masiyiwa examples and numerous others like them illustrate, this is also largely the case during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, with its varied, changing and often expanding demands/appeals and frequently inadequate – if improving – philanthropic responses (Julien 2020). Experience with previous epidemics and pandemics, supplemented by emerging insights from Covid-19, have informed the design and implementation of emergency coronavirus plans and strategies worldwide, including for dealing with voluntarism and managing donations (Alexander 2020). In emergency coronavirus planning scenarios, responsibility for external donations and government/state resource commitments is routinely combined with administrative oversight for internal donations of various kinds. In practice, this creates a pressing, possibly overwhelming, need to coordinate appeals for assistance while managing a diversity of resources earmarked for coronavirus response in an accountable and transparent way (Transparency International 2020). Notably, the circumstances surrounding the previously mentioned sacking of Zimbabwe’s minister of health, and ongoing legal and media challenges to UK government officials against the lack of transparent and competitive tendering in the award of Covid-19 related contracts (Monbiot 2020) remind us that expectations of resource governance, transparency and accountability are not just ethical and moral, but frequently political and legal too. And that, like the good governance agenda as a whole, these expectations can be heavily neoliberal in tone and intent, and as process. Significantly, however, expectations of transparency and accountability in how donations are managed or used have not historically been routinely extended to how the wealth which makes corporate and HNWI Covid-19 philanthropy possible is generated in the first place (Mahomed 2014). How best to explain such imbalances in what has been described as the power of process and practice in philanthropy (Mahomed and Moyo 2013)? And how best to prevent its use in, say, ‘offset[ing] reputational damage or exploitative practice’ (Mahomed 2014)?
The point is that African philanthropy is increasingly seen as indispensable to the emergence of a self-reliant continent, with corporate philanthropists looking to strengthen links between business and philanthropy, considering ‘investments with a social impact’ a suitable means for achieving this (UBS and TrustAfrica 2014). Aliko Dangote Foundation (Dangote n.d.) and Higherlife Foundation (n.d.), for example, thus function as CSR units of Dangote Industries Ltd and Econet, respectively. Their donations or pledges in both cash and kind undoubtedly give a significant boost to the overall coronavirus response effort, to include staff recruitment, training and emolument. Equally, and particularly noticeably, they also impact directly on local and import markets in specialised medical equipment and supplies, as well as in two- and four-wheeled motor vehicles, among other commodities. Yet, these markets might well be dominated by manufacturers and/or intermediary suppliers which are subsidiaries of corporate partner organisations to the charity foundations through which philanthropy is dispensed by conglomerates in the first place. More directly, how have corporate philanthropists reacted to the disruptive effects of Covid-19 and the varied responses to it on the factory floor, behind the bank counter, at the plantation gate and in front of the computer screen? Specifically, were business practices adequately adjusted to reflect the new normal in a time of coronavirus? Did they readily and effectively incorporate workplace Covid-19 preparedness planning and response strategies, including testing facilities where appropriate? Were adequate supplies of PPE, relevant equipment, water, soap, sanitisers, etc. made available to employees? And where, as with several of the corporate donors in question, their businesses operate across national boundaries, were common standards maintained across the board or did arrangements differ between ‘home’ and ‘foreign’ sites and workforces (and, if so, why and with what consequences for workers)? Overall, do philanthro-capitalists lead by example here in a way reminiscent of their public giving and pledging? As Mahomed (2014) notes, ‘the ethics of how philanthropy money is made (especially if made in an endeavour that disadvantages those it now seeks to support) must be called into question.’ That we are in the middle of a pandemic is no reason not to at least raise the question of the often differentiated nature of the process by which donated wealth is made or, indeed, of how coronavirus has been (or is likely to be) exploited for capitalist investment and profit accumulation.
But the lesson of Covid-19 need not involve either depoliticising philanthropy (it has after all contributed actively to the long-term process of privatising and commercialising formerly public health systems on the continent) or underestimating the complex dynamics of emergent solidarity between often conflicting and competing class interests. Take the following two parallel and competing but interrelated phenomena. On the one hand we have Donald Trump’s thus far futile attempt to encourage wider use of the labels ‘Wuhan Virus’ and ‘Chinese Virus’; his still unfounded but periodically repeated claim that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a Wuhan laboratory; his insistence that the WHO is so severely compromised by links to China that its handling of the pandemic was tardy, grossly inadequate and ineffective, as well as lacking transparency; and his threat to withhold American funding for the organisation – a political stance which has not won widespread or unqualified support from other major WHO donors who have publicly supported the agency and its director-general, if not necessarily China’s reported handling of the initial stages of the virus outbreak (Kelland and Nebehay 2020). On the other hand, there are official Chinese state objections, denials and counter-accusations; and the skilful ‘weaponisation’ of the material and symbolic significance of its carefully cultivated (self-)image of generosity to, and solidarity with the world’s needy and oppressed, particularly in coronavirus times. So, alongside Chinese government support in cash, kind and personnel provided to selected African and other countries under threat from coronavirus (Asiedu 2020), we also have worldwide donations of medical equipment and supplies in support of Covid-19 response efforts by private philanthropic foundations linked to Jack Ma, China’s wealthiest man, and member of the Chinese Communist Party (Hatton 2020). Ma’s corporate philanthropy has extended to donations to New York authorities and the WHO in the wake of Trump’s de-funding threat, as well as to all of Africa, and has included an online training manual for clinical treatment of coronavirus based on first-hand experience of doctors in Zhejiang and the Global MediXchange for Combating Covid-19 programme with its International Medical Expert Communication Platform (Alizila 2020). But while Jack Ma’s donations have been widely celebrated in Africa as promptly and efficiently delivered, Chinese government donations have not been universally welcome (Asiedu 2020; Patrick 2020), partly because of reported poor quality and questionable reliability of donated supplies and equipment.
Ma’s philanthropy has made him as newsworthy at home and abroad as President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party leadership, who see Chinese state and private Covid-19 philanthropy as part of a wider coronavirus diplomatic strategy designed to distract attention from Chinese state contribution to the initial ‘escape’ or spread of the virus, while positioning their country as champion of the fight against the pandemic (Gracie 2020; Hatton 2020). This assumes heightened significance in places like Europe and Africa where, in contrast to Jack Ma and his private foundations, the Chinese state has suffered Covid-19-related reputational damage (Asiedu 2002). Indeed, the arrival of Nigeria’s allocation from Jack Ma’s Covid-19 donation to African countries via the African Union's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention was a major prompt to local media and popular commentators to challenge local HNWIs to emulate Ma’s philanthropy. This would lead eventually to the significant boost for CACOVID’s funding appeal discussed at some length previously. In contrast, the Nigerian Medical Association, Trade Union Congress and main opposition party strongly opposed federal government approval for a team of Chinese medical professionals funded by the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation to provide direct support for the government’s Covid-19 response efforts, citing rumours of an upsurge in coronavirus infection and mortality in other countries following the arrival of Chinese medical personnel (Ibid.; Ayitogo 2020). There was also residual popular resentment at the widely reported scapegoating of African migrants in China at the outbreak of the pandemic which had drawn official protests from the Nigerian and other African governments (and to which I return later). But as the donation which also included a consignment of medical equipment and supplies had been announced as a fait accompli, government officials and spokespersons would spend media appearances trying to justify the decision, pacify local doctors, rebut opposition claims and win public support through a fascinating mix of obfuscation, mendacity, petulance, deflection and insinuation in a desperate attempt to deliberately downplay Chinese state involvement and thus avoid a diplomatic incident. So in their different ways, and like the Zimbabwe government’s desperate bid to silence internal dissent and protest which we encountered earlier, Trump’s assault on WHO handling of the pandemic, official Chinese and Nigerian government public relations and propaganda assaults on their respective (and wider) publics indicate active involvement in what Carrie Gracie (2020) has described, with specific reference to the Chinese ruling class, as rewriting Covid-19 facts to suit their narrative.
A single global pandemic or innumerable local epidemics?2
While it is officially (and by definition) a global pandemic, then, coronavirus is manifest at different temporal and spatial scales as process, response and outcome. Take the announcement in mid March by the South African minister of public health of her country’s intention to erect a 40-km fence at the Beitbridge crossing on the border with Zimbabwe, to prevent ‘undocumented or infected persons’ from crossing into South Africa (Zvomuya 2020). In the event, alongside quarantines, lockdowns, curfews and test/track/trace systems, border closures represent ready expressions of spatialisation of the pandemic, although maybe not as intuitively as maps and graphs tracking the pandemic’s spatio-temporal evolution, often in ‘real’ time. This is a theme which has been taken up in the emerging literature. Ribeiro et al. (2020) suggest that the pandemic provides a lesson in the territorial consequences of global-scale neoliberalism in both peripheral and core regions and localities. And, in the early stages of the pandemic, Swartz and Valeske (2020) cautioned against an exclusive focus on core economy epicentres to the neglect of immediate threats and longer-term risks posed by coronavirus to popular classes in peripheral economies and societies. In practice, as we have seen, such territorial consequences are neither indiscriminate nor unrelated to age, class, race or ethnicity, either within or between regions, countries and populations. ‘For the vulnerable’, as Swartz and Valeske (Ibid.) perceptively observe, ‘the coronavirus will not be just an inconvenience, leading to loneliness or a temporary loss of income – it will likely cause untold suffering. The virus may result in the death of the physically vulnerable, including undernourished children and adults, or those with tuberculosis or Aids.’ The ACSS has mapped ‘relative [national] vulnerability’ to a number of ‘key risk factors’ which both predispose Africa’s countries and regions to Covid-19 and are implicated in the onset and subsequent contact transmission of the virus: of these, international exposure, urban population size and strength of health sector show the strongest correlation to reported Covid-19 onset, while subsequent contact spread correlates more strongly with urban population size, population age structure and press freedom than with external contact, which remains nonetheless relevant (ACSS 2020b, 2020c).3 The Center offers little in the way of a political economy to account for the processes which create these predispositions and maintain their associated vulnerabilities in existence. But it does propose ‘a typology of seven COVID-19 profiles’, which group countries across the continent with shared and evolving combinations of risk factors, to create a differentiated coronavirus landscape encompassing multiple pathways or trajectories of actual and/or predicted Covid-19 experiences (ACSS 2020c). This is a useful but ultimately limited antidote to a noticeable tendency to generalise and/or homogenise Covid-19 realities. But it is reminiscent of Ribeiro et al.’s (2020) interest in territorialising the various elements of the pandemic, even if the ACSS typology’s intent is utilitarian rather than radicalising. And while there might well be tools of value in these profiles for an eventual construction of political economies of coronavirus risk and avoidance, their value would be much enhanced by an acknowledgement of the much wider impact of neoliberalism on increasing vulnerability among the popular classes, and not only in relation to continental health and welfare systems, but also to the way different countries are unevenly integrated into the world economy.
Combining infographics from sources like the ACSS with details from the coronavirus in Africa Tracker (ACSS 2020a, 2020c; African Arguments 2020), among others, helps to highlight the primary role of important regional nodes on global commodity/value chains, capital flows and passenger traffic as continental infection ‘gateways’ at the extremities of the continent (African Arguments 2020; Egbejule 2020). It also helps to better understand the pandemic’s subsequent in-continent/country evolution and presumed drivers, while anticipating possible responses to its varied direct and indirect manifestations (ACSS 2020c). As Egbejule (2020) notes of North Africa’s pandemic hotspot and gateway role, citing in part a former Liberian cabinet minister, its ‘unique geographical location, culture and socio-political history make it less isolated from Europe – one of the pandemic’s worst hotspots – than the rest of Africa. [It is] thus much more connected to Europe and integrated into European value chains than [its SSA] counterparts … . This integration translates into significant people-to-people exchanges with significant North African diaspora communities in the worst affected European countries – Italy, Spain and France.’ For many African individuals and groups, then, Covid-19 is a disease first and foremost of the internationally (particularly intercontinentally) mobile, of privileged elites to be laughed at and mocked for their inability to seek medical treatment overseas as readily as they would no doubt have done in pre-coronavirus times (Nwaubani 2020). Available official and media reports suggest primary infections were indeed linked overwhelmingly to traveller arrivals from Asian, American and European epicentres, ‘with most imported cases coming from Europe’ (Taylor 2020), although several African countries had been identified by the WHO as being at particular risk because of the frequency and volume of their air transport links to China (Mallapaty 2020). But widespread local fears of a major risk of direct infections posed by resident and visiting Chinese do not appear to have been realised thus far. However, as in Europe and America, this might not have been enough to prevent reported incidents of racial profiling or anti-Chinese prejudice, and other expressions of sometimes state-sanctioned xenophobia (Mwaura 2020).4 Similar fears and widespread reservations were expressed about perceived risks posed by returning country nationals, particularly those repatriated from coronavirus epicentres, even though they would have been subject to existing testing, monitoring and quarantine regulations and procedures. Also, while uncommon, coronavirus infection importation from Africa is not unheard of, and the Vietnamese government had to repatriate some 120 to 140 of its nationals from Equatorial Guinea, where they had contracted Covid-19 while employed as migrant construction workers (Nguyen 2020).
Reliable reports also suggest an initial urban bias in community transmission. In Sierra Leone, for instance, one of the last African countries to report confirmed infection and still with no official fatalities in late April, the daily update for 22 April locates at least 70% of national infections in the Western Urban district containing the capital Freetown (MIC 2020). Similar urban biases have been reported elsewhere in the ECOWAS region in Ghana and Burkina Faso, which had by some margin the highest number of reported infections and fatalities, respectively (ECOWAS 2020). Here, the two largest Burkinabè urban centres accounted for nearly 82% of all infections (Boureima 2020), while the two most impacted regions in Ghana were Greater Accra and Ashanti, and in particular their respective metropolitan areas of Accra and Kumasi (Africanews 2020). In Nigeria, Lagos, Abuja and (latterly) Kano have emerged as the three main epicentres (Amaza 2020). But while this might simply reflect an imbalance in the availability of testing facilities and coverage of reporting, (early) trends and patterns are subject to rapid change, as a nearly 17-fold increase in Guinea Bissau’s confirmed cases over a two-week period reminds us (ACSS 2020a). Available statistics thus need to be closely monitored and carefully interpreted. The previously mentioned ACSS typology, for its part, sees urban population density and levels of international exposure (mediated largely via urban societies, economies and infrastructure) as strongly correlated with incidence of regional and country coronavirus hotspots, but contains little explicit reference to applicability of this information to rural Africa. As Diop et al. (2020) observe, however, there is ‘little information on the relative rate of transmission of COVID-19 between rural and urban areas’, although Africa’s relatively young population and sparsely populated rural areas may limit both the spread and severity of the virus, leading to staggered peaks within individual countries. Across rural and urban Africa, it is also unclear how the impact of widespread infectious diseases and comorbidities might affect the immune system’s capacity to stave off coronavirus infection (Mburu and Boum 2020). Nor is there any certainty regarding how long the pandemic is likely to last, although there are speculations that ‘[l]ike HIV, Sars-CoV-2 is here to stay’ (Osterholm and Olshaker 2020).
Sometimes, as in northern Nigeria, rapid change in infection and mortality rates and totals or spikes are unintended consequences of state and other responses aimed, somewhat ironically, at mitigating the spread of the virus. Here, regional state government intervention involving coordinated repatriation of almajirai or peripatetic Koranic boy learners across all 19 northern states to their various states of origin during a country-wide lockdown led to the mostly urban–rural transfer of (possibly tens of) thousands of boys, significant numbers and proportions of whom would test positive for Covid-19 on arrival in those home states which practised testing and quarantining (Orjinmo and Abubakar 2020). We can only speculate on probable effects on relative rural–urban transmission rates and community transmission at regional or state and federal levels. At the same time, the brief glimpse offered of vulnerability within the institution of almajirinci, specifically of its adherents, highlights the value of extending ACSS (2020c) coverage of vulnerability of country/territory to that of individuals/groups making up country populations (UNECA 2020), and suggests interesting avenues for exploration – state, class, religion, labour, colonialism, exploitation, petro-capitalism and so forth – which are all implicated in the political economy of Covid-19 risk, vulnerability and response.
We are not all in this together
Much of the foregoing suggests that there is now widespread recognition that Covid-19 has ‘a political, as well as a biological, epidemiology’ (O’Toole 2020), which amplifies existing but often hidden disparities in society and impacts most negatively on the vulnerable and marginalised, ‘those who were already marked as surplus to the movements of power and capital and security’ (Ironstone 2020). The almajirai represent one of many such (in this case migrant and displaced) examples (BBC 2020f). It is for this reason that Mair (2020) insists, even while acknowledging its ‘environmental’ origins, that coronavirus transmission and spread are ‘socially driven’, with roots in a political economy of crisis which prioritises exchange value and the market over other kinds of value. Or, to put it more directly, while the Covid-19 virus might not discriminate, political economy does, frequently reinforcing existing, and sometimes creating new patterns of coronavirus-related inequality (Ironstone 2020; Malik 2020), as even the Bretton Woods institutions and regional development banks now readily admit (IMF 2020).5 Coronavirus thus affects people from all continents and countries, albeit in differing ways and to different degrees (Solnit 2020), while highlighting pre-existing inequalities and biases in society (Ironstone 2020). But if Covid-19 ‘underscores the limits of both neo-liberal globalization that has reigned supreme since the 1980s, and populist nationalisms that have bestrode the world since the 2000s’ (Zeleza 2020), it has also, and equally importantly, given rise to transnational solidarity and anti-capitalist resistance and opposition (see endnote 1 and ROAPE blogpost [Roape.net n.d.] for examples). ROAPE is fully committed to the emergent intra- and inter-national ‘movements’ which aim to resist attempts by coronavirus interventions to privilege the interests of capital at the expense of labour and nature. For its part, transnational capital is already making its long-term intentions clear, judging from how well positioned corporate philanthropists like Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group and Strive Masiyawa’s Econet already appear to be to capitalise on the expanded digitalisation of economy and society already under way. Or, indeed, by the prospects for similarly expanded profit generation in a new Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) for Dangote Cement, which is already pursuing a strategy to increase the relative contribution of its rest-of-Africa operations to overall company profits (Megayo 2020). Little wonder. For, as Fernando (2020, 367) cautions, although a variety of pandemic responses have emerged across the world, states show little readiness or enthusiasm for abandoning neoliberal economic growth, the latter’s manifest failure to respond effectively to the challenge of Covid-19 notwithstanding.
Yet the entreaty to know your pandemic and responses to it in order to act on its politics poses something of an ongoing challenge. While Asian and European countries had been caught unawares by the unexpected emergence of Covid-19, African countries were able to anticipate and, in some cases at least, plan for its seemingly inevitable arrival (Mburu and Boum 2020). They were also able to contemplate widespread and increasingly concerning predictions of its potential for overwhelming their continent’s chronically underfunded public healthcare, and heavily dependent and informalised economic systems (BBC 2020b; Boseley 2020). Thus:
In China and much of Europe, the coronavirus crisis precedes an economic crisis. But in many developing nations the economic shock has come first, as governments have locked down their economies to reduce the speed of contagion. As a result, countries in Africa and Latin America, together with Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, are expected to suffer their greatest ever economic decline. (Goldin 2020)
In the event, African economies have had to contend with both the indirect effects of lockdowns in/by other countries and the direct effects of their own quarantine, border closures, lockdowns and social distancing measures, as countries round the world try desperately to slow the spread of a pandemic caused by a highly infectious respiratory virus for which there is still no vaccine and which does not require direct contact for transmission (Quakyi 2020). Nor, it would appear, is SARS-CoV-2 (the virus which causes Covid-19) affected by either seasonality or weather (Osterholm and Olshaker 2020). Beyond this, what we actually know about the pace, direction and transmission of the pandemic for certain is growing but remains limited, often speculative and widely anticipatory, with much seeming to depend on outcomes of Covid-19 response interventions rather than on SARS-CoV-2 biology per se (Diop et al. 2020). Indeed, as virus biology may be much less dangerous than human behaviour in the face of real and perceived risks of Covid-19 (Cole 2020), public policy responses aim specifically to influence human behaviour. As ubiquitous as they are controversial, these policies have attracted particular attention, notably their unintended but not always unanticipated economic, social, political and, to a lesser degree, environmental consequences (UN 2020; UNECA 2020). As I show next, there is here another reminder of why state authorities, for example in Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea, and Egypt, among others, go to great lengths to control the Covid-19 narrative, including withholding official statistics from, and even expelling representatives of external monitoring and reporting agencies, and foreign journalists, considered not to be ‘on message’.
Alex de Waal (2020) has noted that although a ‘global pandemic unfolds in different ways in different countries, … governments usually adopt a standardised set of interventions regardless of their differences’. In the current pandemic, the most commonly adopted policy responses across Africa have been governance policy (travel bans, border closures, lockdowns/curfews, travel bans and states of emergency), macro-economic policy (fiscal, monetary and exchange rate measures) and socio-economic policy (enterprise and income support, and social programmes) – all preferences and/or choices which undoubtedly reflect the early adoption of a joint African Union continental strategy to complement national and regional initiatives (UN 2020). But as both UN (Ibid.) and Ozili (2020) also show, there are significant differences in the rate of adoption of individual policies and in the degree of policy stringency. Far fewer countries, for example, set out to mitigate socio-economic impacts (generally reactive) than to enforce governance policy (pro-active and preventative). But if behavioural change can reduce the spread of Covid-19 by up to 80% as the WHO claims (Cole 2020), this does strengthen the case for the widespread early enforcement of governance policy. The most frequent of these are varying degrees of lockdown. However, as Osterholm and Olshaker (2020) note, ‘[w]e know that strategic lockdown causes great economic and social pain, and we must be prepared to continue taking care of those who suffer as a result, whatever the price’ (emphasis added). As both the media and activists on the continent have emphasised, and as governments are well aware, those who suffer the most are the tens of millions of the mostly urban poor, marginalised and self-employed pursuing precarious informal sector existences (Burke 2020), often of necessity in violation of curfews, lockdowns, travel bans and social distancing measures. So what possible justification could there be for the dehumanising, brutalising and even murderous treatment that these citizens, many of whom are women, children and migrants, have reportedly been subject to by enforcement agents (Bugeja 2020; Bujakera and Mersie 2020; Olewe 2020)? In Angola alone, to take one of the more egregious of such cases, security forces enforcing coronavirus measures reportedly killed seven teenagers over a two-month period, all of them from poor neighbourhoods in Luanda, the national capital (BBC 2020g).
Nor is this a rhetorical question. State income support and social policy and palliative measures to mitigate the worst effects of lockdowns, curfews and states of emergency have been the exception rather than the rule, with most governments clearly considering their cost either unaffordable or too high a price to pay (UN 2020). Where such measures have taken the form of macro-economic interventions (for example interest rate cuts and tax relief), they have not benefited the vast majority of people in overwhelmingly informalised economies either directly or at all. And, while they have been welcome in countries like South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, Morocco and Uganda which have adopted them, publicly funded cash transfers and food deliveries have rarely been able to come anywhere near to satisfying existing legitimate demand, given its sheer scale, diversity and need for accurate targeting. Equatorial Guinea, whose leaders had donated US$2 million to China in support of its coronavirus response prior to the arrival of SARS-CoV-2 in Africa (Ozili 2020), has opted for targeted (not universal) ‘basic’ supplies of food and other essential products, personal and home hygiene kits, and access to counselling, social support and healthcare services, as part of its social protection measures (Vieira de Almeida 2020). Under the cover of coronavirus governance policy, governments in North Africa are silencing dissent and reining in opposition (Yerkes 2020), with Egyptian coronavirus frontline workers voicing dissatisfaction at poor working conditions, being intimidated and silenced in a manner reminiscent of China’s treatment of Covid-19 whistle-blowers and protesters (Michaelson 2020). In Tunisia and Mauritius, government measures designed to counter fake coronavirus news are being used to silence well-founded criticism and dissent over official Covid-19 policy and to limit freedom of expression more generally (Budoo 2020). In yet other countries like Guinea and Zambia, the pandemic is being used as cover by sitting presidents/regimes ‘to advance … authoritarian agendas and prolong their time in office’ (Cheeseman and Smith 2020). Charities and volunteers therefore continue to play an important role in running shelters and feeding centres, supplying potable water, hand sanitisers and masks, but also in monitoring and publicising human rights abuses and executive and judicial excess in collaboration with various activists/groups and sympathetic media outlets.
But to return to de Waal, while there are undoubtedly significant overlaps in the broad policy types adopted as coronavirus response measures across countries, there are also noticeable, even significant, differences in policy choice and timing which reflect varied local political economic contexts and pandemic experiences. Indeed, even with lockdowns, the most widely adopted of any policy option, ‘each [one] is different’ (UN 2020, 6), reflecting no doubt the specifics of the ‘innumerable local epidemics, each one slightly different’ evoked by de Waal himself (de Waal and Richards 2020). That outcomes are similar, predictable and, in some cases, predicted should not be allowed to obscure this complex and differentiated reality. Indeed, an awareness of the latter should help to guide the search for relevant information to complement what we already know for certain. That is that the world is still in the grip of a coronavirus pandemic; that Africa might or might not be its current epicentre; and that nobody knows for sure how Africa’s many ‘other’ or local epidemics will evolve over the next few weeks, months or even years. Yet this has not stopped multilateral institutions and multinational corporations from outlining a variety of options for exiting lockdowns and, ultimately, the entire or whole pandemic; or indeed predicting and modelling the contours of post-coronavirus ‘new normal’ continental and/or global economies. As an increasing number of countries exit lockdowns, this should awaken an urgent desire among progressive forces to redirect the focus of attention to a determined pursuit of an analytically rigorous understanding of the differentiated spread and impact of, and state and other responses to Covid-19 – and in so doing to return also to what ought to be our core concern: the political economy of uneven incorporation of African economies, societies and natures into the world economy, the accompanying implications for social, spatial, structural and other forms of differentiation, and the latter’s manifestation within and between population, place and space/territory. For, as Philip Alston (2020) reminds us, ‘[t]he coronavirus has merely lifted the lid off the pre-existing pandemic of poverty. Covid-19 arrived in a world where poverty, extreme inequality and disregard for human life are thriving, and in which legal and economic policies are designed to create and sustain wealth for the powerful, but not end poverty. This is the political choice that has been made.’ For ROAPE it is a political choice that cannot and must not be allowed to stand unchallenged either in the current coronavirus times or in a post-Covid-19 world.
Articles in this issue
There are five articles in this issue – two are thematic papers while three present detailed case studies. In the first of these, enduring poverty, worsening inequality and a degrading environment in the midst of petroleum wealth represent the immediate context for Isidore Udoh’s examination of socio-environmental conflict in the Niger Delta. The paper’s aim is to search for theoretical and empirical explanations for this regional conflict, notably the recourse to armed struggle against the state and petroleum mining companies by groups from oil-producing communities. But rather than concentrate on the macro-scale and/or on actual violence as much previous research has done, Udoh combines macro-scale and micro-level analyses, while paying particular attention to grassroots perspectives on conflict from a cross-section of Delta society. In particular, he is interested in what his respondents say about perceived causes of, and solutions to violent local conflict, but also in how his findings stand up to scrutiny when compared to relevant theoretical and empirical literature. The second of these aims is the more straightforward, with largely unproblematic findings. Indeed, Udoh’s early observation that ‘the failure of neoliberal globalisation has spawned simmering grievances, a survivalist culture and a politics of ethnic mobilisation’ (2020, p. 200) is shown to be both relevant and appropriate throughout the article. The paper’s real value lies, however, in its pursuit of the first of its aims. Here it offers valuable insight into complex local intra-ethnic societal dynamics, in particular the expressions of political action and grievances against local ruling elite and emergent commercial and sectional interests, on the one hand, and the polarisation of opportunity and wealth resulting from this, on the other. In short, Udoh highlights how petro-capitalism’s disruptive, divisive and destructive macro-scale tendencies are manifest at the local level in sometimes unexpected ways, thereby providing further support, if more were needed, for the widely held belief that violent conflict thrives in the toxic atmosphere of ‘divide and rule’ created and maintained in existence by collusion between government officials, local or ‘traditional’ leaders and multinational petroleum company representatives.
But what is particularly striking about the findings is, first, how desperately his respondents crave truly representative, trustworthy, accountable and responsive leadership at all levels and across state, civil society and big business; and, second, how clear-eyed they also appear to be about the various ways in which they could become sufficiently ‘empowered’ as individuals and groups to challenge the worst excesses of elite collusion, state oppression and corporate greed. What we encounter, then, is no amorphous peasantry or undifferentiated proletariat, and certainly not individuals and communities devoid of all agency. Udoh concludes, not surprisingly, that only a negotiated (rather than imposed) settlement is likely to provide a lasting solution to conflict in the Delta, and that this will have to meet local expectations, particularly among Delta youth, to be treated as equal partners by the Nigerian state and its corporate clients in matters to do with the generation and distribution of oil wealth. Such equal partnership, the paper specifies further, must promote ‘development’ of a kind which ‘benefits, empowers and uplifts’ the region’s poor, while operating on the basis of ‘transparency, accountability, trust, participation, inclusion and responsible oil production practices which do not violate the integrity of the region’s ecology’ (2020, p. 217).
In the interim, how might coronavirus have impacted on Delta populations of the kind studied here, and which are directly linked to global commodity/value chains which would have been disrupted by lockdowns in both the producer and consumer zones? Would the regional poor, who are among some of the country’s poorest, have been able to benefit from palliative programmes at both state and federal levels? How might the ‘simmering grievances’, ‘survivalist culture’ and ‘politics of mobilisation’ which Udoh references, and which can, for present purposes, be seen as the localisation of neoliberal-globalisation-in-crisis, have been affected by the pandemic and/or responses to it?
The second article is an examination of Chinese investment in the Sierra Leone telecommunication sector by Aaron van Klyton, Said Rutabayiro-Ngoga and Lakmal Liyanage. Like Tom Goodfellow, who we encounter later, the authors are interested in the politics of international finance in infrastructure in Africa. But while both international financial institutions (IFIs) and China may be uninterested in significant real estate investment in Africa, as Goodfellow suggests, Klyton and his co-authors demonstrate that the opposite is true in the case of telecommunications infrastructure. Both papers are interested in the uneven incorporation of territories, spaces and places into a world economy, and the dependent nature of Africa’s links within this economy. However, in their Sierra Leone case study, van Klyton and his colleagues trace the structures and processes via which the World Bank continues to impose its tutelage on countries, particularly in the form of development/technical assistance. Central to this are policy and loan conditionalities which function not only ‘as a screening device that measures the willingness of a debtor country to align itself with IFI neoliberal policies’ (2020, p. 221), but also as integral components of wider historical and contemporary processes and factors which ‘structurally trap African countries’ within wider configurations of unequal exchange. Chinese investment, on the other hand, did not come with similar ‘indirect means of persuasion’ or control, although it was securitised in other more palatable ways.
Using the concept of the ‘organisational field’ which refers to ‘a community of organisations engaged in a common meaning system and whose members interact with each other more than with actors not in the field’ (2020, p. 222), the paper tracks the shifting contours of power, autonomy and dependence characterising such interaction in the case of the Sierra Leone component of a World Bank-funded project to extend fibre optic cables from Europe to the West African coast. The West Africa Regional Communication Infrastructure Programme (WARCIP) also included Liberia which, unlike Sierra Leone, did not defy any of the Bank’s conditionalities, and is therefore not central to the paper’s narrative. Taking the terrain of IFI telecommunications funding and WARCIP as their ‘organisational field’, the authors identify relevant interests and agents, set out the rules governing interaction between them, and explain how power, and therefore the capacity to effect far-reaching change, is negotiated and/or contested. In particular, they show how neoliberalism both establishes and perpetuates itself; and call attention to the opportunity offered by China’s infrastructure-for-loan programme which is deployed as a foil by Sierra Leonean government officials in resisting World Bank requirements to liberalise the local broadband market via public–private partnership contracts. Thus, Chinese intervention in international telecommunications funding without associated neoliberal conditionalities opened up IFI dominance to challenge in this as in other areas of development/technical exchange. Indeed, van Klyton et al. suggest that the inevitable Bank suspension of programme funding in retaliation for the country’s failure to fulfil agreed conditionalities in full became merely symbolic, with a Chinese replacement loan making up the shortfall in practice. That the Bank opted for confrontation and public censure rather than renegotiate terms and increase its competitiveness in the face of the Chinese challenge indicates its steadfast ideological commitment to continuing to impose a neoliberal capitalist logic on African economies, societies and environments, and maintain its ongoing assault on the socially progressive or interventionist state.
Both the Chinese presence and persistence of neoliberalism in Africa are recurring themes in the pages of ROAPE which resonate with the editorial’s main preoccupation. For a start, IFI neoliberalism contributed significantly to the increased vulnerability of the popular classes both in the run-up to, and since the arrival of Covid-19. But neoliberalism has also influenced the nature, extent and intensity of state coronavirus response, favouring more generous macroeconomic policy aimed at mostly big business at the expense of more circumscribed socio-economic intervention targeting the poor and marginalised. Furthermore, welfare interventions are considered extraordinary and temporary rather than long-term or permanent, with lockdown exit strategies envisaging a rapid return to market-based post-coronavirus exchange. Central to all this, as to neoliberal globalisation more generally, is a considerably expanded role for information and communications technology (ICT) and digitalisation, which WARCIP was designed to facilitate in the first place, and whose potential for profit generation provided explicit justification for Sierra Leone government reluctance to divest its telecommunications infrastructure holdings. The sight of Strive Masiyiwa’s Econet Group combining a social welfare function with profit generation during Covid-19 might well have engendered feelings of vindication among officials concerned, even if their overriding motivation might not have been entirely community-spirited.
Godwin Okeke and Uche Nwali’s examination of ‘money politics’ in Nigeria is the third of the articles in this issue. Like Udoh they also take Nigeria’s gross inequalities in access to wealth and opportunities for social advancement as their starting point. However, the focus here is on poverty (or, more accurately, disparities in wealth) and its direct and indirect effects on the functioning of institutions of democracy, in this case electoral politics. They argue that a defining characteristic of Nigerian democracy is that ‘capital-intensive electoral politics, and … material inducement [are used] to manipulate elections and their outcome’ (2020, p. 238). They demonstrate this via an examination of the origins, structure and functioning of this ‘money politics’, which appears to flourish in the face of repeated enactment of legislation designed specifically to regulate its malign influence. In doing so, they illustrate why a widespread desire among Nigerians for progressive leadership at all levels, and the right to influence the choice of who they are governed by via free and fair elections, is likely to remain unfulfilled. They insist that to look for an explanation for this depressing state of affairs in a reluctance or failure to enforce existing and enact new legislation is to miss the point. The explanation, they are convinced, lies in the class character of postcolonial Nigeria, specifically the links between class, economic structure and the law: laws, they point out, serve to protect the interests of the dominant class, in this case a coalition of political, military and business elites. The paper thus explores these links in the case of recent campaign finance laws, to demonstrate in detail how such legislation is ‘rendered toothless or ineffective’ in practice (2020, p. 240). In the process they show that the overall effect of money politics is to undermine meaningful popular participation in the democratic process; price men, women and youth of limited means out of electoral politics; reinforce elite control over state power and resources; and, by exacerbating marginalisation and vulnerability of the majority while guaranteeing continuing accumulation by a minority, it widens socio-economic inequality and intensifies poverty.
Yet it is precisely such corruption of structures, process and people which partly explains why large sections of the labouring/popular classes have been unable to respond effectively to the challenges posed by Covid-19, and have ended up needing palliative measures to help sustain life and livelihood. But, commonly reserved for the poorest and most deprived citizens, these have sometimes turned out to be non-existent, inadequate and/or poorly-timed, in addition to being authorised by elected politicians, and funded partly by donations from philanthropists, some of whom would also have donated generously to the costs of election campaigns which saw the politicians elected to office in the first place. In short, Okeke and Nwali help to explain why, like Udoh’s respondents, many Nigerians end up with governments/rulers they are unhappy with, and for some of whom the best interests of the electorate do not appear to be a priority, except in a cynical self-centred way (as in the anecdote of the privately sponsored coronavirus public health message posters with the prominently displayed identity of its sponsor who also happens to aspire to elective office). But if the article makes for depressing if not entirely unfamiliar reading, its authors are careful to also identify hopeful signs of popular resistance, even if these have sometimes been ethically suspect and/or legally questionable. Yet their very existence augurs well for a more progressive post-Covid future.
Tom Goodfellow addresses questions of political settlement in his article, which returns us to the theme of political economy of infrastructure provision and funding first introduced by van Klyton. Like Udoh’s Niger Delta study, Goodfellow’s careful, detailed and analytically rigorous examination of urban infrastructure and real estate also qualifies as an examination of the localisation of neoliberal globalisation. By its own admission more a contribution to conceptual debates than an empirical case study per se, Goodfellow’s contribution sets out to complement the focus on relations of production and labour in studies of African capitalism by highlighting ‘the operation of [international finance] capital’ (2020, p. 265), particularly its uneven geographical development. A key tool in demonstrating the latter, in showing how global finance capital and domestic real estate investment intersect to produce a particular capitalist dynamic on the ground, is the realisation that ‘while on the one hand international financial flows are increasingly infrastructuralised, on the other, domestic capital is real-estatised’ (p. 258). Along the way, Goodfellow shows how the structure, composition and functioning of capitalism in Africa has evolved since seminal contributions of/by John Saul, Colin Leys, Giovanni Arrighi and James Fergusson; notes the differentiated nature of capitalism on the continent at the present time; and reiterates the crucial point that
We cannot … fully understand operations of capital in Africa without attention to which groups of people exercise power over the economy, acknowledging that these forms and sources of power are often not those conventionally associated with capitalist economic relations. (2020, p. 267)
In the final paper, Jean-Claude Ashukem speaks to how agro-capitalism operates on a global scale, ostensibly as a tool for poverty reduction, enhanced food security and the achievement of a green economy. He is interested in the intertwined pursuit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and a global green economy (‘[t]he bio-economy plays a key role in the transition to a more circular, renewable and resource-efficient society by 2030’, 2020, p. 279), but particularly in the likely consequences for Africa’s peasantry and natural environment. Thus Ashukem devotes fully a third of the paper to illustrating current/recent trends in land grab; identifying the driving forces which account for them; and demonstrating how addressing ‘global food and energy crises, … one of the underlying objectives of both the bio-economy and SDGs [would] further augment pressure on land use in SSA’ (p. 281). Yet it is precisely such profit-driven land use change, involving extensive forest and woodland clearance, expansion of intensive agriculture and creation of new neoliberal landscapes of green ecology/economy, which reorganises human–nature relations in ways which facilitate transmission of potentially zoonotic viruses like SARS-CoV-2 (Fernando 2020). As Fairhead, Leach and Scoones (2012) have observed, and as Ashukem confirms here, not only does such ‘green [land] grabbing’ represent the most recent in a long line of colonial and neo-colonial interventions which alienate resources under the guise of environmental protection and/or improvement, but it also involves a bewildering array of capitalist interests and agents engaged in new ways of valuing, commodifying and marketing nature and its resources. In other words, we have here a contribution which complements the earlier papers by van Klyton et al. and Goodfellow in accounting for Africa’s attraction to various types of global investment finance. Once again, we can only speculate on the implications of the land grab and dispossession discussed on the capacity of local economies, societies and livelihoods for coping with the ravages of Covid-19. But whether or not what Ashukem describes as the ‘dark side’ of the bioeconomy–SDG nexus is ever fully realised and international commercial interests are given free rein in facilitating land grab, intensifying class conflict, worsening poverty and degrading natural environments are ultimately a political decision.
Briefings and debates
In this issue’s briefings, the first piece, by Ikedinachi K. Ogamba, contributes to the debate on education and inequalities in the era of neoliberal globalisation. Using the case of Nigeria and the analytical lens of the capability approach, it explores the extent to which conditional cash transfers have expanded the choices and potentials of children from poor households. It finds that the effectiveness of the transfer programme in mitigating the effects of neoliberal policies in education and addressing inequalities – both in a commercialised school sector and society more broadly – has been limited. Next, Musiwaro Ndakaripa examines some of the major financial dynamics in Zimbabwe’s July 2018 presidential, parliamentary and local government elections, particularly matters of election funding and vote buying. Accordingly, having come to power through military assistance just a few months before, in November 2017, the new government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa of the governing Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF), instituted only cosmetic political reforms to gain legitimacy while maintaining financial networks and tentacles on public institutions. Using the concept of ‘competitive authoritarianism’, Ndakaripa shows that the government then retained power also thanks to a huge funding base, abuse of public resources and massive vote buying that made the elections materially a highly biased affair, in favour of the ruling party.
Relatedly, Mike Chipere, in a debate contribution, explores Zimbabwe’s current political crisis, particularly the predicament in political leadership. He identifies three main impediments to getting out of the crisis: the present rule of Mnangagwa and his ZANU–PF party; the leadership and policies of the largest opposition party, the MDC; and the operations of the World Bank and the IMF in the country. For Chipere, Zimbabwe needs to find a ‘third-way’ political movement whose main priority is to propose a new trajectory for the country which (i) dispels the delusions and divides advanced by the ruling party and other influential actors including the MDC and IFIs, and (ii) uses home-grown policies, based on a deep appreciation of local realities, not borrowed ideas from elsewhere. In another debate piece, Rune Larsen and Stig Jensen offer a critical perspective on Western imaginations of Africa. They discuss how exceptionalised images of Africa are reproduced in contemporary Western discourse and imagination. They argue that these exceptionalised depictions of Africa enable Western consciousness to escape a confrontation with its own dysfunctionalities, thus projecting all the excremental features characterising human existence on to its African Other. This is interpreted by Larsen and Jensen as a way for Western subjects to alter themselves into a position of idealised and imagined advanced civilisation – thus legitimising contemporary acts of neo-colonial exploitation in Africa.
Finally, in the second part of John Saul’s contribution to debate on the importance of the ‘hero’ in history, he reflects on the assassination of liberated Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel, and its impact on the course of Mozambique’s postcolonial history. He goes on to examine the wave of assassinations that have scarred Mozambique’s recent history, and interprets this as the consequence of the vanguardism of the greedy Frelimo elite intent on keeping control of the country in their own interest, boding ill for the majority of the country’s people. We encourage Debate contributions on the issues Saul raises.
On Roape.net
Since the start of the pandemic roape.net has had a wide-ranging focus of the impact of Covid-19 on the continent. We have covered aspects of comedy and public health, and resistance and crackdowns on poor communities across the continent. We have also brought in new writers, from Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, to cover developments.
In April, near the start of the global shutdown, we spoke to activists and researchers on how governments were using the virus as a cover for wider repression, in the broader context of capitalism, climate change and popular struggle. For example, in April Heike Becker, Femi Aborisade and Issa Shivji (2020) reported on the reaction of governments, the struggles of poor communities and the urgency of building of a new world out of the ruins of the old.
Another blogpost by Ambreena Manji (2020) argued that we need a better understanding of home, labour and inequality in the pandemic, and that feminist thought is central to a just future. Focusing on the global South, she argued that women have borne the brunt of the violence directed towards the homes of working people.
In addition to covering the Covid-19 crisis we have posted widely in other areas. At the beginning of June on the fortieth anniversary of the murder of the revolutionary Walter Rodney in Georgetown, Guyana, we used the occasion to look at the epoch-making Black Lives Matter struggles around the world following the murder of George Floyd in the USA. In an interview with Jesse Benjamin, leading activist and thinker of the Walter Rodney Foundation in Atlanta, we discussed the new struggles in the context of Rodney’s life and work (Benjamin and Zeilig 2020). In the same week, we published a robust and erudite defence of Rodney’s political economy by Walter Daum (2020).
Other blogposts of note have been Magdi el Gizouli and Edward Thomas on the dynamics of the Sudanese revolution and the need to delve beyond the asphalt of cities and towns: this contribution was posted on the first anniversary of the massacre of protesters in Khartoum last year (el Gizouli and Thomas 2020). We also posted Jean Copans’ (2020b) blogpost ‘introduction’ to his article published in the March issue of ROAPE (currently available to read for free: Copans 2020a) on social class, African studies and linguistic divides.