Still in chains: South Africa after apartheid

                                 They never freed us. They only took the chain   
from around our neck and put it on our ankles 

-- anti-apartheid activist Rassool Snyman to Naomi Klein

The fight against the system of racial segregation and white supremacy called apartheid (“apartness” in Afrikaans) was one of the great liberal and left-wing causes of my generation. It was a fight not only for political democracy in South Africa but also for socio-economic reform. The Freedom Charter, adopted by the African National Congress in 1955 called for “restoring national wealth to the people” (understood as nationalization of the mines, banks and “monopoly industry”), “re-dividing the land among those who work it to banish famine and land hunger,” improved pay and working conditions, free healthcare, universal literacy, and decent housing for all.

Apartheid as a political and legal system was dismantled in the early 1990s. South Africa’s capitalists did not on the whole object. Apartheid had brought them immense profits from the exploitation of a cheap captive labour force. But it had its drawbacks. By denying training and advancement to a large majority of the workforce, it created a growing shortage of skilled labour. Capitalists are often willing to accept a measure of social change, provided that they can set its limits.

Little change

Although apartheid is gone, economically South Africa is still one of the most unequal countries in the world. Almost all the land, mines and industry remain in the same (mostly white) hands. Almost half the population lives below subsistence level. Unemployment is widespread; children scavenge on dumps and landfill sites from sunrise to sunset seven days a week. Life expectancy is falling (a drop of 13 years since 1990) as AIDS, drug-resistant TB and other diseases spread.

Even segregation still exists in practice. The wealthy take shelter in “gated communities” from the violence pervading the shantytowns. As the wealthy are no longer exclusively but only predominantly white, the proper name for this is class rather than race segregation.

True, efforts have been made to improve living conditions. Close to two million new homes have been built. (Whether they count as “decent housing” is another matter.) Water, telephone and electricity networks have been expanded. But while millions were rehoused, millions were also evicted for rent arrears. Nine million people were connected to the water supply, but during the same period ten million were disconnected as the price rose out of their reach.

Caught in a web

How did the main reform goals of the Freedom Charter come to be abandoned? Political journalist William Mervin Gumede tells the story in his book Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (Cape Town: Zebra Press 2005).

While political negotiations, conducted in the glare of publicity, moved the ANC toward government office, parallel and almost unpublicized economic negotiations, led on the ANC side by Thabo Mbeki (now president), ensured that when the ANC did take office it would be unable to act against white business interests. A new clause of the constitution made all private property sacrosanct. Power over economic policy was ceded to an “autonomous” central bank and international financial institutions.

“The ANC found itself caught in a web made of arcane rules and regulations… As the web descended on the country only a few people even noticed it was there, but when the new government … tried to give its voters the tangible benefits they expected the strands of the web tightened and [it] discovered that its powers were tightly bound” (Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, pp. 202-3).

Relentless pressure

The ANC hierarchy came under “relentless pressure” from local and international business, the (business-controlled) media, foreign politicians, the World Bank and IMF, etc. It was “an onslaught for which the ANC was wholly unprepared” (Gumede, p. 72). This does not mean that crude demands and threats played a crucial role. It was a process more of seduction than intimidation, aimed at integrating a set of new partners into the institutional structure and social milieu of the global capitalist class.

This meant providing opportunities for ANC officials to go into business or train at American business schools and investment banks. Leading figures were lavished with hospitality: 

“Harry Oppenheimer [former chairman of Anglo American Corporation and De Beers Consolidated Mines] was eager to entertain Mandela at his private estate, while Anglovaal’s Clive Menell hosted him for Christmas (1990) at his mansion… While separated from his wife, Mandela’s home for several months was the palatial estate of insurance tycoon Douw Steyn… His daughter Zinzi had a honeymoon partly financed by resort and casino king Sol Kerzner, and Mandela spent Christmas 1993 in the Bahamas as a guest of Heinz and Independent Newspapers chairman Sir Anthony O’Reilly” (Gumede, p. 72).

It seems churlish to begrudge Mandela a little luxury after 27 years in prison. But what were his benefactors’ motives?

The markets: stern taskmasters

Nevertheless, the most effective form of capitalist influence was the impersonal pressure of “the markets.” As Mandela told the ANC’s 1997 national conference: 

“The mobility of capital and the globalization of the capital and other markets make it impossible for countries to decide national economic policy without regard to the likely response of these markets” (Klein, p. 207). 

And the markets punished the slightest sign of deviation from the “Washington consensus” with capital flight and speculation against the Rand.

Mbeki was the first to grasp what was needed to win the markets’ confidence. Precisely in order to live down its “revolutionary” and “Marxist” past, the ANC leaders had to prove themselves more Catholic than the pope. “Just call me a Thatcherite” – quipped Mbeki as he unveiled his new “shock therapy” programme in 1996. South Africa could not afford the protectionist measures with which Malaysia, for instance, warded off the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Orthodoxy, however, was never rewarded with the hoped-for flood of foreign investment.

The markets are stern taskmasters: they demand everything and promise nothing.

A sell-out?

It is not altogether fair to say that Mandela or Mbeki “sold out.” They simply saw no escape from the “web” spun by global capital. Indeed, at the national level there is no escape. Reformers in other countries, such as the Solidarity movement in Poland and Lula’s Workers’ Party in Brazil, have gone through much the same experience on reaching office. Socialists have long said that socialism cannot be established in a single country. Now we also know that under conditions of globalization even a meaningful programme of reform cannot be implemented in a single country.

Capital is global. That is its trump card against any attempt to defy its dictates that is confined within national boundaries. The resistance to capital must also be organized on a global scale if it is to have any chance of success.

Originally published March 2008

Nigeria's Crackdown on Free Speech

Nigeria is preparing legislation that could mean the death sentence for anyone found guilty of hate speech. It is also contemplating new media laws that have earned it the accusation of trying to curtail free speech. 

Ignoring strong criticism, the nation's highest lawmaking body, the Senate, is preparing a law which will make it possible to sentence to death by hanging anybody convicted of spreading hate speech. The Prohibition of Hate Speech Bill is being sponsored by Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, a lawmaker of the ruling All Progressives Congress party.

The bill, which was initially thrown out following a barrage of attacks, resurfaced suddenly a fortnight ago, going through two readings in just two weeks. It is a very extensive piece of legislation, which covers a slew of possible wrongdoings, including the publication or presentation of material deemed to stir up ethnic hatred. It also takes aim at written or visual acts seen as threatening, abusive, insulting or offensive. The proposed law says that any person who commits an offence of the kind described could be jailed for life. If the actions are found to have caused loss of life, the punishment can be death by hanging.

he government also aims to implement more stringent laws regulating the media. Information and Tourism Minister Lai Mohammed recently said that the laws passed 27 years ago needed to be re-evaluated. He added that the new bill ''will address the existing lacunae in the areas of the regulation of the Internet,'' among others.

Under the new laws, fines for erring broadcast media organizations will be moved upward from 500,000 Nigerian Naira (N) (€1,252) to N5 million for hate speech and related offences.

"Our view, and very much that of civil society organizations in Nigeria, is that the government does not have any patriotic or nationalistic reason for amending the existing broadcasting laws. In fact, the government is planning to target independent media. The primary target is the African Independent Television. Everybody knows that the federal government is not comfortable with the liberal approach that most of these independently-owned and operated electronic media houses,'' Emmanuel Onwubiko, coordinator for Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, told DW.

Uba Gaya, a public affairs analyst and former deputy president of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, an umbrella organization of Nigerian editors, described the bill by the lawmakers as illegal. He also advised the government to avoid actions that could scare away foreign investors. ''My view is that the government should tread with serious caution, so that it is not perceived negatively by the international community. Every step we take is being watched. There are international groups that monitor the media globally. They are watching every move, every step the federal government takes,'' Gaya told DW. Gaya called attention to the ''speedy pace'' the hate speech bill is going through the National Assembly. He added that he considers the changes to be illegal. ''The social media bill being considered by the National Assembly contravenes Section 39 of the 1999 Constitution of the Nigerian Federation of Nigeria, which guarantees freedom of expression, opinion,'' and information.

Leftist Hypocrisy about South Africa (1974)

 From the November 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The evils of capitalism are inherent, so that no matter whether it is run by avowed capitalists or alleged socialists, the leopard always has the same nasty spots. One perennial result is that when leftists get into power, they do the dirty work they spent their pseudo-socialist time denouncing while in opposition. It could be said that the reverse of the question: who will do the dirty work under Socialism? is: who actually does the dirty work under capitalism? On the one hand, dustmen, miners, and other workers. On the other, the claimants for the rôle are the leftist political swindlers.

It is possible that some of them, being particularly stupid, at first think they can run the system without the dirt. But experience of office soon makes the real position clear. A government has to govern (one of Wilson’s great sayings).

Examples are legion. During the Tories’ "thirteen wasted years", Wilson and Co. went on about the nastiness of Polaris submarines with their murderous missiles. Three Wilson governments later, and not only are the appalling weapons still in Holy Loch — nobody gives a second thought. Least of all the leftist Aldermaston marchers of the great days of yore, who are now members of the Government.

Another prime example is, of course, South Africa. For many years this has seemed a soft option to the leftists. The racialist regime there is gruesome even by capitalist standards (although it could hardly be worse than those in eastern Europe; or in black African countries such as Uganda or the Central African Republic where President Bakasa personally supervises the beating to death of political opponents). So for years we have endured the spectacle of leftist politicians getting publicity out of such world-shattering matters as the admission of a South African cricket team to this country.

But then, the pseudos get into power (plush offices and black limousines). Lo and behold, one of those who screamed loudest about the cricket tour in ’70 and actually threatened to sit on the wicket at Lord’s — such heroism: he might, in our climate, have got rheumatism in his leftist arse — called Frank Judd, actually finds himself the boss of the Royal Navy. Under the orders of the anti-apartheid Judd, our gallant sailors have been in Simonstown taking part in joint exercises with the South African Navy. Does Judd think this is a lesser encouragement to the racialist regime than playing cricket with them at Lord’s? Well no, he doesn’t. The report (in the Observer — and doubtless other papers too) made clear that Judd was most upset. But the interests of British capitalism (which has enormous investments in South Africa — its third biggest customer, too) demand that the British government plays ball in a more serious way than cricket — and if the blacks don’t like it, it seems they have to lump it.

You might say that if Judd’s conscience was so offended, he could throw up his job; perhaps also his seat in Parliament and his membership of the Labour Party. How can you belong to a party which practises the opposite of what it has preached? Perhaps someone can tell me the last time a pseudo-socialist leader, realising that when in power they were doing the same dirty work as all capitalist governments, left his party and denounced it as being fake-socialist. Some hopes!

About the same time, the TUC was engaged in its annual beano. About a dozen of their prominent leaders (“Mr. Ray Buckton and Others” as the Times put it) wrote a letter to that well-known socialist journal to say how they deplored these junketings contrary to the principles of the Labour Party, etc. ad nauseam. These nauseous specimens did not challenge Wilson when he addressed them a few days later by saying that unless the operation was called off they would leave the Labour Party. All they did was to get their smug letter into print so that later, when challenged about their attitude on the fashionable South Africa issue, they could look righteous and say: “we objected”. Would Vorster be trembling because they had written their useless letter while their government was supporting him (as it did, of course, in 1970 while the idiotic cricket rumpus was going on)? Will the downtrodden black workers feel uplifted by this cant?

Before leaving South Africa, the British Lions rugby team went on a tour of Apartheid-land recently despite the pleas of Wilson and his so-called Minister of Sport, the football referee Howell, to call it off. Wilson instructed the British Embassy there to have no truck with the team and not to socialize with it; no cocktail parties, etc. (Needless to say he did not instruct the Embassy to have no truck with Vorster. That would be serious.) So the Ambassador could carry on socializing with Vorster but not with Willie-John McBride — who would naturally be heart-broken to have to get tight on South African hospitality instead of British. But what happens when the Lions came back ? Why, the Minister of Sport himself drank toasts at their reception.

What unprincipled bastards Labour are !

L. E. Weidberg.

What Independence?

Although many on the continent have tended to equate decolonisation with the dawn of independence in the 1960s, independence, in fact, turned out to be a bit of a hoax.

While it improved life for some on the continent, for the most part, it did not mean freedom. Rather, it marked the internationalisation and indigenisation of colonialism. It was to become a tool to transform Africans from being the objects of colonial subjugation into partners in their own exploitation.

The largely forgotten Eurafrica project was a plan to replace European colonial competition for Africa's resources with an internationalised colonialism that would allow Europeans to jointly exploit the continent under the auspices of what became the European Union.

As European scholars Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson of Linkoping University in Sweden have noted, "the EU was from the outset designed, among other things, to enable a rational, co-European colonial management of the African continent".

As the Chinese do today, in the years following the end of World War II, many in Europe saw in Africa the resources and markets they required to rebuild their shattered economies and to join the United States and the USSR as a third superpower. Africa and its resources thus featured prominently in discussions over the creation of pan-European institutions. 

The Rome Treaty, which established the EEC in 1957, was nothing short of a resurrection of the Berlin Conference's General Act, which 73 years earlier had sought to create an internationalised regime of free trade stretching across the middle of Africa. The six European countries, without the involvement of any Africans, promised each other equal access to trading and investment opportunities in what is today the territory of 21 African countries: Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, the Republic of the Congo (Congo Brazzaville), the Central Africa Republic, Chad, Gabon, the Comoros, Madagascar, Djibouti, Togo, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia. In fact, as noted by Hansen and Jonsson, three-quarters of the territory covered by the EEC actually lay outside continental Europe.

Although the British did not join the first EEC treaty, they had similar ambitions for retaining control of their colonies. In 1947, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stafford Cripps, declared that "in Africa indeed is to be found a great potential for new strength and vigour in the Western European economy". British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan commissioned a cabinet committee report on the effect of African independence on "the prestige and influence of the UK" and whether "premature withdrawal of United Kingdom jurisdiction would leave a vacuum which would be filled by a country hostile to the United Kingdom and her Allies".

It was into this context that the countries of Africa were born. 

Congenitally misshapen, they were easy prey for Europe. The Eurafrica project was simply given a makeover as the 1963 Yaounde Convention signed between the EEC and 18 former French and Belgian colonies. Under the agreement, the Europeans allowed free access to their domestic markets to products from the African members, while the latter were, at least initially, permitted to impose restrictions on the entry of European goods into their territories in order to protect their own infant industries.

The UN Economic Commission for Africa had warned, as related by Hansen and Jonsson, that the arrangements were likely to lead to economic dependency by tempting the Africans "to prefer the short-run advantage of tariff concessions [in EEC markets] to the long-run gains of industrial development". This is because the Europeans were unlikely to keep their markets open if the Africans actually decided to lock out EEC goods. Sadly, the advice fell on deaf ears.

African nationalism was born, nurtured, encouraged and shaped by colonialism. Africans were encouraged to think of it as genuine indigenous expression. Even though the African nations espousing it were born out of the 1884 Berlin Conference and African nationalist leaders were the products of colonial schools and European universities, African nationalism was still cast as the antidote to colonialism rather than an outgrowth of it.

As described by the late Kenyan professor, Ali Mazrui, "African nationalism seeks to achieve and to maintain equality with Europe." Eurafrica gave African elites the opportunity to prance around the international stage pretending to be the equals of the colonial masters whose bidding they were doing.

By 1962, an American observer in Paris, Schofield Coryell, declared that African countries remained "essentially what they were: agricultural appendages to Europe". If this sounds familiar, it is because African elites are, to borrow from Wole Soyinka, still heading to foreign capitals to loudly proclaim their independence, while consigning their countrymen into debt and bondage.

Leopold Senghor, the first president of independent Senegal, recognised that decolonisation was more than simply independence. Writing in Le Monde in 1957 he declared: "By decolonisation, I mean the abolition of all prejudice, of any superiority complex in the minds of the coloniser, and also of any inferiority complex in the mind of the colonized." Senghor was the foremost proponent of negritude.

Andrew WM Smith and Chris Jeppesen note in their introduction to the book Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa, "Colonial authority never rested on juridical control alone. Its perpetuation depended upon complex systems of knowledge and power that facilitated the physical, racial, economic and linguistic subordination of colonial peoples."

 As long as it was built on the same systems and logic, "independence" was never going to undo it. True decolonisation requires more than just the physical absence of the coloniser. It means deconstructing the frameworks that have been used to define the African's place for him. That is the work that remains to be done.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/eurafrica-myth-african-independence-191124063734264.html

Measles - the killer

Measles has killed nearly 5,000 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2019, authorities said, after the disease spread to all the provinces in the country.

Close to a quarter of a million people have been infected this year alone.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says this is the world's largest and fastest-moving epidemic.

Measles in DR Congo has now killed more than twice the number who have died of Ebola there in the last 15 months.

The Congolese government and the WHO launched an emergency vaccination programme in September that aimed to inoculate more than 800,000 children. 

Four million children have been vaccinated, but experts warn that this amounts to less than half of the total in the country - and not enough vaccines are available.

The majority of those infected with measles in the country are infants.

But poor infrastructure, attacks on health centres and a lack of access to routine healthcare have all hindered efforts to stop the spread of the disease.

It is estimated that a global total of 110,000 people die from measles each year.

Extinction of Plant Life

A third of plant species in tropical Africa are threatened with extinction, a new study suggests. Plants are crucial to many ecosystems and life in general, providing food and oxygen, as well as being the source of myriad materials and medicines. However, human activities including logging, mining and agriculture pose a major threat.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/study-one-third-of-tropical-african-plant-species-at-risk-of-extinction/ar-BBX4oUX?ocid=spartandhp

Ghana's stolen fish

Further to the Icelandic looting of Namibia's fish, illegal fishing by Chinese-owned trawlers is costing Ghana millions.

Illegal and destructive practices by foreign-owned trawlers are draining the Ghanaian economy of an estimated £50m a year. Along its 350-mile coastline, overfishing has driven small pelagic species known as “people’s fish”, the staple diet, to the verge of collapse.

In 2015, as part of a $55m World Bank project, Ghana placed an observer on every industrial trawler, to collect data and report violations of fisheries law. Around the world, the work of these observers is becoming ever more dangerous. In 2017, a report by Human Rights At Sea found six cases of disappearances of observers in the Pacific. It concluded their work was hampered by “inadequate legal protection” and “physical danger”.  Illegal fishing is common, they said, confirming reports of the targeting of small pelagic fish or “saiko” by trawlers, an illegal trade revealed by the Environmental Justice Foundation this year. Two of them witnessed observers taking bribes, they said. Some had been beaten by the Chinese crew – 90% of the vessels are estimated to be Chinese-owned. Some 80 to 90% of reports by observers contained incriminating evidence of illegal fishing. Despite such allegations, only 23 trawlers were sanctioned for illegal fishing in 2018 and prosecutions were subject to political interference, according to the commission source. “We choose the observers … but politicians call our bosses and tell us: ‘Don’t prosecute these people.’”

Emmanuel Essien a fishing observer alleged illegal fishing by a trawler he had been working on. If the allegation was proved true, the ship’s captain faced a minimum fine of $1m. 28-year-old Emmanuel vanished at sea  from a trawler called Meng Xin 15, owned by a Chinese state-owned enterprise, Dalian Meng Xin Ocean Fisheries, according to an investigation by China Dialogue Ocean, which found the fleet has committed 16 fishing offences in Ghana since 2016. Its special status as an “offshore fishery enterprise of the ministry of agriculture” gives access to subsidies and tax exemption.  The World Bank highlighted Ghana’s “weak commitment” to reducing the number of industrial trawlers and its “less than agreed” scale of law enforcement, including “partial prosecution of offences and collection of fines”.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/16/ghana-fisheries-observer-vanishes

South African Inequality

South Africa has one of the highest levels of inequality in the world. One of the main reasons for the huge economic disparities between races is a legacy of apartheid - a system which ensured that the white minority population had access to the best the country could offer.

Black South Africans earn on average three times less than their white counterparts, a report into inequality in South Africa has found.

It said that the average monthly salary among black people - who account for 80% of the population - was 6,899 rand ($466,90; £362,60) while the figure was 24,646 rand ($1667,95; £1295,35) for white people.

Black people fared worse in terms of unemployment, access to private medical care, housing and electricity.