Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 146
December 9, 2020
The Real Housewives of Nollywood
Image credit Ariyo Olasunkanmi via Wikimedia Commons.
Film, like all types of media, can be an effective driver for permanent sociopolitical change, bringing together artists, academics, and activists for inspiring and informative work. It is a medium that can break down stereotypes, and fashion new ways of thinking in an ethnocentric Nigeria. It can produce work that is representative of the ideals that our society should strive towards.
One of the biggest criticisms of Nollywood in recent years has to do with the industry���s obsession with so-called ���Lekki stories:��� grandiose and detailed displays of the rich and their vices, thoroughly lacking in any profundity or nuance, failing to explore the artistic depths to which even comedy and romance can go. Lekki films offer little representation of the lives of the vast majority of people who watch them. A popular argument in favor of such films is that cinemagoers want an escape from the grit and hustle of their toils, they want a reason to laugh. The advent of the End SARS campaign, however, and what has followed in recent weeks, suggests that the Nigerian people, if they were not before, may now finally be tired of avoiding our society���s more difficult conversations.
At first, many political analysts were quick to dismiss the protesters��� aims as futile, as indeed, several official government announcements in the past had supposedly put an end to the infamous Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). As the nation reels in light of the disheartening events of recent weeks, some are now categorizing the EndSARS campaign as more than what it initially appeared to be, a sort of revolt against a political and class system that the people have seen increasingly marginalize and oppress them. South Korean director Bong Joon Ho���s 2019 Academy Award-winning��Parasite gives somewhat accurate insights into what happens when the poor become interested in the rich and powerful: manipulation, brutal murders, disappearances, and neither class remaining the same. Troubling? Surely, but these shifting social perspectives suggest that the popular trend in Nollywood may soon be on the decline.
Even Hollywood has seen its films and landscapes continue to be redefined by various social movements and ideals: the feminist movement repeatedly calling for films and characters that embody its ideals, creating an accurate representation of role models for young girls and women everywhere; the MeToo movement advocating for accountability and discussions about sexual harassment and its effects on Hollywood and American society; and so on.
Hollywood���s diversity craze has also seen the most respected and prestigious film awards body on the planet��create numerous representation requirements��on films for award eligibility. Likewise, we have also seen films engage intense discussions by themselves. David Fincher���s��Fight Club, polarizing critics in 1999, has become a source of solace and something of a voice for America���s millennials. Film can either be largely affected by various societal interactions or engage these changes itself. What does this mean for Nollywood and its influence on the nation���s increasingly enterprising and emboldened youths?
If Kemi Adetiba���s��King Of Boys (2018)��was a thrilling expos�� of the bloodshed, grit, and ���juju��� needed to rise to the top in Nigeria���s far-from-typical political climate, then Adejuyigbe Lateef���s��The Delivery Boy (2018) details the more violent effects when young men are not allowed to sit and talk about their problems. These films, celebrated mostly for their technical workmanship and vividness when initially released, may very well generate much more discussion for their themes and ideas today. Already, even as several high-profile filmmakers have themselves made calls for more socially and politically conscious films, some filmmakers have long used their much more limited platforms to advocate for social reform. Joseph Entekume���s short film Oblivion (2018), written by and starring Kenneth Agabata, engages mime and elegantly choreographed dance to give voice to the plight of victims of the cruel Fulani herdsmen massacres, also posing piercing questions that society now looks ready to discuss, including: how long until we too become victims of their fate?
Perhaps, Nollywood may ask itself the same.
December 8, 2020
A slaughter in Kumba
Kumba, Cameroon. Image credit Jbdodane via Flickr CC.
Blaise Eyong was stunned by what he saw when he walked into the classroom in Kumba, a bustling town and separatist fiefdom in Cameroon���s South West cocoa belt region: six students had been shot by unidentified gunmen. Despite years spent covering the country���s fratricidal conflict, the freelance multimedia journalist remembers being shocked at the depth of inhumanity that drove the perpetrators to carry out the recent attack on October 24 at the Mother Francisca Bilingual International Academy.
Eyong, who has survived a brush with death at the hands of separatist fighters and lost a relative as a result of the army���s scorched-earth raids, is no stranger to personal loss. But not even he could have imagined he���d have to cover such a heinous scene in his hometown, which has yet to recover from the February 2019 attack on its regional hospital.
Just like the bedridden patients who met their death in Kumba District hospital, the young students of Mother Francisca could not have known that their trip to school that Saturday, to make up for ghost-town Mondays, would be their last.
According to several news reports and first-person witness accounts circulating on Cameroonian WhatsApp forums and social media, the attackers, who were wearing everyday clothes, arrived on motorcycles around midday. Moments thereafter, the shooting began, leaving six students dead (and a seventh who would succumb to their injuries the next day) and about a dozen others, mostly girls ranging from ages 12 to 14, gravely wounded.
Eyong would later describe the sight on his Twitter handle in these terms: ������on my left was the brain of a child. She was shot on the head in close range. The floor was covered with blood and the wall around the board is stained with more blood.��� A day before the Mother Francisca massacre, Eyong, used the #MyAnglophoneCrisisStory, to remember the time in 2018 when, on his way back from an assignment about villagers who had taken refuge in the forests, he was held hostage by separatists who threatened to kill him.
Using the same hashtag, he recounted the story of his brother���s wife and son who died in a forest after escaping a military raid in the village of Kakeh II, and how their remains were later found under a tree. While Eyong expressed relief that the incident didn���t radicalize his brother like it had countless others, he doubted if his brother would ever get over the trauma of his loss.
Eyong���s story of personal loss is one just of a million unspoken stories stewing in the two English-speaking regions. The tragedy in Kumba births its own stories in a vast catalogue of grief that has found a home in the former West Cameroon.
There is the story of the father, a local carpenter, who told a local reporter that he saw a dozen men dressed in civilian clothes riding on four motorbikes, three on each motorbike and some carrying guns and an explosive. Moments later, he reported hearing gunshots. Deciding to walk in the direction of the shooting, he ran into a child who told him his daughter had been shot.
When he eventually found her in the medley, he noticed only the blood on her hand. He hopped on a random motorbike to rush her to the hospital. But moments after their arrival, the doctor revealed she had also been struck in her back. A team from Doctors without Borders transported her to another facility for surgery. Sometime in the early hours of the morning, he received a call to say his daughter had succumbed to her injuries.
His voice heavy, the father said he has resolved not to send her three remaining siblings to school, and shaking his head, noted that his daughter was attending school in the capital, Yaound��, but recently insisted she wanted to return to school back home.
���I be di see people dem di lose their pikin I no di ever feel am because e nobi don touch me but when e don touch you na that time you di know say e di hot.��� (���I remember feeling nothing when I watched other parents mourn their slain children but now I understand their pain.���)
He admitted that prior to the Mother Theresa shooting, he never felt affected by the killings around him. For ordinary people like him, who are caught between the excesses of the Cameroon military, armed groups, and a nascent criminal network, in a landscape where distrust of the central government is entrenched, looking away seems like the safest way to cope with the kidnappings and killings.
Alas, fear has found a welcoming home in this region, where the skeletons of razed villages and bullet-ridden buildings stand like monuments to a past that seems as distant as the world���s ears to its agony. Meanwhile, schools, teachers, and students remain under weekly attack, and though the Mother Theresa massacre seemed to inspire a moment of reflection, even among the warring factions, the cycle of score-settling murders, kidnappings, and arson continue.
Following the incident, Paul Atanga Nji, the Minister of Territorial Administration, a native of the North West, travelled with a delegation of ministers to Kumba. While addressing the media in French at a gathering, the hawkish minister struck a cavalier tone while praising his 87-year old boss, President Paul Biya.
���When the terrorists began, they thought they���d have international support, but due to the state���s forceful response, President Biya has won this war.�� Cameroon remains united, upright, firm, and indivisible,��� he said.
For the likes of the minister and his adversaries among the belligerents in the secessionists��� ranks, it might not matter that a generation of children continue to be scarred from the protracted violence; it might not matter that communities and their histories are being wiped away, and that a child���s last memory was a gun aimed at them.
The massacres at Kumba and Ngarbuh might not matter to these men who are shielded from everyday violence by distance and power, but the many victims of the last four years are not anonymous; they are more than figures; more than mere names and faces; they are sons and daughters, siblings, cousins, mothers, fathers, neighbors, elders, and friends. The victims are people like Eyong���s brother, who despite his profound loss, still found the strength and restraint to cling on to hope.
On November 6, Cameroonians from across the country converged in Kumba for the public funeral of the slain students. Yet the question persists: what will it take for the Biya regime to address the root cause of this senseless conflict?
Deep and comprehensive dependency
Photo by Nicolas Picard on Unsplash
Tunisia has undergone radical changes in the past decade, and faces more in the years to come, if the European Union (EU) has its way. As the first country to topple its dictator in early 2011, it set off a chain of revolutions across North Africa and West Asia that led to a political reconfiguration, the impacts of which are still playing out. Although Tunisia is often seen as the ���success��� story of the Arab Spring, the transition has been much more complex.
The existing economic trends, and the power of the existing political and economic elites, have been strengthened, and the Tunisian people have yet to reap substantial benefits from their revolution. Tunisia is, ostensibly, now a democracy, but a series of technocratic governments have struggled to bring change, and to balance the interests of the traditional elite and the less privileged general population.
The role of the EU (and other international actors) in this transition has been controversial, with some arguing that the ongoing Western-sponsored transformation aims to subvert the aspirations of the Tunisian people���s calls for dignity, bread, national sovereignty, and social justice. Western actors, including crucially the EU, have advocated for more of the same economic policies that many believe created the problems in Tunisia in the first place.
Tunisia has a long history and set of ties with the EU, and with France in particular. It became a French protectorate in 1881. While formal independence was granted in 1956, the legacy of colonialism has been hard to erase. The imperial economic patterns���whereby colonial economies were structured to meet the needs of the ruling power���endure, as does the economic dependence on the former colonial ruler.
It is in the context of these systemic legacies and deep power imbalances, as well as the political tumult brought about by the Arab Spring, that the EU has proposed a new set of trade deals with Tunisia and its neighbors. The EU proposes that Tunisia enter into a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with it, and negotiations have been ongoing for five years. The economic and social impact of such an agreement could be disastrous. In a new study published by the Transnational Institute, we examine the concerns that have been voiced about the DCFTA, but largely excluded from official negotiations and the national discussion in Tunisia on the mooted trade deal.
The process of negotiating the DCFTA has been problematic, notably in three ways. First, Tunisia���s multifaceted dependence on Europe, and the obvious asymmetry between the two, clearly prevents any equitable negotiation being possible. It is expected that this trade deal will exacerbate already existing power imbalances. Second, the EU is using a classic carrot- and-stick approach to force Tunisia to sign. On the one hand, it offers conditional loans and technical assistance to cash-strapped Tunisian governments, and on the other it exercises pressure and blackmail by placing the country on its black list of tax havens (in December 2017) and on its money laundering and terrorist financing black list (in February 2018). Last but not least, the approach to civil society consultation has been highly inadequate and lacking in transparency. The organizations consulted officially have been carefully selected, while the main social groups who are negatively affected by free trade agreements (such as small farmers, female agricultural workers, informal laborers, small and medium producers, consumers, and beneficiaries of public services) are excluded from the discussion.
When it comes to the likely impacts of the DCFTA, they could be devastating for most Tunisian people. Low wages are Tunisia���s main comparative advantage, and the DCFTA targets this. It will encourage EU investors to relocate labor-intensive activities to Tunisia to maximize their profits by capturing the value created by super-exploited, low-wage Tunisian workers.
With its focus on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), the DCFTA would potentially benefit 83% of EU enterprises, but only 3% of Tunisian enterprises. As a result, the incentive policies in the DCFTA will have vastly different effects for the different parties to the agreement. In Tunisia, they will strengthen the top of the pyramid, whereas in Europe they will support its base. The potential social justice implications for the Tunisian people will be stark. Moreover, the Very Small Enterprises (VSEs) which are the key economic actors in Tunisia���making up about 95% of enterprises���are not expected to evolve under the DCFTA, but to disintegrate and disappear to the benefit of larger companies. They will be unable to survive the tsunami of EU products and capital flooding in, especially without specific policies designed to protect and strengthen them.
For the few larger Tunisian companies, the DCFTA gambles that, once integrated into the EU free trade system, they will be able to create jobs. The overlapping interests of the Tunisian rentier oligarchy, political power holders and Western free trade actors align in pushing for a trade agreement that directs the Tunisian economy to exclusively support export-oriented companies. The existing subordination of the economic system to these narrow interests will be reinforced by the DCFTA, with public policies increasingly serving sectors which have very low added value for the local economy, but which create rents for exporting companies and huge profits for European firms. Thus, domestic capital will become integrated into the international division of labor, at the very bottom of the value chain, and move towards providing market services for foreign companies.
It becomes clear that the EU���s strategy is not simply aimed at invading the Tunisian market and capturing the surplus value that can be derived from it. Beyond that, it aims to set up the conditions and instruments for long-term economic domination. This involves destroying domestic enterprises, dominating the local market, limiting regional integration, monopolizing resources, destroying the state���s regulatory role, and locking in these conditions via a legal framework over which only the EU has control. What is proposed involves the hostage-taking of national productive forces (at very low cost) to direct them, through ���upgrading��� and technical assistance, toward feeding the free trade requirements of the EU.
Free trade agreements are means for a dominant economy to subdue a weaker one, relying on the help of a rent-seeking local oligarchy. In more general terms, free trade, or rather unequal exchange, is a mechanism of domination and exploitation, affecting less developed economies and leading to their submission to the rich capitalist countries. This will happen at the expense of most Tunisians��� political, economic, social, and environmental interests. It would be naive to expect that the deepening of inequalities and entrenching of economic subordination that will result from the DCFTA will have no political effects. It is therefore wise to remember that the core slogans during the uprising in Tunisia a decade ago called for social justice, sovereignty, and the end of the ruling oligarchy���s privileges.
Ultimately, to stop the bleeding of Tunisia���s wealth and the suffering of the less privileged in society, as well as to unmask the local profiteering oligarchy, a change in the economic approach that has been followed in recent decades is desperately needed. The only way forward is to walk firmly on the path of decolonization towards a new liberating and transformative alternative economic order, not only for Tunisia, but also for other subjugated countries in the region and across the global South.
For more details, please read the whole study here.
December 7, 2020
Angola’s veterans
Sao Martinho Dos Tigres, Angola.
In January 2016, Jo��o Louren��o, the then-Angolan Minister of National Defense, spoke at a ceremony honoring Angolan veterans and former combatants. At this event, Louren��o lauded the bravery of combatants and ex-combatants by cautioning the country to never forget the hard work done by veterans, because Angolans ���would not be here were it not for the patriotic citizens who gave the ultimate sacrifice to defend the country.���
Angola���s modern history is laced with conflict: 13 years of anti-colonial war (1961-1974) followed soon after by 27 years of civil war (1975-2002). The political scene after independence became one where peace, in the words of Achille Mbembe, was ���more likely to take on the face of a ���war without an end.������ While the Luena Peace Accords brought an end to the civil war, political wrangling between the governing Movimento Popular de Liberta����o de Angola���Partido do Trabalho (MPLA) and the opposition parties, as well as stark socio-economic disparities between the rich and the poor, have contributed to a fragile yet peaceful postwar Angola.
Much has changed since Louren��o���s address to Angolan veterans. The biggest change was his election as president in 2018, taking over after the almost four-decade reign of Jos�� Eduardo Dos Santos. Many observers welcomed Lourenc��o, though feared that he would be a puppet of his predecessor. Louren��o moved swiftly to assert his autonomy and reassure the public of his commitment to fight the endemic culture of corruption. Since taking over the presidency, Louren��o���s agenda for a ���New Angola��� has involved reconstituting the executive branch, attempting to diversify the economy, and pulling the country out of an economic crisis that began in 2014. In 2018, eager to boost investor confidence and gain public support, the president sacked several high-ranking political and military officials who were implicated in massive corruption scandals during Dos Santos��� regime. Among the top generals who were sacked, but later given a second chance, was General Geraldo Sachipenga Nunda, the commander-in-chief of the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA). General Nunda currently serves as the Angolan ambassador to the United Kingdom.
But how do these recent changes affect the daily lives of ex-combatants and other soldiers who still need help reintegrating into civil society a decade after the end of the war? Do Angolan veterans see themselves as active participants in Louren��o���s New Angola? What does it take for veterans to make it in civilian life? Can the moral economy of veterans offer insights into the precarity, resilience, and agency of life after soldiering?
These questions are at the heart of John Spall���s latest book, Manhood, Morality and the Transformation of Angolan Society. The book focuses on ex-soldiers in the city of Huambo who fought for the MPLA regime between the mid-1970s and the 1990s, in the Forc��as Armadas Populares de Libertac��a��o de Angola (FAPLA).�� Manhood, Morality and the Transformation of Angolan Society is a compelling ethnographic study of Angolan veterans. Putting former combatants at the center of his analysis, Spall explicitly engages with some of the more pressing debates in the scholarship on soldiering and masculinity in war veterans, notably the significance of understanding the complexity of veterans��� masculine identities through moral economy. The author moves away from binary conceptions separating veterans��� economic practices and morality. Instead, he posits that the moral economy of the veterans entails an entanglement of expectations, traditions, and values rooted in Angola���s complex history of colonialism and politics.
A moral economy approach offers a useful way of understanding ex-soldiers��� militarized masculinities after their disarmament and reintegration into civilian life. The central argument of the book is that ex-FAPLA combatants��� moral concerns were also rooted in the rich Umbundu cultural traditions, as some veterans were concerned with transformations in gender and intergenerational relations. For older veterans, for example, their postwar masculinities were linked to gaining respect and authority as breadwinners and wise elders. Since Umbundu traditions value wisdom and good judgement, senior veterans took these qualities much more seriously than their younger counterparts.
While all the chapters complement one another, chapters two, three, and four provide a cogent exploration of what Spall calls the veterans��� ���life project������the way men in Huambo performed distinct cultural styles of masculinity and expressed their moral visions of the future and aspirations for themselves. The in-depth interviews demonstrate how, in the face of growing wealth disparity, some men equated money with power and longed for economic prosperity and upward mobility. Despite rebounding oil prices in 2012, the MPLA leadership failed to place the country���s mineral wealth at the service of all Angolans. As a result, for some veterans the pride and lure of the middle class remains a dream. Other veterans, however, decried the ways consumerism and personal enrichment became more important than the value of fellow humans.
The book also reveals the significance of marriage and religion in shaping the postwar masculinities of ex-combatants. Some veterans insist on spiritual rather economic assimilation to build a sense of community and reintegrate into civilian life. According to one interviewee, church communities offered some men the respect many had longed for since their demobilization. While some fighters were respectfully welcomed back as heroes, others were eyed suspiciously and rejected by their communities. Thus, in most cases, gaining acceptance and public dignity depended on whether a man was married and could perform the role of a diligent breadwinner. Finding a wife (or wives) was a priority for most veterans. Marriage became an important factor in veterans��� readjustment to civilian life, and a way for them to reassert their masculine authority within the society.
The experience of service boosted veterans��� sense of entitlement to basic rights and national recognition. Often, military service elevated former FAPLA soldiers��� sense of themselves as people more capable of reclaiming their agency and demanding their recognition in the power-laden nationalist politics. Spall argues that gaining the status of ���ex-combatant��� or ���veteran��� became a way for ex-soldiers in Huambo to speak back to coastal power from the Planalto. Being recognized as an ex-FAPLA veteran however does not mean that veterans are blinded by their patriotism. Many ex-combatants see a vast chasm between MPLA���s wartime rhetoric and postwar reality. Far from glorifying their patriotism, testimonies of ex-FAPLA combatants reveal veterans��� refusal to identify with egregiously kleptocratic party elites and the current state of Angolan politics. The destruction and neglect of the rural agricultural economy and the marginalization of the poor, including of veterans in Huambo, has left a majority of the population vulnerable.
It is worth emphasizing that Angolan veterans cannot be treated as a homogeneous group. Some former fighters with access to political and economic capital thrived after the war while others still struggle immensely to readjust to civilian life. Thus, despite the Ministry of Former Combatants and Veterans efforts to recognize all veterans���and include them in the diversification of the economy through agricultural development��� many ex-combatants from marginalized geopolitical areas, and who lack political clout within insularity of the MPLA party-state, continue to feel betrayed and ignored.
A decade after the end of 2009 UN-backed Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) program, many FAPLA veterans still find themselves working as unskilled laborers in the informal economy, although some had hoped for better career and economic opportunities. One veteran explained the precarity of their lives, ���We all have our own business, which is very difficult because it���s not like when you have a salary and you always know how much you���re going to get … [O]ur children���s work never stops and our work never stops, but we still have a lot of difficulty, up to today.��� Veterans��� notwithstanding, the disillusionment with their socio-economic situation after the war, unmet expectations, and difficulties in resettling into civilian life hinder ex-combatants from fully participating in president Louren��o���s project of New Angola. Manhood, Morality and the Transformation of Angolan Society provides us with a timely reminder of how former fighters understand their own postwar experiences and nurture their ability to build social relationships.
Indeed, combatants and ex-combatants can become a major source of socio-economic stability in postwar societies. But in Angola today, and across Africa, crony capitalism, which is characterized by proximity to the ruling party elites, remains the biggest factor in personal enrichment and access to political and economic power of a few ex-combatants, even as many veterans are left marginalized, voiceless, and impoverished.
The Ethiopian model
Photo by Daggy J Ali on Unsplash
Modern Ethiopia has been ruled at various moments by an empire, a dictatorship and since 1991 by a one-party state. Both the Emperor and the Derg (the military dictatorship which ruled Ethiopia from 1974 until 1991), ran Ethiopia as a centralized system. Ethiopia���s current political system���a federation consisting of 10 semi-autonomous regions that roughly coincide with the country���s largest ethnic groups���is very much the work of the Ethiopian Peoples��� Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the coalition of ethnic nationalist parties which defeated the Derg. The EPRDF drew up a new constitution which sought to realize political and economic rights for Ethiopians. Until recently, most of Ethiopia���s regions and their nationalist parties asserted their rights inside this federation. Much of the credit for this was owed to Meles Zenawi, from the Tigray People���s Liberation Front (TPLF). Meles was quite skilled at managing these demands and tensions. Though his regime faced challenges in 2005, during federal and regional elections, and 2008, during local elections, Meles���s regime remained quite popular. Part of Meles��� appeal was that he was credited with introducing a model of the developmental state, which eschewed neoliberalism, while leading to economic growth and vast expansions in communications, education and hydroelectricity in Ethiopia. In sum, he transformed the country. Meles died in 2012.
Initially, Meles���s successors in the EPRDF, under Hailemariam Desalegn (who lacked Meles���s charisma and decisiveness), managed to keep the system together, but from 2015 onwards tensions began to show. The central government���s plan to expand the administrative territory of Addis Ababa (also the federal capital) into Oromia, resulted in widespread, protracted protests. Hailemariam tendered his resignation. The result was a managed transition within the EPRDF, following an internal vote, to a new government in 2018 led by Abiy Ahmed, a charismatic and young leader of the Oromo Democratic Party. Ahmed was very popular, both at home and abroad. He won a Nobel Prize (he secured a peace deal with neighboring Eritrea, a former province of imperial Ethiopia); at home, he initiated a number of reforms (release of political prisoners) and announced constitutional reforms to break with ethnic politics, including what would have been Ethiopia���s first democratic elections. But Abiy went further. He also stated his intention to break with Meles��� economic legacy: He announced a series of neoliberal economic reforms, most significantly privatizing state utilities, including privatizing Ethiopian Airlines, the best run airline on the continent.
Then in November 2019, he announced a new political party, the Prosperity Party, consisting of some elements of the EPRDF. Meanwhile, his own base began to fall apart, especially among Oromos. The latter openly began to challenge his legitimacy. The state���s response was mass arrests and detention. Then, in October, the Tigray People���s Liberation Front announced that it wanted to govern itself. Abiy���s decision to postpone elections (he cited COVID-19) made his government illegitimate, they argued. A month ago the federal government declared war on the TPLF. At least 27 people have since died in the war and hundreds left homeless. More than 43,000 fled to Sudan.
The takeaway is that the Ethiopian state model is in crisis.
This week on AIAC Talk then, we discuss how Ethiopia helps us make sense of and work through questions about the nature of the African state: whether development is an emancipatory goal or not; what does it mean to alleviate poverty; and finally how do we create constituencies that support pro-poor policy in the face of rapacious capitalism.
Our guest is Elleni Centime Zeleke, Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Ethiopia In Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964���2016 (Brill, 2019) among other published works.
Stream the show Tuesday at 19:00 SAST, 17:00 GMT, and 12:00 EST on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you missed our episode last week, we paid homage to the greatest footballer of all time, Diego Maradona. We were joined by the Colombian multimedia journalist, writer, translator and author, Pablo Medina Uribe, whose work has featured on Africa Is a Country before. We were also joined by Tony Karon, who teaches on the�� politics of global soccer in the Graduate Program in International�� Affairs at the New School in New York. Tony is editorial lead at AJ Plus and before that spent 15 years at TIME magazine, where he was a senior editor.
Clips from that episode are available on our YouTube channel, but best check out the whole thing on our Patreon along with all the episodes from our archive.
December 6, 2020
All that glitters
Image credit Shahir Chundra via Wikimedia Commons.
This post is part of our series ���Climate Politricks.���
Tanzania���s largest mines are located in the area that surrounds Lake Victoria, about a thousand kilometers from Dar es Salaam. Its significant gas reserves are located offshore, in the southern regions of Lindi and Mtwara. The country���s extractives sector employs about a million people, and produces a broad range of precious metals, including Tanzanite, a unique and rare gemstone found nowhere else in the world. The mining sector has, over the last three years, attracted significant media attention due to a protracted taxation dispute between the government of Tanzania and Barrick Gold, the Canadian multi-national mining company, which holds majority shares in three of the four largest gold mines.
Tanzania liberalized its mining sector in the 1990s, after more than two decades of a socialist experiment. In this period, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) had exclusive extraction rights but struggled with inefficiency due to limited capacity and a politicized mandate. Therefore, liberalization was driven by the imperative for attracting new investment and maximizing benefits���especially tax-based, from the sector. This reform effort focused on attracting medium to large scale corporations, as obvious custodians of the required knowledge and financial muscle, and underplayed the role and contribution of small scale miners. The change in policy presented an opportunity to established firms such as Barrick Gold, which entered the country in 1999. A presidential investigation committee report released in 2007 revealed that the 1990s reform had resulted into a notable expansion of the sector, but its contribution to the national economy, from 1.7% in 1997, to 3.8% in 2007, was not commensurate with the size of the investment, and called for further reform.
Tanzania���s tax dispute with Barrick, which began in early 2017, and is now seen as the most bold example of the country���s desire to reform the extractives sector, can be interpreted as a continuation of the 1990s and 2000s reform efforts. The tax dispute flared when Barrick���s subsidiary, Acacia Mining, now a defunct entity, was investigated by public authorities and accused of under-declaring the composition and value of semi-processed mineral ores. These ores���commonly known as concentrates���originated from two of the company���s three mines, and were exported abroad for further processing. Tanzanian authorities claimed, as a result of their investigation, that Acacia owed the country a significant amount of money in taxes, and subsequently served the company with the now infamous $190 billion tax bill.
In response, Acacia rejected all allegations of tax misconduct. Meanwhile, the Tanzanian authorities refused to engage the subsidiary in resolving the dispute on the ground of non-registration in the country (even though Acacia continued to operate). It took the intervention of Barrick, the parent company, in June 2017, to break the impasse, and agree on a negotiation process.
As Tanzanian authorities prepared to negotiate with Barrick, they hurriedly overhauled the legal regime governing the mining industry in July 2017, and introduced three key laws that collectively allowed for renegotiation of extractive contracts, restricted international arbitration as well as export of mineral concentrates, and provided for local value addition. These changes revealed the depth of resource nationalism underpinning the drive for reform, and were criticized by opposition parties because of their potential for scaring investors away.
In July 2019, Barrick disclosed that an agreement had been reached for resolving the dispute with Tanzanian authorities. The proposed resolution included buying Acacia out, a payment of $300 million to settle all disputes, granting of 16% of shares to the government for free, and equal sharing of economic benefits. Also, the agreement revealed that Tanzanian authorities had agreed to international arbitration, and a selective lifting of a ban on the export of concentrates. These exemptions effectively contravened the laws passed in 2017.
Tanzania received $100 million in May 2020, as the first tranche of the $300 million that Barrick owes Tanzanian authorities. The rest���$200 million���will be paid over the next five years, in installments of $40 million per year. Tanzania���s agreement with Barrick has the potential for maximizing extractives revenues, but the outcome will depend on the government���s ability to limit and audit costs, and carefully weigh decisions for injection of new capital. The first payment of $40 million in dividends in October 2020 by a joint venture company��� Twiga Mineral���s Corporation���suggests Tanzanian authorities were able to avoid past cost monitoring mistakes. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to undertake a comprehensive assessment of the terms and implications of the final agreement because none of the parties have disclosed it.
There are many countries in Africa that struggle with the similar problem of inequitable share of proceeds from their extractives sectors. Tanzania���s experience provides three key lessons:�� First, countries that are keen to reform their extractive sectors ought to invest in quality historical data, and effective cost audits. Tanzania has good auditing capacity, but lacks comprehensive production data, and this aspect limited its achievements in negotiations with Barrick.
Second, authorities need to ensure the reform effort does not deviate from feasible and standard industry requirements. Tanzania���s initial attempts to restrict international arbitration appear to have been misguided. Multi-national corporations require access to international arbitration as a key pre-requisite for investment due to, often, their lack of trust in local judicial systems. Tanzanian authorities amended the country���s arbitration law in February 2020, but the usefulness of the changes remain unclear, because they have not been tested.
Third, negative publicity from international media is likely to affect the inflow of investments into the extractives sector, and the country in general. There has to be a strong case for reform, and potential for success in order to make the associated cost justifiable.
Tanzania has made significant progress in reforming its extractives sector, but the government���s approach remains top-down and opaque. The country���s extractive sector���s transparency agenda lacks resources and effective leadership, a situation that raises questions as to whether authorities can sustain the imperative for reform, without meaningful external pressure.
December 4, 2020
Traditional wars
Image credit Fiona Graham via WorldRemit Flickr CC.
Kenya is awash with talk about the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), first agreed in 2018 between the former foes at the top of Kenya’s politics: President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga. Kenyatta’s Jubilee Alliance defeated Raila’s Orange Democratic Movement in 2013 to win the presidency. Both happened to members of Kenya’s ruling elite. Jomo Kenyatta, Uhuru’s father, was the first president of an independent Kenya. Oginga Odinga was vice president. Both are pushing this agenda, which undermines the popular 2010 constitution, despite what appears to be widespread disinterest.
Many proposals within the BBI document, including a bigger parliament and two appointed deputy presidents, are leading Kenyans to question whether this agenda is actually intended to build ���bridges��� or billionaires. This article is part of a series where we republish selected articles from The Elephant. The series is curated by Africa Is a Country editorial board member, Wangui Kimari.
When they met and shook hands in March 2018, Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga pledged to address a number of issues that, to them, bedevil Kenya���s politics. A plan, formally referred to as the Building Bridges Initiative to a New Kenyan Nation���or simply, BBI���was announced in front of an audience that had witnessed a rather chaotic turn of events in the preceding months.
Raila had successfully contested Uhuru���s presidential victory at the Supreme Court and proceeded to boycott a repeat poll, citing lack of a competent and impartial electoral commission. Two months before the two leaders met, Raila had also made real his threat to take a symbolic presidential oath as the ���people���s president��� in defiance of Uhuru. A joint report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch stated that the police had behaved appropriately in some instances but, in many others, had shot or beat protestors to death.�� Meanwhile, pressure from civil society organizations and the international community to find a political settlement was piling even as a debt-burdened economy was threatening to stall. Uhuru, like former president Mwai Kibaki before him, was probably worried about tarnishing his legacy.
Uhuru appointed an advisory committee in a matter of weeks. The members of the committee were instructed to make actionable proposals to address the BBI agenda, including proposals to review Kenya���s now ten-year-old constitution. The BBI���s nine-point agenda included ethnic antagonism, lack of a national ethos, devolution, divisive elections, security, corruption, shared prosperity, responsibility, and inclusivity, as the main areas requiring intervention. It didn���t matter that protestors, including Raila himself, had singled out electoral malpractice as the main problem.
It wasn���t lost on many that nine days prior to the 8 August poll, the body of Chris Msando, the head of information, communication, and technology at the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), had been found on the outskirts of Nairobi. Very few people, if any, thought that the Kenya 2010 constitution was the poisoned chalice.
Since then, the BBI bandwagon has threatened to change the constitution. It has taken particular issue with the winner-takes-all system, a feature that the 2010 constitution had actually been designed to dampen by diluting the powers of the presidency and distributing them across parliament, and devolving some responsibility to the 47 newly-established county governments.
Despite its pure presidential system, some supporters of the BBI have even argued that the 2010 constitution did not create an imperial presidency, that, in fact, it created a system of checks and balances on how the president should exercise his/her authority. In addition, the terms of reference for the Committee of Experts (CoE) who wrote the 2010 constitution were strikingly similar to those that, ten years later, were assigned to the BBI task force. Similar to BBI, the idea of building bridges and creating a national ethos had also been at the heart of the CoE���s mandate.
The constitutional draft that the CoE proposed (now Kenya���s constitution) not only received the popular vote during a referendum, but it also received the support of a broad section of the country���s political leadership, Raila and Uhuru included. What the 2010 constitution has not received since its promulgation is fidelity and adherence to its spirit.
A key weakness of constitutions the world over is their dependence on traditions put in place by human beings, which often makes them vulnerable to prevailing political interests. In Kenya���s case, the problem has never been a constitutional one in nature, but the result of deliberate efforts by Uhuru Kenyatta, and the Kibaki administration before him, to undermine the constitution and to reassert direct presidential control over devolution and over the other arms of government, the legislature and the judiciary.
I have written elsewhere about the significance of the reduction of the role of county governments by central government bureaucrats���the most significant structural change in Kenya since the 1960s���to simple units of administration and development, while minimizing their political features. In this way, feelings of exclusion and marginalization, underpinned by unaddressed historical injustices, have continued to exist despite constitutional change. Measures that would enable real participation in matters of governance and policy at the local level are frowned upon. Dismissed. Ignored.
Assertive County Governors are viewed as a nuisance that should go away. Responsibility over land administration, education, mega-infrastructure and parastatals has remained in the hands of the central government, and as such, under the direction of the presidency. In fact, matters of devolution have been domiciled within a national government ministry. Despite the establishment of a National Police Service Commission and an Independent Police Oversight Authority, police officers have continued to function outside the law with the express direction and support of higher-ups, with some shooting suspects dead in broad day light. President Uhuru Kenyatta has violated the constitution he wants to amend by refusing to swear in 41 judges appointed by the Judicial Service Commission. A resolution to the land question remains as distant as ever, despite the establishment of a National Land Commission.
These multiple assaults on the constitution and the law by executive fiat mean that it would be very difficult to remove an incumbent president from office through an electoral process, and in 2017 many paid the price of attempting to do so with their lives.
The question is, what has changed since then? Why has it become necessary to review or change a document that was written to avert the very conflict that the BBI task force was assigned to address? Also, should constitutional reform be prioritized when it���s not clear that the country is facing a constitutional moment but is in fact grappling with a global pandemic, an ailing economy, and a political leadership that has a penchant for behaving badly?
The theory of the ���constitutional moment��� refers to lasting constitutional arrangements that result from specific, emotionally shared responses to shared fundamental political experiences, or when there are unusually high levels of sustained popular attention to questions of constitutional significance. The constitutions of the United States, nineteenth-century Belgium, post-apartheid South Africa, and the Kenya 2010 constitution come closest to demonstrating this theory.
In the absence of a constitutional moment, a constitutional review usually serves other���more technical���goals and cannot be considered to be a fundamental choice regarding the political design of a country. One of the drawbacks of a constitution that emerges without the blessing of a constitutional moment is that it does not contribute to a sense of union, or the formation of identity, among the members of the society to which it applies.
In short, absent of a constitutional moment, the BBI is beginning to look, feel and behave like no more than a mere pact between the elite.
It is unlikely that the BBI will constitutionalize ordinary politics. Without popular enthusiasm for a new constitution, many Kenyans will perceive the plan to be no more than a pragmatic form of protection of the interests of the elite.
And this, since the handshake in 2018, is what has been taking place.
For Raila���s supporters, the BBI promises their leader a place in a future government. Uhuru���s supporters continue to be divided over the plan, as some remain suspicious of Raila���s intentions, and others believe that the BBI will consolidate Uhuru���s legacy at the end of his second term in office. For the supporters of the Deputy President, William Ruto, the BBI is meant to frustrate his efforts to succeed his boss come the next elections in 2022.
In an environment devoid of political trust, it is unlikely that the BBI will put an end to political tensions and instability in the country. In fact, a cursory survey of social media language during the COVID-19 pandemic reveals that extreme views and divisive political rhetoric are on the rise.
It is therefore more likely that the BBI will amplify the country���s ethnically polarized politics, setting the stage for future conflict. In this way, the BBI has quickly moved from building bridges to becoming the agent of their imminent destruction.
Kenya���s political class is yet again employing constitutional change as a tool to fight its traditional factional wars.
The results can only be disastrous.
Raila Odinga, now BBI���s primary mover, has insisted that it is time to proceed to a referendum. Together with Uhuru Kenyatta, Raila has declared a second BBI report released on 21 October 2020 (the first was published on November 2019) to be final.
In his address to the Siaya County Assembly, Dr Adams Oloo, the BBI Steering Committee Vice-Chairperson and a close Odinga ally, intimated that only Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga have the final say on any further amendments to the document.
It is not clear whether it will be possible to complete the constitutional process in time for the embattled IEBC to effect the necessary changes ahead of the August 2021 referendum���which the IEBC estimates will cost Sh14 billion.
The electoral commission, whose term the BBI report has reduced from six to four years, has itself expressed reservations over the document.
Religious leaders and internally displaced people have also weighed in: the possibility of creating an imperial presidency and the fact that their concerns have not been addressed are, to them, key concerns. After promising the Pastoralist Parliamentary Group (PPG) that their concerns would be included in the document to be put to a referendum vote, Raila has backtracked, insisting that no changes will be introduced to the document after all.
The political struggles undergirding the BBI process have been laid bare. All language regarding consensus building has been thrown out. The main protagonists, in the wider race to succeed Uhuru Kenyatta in 2022, are Raila Odinga and William Ruto.
For the Ruto camp, a ���Yes��� vote in the referendum would be a disappointing measure of their popularity. For the Odinga camp, a delayed referendum would not leave them with much time to gauge Ruto���s and their own strength in the run-up to the 2022 polls.
Caught haplessly in the midst of these struggles, of course, are Kenyan citizens. They are now meant to forget that the Jubilee Administration had promised to tackle four big agendas ����� affordable universal health care, food security, manufacturing and affordable housing ����� now a near laughable prospect, given the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the disastrous economic record that preceded it. A Jubilee politician has bragged that the BBI is a clever innovation to save the Big Four Agenda from completely turning to ash.
Broadly, the proposals of the second BBI report seem to have tightened control around the presidency. If successful, the president gets to appoint a prime minister from parliament who will also be the leader of the largest political party or the largest coalition of political parties. The president will also appoint two deputy prime ministers and cabinet ministers drawn from within and outside of parliament. The report has also recommended the disbandment of the National Police Service Commission and the creation of a National Police Council to be chaired by a cabinet secretary, that is, a presidential appointee. It has also established the office of an ombudsman within the judiciary, to be appointed by the president. A number of (early Christmas) gifts have been presented to various key players, perhaps as seductive (and useful) distractions from the proposed tyrannical changes.
Changing the 2010 constitution will not be easy given the high constitutional guardrails. It requires securing both a majority of the votes in a referendum and a majority of votes from members of the 47 county assemblies. In this way, the BBI report proposes an increase of the minimum revenue distributed to county governments from 15% to 35% of national revenue. Members of county assemblies will be allocated 5% of county revenue for a newly-created Ward Development Fund, modelled on the Constituency Development Fund. Businesses set up by young Kenyans will be tax-exempt for the first seven years of operation. The number of members of parliament has been increased, with an additional 27 new senators and 10 new members of the national assembly. The second runner-up in a presidential contest will be named the Leader of the Official Opposition, with a shadow cabinet, technical support and a budget.
All this is in complete disregard of the debt overhang that Kenya has found itself in since 2013. In fact, the external debt has grown by 15.6 per cent to Sh3.7 trillion between March and August 2020. Over the same period local debt expanded by 9.7 per cent to Sh3.4 trillion. The overall cost of running parliament is already 2 per cent of the national budget, and that of running the Executive has increased by 20 per cent over the last two years alone. As the government suspends health insurance for COVID-19 patients in the midst of a second, spiking wave, no one is talking about the possibility of the proposed referendum facing funding shortfalls.
In their response to the first constitutional draft that was published by the Committee of Experts in 2009, Kenyans cautioned against the creation of a bloated government���a concern that is still close to their hearts. This also means that Kenyans are not opposed to the existence of an opposition, per se, but that the loser of an election needs to feel that they have lost fairly. The dispute during every electoral cycle is usually over the sloppy manner in which elections are conducted, coupled with a high trust deficit often cultivated by politicians.
The solution, in my view, is to respect the law and cultivate a culture of constitutionalism. The Kenya 2010 constitution is not perfect, but it is also true that the leadership has not adhered to its letter and spirit.
Reviewing the constitution less than a decade after it was first promulgated may be right and proper, but one may ask, what is the constitutional moment this time?
December 3, 2020
Gramsci in the postcolony
Aswan, Egypt. Image credit PnP! on Flickr CC.
It was while working on a project that traced the rise and fall of Nasserism in Egypt���a political project that emerged during Egypt���s anticolonial moment and that was led by one of the major figures of global anticolonialism, Gamal Abdel Nasser���that I began thinking about traveling theory. I was reflecting on Nasser���s powerful presence, both in Egypt and across Africa, Asia, and the rest of the postcolonial world. A question I repeatedly came back to was, what made Nasserism���as a political project���both singular and powerful? And how might it be connected to our contemporary moment, particularly following the 2011 Egyptian revolution?
Because I was simultaneously thinking about Marxism in the context of North Africa, I had already been exploring Antonio���s Gramsci���s work. I found Gramsci an interesting Marxist to think with because of the way he connected the material to the ideational, as well as his own identity as a Southern Italian and how this influenced the way he thought about dependency, power, and inequality. I found his concept of hegemony especially interesting, not least because it seemed to me one way of answering the question: how might we understand the power of the Nasserist project?
Hegemony, as a concept, is many things to many people. As Marxists are prone to do, there have been endless debates around what hegemony specifically means, where and when we might have seen it materialize, and how it relates more broadly to Marxist theory. What I found interesting about the concept was the way it brought to light the dialectic between consent and coercion. One element of the Nasserist project I thought important was the way it was able to embed coercion within high levels of consent���it is not that violence was not part and parcel of the project, but rather that this violence was in a constant relationship with particularly strong levels of consent. I also found hegemony an important lens because of the way it centres both an analysis of the ruling class and subaltern classes, as well as the way it urges us to focus on political projects rather than individual figures (as tends to be the case with work on Nasser).
As intriguing as hegemony seemed as a concept, I was conscious of its origins as well as the particular context in which Gramsci developed most of his ideas. Gramsci was very grounded in the everyday workings of capitalism in Italy (and more broadly, Europe). While some of his work can be said to be international, the majority of it was dedicated to understanding his own context. What would it mean, then, to use one of these concepts in a context very different to southern Italy? While southern Italy can be said to have been subservient to and dependent on northern Italy, it was still quite different from a context such as Egypt, which was part of the British Empire first and then a newly independent nation soon after. This is where the idea of traveling theory came into the project, as a way of tracing the movement of hegemony���as a concept���from Italy to Egypt. Here I thought with Edward Said���s work on traveling theory, paying attention to how ideas, concepts, and theories change and shift as they move temporally and geographically.
As the concept travels, it stretches (as Frantz Fanon writes in relation to Marxism more broadly) through an encounter with colonial capitalism and anticolonial struggle. Nasserism can be understood as a hegemonic project���the only one in modern Egyptian history���but this instance of hegemony can only be understood through colonialism and anticolonialism, both of which were constitutive of its development. In other words, in the context of the postcolony, hegemony can only be understood through a careful analysis of colonialism and anticolonialism, and the economic, political, and social dynamics that these produced.
To make sense of the question of hegemony and the colonial context, one place to start is with the debates around Subaltern Studies as well as Third World Marxist traditions more broadly. As scholars such as Ranajit Guha have noted, in the context of the colony, coercion is key. This produces a form of domination rather than hegemony, where what he calls persuasion or what we might call consent is relegated to a secondary concern. Siba Grovogui makes a similar point when he argues that in the colonial context we see an ���unparalleled machinery of coercion.��� And Frantz Fanon has argued that the ruling class that comes to power after independence similarly cannot create hegemony, because it must answer to global capital rather than to social forces within its own society. What ultimately matters for Guha, Grovogui, and Fanon is that an analysis of hegemony in the colonial or postcolonial context must take into account the differing historical processes that created ruling classes in these spaces. In other words, this becomes key to any understanding of how hegemony travels to the colonial context.
Under Nasserism we see the emergence of a hegemonic project, but one made possible in and through anticolonial struggle and the particular forms of material and ideological transformation that speak to the broader anticolonial consciousness present in that moment across the world. If colonialism precluded the creation of hegemony in Egypt pre-1952, anti-colonialism was, largely, able to make hegemony possible post-1952. On the one hand, this hegemony was partly predicated on the strength of anticolonial struggle in Egypt leading up to the 1952 revolution, and the broader socialist imaginary that existed across the postcolonial world. Various radical movements had already articulated many of the ideas that would become attached to the Nasserist moment, and in many ways, the Nasserist project had the effect of de-radicalizing some of these ideas and the social forces that produced them. On the other hand, there was also a clear recognition on the part of the Nasserist ruling class that cultivating consent was key to amassing power. Whether through the invocation of ideologies such as Arab socialism, pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism and non-alignment, or through material changes, such as free healthcare, education, and guaranteed employment, it was clear that the ruling class saw an investment in consent as important, allowing it to cultivate a hegemonic project invoking Third Worldism, socialism, and independent development. The tragedy, of course, is that even though it was a continuation of these radical energies, it also betrayed them by both falling short of their radical goals as well as unleashing social violence in order to rule.
In Egypt, the absence and then presence of hegemony can only be understood in relation to the particular forms of capitalism produced through colonialism and anticolonialism. There is a larger work where the themes explored in this essay are explored in greater depth. But, it suffices to say that reading Nasserism through hegemony not only unpacks some of the entanglements of hegemony in the postcolony, but also provides an invigorating lens through which to understand the power and legacies of Nasserism as a political project.
December 2, 2020
Small changes
Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash
The political rise of Bobi Wine (who officially filed to contest Uganda���s 2021 presidential elections) and his People Power movement in Uganda suggests the country is either in the midst or on the brink of a paradigmatic rupture in its political continuum. Among many other examples, Wine���s unjustified arrest in late October immediately following his filing for candidacy to run against the 35-year incumbent president, Yoweri Museveni, reveals a regime growing increasingly worried about its opponent���s reach and appeal.
Due in part to the regime���s various actions against him, Wine���s chances seem to have dwindled considerably. Despite this, it remains utterly futile to offer predictions for the greater outcome of Uganda���s 2021 elections. However, within the broader context of neoliberal hegemony, and especially given their redistributive potential, co-operatives provide a convenient lens through which to examine, if not its future, the political present of Uganda.
Prior to February 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of registered cooperative societies in Ugandan exceeded 21,000 with more than five million members, according to a report by the International Cooperative Alliance. For a country with a population of 45 million, this is a staggering figure. However, co-operatives and their members have been, and continue to be, largely disregarded as an organized voting base both with regards to ruling party policy and opposition party proposals.
The story of Uganda���s cooperative movement is as long as it is complicated. Beginning in 1913, co-operatives initially formed as a challenge to European and Asian economic interests in the cotton and coffee industries, growing after the 1946 Cooperative Societies Ordinance that legalized them. Following independence in 1962, the administration of President Milton Obote favored co-operatives for the country���s development, creating the Bukalasa Cooperative College in 1963 and the Co-operatives Development Bank the following year.
The number of registered coops grew significantly during Obote���s first tenure, eventually securing a 100 percent monopoly on ginning cotton and an overall production value of 325 million shillings. However, co-operatives suffered greatly with the instability of the following decade under President Idi Amin, during which cotton production alone fell 93 percent.
Following Uganda���s implementation of the World Bank���s Structural Adjustment Program, the 1990s saw a multi-pronged assault on the country���s cooperative movement. The Cooperative Development was liquidated, government-run coops were dissolved, and insolvency intensified, partly due to unpaid war debts as well as evaporating government assistance. According to political economist Jorg Wiegratz, Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), effectively budget cuts mandated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), reduced access to government support in the areas of finance, technology, and infrastructure, and though state control remained significant, its preferences had reversed to favor transnational corporations to the detriment of co-operatives and their previously better terms of trade.
Without the guarantee of government investment and assistance, co-operatives fail to capitalize on their advantages, such as their unique ability to establish and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with their smallholders. With more than 75 percent of the Ugandan population engaged in small-scale agriculture, the impact on the co-operative movement and the equity it produces cannot be understated. Wiegratz, however, goes further in his research, not only acknowledging this characteristic of co-operatives but arguing that they provide a vehicle for political resistance to the state���s neoliberal policy agenda.
Co-operatives today are primarily the product of a donor-driven, ���reformist ���social enterprise��� approach��� that focuses more on issues of self-help and inclusive development that, if successful, is only minimally redistributive; for this reason, the movement���s revival has been described as largely apolitical. Often taking the form of small, private business, the vast majority of co-operatives can neither hope to threaten the market share of transnational corporations nor challenge the advancing structural inequalities of neoliberalism more generally.��The majority of the co-operatives that have been registered since the 1990s are small savings and credit banks completely equipped to offer meaningful support to other co-operative ventures in different sectors. The qualitatively limited re-proliferation of Uganda���s co-operatives since the 2000s is far from being the revival it has been proclaimed to be.
Given the Ugandan government���s commitment to creating an attractive environment for foreign direct investment, it would be a mistake to qualify its modest acquiescence to donor-sponsored coop development as anything but supplemental to the overarching neoliberal economic policy. The administration of President Yoweri Museveni���s adversarial posture toward co-operatives that grow beyond the tolerated measure of size and success has been documented by Wiegratz, as well as by Karen Wedig.
The management of the Bugisu Cooperative Union (BCU), a federation of co-operatives owned by coffee farmers and one of the oldest, continuously operative cooperative societies in Uganda, provides the perfect example of government interference with such anti-neoliberal institutions. In 2008, the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) candidate for BCU���s chairmanship lost to Nandala Mafabi of the Forum for Democratic Change, Uganda���s largest opposition party. By 2011, the BCU, which had only a decade previously failed to pay producers, was already reporting net profits, prompting its seizure by the NRM government. The market price paid to producers dropped by 75 percent and billions in Ugandan shillings were misappropriated, leaving the BCU in massive debt. Whereas the National Agricultural Modernization Acts of the 2000s had merely, as Wiegratz states, bypassed co-operatives (in favor of medium-sized farms and large-scale agro-business), the corruption of the BCU���s ���caretaker period��� explicitly demonstrated the NRM���s opposition towards more ambitious cooperative societies.
It must be said that Bobi Wine, as a presidential candidate, has no realistic chance of winning the coming election. Numerous controversies and setbacks, from the total collapse of the opposition���s unity under a single candidate to the legal battle for the ownership of Wine���s new party, have hobbled an already up-hill campaign. And so, the fate of co-operatives, or any divergence from neoliberal economic policy for that matter, rests more reasonably with the more likely���though certainly still difficult to achieve���piecemeal realignment of parliament. It has yet to be seen whether Wine���s People Power movement���now flying the banner of the National Unity Platform���has had the effect of expanding or simply cutting into the opposition���s existing representation in parliament, as well as smaller, local offices. Regardless of their success with the former, three decades of despotic, authoritarian rule seems to have had a peculiar effect on the ideological discourse and diversity of Ugandan politics, an effect I personally observed during my research in Kampala in the summer of 2019.
Today, in Uganda, ���ideology��� is often used interchangeably with ���strategy.��� More than once, the political strategy of the FDC���known universally as one of defiance to the Museveni regime and one that led to a rift and splitting off of a group that became the Alliance for National Transformation���was described, to me, as ���ideology.��� It seems that the concept and operational characteristic of ideology has shrunk within the ideological vacuum created by an intractable dictatorship. Nabilah Sempala, Women���s MP for Kampala, put it best: ���If you have a king…what���s the ideology?��� Sempala may have been speaking about the NRM government, but her words are no less apt for those parties comprising the opposition, as others have made similar assessments.
���The contestation that is going on in the country is not a contestation based on ideology, of how the country should be managed,��� Kizza Besigye, founder and four-time flagbearer for the FDC. ���It���s not a contestation for leadership as such. It���s a more fundamental contestation for ownership of the country.���
Besigye���s words imply that an inability to realistically envision taking power���or perhaps a preoccupation with doing so���precludes imagining what to do with it. Besigye certainly has been criticized for presumably inferring just that; though the FDC has consistently released comprehensive party manifestos before every election; and though the manifesto of 2016 only mentions a nominal support for co-ops, stating vaguely that priority be given to ���reviving and strengthening agricultural co-operatives��� without saying how or in what form any support would be given.
If the FDC���s stated support for co-operatives is vague, then that of Wine���s NUP is nonexistent. As political organizations, NUP and People Power are utterly thin on policy, let alone that which has been committed to text. Even the recent release of the NUP���s election manifesto was nothing more than a short, rather vague speech by Wine, in which co-operatives go entirely unmentioned. Despite emerging as the only other political entity with the growing influence to rival that of the FDC, People Power remains observably non-ideological in its pursuit of power. Again, however, this seems an unfortunately reasonable outcome of Uganda���s unique political paradigm.
���You have a neoliberal economic order with a neoconservative political system coexisting,��� said Moses Khisa, professor of political science at NC State and regular contributor to Uganda���s Daily Monitor newspaper. ���The economy is … disarticulated from politics and political actors are not integrated in the economic system in ways that can represent economic interests.���
Wine, like other opposition candidates before him, has regularly criticized the corruption of the Museveni regime, arguing for the need for stronger institutions. Furthermore, in contrast to what Khisa claims, his personal experience growing up in one of Kampala���s ghettos suggests that he may at least be more concerned with poverty alleviation, and by extension, with prioritizing the co-operative revival. But this is far too little circumstantial evidence to go beyond the mere suggestion that even a substantial change in government would lead to anything more than continued neoliberalism, albeit with a prettier face.
For those disappointed in the dwindling prospects of big political change in Uganda in the coming year, it is more appropriate to focus, for now, on those small changes, not only with regard to implementing a more democratic political order, but also a more robust, complete revival of the co-operative movement. After all, that is how co-operatives themselves work.
December 1, 2020
After art repatriation, what comes next?
Benin Bronzes, at the British Museum. Image credit Raj Patel via Flickr CC.
In the film ���Black Panther,��� the villain Eric Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan, asks a British museum curator, eyeing African artworks, ���How do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like they took everything else?��� As Killmonger reminds us, an enormous volume of cultural artifacts have been taken from Africa. Items gathered by theft, coercion, and looting, as well as for the purpose of research supporting scientific racism, are increasingly recognized as illegitimately appropriated and due to return. The repatriation debate is now high-profile enough to make it into a popular film, along with books by academics, scholarly journals, and popular websites.
The Benin Bronzes are one high-profile case. The sculptures, looted by British military forces from Benin City in 1897,�� are now held by institutions and private owners all over the world and, despite the obvious way in which they were stolen, are returning only in a slow, piecemeal fashion. The British Museum, which holds a large collection, continues to resist their return. At the same time as repatriation remains contentious in some spaces, however, it is also gaining ground. Institutions such as the Smithsonian in the US, Dutch heritage institutions, and the German and French governments have made commitments to returning at least some types of cultural property. Even if such efforts are halting or half-hearted, the fact that states and institutions are now feeling the obligation to publicly indicate their repatriation efforts is a positive sign for the process���s advocates, reflecting a broader shift in its favor.
Still, the returns themselves are only part of the story. What happens next?
This question requires us to think about the role of cultural artifacts in contemporary societies. The Senegalese scholar, Felwine Sarr, and French counterpart, B��n��dicte Savoy, the authors of Restitution Report commissioned by the French government, say that African nations face a double task: first, restoring memory through reclaiming heritage, and second, a process of ���self-reinvention��� that connects reclaimed artifacts to present-day societies and their challenges.
Sarr and Savoy���s suggestion is something that scholars of history and heritage have long called the construction of a ���usable past��� for a nation, something that can be mobilized to address the concerns of the present. The first president of Botswana, Seretse Khama, noted how key this project was to newly independent African countries: ���We should write our own history books to prove that we did have a past, and that it was a past that was just as worth writing and learning about as any other. We must do this for the simple reason that a nation without a past is a lost nation, and a people without a past are a people without a soul.���
Tangible cultural heritage is a materialization of the past. It makes history visibly, palpably available to contemporary people. Importantly, cultural heritage is not a static or stagnant collection of objects, but a living construction. As the heritage scholar Rodney Harrison puts it, ���Heritage is not a passive process of simply preserving things from the past that remain, but an active process of assembling a series of objects, places and practices that we choose to hold up as a mirror to the present, associated with a particular set of values that we wish to take with us into the future.��� The return of cultural artifacts provides objects around which what Sarr and Savoy call the ���project for the future��� can coalesce.
What might this project for the future be? Some results of repatriation are evident already: in South Africa, the return of the bodies of a San couple provided closure for their families and advanced the decolonial project. Other countries provide useful parallel examples. In the US, the Cherokee anthropologist Russell Thornton has illustrated the role of returns in healing the cultural trauma of Native American communities. We can look, too, to the ways in which African nations are currently utilizing heritage in the interest of present and future societies. Heritage sites are used for economic development and recognition via World Heritage listing, while communities can reconnect with their pasts through archaeology from the ground up.
Such examples indicate that African nations are already managing their own heritage and managing it well. One of the arguments against repatriation is that African countries lack the capacity to adequately care for fragile items. But impressive institutions such as Dakar���s Museum of Black Civilizations refute this claim. (Indeed, the global North should consider whether its own profiting from colonial theft of heritage brings an ethical obligation to make amends through material support for resourcing and training African heritage institutions.) What Africa lacks is not the ability to manage heritage, but the heritage itself: the Benin Dialogue Group���s planned Royal Museum for dispersed heritage will create a home for repatriated objects, awaiting only the actual returns of what was looted in 1897. Stolen artifacts can return to nations more than capable of both caring for and utilizing them going forward.
After repatriation, then, the next question for African countries is about the future they wish to make through heritage, including the heritage that they are now reclaiming. While researching the Rwandan state heritage sector, I met government employees who were finding ways to make heritage work. In a country consumed with the pursuit of development, these practitioners investigated how heritage could contribute, as one told me, to ���the future we want.��� This meant giving Rwandans evidence, through museums and public history, of a usable past of which they could be proud���one that would counteract the ethnic divisions instituted by colonialism. Heritage was not just instantiations of history, nor was it a collection of inanimate objects: it was the project of making a new future for Rwanda.
The discussion of repatriation must not stop at simple returns, because these are not the endpoint of the process. They are only the beginning of a new one: mobilizing heritage as the material foundation for constructing understandings of the past that matter to the present and future. Repatriation is, in part, the righting (limited as it may be) of historic wrongs through the recognition of colonial injustice and the return of stolen heritage. But in enabling new narratives that are based on the material past and also responsive to the needs of the present, repatriation opens up new possibilities for the futures that African nations will make for themselves.
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