Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 162

Although it���s dangerous, we need to survive

Burundian refugees in Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Uganda are enacting grassroots responses to COVID-19.





Image credit Sam Meyerson.

Spread out across the rolling plains of southwestern Uganda, Nakivale Refugee Settlement is Africa���s oldest continuously inhabited refugee camp and home to 104,169 refugees from across East and Central Africa. In their respective sections of the sprawling camp, refugees of six different nationalities have worked to forge new lives out of the trauma of displacement. Somali refugees with global diasporic connections have struck up import-export enterprises, Congolese and Burundians preside over a trade in agricultural produce, and refugees of all stripes have opened restaurants, bars, cinemas, churches, and mosques to make their new surroundings a little more like home.

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages, the communities that Nakivale���s residents have struggled to build may be at risk. Some observers, especially in the West, predict that Africa will be the pandemic���s next epicenter as fragile medical systems are overwhelmed. Others contend that African governments��� experiences with previous epidemics leave them uniquely prepared to find innovative solutions to COVID-19. But as George Kibala Bauer writes, these polarized narratives of success and failure do not fully capture the complex realities of life in Africa during the pandemic. These realities can be found in the struggles of grassroots organizations and ordinary people across the continent to combat the economic and health effects of COVID-19 in their communities. From their victories and setbacks, we can learn a great deal about the power of social responsibility in times of crisis, and especially about the structural barriers that limit it.

Refugees have long relied on norms of social responsibility to withstand the rigors of daily life in Nakivale. The work of Talented Orphan Healing Aid (TOHA), a small, refugee-run NGO based in Nakivale���s Burundian community, exemplifies this ethos. Founded in 2015 by Benefice Tuyisenge, a former student and community organizer from Bujumbura, TOHA has undertaken a holistic, grassroots response to the pandemic: constructing sinks from branches and jerrycans to encourage handwashing, distributing soap and facemasks to refugees, and working to dispel widespread misinformation regarding COVID-19. TOHA���s efforts are bolstered by the contributions of other refugees, who pass along information by word of mouth and share their sinks and soap with their neighbors. As Nakivale resident Leoncie Bigirimana stated, ���When they teach us, if we encounter other people, we teach them.���

TOHA staff members generally work voluntarily or for small stipends, and they are dogged by worries that they might catch COVID-19 in the course of their work. ���For myself and my family, this disease has instilled a lot of fear in us, because we see that there���s nothing that can treat it,��� said Etienne Niyomwungere, TOHA���s treasurer. Tuyisenge, who is asthmatic and lives with the six orphans whom he is fostering, shares Niyomwungere���s anxieties. In spite of these fears, TOHA staff feel bound by a sense of responsibility to their community. ���When people die,��� Tuyisenge explained, ���They are wise people, resourceful people, knowledgeable people���We need to keep on saving the lives of people.���

Image credit Sam Meyerson.

Yet social responsibility has its limits, especially in times of great hardship and in the face of implacable structural forces. In accordance with government-mandated lockdown measures, the majority of shops and marketplaces in Nakivale have been shuttered, making it difficult to find work or obtain basic necessities. To make matters worse, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Food Program (WFP) have slashed refugees��� rations by 30 percent and reduced their monthly cash allotment to less than six US dollars. These cuts were precipitated by a significant decrease in US funding to the UN and its subsidiary agencies over the course of the Trump presidency.

As a result of the lockdown and aid cuts, hunger has begun to take its toll on the social fabric of Nakivale. Unsure of where their next meal will come from, many refugees are no longer willing to share their food with needy neighbors. Landlords have begun kicking impoverished tenants to the curb, forcing homeless refugees to lay their heads in construction sites and leaving them susceptible to diseases like malaria. ���People are shut in completely,��� Burundian refugee Domitila Mbonigaba lamented. ���We���re not getting food, we���re dying of hunger.���

TOHA has begun taking steps to tackle the desperation taking root in Nakivale. The organization is currently distributing tomatoes, dried fish, and charcoal to 134 particularly vulnerable refugees in order to supplement their meager rations of rice, beans, and cooking oil. Unfortunately, these efforts have been hampered by the systemic corruption that pervades all levels of political authority in Nakivale. TOHA typically identifies especially vulnerable refugees who require extra assistance through official lists kept by the camp authorities. However, the officials who curate these lists allegedly expect bribes from those seeking to have their names added, causing many recently arrived refugees, who are often unable to pay, to be left off. As a result, TOHA has failed to include some vulnerable people in its food distribution program, leading to confrontations with incensed community members and rumors that TOHA itself is involved in networks of corruption. To remedy the situation, Tuyisenge and his colleagues are seeking ways of identifying beneficiaries while circumventing corrupt power structures. But TOHA���s focus on orphans, the disabled and other particularly vulnerable refugees will likely remain a source of friction with the community at large as conditions in Nakivale deteriorate. ���People come to tell me that, ���Benefice, all of us are refugees, and all of us are vulnerable. You shouldn���t choose who is vulnerable and who is not,������ Tuyisenge explained. ���And I tell them, ���No, we are all refugees, but the categories are different. There are people who have legs and hands, but there are other people who don���t.���”

Corruption in Uganda is a complex and multifaceted problem, rooted in patronage politics, the legacies of colonial rule, and the economic liberalization and crony capitalism that accompanied the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s. As refugees in Nakivale have experienced firsthand, corruption is also closely connected to the maintenance of a militaristic, authoritarian state. Some police and military personnel in Nakivale have used the lockdown as an opportunity to terrorize refugees, and to line their pockets in the process. Refugees caught violating the government-mandated 7:00 p.m. curfew, often to gather firewood, can suffer police violence. ���There���s no charcoal, so you have to go search for it,��� one refugee recounted, ���But when you go and search for this charcoal in the evening, you encounter the police and they arrest you and beat you.��� Another refugee complained of rampant corruption and baseless arrests: ���If they do not find you in your house, then you are beaten seriously. If you don���t have something you can pay them as a bribe, then you are jailed for two or three days until you pay something.���

Police officers and local government officials have also used the air of secrecy surrounding the lockdown to exact revenge against refugees seen as uncooperative, part of a longstanding campaign against those who threaten the interests of Nakivale���s corrupt bureaucracy. For instance, on May 5th, police allegedly murdered a Congolese refugee named Freddy Kayiji for failing to bribe a local official after renting a house. TOHA staff and other community leaders have tried to initiate a dialogue with the police, but Tuyisenge says they have been unable to secure a meeting with police and military commanders. Tellingly, a local official stated that only ���lawbreakers���are the ones having problems��� with the police.

The corruption, police violence, and aid cuts demonstrate that, in the midst of the pandemic, refugees in Nakivale have become collateral damage in political, economic, and ideological contests taking place from Kampala to Washington. In light of the colonial legacies and stark global inequalities underscored by COVID-19, refugees��� daily struggles to survive constitute acts of resistance against the historical and political injustices that produced their current circumstances. The painstaking efforts of grassroots refugee organizations like TOHA provide insight into how many of the continent���s poor will weather the pandemic, even as international media outlets focus mainly on dire predictions of death or large-scale government policies. In the face of economic strain and systemic challenges stemming from within and without, communities across Africa are taking survival into their own hands, demonstrating that ordinary Africans are far from the passive victims of Western imagination and highlighting the importance of social responsibility in a time of great fear and precarity. As Tuyisenge puts it, ���When you support people, you also support yourself.���

The media���s crisis on Ethiopia

Western media coverage of Ethiopia���s political crisis turns a blind eye to the grassroots movement behind the protests.





Image credit Carsten ten Brink via Flickr CC.

Ethiopia is facing a turbulent political period of unrest ignited by the shooting death on June 29 of a beloved and iconic Oromo musician and activist, Haacaaluu Hundeessaa. Assassinated in the capital, Addis Ababa, Haacaaluu played a pivotal role providing inspiration and vision for the youth movement in 2014-2018 that forced a peaceful change at the top of Ethiopia���s ruling party in 2018.

In April 2018 in an internal party election of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), Hailemariam Desalegn was succeeded by Abiy Ahmed. The latter embarked on a reform process which was supposed to address contradictions exposed within Ethiopian society and politics by the protests, especially the need for domestic economic reforms and breathing life into the federal character of the Ethiopian state. Abiy has since dismantled the EPRDF and formed a unitary party, the Prosperity Party (PP).

The news of Haacaaluu���s death shook a country already despairing of a smooth transition to democracy. It touched off widespread grassroots protests in the Oromia region, the largest and most populous of Ethiopia���s 10 federal states. Police responded with a brutal crackdown starting with firing live ammunition into crowds of mourners. Immediately a sweep of Oromo individuals and institutions followed. At the time of writing more than 300 people have been killed, many more injured by security forces in the aftermath of the assassination. Three weeks ago, government sources reported that more than 7,000 people have been detained. Although updated figures have since not been released, detention rates remain high and schools emptied by COVID-19 are now prisons.

The first taken were well-known opposition leaders Bekele Gerba and Jawar Mohammed, along with 35 others. Jawar���s arrest was particularly dramatic because, despite his stated skepticism, he was considered an early ally of Abiy. The next day after Jawar���s arrest, police ransacked and closed the Oromia Media Network (OMN), a popular alternative to government-controlled sources of information for millions of people in Afaan Oromo, a language spoken by about half of the country���s population. The OMN was established in 2013 by journalists and activists living abroad, and Jawar became its second Executive Director in the US. After Abiy became a prime minister, Jawar returned to Ethiopia.

Unfortunately, international English language media coverage of the unfolding crisis in Ethiopia has presented a single, incomplete narrative to explain the conflict. Major news outlets, such as Associated Press, Washington Post, and WSJ represented the crisis by attributing it to ���ethnic��� tension, using terms such as ���violent mobs��� and ���vandalism.��� Some outlets insinuate that the current catastrophe is a byproduct of the country���s ���ethnic federal system.��� TIME conspicuously implicated the country���s constitution because it ���divides Ethiopia into ethnically based territories.���

In Ethiopia���s existing political landscape, a fraction of the approximately 20% of the population who are urban elites blame the constitution for the current tensions and want to dismantle the components that protect the rights of named regional states. They want the resource base to be treated as a centrally controlled asset they can exploit.�� The model of multinational federalism created regional states from national/linguistic/cultural groups as semi-autonomous entities to cooperate in federal arrangement. This decision was the result of long resistance to autocratic centralized military rule. It retains a strong support among rural producers (at least 80% of the population).�� They want rights to develop the lands they consider their birthright and to protect them from unsustainable development by urban elites controlled from Addis Ababa. Yet mainstream media coverage presumes that nationality-based territories protected in the constitution contribute to the unrest rather than provide a solution.

Ethiopia is on the brink of chaos, perhaps even at great risk for a devastating civil war, primarily due to Abiy���s attempts to subvert the existing constitutional arrangement. Most Ethiopians do not support the imposition of further centralization from Addis Ababa. By turning a blind eye to the mounting grassroots resistance, media coverage fails to provide the kind of complete picture or balance necessary to understand the crisis.

Media coverage of Ethiopia needs to acknowledge those who support the sort of regional state autonomy based on linguistic/cultural groups that is enshrined as ���multinational federalism��� in the Ethiopian constitution of 1995.�� When Abiy stepped into the political opening created by the youth resistance, he explicitly promised to deliver the transition to democracy via free and fair elections that the previous regime had failed to deliver. The US, the EU, and other international bodies accepted and praised him for his commitment to democratic transition.

However, the basic demands of the grassroots movement have been deliberately dismissed. The marginalized groups are again disappointed.�� Furthermore, Abiy has commanded an active campaign to delegitimize the peaceful protests and the youth who led them. His government encourages the maligning, denigrating, and targeting of Oromo youth categorically. Over the last two years and increasingly in the aftermath of the assassination, state media have continuously referred to them as ���violent,��� ���hate-driven,��� and violent mobs driving ���inter-ethnic��� conflict. They are now being scapegoated for the recent unrest. Both domestic and international media outlets have magnified this narrative.

With Abiy���s about-face, the glimmer of hope, presented by what was to be a transformative transition to participatory democracy, has now flickered and disappeared. In fact, while urging the youth movement and Oromo leaders to ���give him time,��� the prime minister has taken giant steps away from democratization.

Over the last year and half, while virtually all media reporting on Ethiopia centered around vanity projects which placed the Prime Minister in the limelight, his government has imposed a state of emergency and military command with severe restrictions on citizens in parts of Oromia where his policies enjoy little or no support. Forces under his direct control carry out extrajudicial killings, rape, torture, house burnings, displacement, and other human rights abuses in these dissident areas as documented by human rights groups such as Amnesty International.

Media reporting has missed how Abiy���s persistent steps have subverted the goals of the grassroots movement. In October 2019, for example, Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize, winning laudatory media coverage. He also dramatically acted to dismantle the ruling coalition party, EPRDF, which provided the underpinning to multinational federalism. In an affront to the spirit of federalism he announced the creation of a single national party.

This move was universally unpopular with the youth movement as a betrayal of the promises of democracy. The ensuing region-wide youth demonstrations, in which 86 people died, were blamed on Jawar, noting his large following among the youth. He had spoken out publicly against Abiy���s political move against federalism by forming a single party. But media reports, and even human rights groups, missed this wider context of youth vexation over Abiy���s betrayal.

Remarkably, people managed to hang onto hope as they anticipated elections. A key to that constant reminder of hope was the music of Haacaaluu on everyone���s playlist, singing about what was possible if they peacefully harnessed their energy and looked to a future of unity. He embodied the grassroots. He himself had urged the youth to be patient with Abiy and to wait for him to get them to elections so that they could realize their desire to transition into a decentralized (multinational) federal system.

Haacaaluu���s assassination removed a safeguard against despair, not only for Oromo, but for other people brought forcibly into Ethiopia and marginalized thereafter. They all anticipated a change away from oppressive economic, political, and cultural structures.

Abiy���s return to authoritarian rule has re-ignited the #OromoProtests movement. His brutal response in suppressing the protests threatens to destabilize the country and the region. Yet the media claim that Abiy has ���transcended��� ethnic politics, missing many complexities, including a rise in incendiary historical narratives coming from his office and amplified on state and establishment media that pits national groups against each other. Following the assassination, media coverage has missed the scale and motivations for the ongoing government crackdown against anyone who does not agree with Abiy���s agenda. Journalists have presented simplistic narratives that suggest a personal conflict between Abiy and Jawar, reducing an extremely complex story involving much of the grassroots, who are entirely erased from coverage. By including the view from the grassroots, media outlets can deliver a more complete and balanced account of this volatile and fragile moment in Ethiopia.

Khartoum’s lockdown

In Sudan's capital, security forces arbitrarily enforce a haphazard lockdown.





Central Khartoum. Image credit Hans Birger Nilsen via Flickr CC.

The global dilemma of COVID-19���saving lives or saving the economy���has even more layers in the crisis-stricken Sudanese capital. The power-sharing agreement signed after the December 2018 uprising between the ���civilians,��� comprised of opposition parties and backed by the revolutionary masses, and the ���military��� generals, who deserted the sinking ship of the former regime, is becoming an endless scene of rivalry and finger-pointing. The two parties of the transitional government not only possess divergent interests but also conflicting ones. Simply put, the success of this transitional phase toward civilian and democratic rule is a major threat to the decades-long military control over the country.

Although it is not clear if an Egypt-like coup scenario is on the generals��� minds, they have worked tirelessly to discredit their civilian partners. Khartoum, the pandemic���s hotspot, has been the stage for this standoff. In the capital, there are the officially declared lockdown measures: the ones enforced by the security forces and the ones followed by ���formal��� citizens. Then there are the ones navigated by the ���informal��� urbanites, as well as the numerous combinations of all these versions.

The civilian-led executive body, aware of the country���s collapsing health system, has pushed for the replacement of the partial curfew by a complete shutdown of the city one month after the detection of the first COVID-19 case in mid-March. At the time of writing, the number of detected cases has exceeded 11,400. However, the low case detection rate of 22.7% implies that more cases remain undetected. Officially, moving around the city for grocery and basics is allowed until 1 pm, but shops and small markets in our peripheral neighborhood in Al Haj Yousif stay open until midnight. You cannot cross bridges from one part of the tripartite city to the other unless you or your vehicle have a permit, but it does not matter who or how many people are in the vehicle, and official channels to obtain permits are not the only ones. Only essential businesses were exempted from the lockdown, yet JTI, the biggest tobacco factory in the country, has managed not only to secure operation permits, but also to increase its labor force per shift. Big markets are not allowed to open, yet in the early days of the lockdown, vendors were allowed in Al Souq Al Markazi (the Central Market) until 1 pm, then they were chased and beaten for not disappearing from the streets immediately despite the ban on public transport.

For the city dwellers, the COVID-19 preventive measures sounded like a cruel joke. Slogans urging Khartoum dwellers to ���stay at home��� were nothing but a reminder of the worsening status of the already poor urban infrastructure. The slack control that security forces are exercising over the smuggling of subsidized LP Gas, fuel, and bread flour to neighboring countries, or to the black market, have created snaking queues in front of petrol stations, bakeries, gas shops, and at designated delivery points. ���Social distancing��� is the last thing Khartoum is prepared for, with more than 50% of the city���s eight million residents concentrated in crowded informal settlements. In what seems almost surreal, police forces targeted these makeshift arrangements to ���stay at home��� in one of its forced evictions of informal residents to the south of Khartoum.

Even the remarkable efforts put forward by the Ministry of Labor and Social Development, to provide both in-kind and financial support for the ���unstructured sector and for low-income families,��� were significantly undermined by the poor governance of its distribution through neighborhood committees. In general, the heavy reliance of the executive government on under-resourced and nascent neighborhood committees������the gift of Sudan���s contemporary revolutionary experience������is clearly becoming a double-edged sword. Committee members have been selflessly supporting the civilian-led executive body in the control and distribution of many basic supplies, compensating for the deliberate failure by security forces to carry out these tasks. However, democratic processes and channels of accountability in these committees remain fluid; they vary from one area to another, and are tainted by political rivalries, making way for corruption.

Broadly, the stakes of the lockdown for the civilian population ranged from being a plausible measure to contain the pandemic, a temporary relief with the weakening demand on petrol fuels amounting to almost $200 million per month of subsidies, but also a threat due to the rising discontent amongst the daily earners. The military, on the other hand, in its passion for ���states of emergency,��� received the lockdown news as a godsend. Where and when possible, security forces arbitrarily enforce it, to the extent of shooting two civilians dead, boldly blackmailing the non-compliant, or ignoring pandemic protocol by joining the gatherings at tea sellers next to check points���reminding their civilian partners of who is really in control of this country.

Recovering the lost heritage of emergency relief

Local traditions of crisis management���especially those resistant to predatory capitalism���have largely been forcibly shed along the path to ���development.��� The age of COVID-19 is the time to recover them.





Image credit Mitchell Edwards.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, the insidious impact of COVID-19 is being felt less in the lungs than in the stomach. From Nigeria to Kenya, the implementation of draconian measures has reportedly kept ���confirmed��� cases low, but at the disproportionate expense of those already struggling to make ends meet.

Yet, this is not a problem of ���food scarcity.��� The problem is affording the food that very much remains plentiful. Those involved in the daily face-to-face transactions that drive cash flow and keep economies afloat are at an obvious loss when quarantines, curfews, and lockdowns prevail. Inequalities enshrined in neoliberal political regimes continue to keep food in some mouths and not in others.

Such challenges demand alternative solutions. For far too long, hunger-generating crises on the continent have primarily served as an opportunity for powerful organizations and distant actors to experiment with market-oriented schemes under the banner of ���humanitarianism.��� Local traditions of crisis management���especially those resistant to predatory capitalism���have largely been supplanted and thrown by the wayside as a result, forcibly shed along the path to ���development.���

Now is the time to recover the value of this lost heritage and put it to use in the present. The continent lays claim to a repository of underappreciated grassroots strategies that have proven effective at mitigating crises and ensuring sustenance. We must learn from them. We must appreciate their complexity. We must consider how they might be renovated and supported to best operate in the present.

I���m convinced of the need for this project because I continue to see it at work. When I came to north-central Uganda to conduct doctoral research six months ago, I had little idea that studying histories of disaster relief would become a topic of contemporary concern. Since then, however, the area���s wrestled with locust invasions, unprecedented flooding, and a global pandemic���a biblical confluence of calamities that has led people of all different walks of life to pursue self-sufficiency by taking up longstanding strategies designed to alleviate hunger.

One of these strategies involves ���dero.��� Dero are granaries, and for a very long time they served as the centerpiece of food security in Acholi-speaking Uganda. They look much like the thatch-roof homes found in this region, except they���re considerably smaller and elevated off the ground by wooden stilts. In the past, it was necessary for every homestead to maintain several of these storage facilities because they prevented droughts from becoming famines.

Dero worked by making sure enough food was available from harvest to harvest. They preserved agricultural yields for daily use and when needed most. Many elders now describe dero simply as ���insurance������material buffers aimed at lessening the weight of the extraordinary.

Image credit Mitchell Edwards.

However, the past 50 years have witnessed the disappearance of dero, and there is no denying that the decades-long civil war accelerated this loss. Hounded on either side by Joseph Kony���s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and Yoweri Museveni���s military, Acholi communities were violently forced from their homes into internal displacement camps that bore a close resemblance to open-air prisons. This was a protracted lockdown that wrought immeasurable disruptions.

Removed from the land, people had no choice but to rely on rations provided by international NGOs. Acronym-labeled sacks filled with grains from afar swelled congested camps and quickly became the mandated bulwark against hunger. Dependence was manufactured and imposed one meal at a time. Acholi communities found themselves increasingly entangled in globalizing systems that made sure they were ���developing��� along familiar paths and towards preordained destinations.

In today���s post-war landscape, sacks have eclipsed dero as the emblem of food security. Small-scale farmers now depend on cash generated from selling their packaged produce to roaming buyers and agents of industrial agriculture. Farmers��� co-ops have been dismantled, so exploitative pricing is not only a threat, but also an expectation. Against this backdrop, it is common to hear locals tell stories of farming families who rushed to sell their entire harvests and then lacked enough money to provide food for themselves. Whereas practices revolving around dero instilled prudence and sustainability, today���s use of sacks hastens decision-making, diminishes accountability, and deepens inequalities through patterns of extraction.

Moreover, at a very basic level sacks are just not as effective as dero at preserving food. Many complain of how grains that are threshed and kept in synthetic sacks have a shorter shelf life because they���re more vulnerable to pest infestation and mold. Grains stored in dero, on the other hand, are largely left intact and untouched, protected not only by their natural defenses but also by the local materials chosen to ward off vermin and allow for adequate air circulation within.

Attempts to restore the dero, then, should not be taken as some nostalgia for an idealized and indistinct ���African culture.��� It���s a tried and tested strategy that promises to bring real material relief to specific people in the here and now. By better preserving harvested crops, dero will ease the neoliberal push to sell at any cost and keep food in the mouths of its growers. It will open up possibilities for exchange that circumvent conventional markets at a time of indefinite closure. It will bolster self-sufficiency, and in doing so, help locals reclaim some of the power and dignity that characterizes acts of provision.

Most importantly, however, this project would recover living monuments that honor the usefulness of the deep past. Dero would once again become sites of learning where younger generations engage elements of an inheritance they���ve been denied. Dero would serve as venues where expertise is shared, debated, and improved upon. Because, like any strategy, dero are neither faultless nor complete. Their history is not one of fixed traditions and blind adherence, but rather one of dissent, struggle, and transformation.

Restoring the dero honors this heritage and contributes to the messy but necessary work of decolonizing strategies that have been forced to succeed at the expense of others.

Weekend Music Break No.113

We're back with another playlist of songs for your weekend!





Shatta Wale and Beyonce. Image via Shatta Wale on Twitter.

This pandemic is helping the world rediscover the joys of casually listening to music. In that spirit, welcome back to Africa Is A Country���s “Weekend Music Break.” Check out the following pan-African selection of tunes from our intern, Myrakel Baker!

1) First up, we have the Liberian artist Eric Geso���s new single ���I Hear Something.��� The club banger sparked the #IHearSomething challenge. Tag #AIAC and #IHearSomething on your social media to join in on the fun. 2) Ghanian artist Medikal released the music video for his song ���Shout��� featuring Okese1. Check out Medikal���s new album for a deeper listen. 3) Burna Boy wants us to know we are Africans not because we are born in Africa, but because Africa is born in us in his new record ���Wonderful.��� 4) Beyonce drops a video for the highly successful Afrobeat song ���ALREADY,��� featuring Shatta Wale and Major Lazer. 5) Manu WorldStar premieres his latest single ���Choko.��� I���m happy to see all the love he is receiving from this record. 6) The Nigerian singer Timaya releases an autobiographical song ���Born to Win.��� It is the motivational record needed for the quarantine blues. 7) You cannot help but catch a vibe to the 2Baba and Wizkid joint ���Opo.��� The track is an afrobeat/pop song off 2Baba���s new studio album���Warrior. 8) Davido wants to get ���Risky��� with the ladies on his record featuring Popcaan. 9) Tiwa Savage has got a lot of ���Attention��� with her single. Her COLORS performance has been trending on twitter throughout the quarantine period. 10) The world megastar Yemi Alade did not disappoint with her new record, ���Boyz.��� Alade���s record is a perfect way to close out this weekend���s music break, until next time!

What washerwomen would say on a webinar

Regular Kenyans try to survive the economic fallout from the coronavirus.





Lucy Nyangasi, domestic worker, Kenya. Image credit Kate Holt for the Solidarity Center, 2016 via Flickr CC.

Since the pandemic lockdown, many live-in domestic workers and washerwomen in search of daily contracts in Nairobi have seen their work opportunities shrink. What���s more, not only are they not privy to any worker protection, but in the sites where they gather to be picked for hard to come by employment, they are now harassed by a police force sinisterly enforcing distancing measures. Amidst their currently exacerbated life struggles, what would they say if they were invited to the now ubiquitous middle class webinars?

This post is from our partnership between the Kenyan website The Elephant and Africa Is a Country. We will be publishing a post from their site every week, curated by Africa Is a Country Contributing Editor, Wangui Kimari.

As the signature tune for the 9 o���clock evening news floats on the airwaves, Elizabeth Mbatha wearily pushes open the door to her house in Kangemi.

She has just walked 22 kilometers across the city from Moi International Sports Centre in Kasarani where she completed her day-long court-ordered community service to sweep the streets because she could not raise the Sh200 fine for ���failing to observe social distancing rules��� and not properly wearing a mask in public.

Police from Kileleshwa station in Nairobi enforcing public health measures in response to the coronavirus pandemic had arrested Mbatha and a dozen other women the previous day at the spot where they habitually sit, sometimes all day, waiting for someone to hire them for a day���s cleaning work.

In this COVID-19 season, webinars have become the middle class replacement for workshops, but on July 15, a different variety of this urban phenomenon occurred as itinerant washerwomen from Nairobi spoke about coping amid the crisis.

On a normal day, Mbatha walks a 5 kilometer round-trip from her house to Kileleshwa to wait for work cleaning houses and washing clothes. Often, police order the women who sit waiting along residential streets back to their homes where they have nothing with which to feed their children.

���We face innumerable problems. If you leave your child in the care of a neighbor, she will want Sh100 at the end of the day,��� Mbatha said.

Cleaning and laundry work has contracted as employees in the formal sector���grappling with pay cuts and disappearing jobs���stay home and take on the household chores. Live-in domestic staff have been laid off because of fears of COVID-19 infection, and also because households are surviving on reduced incomes.

Some employers called their former domestic staff and asked them not to come to work: Don���t call us, we���ll call you once the crisis is over.

Former live-in domestic workers have now joined day laborers like Mbatha in the search for work.

For some 50 women at each of the 40 waiting spots dotted across the wealthier parts of Nairobi, it is not so much a search for work as it is a game of wait-and-see. According to the Centre for Livelihood Advancement, up to 2,000 women sit in the open around Nairobi waiting for someone to offer them cleaning work, and so far, CFLA has registered 500 of them. Police regularly drive by and order the women to disperse to their homes as part of enforcing anti-crowding regulations. ���Do not bring corona to the roadside,��� the police bark at the women. ���Stay at home until COVID-19 is over.���

Work is irregular, and when it comes, the load is heavy because employers who previously hired once a week are now taking in washerwomen just once or twice a month. It is a headlong dive into the unknown.

Mbatha, a mother of two children, says her husband is on furlough from his contract work in construction. She took the job because sometimes her husband would return home after a day out without finding any work. She has been washing and cleaning for three years.

���Living with an unemployed husband can be very stressful because when you enquire what you will feed the children, fighting can break out���sometimes even in front of the children,��� she adds.

Depressed household incomes have forced many people with precarious occupations like Elizabeth Mueni���also a washerwoman���to move houses. ���I used to pay Sh3,000 for rent every month but I had to move to a cheaper house. Even here, I had to negotiate to pay the Sh1,800 in instalments,��� she adds.

Washerwomen start walking out of Kawangware, Kibera and other informal settlements adjacent to the middle class residential ones early in the morning. They stake out supermarkets, and sometimes road junctions, waiting for people looking for a day���s domestic help.

Employers who offer one-day jobs for Sh500 are of all varieties: homemakers seeking a helping hand with large catering; men who live alone; or people nursing patients and other household members with special needs.

The criteria used to select a washerwoman is capricious: some want plain looks while others are looking for neatness; some seek mature-looking older women while others call up those they have hired before.

���Employers are not the same,��� says Rosemary Ambeyi, a widowed mother of five who works as a day-wage washerwoman. ���Some [employers] invite the women into their personal spaces so that they can exploit them,��� she adds.

Ambeyi has used this work to put two of her children through secondary school and is still educating another three.

���The challenge we have is assuming they want you to work,��� she continues. ���Once you get to the house, some start to make inappropriate advances, and you get into a fight���meaning you are not able to work. If you do not finish work, your pay is docked.���

The problems in the domestic work sector have persisted for over 12 years, says Mary Kambo, the program manager for labor and corporate accountability at the Kenya Human Rights Commission. ���Domestic staff work in isolation and their social connections are threatened. Raising your voice when you are alone could mean the loss of livelihood.���

Last year, an Africa Labour, Research and Education Institute study estimated that there were some two million people employed in��domestic work in Kenya. Although domestic work is not properly documented, the sector is quite significant and plays an important role in driving the country���s economic growth and development.

Nannies, caretakers, cooks, gardeners, cleaners, drivers, and security guards among others, perform important work that makes it possible for professionals and people in business or other occupations to go to their jobs away from home. ���The value of domestic work has, however, not been properly recognized,��� says Kambo, adding that labor laws in the country have proved to be insufficient in dealing with the issues affecting domestic workers.

Working behind closed doors in gated communities, places domestic workers in personal spaces where they are vulnerable to abuse and harassment without any recourse because the laws of trespass make it difficult for labor officers or rights defenders to check what goes on in homes.

���The employee deals with one employer in a private space. When there is a dispute, it is difficult because they are alone. This type of work threatens the worker���s social connection. They do not know each other���s experience, and so cannot receive community assistance and support,��� says Kambo.

For itinerant domestic workers like the washerwomen, the perils are double those experienced by live-in staff.

���You can be summoned and instructed to work from outside the house, working long hours until late,��� says Mbatha. ���The houses we work in are not the same. There are some places that are okay, and others are so hard but you cannot even speak about it. If you speak out, you will jeopardize future work.���

Staking out for work is a dicey game of chance. There are no toilets, and in the event of rain, there is no shelter from the elements. From their stakeouts, many washerwomen often have no way of estimating the amount of work they are signing up for and so cannot charge appropriately for it. They end up working long hours with no food. They can only leave when all the work is done, and sometimes it is too late to walk home.

���No one knows or recognizes us . . . All we want is to be recognized so that we are not harassed and can raise our children from there.���

As the country moves to adopt home-based care for the rising number of COVID-19 patients, itinerant domestic workers will likely play a critical role in supporting families to cope. They have to protect themselves in environments where there might not be water or hand sanitizers.

Although the Kenya Union of Domestic, Hotels, Educational Institutions, Hospitals and Allied mobilizes and speaks for workers in domestic service, those who undertake itinerant day-wage labor without the protection of contracts remain undefended.

Kenya has yet to accede to the convention on decent work for domestic workers. The convention requires member states to ensure the effective promotion and protection of human rights for all domestic workers, and to respect, promote and realize the fundamental principles and rights at work, such as freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining. States are also required to eliminate all forms of forced or compulsory labor, child labor, and discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.

Attempts at organizing domestic work usually run into strong headwinds. People seeking live-in work in the domestic service register in private bureaus where they are required to pay up to Sh500 and asked to wait for a call, which often never comes. Live-in work has long hours���staff are the first to rise and the last to bed, often eating food of low quality. Those in itinerant labor fare worse.

Unlike motorcycle riders���who are largely male, have mobilized into self-help groups and cultivated a saving culture���washerwomen are not organized and do not go beyond making collective savings. Without enough to live on, meeting and organizing becomes that much more difficult. On days when work is scarce, washerwomen borrow money from one another to cross into a new day hoping for better luck.

Beatrice Lucas, a washerwoman living in the Gatina area of Kawangware in Nairobi, says none of the relief assistance meant for people impacted by COVID-19 measures has reached her. Washerwomen have missed out on official emergency relief and assistance because local administrators like location chiefs often map urban dwellings under their jurisdiction when the women are out looking for work.

���You can go a week without assistance or work. Food is handed out to the chief for distribution but the names of beneficiaries are never made public,��� she adds.

Community activist Ruth Mumbi, who recently led a protest by washerwomen in the Eastleigh area of Nairobi when they were locked out of work by the lockdown, says the government���s COVID-19 bailouts are focusing on big companies, with Sh2 billion going to the hospitality industry, yet the women who do this work are also in the hospitality industry but they have received nothing.

Kambo argues that the COVID-19 emergency response should broaden its definition of vulnerable populations to embrace daily wage domestic workers beyond the usual categories of the aged, orphans, and people with preexisting health conditions.

There is an urgent need to formalize the domestic workers sector, especially daily wage earners. ���We need space set aside for us to meet, register and plan our programs,��� says Ambeyi, adding that women have a variety of skills that can be monetized, such as car washing, which they perform as part of their daily labor.

Mary Wambui, who has done laundry work in Upper Hill for years, wants permanent sheds established with washing machines, and a linkage with motorcycle riders to collect laundry and drop it off after it has been cleaned and pressed, thus reducing personal contact and the opportunity for abuse. House cleaning can also be undertaken commercially, together with car washing.

Many government agencies are unaware of the rights violations in the domestic service sector because of poor documentation, leaving victims with no voice. Kambo reiterates that labor laws do not differentiate workers���domestic, office, plantation and the rest. Domestic workers are different and unique, deserving a separate categorization. A special regulation is required to accommodate the domestic worker because this is the one person who cannot unionize.

And because washerwomen serve fellow workers, they should receive treatment free of charge and have their health insurance and social security protection paid for by the state.

A private city

Eko Atlantic in Lagos, like Tatu City in Nairobi, Kenya; Hope City in Accra, Ghana; and Cit�� le Fleuve in Kinshasa, DRC, point to the rise of the private. What does it mean for the rest of us?





Image credit Katie Jane Fernelius.

PROPERTY VALUES have been restored and multiplied. And more buildings are springing up in anticipation of the opportunities that lie ahead. When all is done, A NEW CITY will emerge from an area that once was devastated by NATURE���S ONSLAUGHT. But that devastation is now history. Our ultimate triumph now beckons. The human spirit will prevail again, because of A FEW GOOD MEN who demonstrated tremendous goodwill.

��� Babatunde Fashola, Governor of Lagos State (2007-2015), speaking in 2013.

Babatunde Fashola, governor of Lagos, stood at the podium in front of a Jumbotron projecting his face. It was 2013, and he was opening a ceremony for a small congregation of ���who���s who��� in Nigeria. Then-president Goodluck Jonathan, former US president Bill Clinton, and billionaires Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury looked on from a small audience, a flock of suit jackets and neck ties, kaftans, and caps. It was a celebration to mark the reclamation of 5,000,000 square meters of land from the ocean. On that land, a new city was promised to rise and become the future financial capital of Africa. It would be called Eko Atlantic.

The first time I laid eyes on Eko Atlantic was in a YouTube video. A rabbit hole of auto-play videos lead me to one that panned across a computer-generated skyline of high modernist skyscrapers, a cityscape unpopulated and placeless against an empty horizon. The narrator, British-accented and chipper, announced that Eko Atlantic was a privately-built city being constructed on the coast of Lagos, Nigeria. This new city would become a gateway to the continent and a ���unique opportunity for investors to capitalize off huge developing growth,��� according to the bodiless voice. It would have privatized roads and sewage, its own electric grid, and a sea wall designed to stop the threat of an eroding coastline, effectively reversing a century of natural history. To put it simply, Eko Atlantic would be a city of the future.

It was 2016 and I was living in Lagos. I lived on Victoria Island, a neighborhood known for big business, near the Mike Adenuga Towers which were tinny gold and outfitted with a statue of a bull in the plaza, giving the effect that the building was a double-exposed photograph of Trump Tower and Wall Street. Down the street from me was the Chinese consulate, where every day I���d walk by and see rows of Nigerians on benches outside, waiting to apply for visas. All Eko Atlantic was to me, at that time, was a logo and a long concrete wall at the edge of Victoria Island, separating me from what looked like miles of empty beach and naked steel frames, construction seemingly paused.

At the time, Nigeria was in the middle of a recession. I was advised to bring all my money into the country in crisp $100 bills, so I could exchange my cash on the black market. The banks followed the government���s arbitrary exchange rates and often ran out of cash at certain locations. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the private investigators for scams and corruption, graffitied properties across Lagos in their signature red all-caps: ���EFCC UNDER INVESTIGATION.��� Online, I���d read reports of the EFCC raiding luxury apartments whose walls were insulated with duffel bags full of American dollars. It seemed to me that Lagos was a city held together by cash, as if every building was literally made of money.

Gated communities jigsawed the whole city, creating a compendium of private borders to constantly negotiate. Phone calls, proof of invitation, and persuasion were often required to get you inside. But even outside of these walls, the city felt enclosed. A lagoon, Lagos is crisscrossed by water, dividing it into distinct social geographies like chambers of the heart. A cluster of islands in the southeast���Victoria, Lagos, Ikoyi���were accessible to the mainland via long, heavily trafficked bridges which slowly pumped commuters back and forth. To refer to the islands was to refer to business, to wealth, and to the city���s elites. It was precisely this group of people who attended that 2013 ceremony at Eko Atlantic.

In the video of that 2013 ceremony, Bill Clinton eventually took the stage and praised the Clinton Global Initiative-sponsored project, saying, ���So, for every person who believed in this project, who believed in the future of the city, the state and the nation, I thank you. And I especially thank my friends Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury for making it happen and keeping their commitment. It is a commitment that will eventually not only help brand Nigeria as a country of the 21st century, but also show that it is affordable and profitable to live in harmony with this new natural reality.���

Image credit Katie Jane Fernelius.

Covered by Business Insider and CNN���s Inside Africa, videos of Eko Atlantic told a congratulatory story: the state governors and billionaire Chagoury family had banded together to protect the coastline from erosion with a massive land reclamation effort that had now become ���a city-building project on a global scale.��� The Eko Atlantic channel provided a digital scrapbook of the project���s growth over the previous 10 years as it documented dredging, landfilling, and the construction of new buildings. But it always came back to��those CGI images of the city, projecting an imaginary future where it was said Lagos would become the Dubai of Africa.

In the years since I first encountered Eko Atlantic on YouTube, it has become my white whale, a synecdoche for all the dynamics I���ve been trying to make sense of in Lagos. While it was hailed as an innovative solution to the problems facing the city���the lack of skilled jobs, the paucity of formal housing, and coastal erosion caused by climate change���private cities like Eko Atlantic are really a continuation of the status quo, bypassing democratic debate and concretizing urban inequality in the name of attracting investment. Yet these private cities continue to be symbolically powerful: though their urban imaginaries are created primarily for an audience of investors, the promises can resonate with working Africans too. The powers and processes sedimented beneath the clean facade of projects like Eko Atlantic give insight into cities like Lagos across the African continent, and tell us who claims control of the economic future.

The city as a franchise

In 2018, my friend Ishan and I produced a radio documentary on Eko Atlantic and slum evictions for the BBC World Service. After haggling over email, the development director of Eko Atlantic finally agreed to give us a guided tour of the city and let us film for a short video piece we were producing as a companion to the radio story. (Prior to that, the only time that I had visited Eko Atlantic was for a music festival featuring Diplo, where I had to use one of those awful pre-loaded, contactless wristbands to buy drinks and a late night thunderstorm canceled half the performances. All I remembered of it was walking through the sand in the rain, trying to get outside its walls so I could call a��keke, a moto-taxi, to take me home.)

When Ishan and I showed up at the offices on the perimeter of the city, a black SUV was waiting for us. In the front seat was the development director Pierre and his driver. Pierre had previously been in charge of reconstructing the central district of Beirut after the Lebanese civil war. He also worked on the Monaco urbanization at sea project, which sought to extend the city���s domain through new ���eco districts��� extending offshore.

After we passed through the entrance, Pierre narrated the progress of the construction, nearly word-for-word with the YouTube videos, as we drove down the main avenue. Without the CGI to simulate the district to come, it felt desolate and empty. Occasionally we���d park, so we could film shots of the city. Pierre tried to direct the camera, instructing us on which shots and angles we could use to best portray Eko Atlantic. He complained that the weather would ruin our filming; it was harmattan season and orange dust from the Sahara curtained the sky. A few times, he interrupted a shot or told us to ���cut��� if we were filming something that looked bad, like a construction worker taking a nap by an empty canal.

Pierre also brought us to one of the completed residential towers, Eko Pearl. Like a model home, it was vacant, full of furnished apartments with untouched kitchens, pretending at the future life that would be there. The hallways smelled like a just-opened can of tennis balls.

As we concluded our tour, Pierre took us back to the front offices for Eko Atlantic, where the YouTube videos played on loop against the far wall. In the center of the room was a scale model of the future city, nearly the length of a half a basketball court. It almost looked fun to play with, like a dollhouse, except that each plastic building was closed and impenetrable, no human figurines visible beyond its opaque windows.

Eko Atlantic is part of a cohort of private city projects emerging across the continent: Tatu City in Nairobi, Kenya; Hope City in Accra, Ghana; and Cit�� le Fleuve in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Like Eko Atlantic, the developers have provided assuringly modern visual simulations of cities not dissimilar to Dubai, glass boxes and aquamarine canals sprawled out across geometrically fanciful urban grids.

In a paper about the urban fantasies of these cities, professor of city planning Vanessa Watson��analyzes some of these new urban projects. What they share in common are their sheer scale, promising to be entire cities even as they often exist as offshoots of other metropolitan areas. And, in keeping with that scale, these cities tend to share an unspecified plan for governance, neglecting democratic processes in their development, their creators instead rattling off lists of private sector companies responsible for their formation.

Situated in a mythology of globalization, the promotional literature for Eko Atlantic talks of thriving businesses districts, reliable infrastructure, and prime real estate, all promising to make the city internationally competitive. For a while, Eko Atlantic only existed in virtual space, in computer-generated simulations of glistening glass skyscrapers reflecting an undisturbed sky, canals full of clear still blue water, and avenues lined with trees. It was tempting to question whether Eko Atlantic really existed in any material way, or whether it was some elaborate catfish for investors��� money. Far from reassuring me of its realness, visiting Eko Atlantic gave the impression of a slide deck spat out by a 3D printer.

This high modernist simulation���both digital and physical���embodies a techno-financial imaginary. It���s consistent not just with the architectural character of cities of the Gulf states, but also with the tech campuses of Silicon Valley. As an aesthetic, it���s meant to evoke cleanness, efficiency, and ease; technology smooths out all the rough edges. Such an aesthetic suggests a different vision of city planning: it���s the city as a start-up, a project launched with glossy veneer and devoid of social, political, and historical context.

This style of design stands in sharp contrast to the history of city planning in Lagos. Previously a protectorate of the British colonial empire, then capital city of a newly assembled Nigerian state, Lagos was planned in fits and starts by colonial authorities. Unlike their ventures in southern or eastern Africa, the British colonial forces didn���t pour that many resources into urban planning in Lagos, largely because they didn���t expect to use it as a white settlement. (Its tropical environment was seen as deadly to their delicate British constitutions.) Any urban planning they did was in service of ���administrative and labor control and the effective articulation of exportable surpluses through modern means of transportation,��� according to Liora Bigon���s history of urban planning in Lagos. The overall effect of this meant that many indigenous Lagosians didn���t lose their land rights to enclosure; today, Lagos is rumored to still technically belong to most of the initial ruling families of those indigenous communities, in spite of��extensive land reform since. Certainly, decisions by the British colonial administration had certain effects, especially in terms of��their work to dredge the harbor in order to provide better access to shipping vessels, but early twentieth century Lagos developed much more directly in spontaneous response to forces like migration, health, and sanitation concerns, and economic trends than it did from a centralized planning force.

More recent urban planning interventions have included infrastructural projects like the Lekki-Ikoyi bridge, the roll-out of low-emissions vehicles to replace the beloved danfo buses, and beautification campaigns run by Kick Against Indiscipline which, at their best, plant flowers in the gores between highway on-ramps and, at their worst, arrest street vendors. These measures seem to be more reactive than proactive, creating expensive fixes to bad traffic, emissions, and urban blight without consideration for the social and economic forces undergirding such phenomena: a city sprawling inland due to displacement of its working class by high-end development. In some ways, the privileging of developers��� interests in present-day Lagos expresses the same preferences as its colonial administrators: ���the effective articulation of exportable surpluses,��� or in other words, making money move seamlessly.

Image credit Katie Jane Fernelius.

So, who are these CGI images for? These sorts of simulations disseminate freely and gleefully in the urban planning circuit, where there is an uncritical acceptance that ���smart��� cities are good, as are ���green,��� ���sustainable,��� and ���world-class��� cities. Certain urban planners may get excited about these ideas in the abstract, but, as Watson writes, they also function as justifications to the public for what is ultimately an ���exercise of symbolic power [���] promoting the city and addressed to global elites��� that ���implies a concern with the importance of the city in relation to other cities rather than the extent to which it functions for its citizens.���

It���s tempting to say that this image of a clean, gleaming city was not really made for Lagosians, because we know that materials about Eko Atlantic are mostly being distributed at urban planning conferences around the world to architectural firms and real estate investors, and because the location and walls of the city themselves will likely preclude most of the 21 million Lagosians from accessing it. But I think to say that the vision of Eko Atlantic is not for Lagosians discounts how deeply entrenched narratives of first-world development are, and disregards the desires and dreams of many city-dwellers.

Lagos was the most aspirational city I���ve ever lived in. Almost every Thursday, I���d go to an open mic event at a boutique hotel. The music was good, the yam fries reliably crisp, and the Heinekens cold. It was a regular haunt for the expats who worked at multinational corporations, as well as for the city���s community of Instagram influencers. The rumored ���talent guy��� at a powerful media conglomerate called Pulse Nigeria, a white man in his 50s with a chic bald head and braided hemp bracelets on his wrist, usually attended, sitting in a reserved seat at the front and often accompanied by a young, beautiful Nigerian woman. Every week, one talented singer after another commanded the stage, all making eye contact with this man in the front row, an American Idol rendered in miniature. It felt emblematic of a culture of aspiration that inflected the whole city. Lagos seemed to operate off the premise that each day brought with it the possibility of being discovered; fame and fortune just one chance encounter away.

The enterprise and hustle of Lagos is apparent in contemporary novels about the city, like��Blackass��by Igoni A. Barrett,��Welcome to Lagos��by Chibundu Onuzo, and��Every Day is for the Thief��by Teju Cole. But the idea of Nigeria on the rise is also central to today���s investment literature. Akin to the ���tiger��� economies of Asia, Nigeria and other sub-Saharan countries have been hyped as ���lion��� economies of Africa by the McKinsey Global Institute among others. Urban studies scholars Laurence C��t��-Roy and Sarah Moser ask a provocative and compelling question in the title of their article: ���Does Africa not deserve shiny new cities?��� In it, they write that this investment literature of ���Africa rising��������construct[s] a compelling narrative of Africa as the world���s next big venture, which fuels a broader ���optimism industry.������ For this reason, it can be difficult to say whether the optimism felt at the level of individual Lagosians generates, or is generated by, such claims. If one were to look at reports from McKinsey, it���d be difficult not to believe that Nigeria is on the up-and-up.

While reporting the BBC radio piece, I interviewed multiple activists and residents of slums, people who had been excluded from a lot of economic narratives about Lagos, treated as disposable by the city���s decision-makers, evicted and pushed out of their homes. Though many of them had concerns about Eko Atlantic, all of them also talked about the importance of Lagos getting nice, new buildings. They wanted the city to be modern.

Anthropologist James Ferguson, a keen writer on Africa and globalization, writes that modernity is ���a way of talking about global inequality and about material needs and how they might be met.��� I think that to the extent that certain Lagosians feel excited about Eko Atlantic, it speaks to the fact that they recognize their own economic exclusion and are questioning the role that geography, politics, and the global economy plays in that exclusion.

Ferguson, writing in 2006, points out that certain critiques of globalization can feel weirdly out of place in an African context where franchises like McDonald���s are scant. Instead, globalization in an African context ���brought an increasingly acute awareness of the material goods of the global rich, even as economic pauperization [���] made the chances of actually attaining such goods seem more remote than ever.��� It���s not unfair to suggest that desire for nice, new buildings could express desire for wealth for working Lagosians and their city. I don���t want to suggest that Lagosians are at all gullible about the dynamics underlying Eko Atlantic: I don���t think that most working Lagosians believe that Eko Atlantic will directly house them or offer them jobs or, to be frank, even let them in through the gate. But I do think that Eko Atlantic is seen as evidence of economic growth and advancement in Lagos; perhaps less its driver, as the developers would suggest, and more a symptom of it.

It is important to note that there was and is resistance to Eko Atlantic too. Journalists have reported on��ocean surges down the coast that residents and scientists blame on the sea wall of Eko Atlantic. The Heinrich Boell Foundation of Germany (a leftist public policy think tank) has, in concordance with Nigerian researchers, published literature critical of the project. And��Justice Empowerment Initiative��brings together slum dwellers who continue to organize against demolition of slums in service of new waterfront properties. Their work provides some fine examples of citizen journalism in documenting a record of state abuses against the poor.

A project like Eko Atlantic feels like it ought to be proof that Nigeria is ascendant. It���s exactly the kind of project some international media outlets like to show off as ���innovative,��� in an effort not to focus on the kinds of stories often lambasted for perpetuating stereotypes about the continent (namely, that it is impoverished and chaotic). But far from being a rebuke to those narratives, Eko Atlantic implicitly affirms those stereotypes by positioning itself as a modernizing force in Lagos. These new buildings are ���designed to avoid and supplant the ���failures and decay��� of the existing city,��� as Watson writes. Like a fairy godmother transforming a pumpkin into a carriage, the erection of nice buildings in a walled enclave is proposed as a catch-all solution to the disorder of Lagos���a makeover meant to attract the prince of foreign investment.

Capital is ���globe-hopping, not globe-covering,��� according to Ferguson. He���s rightly challenging the lingua franca of development economics, which conceptualizes globalization as capital flows, as if capital like water disperses evenly across a terrain. It���s this sort of thinking which suggests that Africa need only appeal better to foreign investment in order to improve living conditions for its people. This is the same logic that guided the Washington consensus, the set of structural reforms imposed on the global South by the IMF and World Bank at the end of the twentieth century: reduce state spending, privatize public services, enshrine property rights, and open up to foreign investment.

This logic assumes that Africa had previously been inhospitable to the free market���perhaps a misguided assumption given that capitalism was historically powered by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and given that presently ���the basic commodities that lie in abundance in Africa remain the primary ingredients of the global economy,��� according to��Financial Times West Africa correspondent Tom Burgis. The Washington Consensus has arguably made it difficult for countries to participate as equal partners in the global economy by imposing massive debt on them. Today, many of the countries that are most rich in resources are also the most exploited by multi-national corporations who bypass local democratic processes, abuse on-site workers, and extract resources with little to no taxation paid to the government. All this is to say that corporations from around the world remain actively involved in African economies, not in spite of political conditions, but because of them. And their activity is largely ���concentrated in spatially segregated [���] enclaves,��� to borrow again from Ferguson���in other words, ensconced in places like Eko Atlantic.

Urban studies scholar Michael Goldman��writes about efforts in Bangalore, India to transform local economies into urban real estate through massive development projects. He talks about how the ���privatization bravado��� of the 1990s set the stage for the idea of world-city making in fully-enclosed development projects that allegedly will make cities ���world class.��� As he writes, their enclosures, far from containing their impact, actually require and institute a real estate regime in the government as they give over economic and political control to developers in shaping the city, over the consent of its residents. Consequently, locals ���are being actively dispossessed as part of the effort to build up a world-city based on a speculative imaginary for world-city investors who may just stay away, and for world-city professionals who have yet to come.���

The logic of private cities is a continuation of the logic of the Washington consensus, taken to the extreme. Private cities like Eko Atlantic typically advertise themselves as ���Free Trade Zones��� or ���Special Economic Zones���, classifications meaning that business can be done with as little regulation and taxes as possible. The state has questionable grounds to interfere in operations, like, for instance��in enforcing labor laws. (In 2020, injured workers at the Dangote oil refinery in Lagos expressed concerns that the government lacked power to intervene on their behalf because the refinery was in a free trade zone. Of course, one wonders whether the government would choose to intervene if it could.)

Image credit Katie Jane Fernelius.

But more than just a flashy project for the wealthy, Eko Atlantic is an off-shore account rendered in concrete. The idea of making Lagos the Dubai of Africa takes on new significance in light of Matthew Page���s��Dubai report��based on��data of luxury real estate purchases in UAE��which found over 800 properties belonging to ���politically-exposed persons��� of Nigeria (that is, politicians). As Page writes, ���an unknown proportion, perhaps substantial, of the over $400 million they have used to buy Dubai property could be part of a river of illicit financial flows out of Nigeria, which the think tank Global Financial Integrity conservatively estimated to total $178 billion from 2004 to 2013.��� Eko Atlantic may be positioning itself as the Dubai of Africa not just in aesthetic, but in mimicking how Dubai handles vast transfers of cash: with little oversight or impunity. Assuming the best, it makes Eko Atlantic a great place to avoid taxes or financial regulations; assuming the worst, this could make the private city a good place to park ill-begotten money.

By design, private cities like Eko Atlantic exempt themselves from a political context, less belonging to a nation-state than becoming a city-state unto themselves. But the money undergirding these projects doesn���t appear from thin air: it���s a wealth built by the same history that built the cities and states they occupy.

The city that oil built

It is important to historicize the wealth of the Chagourys and what has made it possible for them to build Eko Atlantic. Most Nigerians know the Chagourys for their association with the country���s bloody dictator, Sani Abacha. Abacha, who was head of state from 1993 to 1998, was notorious for extensive corruption, looting money from oil profits and transferring it into overseas accounts. He was also responsible for the execution of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who protested oil extraction in the Niger Delta.

While reporting for the radio documentary, I talked to Jim Rupert about his work as the West Africa correspondent for the��Washington Post��in the 1990s. Of his investigations into the Abacha regime, he said: ���We didn���t begin by investigating the Chagourys, but rather by investigating what we understood was this corruption within the Abacha regime. And when I went to Nigeria to quietly ask, ���Well, how does all of this corruption work ��� Nigerian officials and journalists, international diplomats all told me, ���You have to learn about a family named Chagoury.������

By Rupert���s account, the Chagourys��� role under the Abacha regime was endemic: not only pilfering kickbacks from oil companies at every step in the supply chain, but also getting contracts to build government office complexes and secret police headquarters in what was then the new capital city of Abuja. The Chagourys also leveraged their access to Abacha to get audiences with multinational corporations and foreign governments.

(When friends ask me how it felt to live in a ���corrupt��� country like Nigeria, I���d usually answer that at least in Nigeria they called it corruption, because in America we called it lobbying. It is important to emphasize that the corruption of Abacha and the Chagourys is not unique to Nigeria. I want to refuse the narrative that corruption is a problem endemic to African elites, a hold-over from cultures of patronage, as moneyed expatriates often claimed to me. Abacha and the Chagoury���s corruption was a process for bypassing democratic decision-making in order to concentrate decision-making and money among an elite few. And, on a practical level, it was facilitated by and moving through Western institutions and partners, like��Halliburton, Swiss bank accounts, and��indirect donations to US presidential campaigns.)

After Abacha died���in the arms of two sex workers, from a heart attack, allegedly poisoned���Gilbert Chagoury paid the Nigerian government $66 million after being found guilty of laundering money for the Abacha regime. In spite of that charge, the Chagourys��� close connection with the Nigerian government and multinational corporations still persists today, as they continue to earn approvals and contracts for large-scale projects. In some ways, the Chagourys represent the ruthless dynamism of capitalism���s exploits on the continent: oil, offshore accounts, contracts for infrastructure development, and now real estate.

Eko Atlantic, like private cities across the continent, signals a profitable opportunity for real estate capitalism. But the ground underneath Eko Atlantic, far from being created out of nothing, has its own history of displacement. In fact, it���s a piece of land that has always toggled between the rich and the poor, less explicit as a class war and more proof of the inextricable and intimate relations between classes.

Before it was called Eko Atlantic, the beach where the private city stood was called Bar Beach. It was a community of petty traders, cleaners, waiters, and clerks who mostly worked in service on the wealthy Victoria Island. But it had a storied past. The British protectorate of Lagos was a tough city for colonial officers. Malaria and heat stroke regularly took out their slim ranks. In an effort to control malaria, the British oversaw multiple projects draining swamps, re-shaping the coastline in ways that still have effects today. Furthermore, in their efforts towards promoting ���sanitation��� (a familiar euphemism in colonial literature), the British apportioned Bar Beach as a ���clean air zone��� in the late 19th century, advertising an area separate from the detritus of Lagos. Over time, that designation eroded and far from being a ���clean air zone,��� Bar Beach became the dumping ground for trams full of effluence (read: shit)���a modern, at the time, attempt to manage sewage in the port city. Lagos eventually traded trams for alternative forms of plumbing, and as its prior reputation as a dumping ground faded from memory, Bar Beach slowly became a place of leisure again.

Beachfront culture was a huge cornerstone of leisure in Lagos. Lagosians today will tell you about holidays spent at the beach as children, eating whole fish and enjoying live music. Some will even recall the Bar Beach show of the 1960s and 1970s, a variety show featuring musical acts, not filmed on location, but evoking the spirit of the shore. It was a spirit that the Lagos State Government would later try to capitalize on in the late 1990s in their efforts to build a tourism-friendly economy.

But the popular beachfront culture couldn���t sanitize Bar Beach completely. During the military era of Nigeria���s history, mainly in the 1970s through the 1990s, the verdant landscape of the beach made it a prime location for military training and exercises, too. Eventually, the military would use the beach to perform public executions.�����In crime-ridden Lagos, public executions draw crowds,�����read a��New York Times dispatch from Bar Beach in 1979. (Some members of the public grimly called these executions another kind of ���Bar Beach show.���) The public executions would stop when Nigeria���s military rule came to an end. But there were still grisly associations with the beach. At the very least, Bar Beach was considered a place where you would get up to no good: the kind of place it wouldn���t be hard to find some drugs if you wanted to.

Despite all this, what is most important to know about the place that preceded Eko Atlantic is that it was a community: home to about 80,000 people, mostly living in stilted homes above the water. The water had always been a threat, not just as it crawled up the coast, swallowing land, but also as it thrashed swimmers around in its notoriously violent tide. Sometimes it would ebb so far as to lick the main road, but Sisyphean sand-filling efforts pushed it back throughout the early 2000s. It has long been evident that coastal erosion is a real problem.

The Lagos state government and the Chagoury family would like you to believe it was coastal erosion that displaced the Bar Beach community���they told me as much in interviews in 2017. But the fact remains that in 2008, state officers arrived, shooting tear gas into the community and burning down homes. In the chaos of the eviction, some fleeing community members drowned off the coast. Countless more lost all their possessions in the mix of fire and water. All of those who survived were rendered homeless in one day. Later that year, Eko Atlantic began construction on the evicted beach. (This wasn���t to be the last eviction, either. Most recently, Tarkwa Bay, which sits directly across from Eko Atlantic, was evicted in early 2020.)

Image credit Katie Jane Fernelius.

The promise of a private city like Eko Atlantic is that it can start a new city off of a blank slate, unencumbered by the burdensome histories that make cities difficult. But Eko Atlantic is the continuation of more than a century of changes to the Victoria Island coast. It is not the first adversary of coastal erosion, nor the first moneyed force to reshape the coastline to its liking. Classed access, partitioning, and political violence run constantly from the colonial-era ���clean air zones��� to the sanitized image of Eko Atlantic today.

I will sheepishly admit that while reporting the radio documentary, I was hungering for some damning detail, something explicitly horrifying to contrast against the narrative of progress that Eko Atlantic���s promotional materials touted. Slum evictions, while horrible, feel almost pass�� in reporting on the developing world. (I once pitched an editor a story about a slum eviction in Lagos and he replied, ���Stories of slum evictions are a dime a dozen.���) As urban historian Mike Davis has shown in his work on cities and slums, the spread of urban poverty is perhaps one of the most striking legacies of the austerity of global capitalism in the developing world, a result of reduced public spending, mass migration and the ���informalization of labor��� (the latter of which he asserts is a euphemism for mass unemployment). The widespreadness of slums can risk inuring us to the fact that urban slums at this scale are a rather novel phenomenon, historically, and one of the most blatant expressions of the inequality inherent to capitalism.

Eko Atlantic is a vision of that inequality thrown into relief. When I flipped my focus from looking at the impacted city-dwellers to the practices of the developers, I was frustrated, like the editor I pitched, by the lack of a smoking gun. Digging into the Chagourys��� association with the Clintons drove me to reading the drivel of right-wing media which, admittedly, sometimes had germs of truth. My friend Ishan and I spoke with journalists and researchers in Lagos who felt threatened by the Chagourys, but those threats were never directly leveraged against them, just ambient warnings from friends and neighbors and coworkers. It was hard to discern what was an actionable threat versus leftover paranoia from a different era in Lagos, when the Chagourys were aligned with Abacha. Such paranoia seemed not unreasonable in our interviewees even if we struggled to fact-check it. For Ishan and I, insulated by our American passports, all we got was a strongly-worded email from Ronald Chagoury Jr. rebuking our interview with him (and with a phalanx of lawyers CC���d).

In looking for the sensational, I think what I had been hoping for was some way to de-sanctify the project, to find a script for how power operated that could expose the aspirational narratives as bogus, so that I didn���t have to graffiti ���NEOLIBERALISM UNDER INVESTIGATION��� onto Eko Atlantic like EFCC graffiti.

But looking for evidence of spectacular, cinematic violence is a fool���s errand, because it dismisses what is hidden in plain sight: that displacement, exploitation, and violence are endemic to Lagos��� relationship to the global economy and have been so long before the emergence of private cities. The fact is that Eko Atlantic, and the political and financial mechanics that make a project like it possible, are not atypical of Nigeria or sub-Saharan Africa. Slum clearance and high-end luxury developments are the expression of the mechanics of global capitalism that have been reshaping African megacities like Lagos for decades. The advent of private cities is just the apogee of financial capitalism���s liaison with real estate. Despite what their developers might claim, private cities represent not a fix or departure from the issues facing these cities, but rather a continuation of the very forces that caused them. In their literal concretization, private cities entrench inequality and affirm private rule.

Perhaps the most nefarious element of the story Eko Atlantic tells about itself and Lagos is that it suggests that the future of the city is enclosed by technocratic capitalism: no longer belonging to Lagosians themselves, but instead to the profit motive. I refuse to accept this inevitability. ���We must be able to envision alternative configurations of agents, practices and social relations,��� Davis writes, ���and this requires, in turn, that we suspend the politico-economic assumptions that chain us to the present.”

As much as private cities exemplify the most financially, socially, and environmentally costly aspects to global capitalism, they might also contain the seeds of its demise���by showing the limits and failures of a capitalistic vision of the future. Aspiration doesn���t need to belong only to McKinsey reports about the ���lion��� economies of the continent. It can be reclaimed by everyday Lagosians as it already is. The future is not entirely foreclosed. At least, not yet.

To fight unemployment we have to fight capitalism

The challenges facing working class South African communities and the prospects for resistance and social transformation during and beyond COVID-19.





President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa waves at factory workers at the end of April while accepting a donation of PPE. Photo via GovernmentZA Flickr CC.

Almost five months into South Africa���s lockdown, new studies are finally indicating the extent of economic devastation it has caused. An estimated 3 million people lost their jobs in the early stages of the lockdown, and once the rest of the lockdown period is factored into future studies, the numbers are bound to increase. Unemployment already hovers around 40%; as a result there was pressure put on the government to expand the provision of social grants before the lockdown started. But the implementation of expanded provision has been slow and many people remain excluded. For the majority of South Africans who are poor and working class, living conditions are dire with the threat from the virus and food insecurity looming large, while many municipalities remain unwilling or unable to provide basic services like water.

Staff writer William Shoki sat down with Siyabulela Mama, Ayanda Kota, and Khokhoma Motsi, three activists from the Assembly of the Unemployed, to talk about the challenges facing working class communities and the prospects for resistance and social transformation during and beyond COVID-19.

The Assembly of the Unemployed is a burgeoning movement that gives voice to South Africa���s more than 10 million unemployed. It unites many movements around the country fighting for the right to work, a basic income grant, and the implementation of a number of job creation strategies that up to now, the South African government has ignored.

William Shoki

Let���s start by talking a little bit about yourselves. What work are you doing, which organizations are you involved with and how did you come to be involved?

Siyabulela Mama

I���m Siyabulela Mama from the Amandla Collective in Port Elizabeth (PE). The Amandla Collective is involved in a range of advocacy platforms. One of these is the struggle for food sovereignty as well as the struggle against unemployment, which is why we are a part of the Assembly of the Unemployed. Unemployment is intrinsic to this system of capitalism. In order to fight unemployment, we have to fight capitalism. So I got involved with Amandla in [either] 2013 or 2014, particularly because I was interested in its stance against Israeli apartheid. It ran a series of campaigns against Israeli apartheid, which is what interested me and how I got to be part of the movement. And so from there, I participated and became actively involved in the Amandla.

Ayanda Kota

I���m Ayanda Kota, and I���m part of the Unemployed People���s Movement based in Makhanda. We���re involved in a number of campaigns, of which one is the litigation for the dissolution of the Makhanda municipality. We won the case on the 14th of January, but now the municipality is appealing the result at the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein, and hopefully they will lose that one again. The reason we approached the courts of law is because of the dismal failure of the municipality to meet its constitutional obligations in terms of Section 152. There���s a crisis of water, there���s a crisis of roads, infrastructure collapsing and the climate crisis���and these are crises due in part to years of corruption and looting.

We also campaign on food sovereignty. We provide teaching and materials to families, especially to women and child-headed households on how to grow their own vegetable gardens, and in some places we provide some acres of land for them to do so. The reason we���ve taken an interest in food security is made evident by COVID-19, which has exposed the limits of capitalism and the lack of capacity from the government. The extent of hunger is huge, and these corporations are devastating our people by increasing and fixing food prices.

But we���re also concerned about water stressed communities. Two weeks ago we held a protest in Port Elizabeth, and before the protest even started the police were already firing rubber bullets. In many of these communities, and in Makhanda also, people will go for two, three, or more days without water. This is a real issue���our people are without water.

Khokhoma Motsi

I���m Khokhoma Motsi, from the Botshabelo Unemployed Movement, which is part of the Assembly of the Unemployed. Our organization was formed in 1999 to fight the inequality that we see in this country, a lack of service delivery and for the issues affecting the unemployed. We are mobilizing on the ground and establishing branches���so far we have eight in Botshabelo, and we���re building some in the Free State.

We are establishing these organizations to fight capitalism, and we conduct political workshops to assist our comrades to have the knowledge of the system we are fighting so that they can stand on their own. We also train them in acro-ecology towards food sovereignty, teaching them how to grow food gardens so that they can grow food for themselves. We also campaign for women���s rights, since they are the ones affected by all of these issues.

Lastly, we���re campaigning for one million climate jobs as well, given the reality of climate change. The Assembly of the Unemployed is also fighting for a basic income grant because that gives people the buying power, which makes the economy of our country open up. On a weekly basis, we have a reading group to discuss these issues and other materials which they think is useful for their circumstances. We want our comrades to stand on their own to fight the inequality and poverty that affects them.

William Shoki

You���ve all sketched a very good picture of the challenges facing working class people in South Africa at the moment. I think it goes without saying that all of these challenges existed before COVID-19, and they���re only deepened by COVID-19. So maybe the next place to go from here is to talk about President Cyril Ramaphosa���s�� most recent address to the nation. At that time, while he was specifically announcing the temporary closure of schools, it was like all of his other addresses in that he just gives us a monologue where he always praises the government’s stimulus package, he talks a little bit tough on corruption, and then concludes by imploring South Africans to show individual responsibility during this pandemic. So, my question is, how would you assess the government’s response to COVID-19 so far, has it been enough to support the most vulnerable during this time?

Khokhoma Motsi

Let���s start with the austerity policies that the government is implementing and has been implementing for a long time. When they implement austerity, they are cutting everywhere, and you never really know in which department or by how much, but it always affects the unemployed and the poor. The rich will always be on the safe side.

It���s the same with the schools. The schools were never supposed to be opened in the first place, and now there���s a contradiction where children get into a taxi to get to school and there���s no physical distancing, but once at school they���re expected to practice that. The President has been protecting the interests of the rich, and nothing else. We the poor are going to die, one by one. The unemployed have never adhered to the measures the government put in place, since they have to hustle on a daily basis for something to eat. But we have to remember, people are not poor because of COVID-19, people are poor because of capitalism.

In townships and rural areas, people are not really tested���so we don���t even know the full scale of the pandemic actually.

Siyabulela Mama

But also on the issue of health, let���s look at the situation that is faced by health workers. Yes, these were struggles happening before the lockdown and COVID-19, but the interventions of government have been questionable. If you look at field hospitals for example���here in PE a field hospital has opened at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium and the old Volkswagen Building���a lot of community health workers who are underpaid in the private sector, are moving to the public sector to treat COVID-19 patients at these field hospitals. However, they���re being sent to these hospitals while there���s a severe shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE). But, in Dora Nginza, in Livingstone, in Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and across the Eastern Cape province, there are scores of empty buildings which can be used and repurposed to do the job that these field hospitals are doing, and much more cheaply. All the money being used to build field hospitals could have been used to obtain the necessary PPE for workers.

We as the Cry of the Xcluded tried to intervene, and this was before [Finance Minister] Tito Mboweni presented his Supplementary Budget Speech���but we were not listened to. And now, workers continue to die because they lack protective gear to shield themselves from coronavirus. But all the while, there are some interesting portrayals of healthcare workers in the media. For example, at Livingstone Hospital and parts of Dora Nginza Hospital, the media recorded doctors cleaning these hospitals. The arguments from mainstream NGOs and the media was that these hospitals were dirty, and there���s a shortage of staff because general assistants or cleaners didn���t want to work, so the doctor���s had to step up and do the cleaning job.

But general assistants haven���t been paid for three months and haven���t been provided with proper PPE, so they decided to engage in a go-slow for three months until these issues were rectified. And then the media walks in and makes a big fuss about doctor���s cleaning the hospitals, who by the way will receive bonuses at the end of the month for working overtime while other workers won���t get these benefits. Take the BBC report at Dora Nginza, which recorded patients sleeping in the maternity ward not being attended to���this was blamed on workers.

However, both Motherwell Community Health Centre and the Kwazakhele Day Hospital were closed due to coronavirus. At Motherwell, 23 staff members tested positive for COVID-19 and the facility had to be closed. So of course, patients were redirected away from these hospitals and to Dora Nginza and Livingstone, and there was a high influx of patients which would expectedly cause strain in these hospitals. Now what could���ve happened is that the workers who tested negative at Motherwell and Kwazakhele be re-deployed to Dora Nginza and Livingstone, with proper PPE provided to all the remaining workers so as to not repeat what happened at Motherwell and Kwazakhele. But this did not happen, and that is a failure of leadership and management. But once again, it���s the workers who are being blamed and demonized.

William Shoki

I think you���re raising a very important point which relates to what Motsi was saying earlier. Throughout this lockdown, workers have been left with this difficult choice between returning to work, which most want to do so they can continue earning a living, but they want to return to work when conditions are safe. But at the point when it cannot be ensured that conditions are safe, there���s obviously going to be a breakdown in the functioning of whichever institution they���re working at, whether it���s a school or a hospital.

And you���re right that every time this breakdown happens, immediately the first people who are scapegoated and blamed for this are workers. When teachers expressed concerns about returning to under-resourced schools with lacking infrastructure, they���re accused of jeopardizing the education of learners. In the same vein, when its health workers expressing worries about returning to workplaces which haven���t met safety standards, they���re accused of jeopardizing the public health mission of managing the coronavirus.

Why do you think this always happens? This portrayal of workers as being disruptive�� and narrowly concerned about wages and working conditions���as if wages and working conditions are trivial issues!

Ayanda Kota

That���s why it���s important to change the narrative. The issues of this pandemic cannot be reduced to an individual���s choices when it occurs at the level of a social crisis. People cannot be held responsible for the failures of their municipalities to provide things like water so that they are able to wash their hands regularly. And when they understandably breach lockdown regulations to gather together and demand this water, which is a fundamental human right���how can you send the police to shoot them?

It cannot be, that when municipalities are forging signatures to loot resources meant to fight this pandemic, and which end up in the pockets of politicians, nothing happens to them. We don���t need the police to shoot people, we don���t need the army to kill people. We need the government to build hospitals and provide medicine. We need the government to provide water to the people. We need them to make sure that they have something to eat so they can resist this virus.

All we���ve experienced during this pandemic so far is a government that is an empty seat. The state has the responsibility, and the state is failing its responsibility. All the while the government has drafted a stimulus package to bail out corporations apparently so they can save jobs. But most companies are shedding jobs anyway, they���re firing people and closing their doors. The stimulus has not been able to save jobs, we could���ve used these funds to provide people a basic income grant directly.

Now, this announcement that public schools will close while private schools are at liberty to remain open, is an insult to the working class. It���s an insult to black working class kids who will not be able to go to school while those who have money will be able to access an education. We���re deepening our inequalities while the state remains as nothing but an empty seat.

Khokhoma Motsi

It���s uncalled for, for the rich to continue to be educated while the poor are left behind. The poor and working class as a whole are being left behind. On the issue of corruption, how far is Ramaphosa really going to push the measures he announced? We have seen food parcels run around in councilors��� hands and I���m not sure when he talks big about tackling corruption, that he is actually going to do that.

William Shoki

One thing that���s becoming clear now is that the state lacks the basic capacity to even implement the policies it commits itself to, nevermind all the things it isn���t doing. We���ve seen widespread corruption and the misappropriation of funds. And so as always, it���s been left to poor and working class people themselves to organize their own resistance to the pandemic, to use their own resources and networks to survive. How have you gone about organizing communities?

There seems to be two things which makes this challenging. One predates the lockdown, which the difficulty of�� trying to mobilize the unemployed majority. That in itself is difficult because you can���t find them all in one place, unlike workers who you can meet on the shop floor, on the entrance to a mining shaft or in the loading dock of a supermarket. But unemployed people are either on the move hustling, or staying at home. And secondly, a pandemic makes it more difficult since as we���ve already discussed, there are restrictions limiting gatherings, which the police are more than happy to repress.

Siyabulela Mama

We have to first understand that the people we are organizing are discouraged, a lot of them have given up looking for work, and they���ve lost hope in the system. The ���new normal��� in some ways has helped us, since we can meet electronically and discuss ways forward. One of those ways forward, is the consensus we���re building around the provision of a basic income grant, which is gaining traction in many other organizations.

More than two million workers have lost their jobs and will have no income soon���a basic income grant is something we can have consensus on, that many people will join us on and support. And on this issue, we are not compromising���we want at minimum R12,500 (US $755) a month, which gives people a decent living. Now, the government is talking about it but the real question is what amount this grant will be, which we don���t know yet.

COVID-19 has made it clear what has always been obvious to us, which is that poverty, unemployment, and inequality are entrenched in this system. This is why when we think about what���s possible, we have to reinforce our campaign for food sovereignty. People in our constituency have backyard gardens and some are opening community gardens, and now we have to distribute seedlings to people so that they are one step closer to providing food for themselves. But more than that, asking how we can use this to develop communal kitchens. We���ve been very careful about not calling them soup kitchens���a soup kitchen is not based on solidarity, it���s one group feeding another. A communal kitchen is based on solidarity, it���s about the community feeding each other.

Khokhoma Motsi

Organizing the unemployed is a mammoth task, but it must be rooted in your own politics���the politics of the unemployed. The unemployed should understand why they���re unemployed, they should understand why we have an economy which makes millions of people fall into that situation. What we emphasize is that when an unemployed person asks themselves why they���re unemployed, they shouldn���t turn inward but look outward���at the system.

We conduct workshops so that people can understand these issues. The problem is that now and again you lose members, especially the youth who are the majority of the unemployed and who still believe they can find greener pastures. That is why you need to emphasize the politics of the unemployed so that we stick together. You do this by talking to the bread and butter issues which affect them, the issues which they face on a daily basis���not just saying, ���look, your government is 123������ and leaving it at that. We have to talk about hunger, basic income, and service delivery, and also take municipalities to court if needs be as those in Makhanda have done.

That���s why reading groups are an important organizing tool as well���to have dialogues, learn, and discuss issues. Our people want to be educated but they won���t be educated at the schools in their communities which have been neglected. But we want people to be serious about this, and that is why we ask them to pay. We know our people are unemployed, but when you say a membership card is about R10 or R20, when people are willing to pay they show that what they are doing is close to their hearts. We know that it���s tough, but it allows us to take this movement seriously, of�� showing to people not only why they are struggling but that they can change that.

William Shoki

One important thing you���ve all mentioned is the importance of making it resonate that the circumstances experienced by one individual, have less to do with the choices made by that individual and rather the system as a whole in which they find themselves in.

Are people making that connection, between their individual challenges and the system as a whole, and understanding this system as capitalism, which is at the root of all the poverty and inequality we face? How do we change the narrative as Ayanda was saying earlier, to emphasize that the system as we know it will never deliver justice and equality for the majority of the South African people?

Siyabulela Mama

I think people are there already. In Kwazakhele township for example, one of the issues we are pushing is people owning their own energy and the question of a just transition to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels. People really want to produce and own their own energy and in doing so are saying that this fossil-fuel based economy should make way for a different economy based on human development. That���s why we see these energy co-operatives cropping up in working class communities, which no one ever talks about���it���s always about independent power producers or whatever. So, it���s very important that when we introduce popular education materials we emphasize a different economy to capitalism, one that is about sustaining livelihoods and not making profits.

Khokhoma Motsi

People are aware, the question is on how do we unite the struggles between the unemployed, the poor, and the workers. We should teach our people that pre-1994 we struggled together, the working class fought together. Our work currently is to emphasize that we need to fight together for an alternative. In every meeting, we should understand the political outlook���why are we together in that meeting? The unity of the working class is of paramount importance. The government is driving us to hell, and people should understand that.

William Shoki

Exactly, so the problem isn���t political imagination���the people know what a different economy could look like, and they know that we need a different economy because the one we have now does not serve their needs.

What then, are the routes to working class unity today? Pre-1994 it was the Congress Movement of the African National Congress, the Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Today, the Congress movement is no longer what it once was, but it���s nevertheless a strong political force close to a lot of people���s hearts.

Looking at the ongoing pandemic, but also looking beyond it���how do we revive that working class unity that was once a feature of working class politics in this country?

Khokhoma Motsi

Pre-1994, after the banning of all those organizations, we must remember that the Black Consciousness movement filled in the vacuum left by the ANC. The United Democratic Front was not the only organization operating at that time. The BC [Black Consciousness Movement] was really in the center of assisting the poorest of the poor in the country.

Siyabulela Mama

First we must understand that there are already forms of counter-power that exist on the ground and in social movements. But every time in trying to create a united front���especially with the last United Front formed in 2015 it became about power within the organization, and the point of the organization to be contesting state power.

So we need to clarify this: what is the point of building a united front? Is it about building counter-power, or is it about contesting state power? And if it is about contesting state power, how do we do that without losing movements which are rooted on the ground, which are first initiated at the grassroots? Whatever the answer, we need to start building a working class movement, one that fights for service delivery and permanent work. We need to bring all of the social movements in one conversation, and build a counter-hegemonic power base first.

William Shoki

As a final question, earlier this year the Cry of the Xcluded was a campaign launched before the pandemic changed everything. It was aiming to kickstart a series of campaigns which would give the basis for a united front amongst the different social movements waging working class struggle today. What���s next for the Cry of the Xcluded? What are the key areas of struggle to pay attention to in the coming months?

Khokhoma Motsi

We are still saying fuck Tito Mboweni���s austerity budget. We had been saying that before COVID-19 and we���ll keep saying it. In the Free State we���re going around putting up graffiti saying this is our demand. We are also mobilizing around a campaign for a basic income grant, and bringing along other forces like the C-19 People���s Coalition to support us.

Siyabulela Mama

We want a basic income grant of R12��500, and this will be an ongoing campaign���so even if the Minister of Social Development introduces a basic income grant, unless and until working class people and unemployed people are receiving R12��500 then this will be an ongoing campaign for all of us, because the amount must speak to a living wage as workers at Marikana were calling for.

But we also understand the ecological crisis, so we are campaigning for one million climate jobs. We want a green new deal for Africa and the transformation of Eskom, against the privatization of Eskom. This idea of unbundling is a foreign concept imposed by the World Bank. We want Eskom to be socially owned, by the people, not pushed more and more into private hands. These are the struggles we are taking forward.

GMOs for Africa?

Rather than addressing food scarcity, genetically modified crops may render African farmers and scientists more, not less, reliant on global markets.





Image credit Joe Brusky via Flickr CC.







Pour le fran��ais, ici.

As COVID-19 continues to lay bare the deficiencies in the global food system, imagining new food futures is more urgent than ever. Recently, some have suggested that seeds that are genetically modified to include pest, drought, and herbicide resistance (GMOs) provide an avenue for African countries to become more self-sufficient in food production and less reliant on global food chains. Although we share the desire to build more just food systems, if history is any indicator, genetically-modified (GM) crops may actually render African farmers and scientists more, not less, reliant on global actors and markets.

In a paper we recently published in African Affairs, we trace a nearly 30-year history of collaborations among the agribusiness industry, US government agencies, philanthropic organizations, and African research councils to develop GMOs for African farmers. We found that these alliances, though impressive in scope, have so far resulted in few GMOs reaching African farmers and markets. Why, we ask, have efforts to bring GMOs to Africa yielded so little?

One reason, of course, is organized activism. Widespread distrust of the technology and its developers has animated local and transnational social movements that have raised important questions about the ownership, control, and safety of GM crops. But another issue has to do with the complex character of the public-private partnerships (PPPs) that donors have created to develop GM crops for the continent. Since 1991, beginning with an early partnership between the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute, and Monsanto to develop a virus resistant sweet potato (which never materialized), PPPs have become a hallmark of GMO efforts in Africa. This is mainly so for two reasons. The first is that GM technology is largely owned and patented by a handful of multinational corporations, and, thus, is inaccessible to African scientists and small to mid-sized African seed companies without a partnership agreement. The second is that both donors and agricultural biotechnology companies believe that partnering with African scientists will help quell public distrust of their involvement and instead create a public image of goodwill and collaboration. However, we found that this multiplicity of partners has created significant roadblocks to integrating GMOs into farming on the continent.

Take the case of Ghana. In the mid-2000s, country officials embarked on an impressive mission to become a regional leader in biotechnology. While Burkina Faso had been growing genetically modified cotton for years, Ghana sought to be the first West African country to produce GM food crops. In 2013, Ghanaian regulators thus approved field trials of six GM crops, including sweet potato, rice, cowpea, and cotton, to take place within the country���s scientific institutes.

However, what began as an exciting undertaking quickly ran into the trouble. Funding for the sweet potato project was exhausted soon after it began. Meanwhile, cotton research was put on indefinite hold in 2016 after Monsanto, which had been supplying both funding and the Bt cotton seed, withdrew from its partnership with the Ghanaian state scientific council. Describing its decision, a Monsanto official said that without an intellectual property rights law in place���a law that has been debated in Ghanaian parliament and opposed by Ghanaian activists since 2013���the firm could not see the ���light at the end of the tunnel.���

Monsanto was also embroiled in legal matters in Burkina Faso, where their Bt cotton had unexpectedly begun producing inferior lint quality. Meanwhile, Ghanaian researchers working on two varieties of GM rice had their funding reduced by USAID, the main project donor. This left them with insufficient resources, forcing the team to suspend one of the projects. The deferment of both the cotton and one of the rice projects dealt a blow to the Ghanaian scientists who were just a year or two away from finalizing their research.

In many ways, the difficulties presented here from both Ghana and Burkina Faso suggest that efforts to bring agricultural biotechnology to Africa are a house of cards: the partnerships that seem sturdy and impressive from the outside, including collaborations between some of the world���s largest philanthropies and industry actors, are actually highly unstable. But what about the situation in other countries?

Both Nigeria and Kenya have made headlines recently for their approval of GM crops. The news out of Nigeria is especially impressive, where officials recently approved a flurry of GMO applications, including Bt cotton and Bt cowpea, beating Ghana to permit the first genetically modified food crop in West Africa. Kenya also approved the commercial production of Bt cotton, an impressive feat considering the country has technically banned GMOs since 2011. Both countries, which have turned to an India-based Monsanto subsidiary for their GM seed supply, hope that Bt cotton will help revitalize their struggling cotton sectors. While biotech proponents have applauded Nigeria and Kenya for their efforts, it will take several growing seasons and more empirical research to know how these technologies will perform.

As the cases described here demonstrate, moving GMOs from pipeline to field is not simply a matter of goodwill or scientific discovery; rather, it depends on a multitude of factors, including donor support, industry partnerships, research outcomes, policy change, and societal acceptance. This complex choreography, we argue, is embedded in the DNA of most biotechnology projects in Africa, and is often ignored by proponents of the technology who tend to offer linear narratives about biotech���s potential to bolster yields and protection against pests and disease. As such, we suggest the need to exercise caution; not because we wish to see the technology fail, but rather because we are apprehensive about multi-million dollar collaborations that seemingly favor the concerns of donors and industry over those of African scientists and farmers.

The notion of public-private partnerships may sound good, but they cannot dispel the underlying interests of participating parties or the history and collective memory of previous efforts to ���improve��� African agriculture.

Des OGM pour l���Afrique?

Plut��t que de pallier l���ins��curit�� alimentaire, les cultures g��n��tiquement modifi��es risquent de rendre les agriculteurs et les scientifiques africains plus, et non moins, d��pendants des march��s mondiaux.





Kabaune village (Giaki), Kenya. Image credit CGIAR Climate via Flickr CC.

For English, here.

Alors que la COVID-19 continue de mettre �� nu les d��ficiences du syst��me alimentaire mondial, il urge, plus jamais, d���imaginer de nouveaux futurs alimentaires. R��cemment, certains ont sugg��r�� que les semences g��n��tiquement modifi��es pour inclure la r��sistance aux parasites, �� la s��cheresse et aux herbicides (OGM) offrent aux pays africains un moyen de devenir plus autosuffisants en mati��re de production alimentaire et les rendre moins d��pendants des cha��nes alimentaires mondiales. Nous partageons certainement le d��sir de construire des syst��mes alimentaires plus justes. Cependant, l���histoire nous enseigne que les cultures g��n��tiquement modifi��es (OGM) pourraient en fait rendre les agriculteurs et scientifiques africains plus, et non moins, d��pendants des acteurs et des march��s mondiaux.

Dans un article que nous avons r��cemment publi�� dans le journal African Affairs, nous retra��ons un historique de pr��s de 30 ans de collaborations entre l���industrie agro-alimentaire, les agences gouvernementales am��ricaines, les organisations philanthropiques et les conseils de recherche africains pour d��velopper des OGM pour les agriculteurs africains. Nous avons constat�� que ces alliances, bien qu���elles soient impressionnantes, n���ont jusqu’�� pr��sent permis qu����� tr��s peu d���OGM d���atteindre les agriculteurs et les march��s africains. Pourquoi, demandons-nous, les efforts d��ploy��s pour introduire les OGM en Afrique ont-ils donn�� si peu de r��sultats probants?

Une des raisons, bien s��r, est l���activisme et les mouvements sociaux. La m��fiance g��n��ralis��e �� l�����gard de cette technologie et de ses concepteurs a anim�� des mouvements sociaux locaux et transnationaux qui ont soulev�� d���importantes questions sur la propri��t��, le contr��le et la s��curit�� des cultures g��n��tiquement modifi��es. Mais une autre question a trait au caract��re complexe des partenariats public-priv�� (PPP) que les donateurs ont cr����s pour d��velopper les cultures g��n��tiquement modifi��es sur le continent. Depuis 1991, en commen��ant par un partenariat entre l���Agence am��ricaine pour le d��veloppement international (USAID), l���Institut kenyan de recherche agricole et Monsanto pour d��velopper une patate douce r��sistante aux virus (qui ne s���est jamais mat��rialis��e), les PPP sont devenus une caract��ristique des efforts d���introduction des OGM en Afrique. Cela est principalement d�� �� deux raisons. La premi��re est que la technologie des OGM est en grande partie d��tenue et brevet��e par une poign��e de soci��t��s multinationales, et qu���elle est donc inaccessible aux scientifiques africains et aux petites et moyennes entreprises semenci��res africaines sans un accord de partenariat. La seconde est que les donateurs et les soci��t��s de biotechnologie agricole pensent que le partenariat avec les scientifiques africains contribuera �� dissiper la m��fiance du public �� l�����gard de leur implication et �� cr��er au contraire une image publique de bonne volont�� et de collaboration. Cependant, nous avons constat�� que cette multiplicit�� de partenaires a cr���� d���importants obstacles �� l���int��gration des OGM dans l���agriculture sur le continent africain.

Prenons le cas du Ghana, par exemple. Au milieu des ann��es 2000, le gouvernement ghan��en a lanc�� un programme ambitieux pour devenir un leader r��gional en mati��re de biotechnologie. Alors que le Burkina Faso cultivait d��j�� du coton g��n��tiquement modifi�� depuis des ann��es, le Ghana voulait ��tre le premier pays d���Afrique de l���Ouest �� produire des cultures alimentaires g��n��tiquement modifi��es. En 2013, les autorit��s ghan��ennes ont donc approuv�� la r��alisation d���essais de six cultures g��n��tiquement modifi��es, dont la patate douce, le riz, le ni��b�� et le coton, dans les instituts scientifiques du pays.

Cependant, ce projet s���est rapidement heurt�� �� des difficult��s. Le financement du projet sur la patate douce s���est ��puis�� peu apr��s son lancement. Entre-temps, la recherche sur le coton a ��t�� mise en veilleuse pour une dur��e ind��termin��e en 2016, apr��s que Monsanto, qui fournissait �� la fois les fonds et les semences de coton Bt, se soit retir�� de son partenariat avec le conseil scientifique d�����tat ghan��en. Expliquant cette d��cision, un responsable de Monsanto a d��clar�� que sans une loi sur les droits de propri��t�� intellectuelle en place – une loi qui a ��t�� d��battue au parlement ghan��en et �� laquelle les militants activistes ghan��ens se sont oppos��s depuis 2013 – la firme ne pouvait pas voir ����le bout du tunnel.����

Monsanto ��tait ��galement impliqu�� dans des cas judiciaires au Burkina Faso, o�� son coton Bt avait commenc�� �� produire des r��sultats de qualit�� inf��rieure. Pendant ce temps, des chercheurs ghan��ens travaillant sur deux vari��t��s de riz g��n��tiquement modifi�� ont vu l���USAID r��duire leur financement. Ils se sont retrouv��s donc avec des ressources insuffisantes, ce qui a oblig�� l�����quipe �� suspendre l���un des projets. Le report du projet sur le coton et de l���un des projets sur le riz a port�� un coup dur aux scientifiques ghan��ens qui n�����taient plus qu����� un ou deux ans de la finalisation de leurs recherches.

�� bien des ��gards, les difficult��s pr��sent��es ici, tant du Ghana que du Burkina Faso, sugg��rent que les efforts visant �� introduire la biotechnologie agricole en Afrique sont un ch��teau de cartes : des partenariats qui, vus de l���ext��rieur, semblent solides et impressionnants, comprenant des collaborations entre certains des plus grands philanthropes et acteurs industriels du monde. Mais en fait, ces partenariats sont tr��s instables. Qu���en est-il de la situation des autres pays africains?

Le Nigeria et le Kenya ont r��cemment fait la une des journaux pour leur approbation des cultures g��n��tiquement modifi��es. Les nouvelles en provenance du Nigeria sont particuli��rement impressionnantes, o�� les autorit��s ont r��cemment approuv�� une vague de demandes d���OGM, notamment pour le coton Bt et le ni��b�� Bt, devan��ant ainsi le Ghana pour autoriser la premi��re culture alimentaire g��n��tiquement modifi��e en Afrique de l���Ouest. Le Kenya a ��galement approuv�� la production commerciale de coton Bt, un exploit impressionnant si l���on consid��re que le pays a techniquement interdit les OGM depuis 2011. Ces deux pays, qui se sont tourn��s vers une filiale de Monsanto bas��e en Inde pour leur approvisionnement en semences g��n��tiquement modifi��es, esp��rent que le coton Bt contribuera �� revitaliser leur secteur cotonnier en difficult��. Si les partisans de la biotechnologie ont applaudi les efforts du Nigeria et du Kenya, il faudra n��anmoins attendre plusieurs saisons de culture et des recherches plus empiriques pour savoir ce qui adviendra de ces projets.

Comme le montrent les cas d��crits ici, le passage des OGM du laboratoire au champ de cultures n���est pas simplement une question de bonne volont�� ou de d��couverte scientifique ; il d��pend plut��t d���une multitude de facteurs, dont le soutien des donateurs, les partenariats industriels, les r��sultats de la recherche, le changement de politique et l���acceptation par la soci��t��. Cette chor��graphie complexe, nous croyons, est inscrite dans l���ADN de la plupart des projets de biotechnologie en Afrique, et est souvent ignor��e par les partisans de la technologie qui ont tendance �� offrir des r��cits lin��aires sur le potentiel de la biotechnologie pour accro��tre les rendements et la protection contre les parasites et les maladies. C’est pourquoi nous sugg��rons la n��cessit�� de faire preuve de prudence, non pas parce que nous souhaitons voir la technologie ��chouer, mais plut��t parce que nous restons appr��hensifs sur les collaborations de plusieurs millions de dollars qui semblent privil��gier les pr��occupations des donateurs et de l���industrie par rapport �� celles des scientifiques et des agriculteurs africains.

La notion de partenariat public-priv�� peut sembler bonne, mais elle ne peut pas dissiper les int��r��ts sous-jacents des parties participantes ni l���histoire et la m��moire collective des efforts pr��c��dents pour ����am��liorer���� l���agriculture africaine.