Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 181
April 23, 2020
Vagabond reflections on the ‘Year of Africa’
Ralph J. Bunche (middle) at a conference in Switzerland in 1955 (Wikimedia Commons).
The year 2020 marks the 60th anniversary of the ���Year of Africa,��� a phrase coined to mark the year in which seventeen African countries declared their independence from European colonial states. One of the first recorded utterances of the phrase was made in the context of a symposium on anticolonialism in Africa convened by the History Department at Wellesley College on February 16-17, 1960. Responding to a New York Times reporter, the African-American diplomat, Dr. Ralph Bunche, then-UN Undersecretary for Special Political Affairs, anticipated that the rapid pace of decolonization on the continent would make 1960 the ���year of Africa��� at the United Nations, with at least four and as many as eight new member states from the continent being admitted into that body. Beside Bunche, attendees at the conference included, Melville Herskovits, the anthropologist and founder of the first African Studies program at a US academic institution, Julius Nyerere, the future prime minister of Tanzania, the Moroccan and Tunisian ambassadors to the United States, as well as British, French, and US representatives.
At the same time that this symposium was taking place, on the other side of the Atlantic in Brussels, Belgium, the future of the Congo, the geographical and symbolic heart of Africa, was being decided at the Belgo-Congolese Round Table Conference. In these tense negotiations, rival Congolese parties came together to settle on the terms of the Congo���s independence from Belgium, itself represented by a divided political establishment. At the conclusion of the Round Table Conference and to the surprise of most observers, Belgium agreed to a six-month timetable with formal independence being granted in a ceremony scheduled for the end of June. This decision would put Ralph Bunche and the Congo���s charismatic future prime minster, Patrice Lumumba on a collision course.
Bunche would travel to the Congo independence ceremonies as the UN���s special representative. He would be there to witness Patrice Lumumba, who had been excluded from the program, interrupt the ceremony with a fiery speech denouncing the Belgium���s brutal colonial rule over the Congo. Lumumba���s performance would raise Bunche���s concern about the Congo���s future with Lumumba at the helm, and would begin a difficult relationship between the two men characterized by mutual distrust and suspicion. As the head of the UN���s mission in the Congo, Bunche was on the ground as the political situation in the Congo quickly spiraled out of control. The fragile relationship would break irreparably when Lumumba would interpret the UN���s failure to intervene in putting down the secessionist rebellion in the mineral-rich Katanga province as evidence of Bunche and the UN���s support of US and Western interests in the Congo. Faced with the UN���s inaction, Lumumba sought the Soviet Union���s aid, a move that would bring to the surface the Cold War tensions already at play in the era of independence on the continent and elsewhere.
Eventually the situation deteriorated into a full-blown crisis and Bunche was recalled to the UN���s New York headquarters. Bunche would therefore be in New York when word of Lumumba���s assassination in January 1961 filtered out of the Congo. Around the globe, angry demonstrations greeted the news, including one at the UN���s doorstep, organized by a loose coalition of African-American activists and artists in New York. On February 15, 1961, these demonstrators interrupted the proceedings of the UN Security Council, denouncing US complicity in Lumumba���s assassination. The demonstration caused Bunche to issue a formal apology to the UN���s leadership and to disparage the demonstrators for their ���scandalous conduct,��� which did not represent African-American sentiment on Africa. Lumumba���s assassination signaled the end of the euphoria that had greeted the ���Year of Africa��� and the beginning of decades of neocolonial rule on the continent. The demonstration itself, however, represented the eruption of a black radical tradition that continues to nourish the imagination, even in these darkest of times of travel bans and the deriding of African nations as ���shit-hole��� countries by the leader of the so-called free world.
April 22, 2020
Unpacking the South Africa���s government’s COVID-19 ���rescue package���
[image error]
President Cyril Ramaphosa visiting South Africa's COVID-19 Information Centre. Image via Government of South Africa on Flickr.
On Tuesday night, April 21, 2020, South Africa���s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, announced the country���s first major COVID-19 economic rescue package, amounting to R500 billion ($26 billion USD). This occurred towards the tail end of a five-week long lockdown, which has pushed the already ailing economy into further crisis.
The announcement follows weeks of intense lobbying and debate within the country. Until this point the government���s intransigence was best represented by the Minister of Finance, Tito Mboweni, blocking increases to social grants, which civil society groups and researchers had pushed. It took an independent think tank���the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ)���to present the first coherent, costed emergency rescue package before the government had put anything on the table. Prior to the announcement, South Africa had allocated 0.1% of GDP to COVID-19 relief, compared to a G20 average of 10.1%.
The plan announced by Ramaphosa therefore represents a major step forward. If effectively implemented, it will make a material difference in the lives of millions of people and support tens of thousands of businesses. However, although the absence of details makes the package difficult to analyze, a number of weaknesses exist.
The size
As a rule of thumb, special COVID-19 government spending announced around the world has been roughly equal to the size of the expected economic contraction in each country. This is because, in the economics of lockdown, each dollar spent is likely to have less of a stimulatory impact than in normal times.
In South Africa, estimates of the economic contraction have increased from 4% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) two weeks ago, to 6 to 8% last week, to around 10% before the announcement of the package. 10% of GDP is just over R500 billion. This is the total the President announced.
But not all of it is new spending, nor necessarily government spending at all.
R200 billion comes in the form of loan guarantees, and R70 billion in the form of tax deferments or deductions. This is not additional government spending, though it will be an important lifeline for businesses and households. This means there is R230 billion in actual spending, or 4.5% of GDP (shown in the table below).
This means there is R230 billion in actual spending, or 4.5% of GDP���R20 billion to health spend and municipalities each, R50 billion to social grants, R100 to job support, and R40 billion to wage guarantees.
On the revenue side, R130 billion of this comes from ���reprioritizing��� existing planned budget expenditure. It makes sense to use money that may have been saved during the lockdown. But shifting money from one budget line to another will not necessarily be a long-term net gain for the economy. This is particularly true if we underfund long-term ���capital expenditure��� (investments in roads, ports, trains and so on).
A further R100 billion is likely to come from the surplus sitting in the country���s Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF).
This means that the logic of austerity���which appears to have a death grip on South Africa���s National Treasury���remains in place, as the package doesn���t necessarily cost the fiscus anything. It also means that far greater spending should be leveraged for additional rescue measures and to set the economy on a new footing in the medium term.
Income support
Researchers, activists, and some admirable government officials, fought a month-long battle against the National Treasury to dedicate additional spending to social grants, i.e. social security transfers to the poor. These grants directly benefit over 18 million people, and indirectly another 14 million.
The announced plan increases the child support grant by R500 ($26) per month, and other grants (such as, old age pensions, disability grants, and foster grants) by R250 ($13) per month.
A new special COVID-19 grant, of R350 ($18) per month is introduced to benefit those ���who are currently unemployed and do not receive any other form of social grant or UIF payment���.
Unfortunately, the numbers announced don���t add up, and the President didn���t tell us how many people this new grant will reach, so it���s difficult to tell what���s going on here.
The most recent proposal on the table covered 8 million people���aged 21 to 59, earning below R3,500 ($260), not employed, and not getting another social grant. Those who proposed the grant originally sought to cover between 13 and 15 million people.
This package will cushion the rise in extreme poverty and hunger. But depending on the fall in incomes in both formal and informal economies, a rise in poverty may still occur. Further, despite proposals on the table, the COVID-19 grant is too little, and its targeting will be complex to administer. A universal basic income grant, at a significantly higher level, would be a better option.
Protecting jobs
President Ramaphosa announced R100 billion ($5 billion) set aside ���for the protection of jobs and to create jobs.��� How this is to be spent is unclear.
R40 billion ($2 billion) has been set aside to support wage payments for businesses unable to pay their workers. It���s unclear whether this includes the R30 billion already allocated for this purpose, or is in addition to it. The IEJ showed that the original R30 billion did not guarantee a minimum wage and would only be enough to cover about 2.4 million workers, a share of those affected.
It is also uncertain whether the other challenges facing this scheme will be attended to. It is slow, cumbersome, and difficult to access. The UIF, mandated to administer it, seems ill-equipped. And the current, illogical, requirement that it only covers businesses who have experienced a total or partial closure of operations as a direct result of COVID-19, must be removed. Restrictions on other funding streams, for example, a requirement of local ownership, also need to be relaxed.
Tax
Bringing South Africa in line with other countries, an amount of R70 billion (just under $4 billion) is dedicated to tax relief. Most of these measures delay the payment of taxes, although there are some tax deductions and holidays. How households (as opposed to businesses) will benefit is unstated.
There is also, it seems, no concrete package of compulsory measures around deferral of rent, mortgage or other loan payments. To date, this has been left to the goodwill of the private sector to offer, coordinated by the banks themselves. The state must step in and regulate this.
Loan guarantees
The largest chunk of money���R200 billion���is dedicated to a loan guarantee scheme. Essentially, banks will extend special loans to struggling businesses and the National Treasury and South African Reserve Bank will bear the risk of default.
This is an important step forward and the commercial banks should be effective at getting this relief to businesses. But there are four issues to consider:
The Reserve Bank, not the Treasury, should stand behind these loans and absorb any losses, protecting funds for future expenditure.
Some businesses need bailouts not loans. As the IEJ notes: ���additional debt, even at concessional interest rates, will not be appropriate for businesses facing a risk of insolvency. Similarly, it may prove optimistic that short-term tax deferrals will be an adequate or effective measure given the likely persistence of severe disruption and low demand beyond the end of the lockdown.���
Strict conditions should accompany these loans. For banks, the loan guarantee scheme should impose maximum interest rates and fees, limiting the scope for profiteering. For the businesses, borrowing conditions restricting executive bonuses, safeguarding jobs, and promoting equity requirements should be considered. These should not be so onerous as to discourage businesses from making use of the scheme.
There doesn���t seem to be a provision for big business (with turnover above R300 million a year). How many of these businesses are in trouble isn���t clear, but support may be needed. This support should also come with strings attached, and if the money is in bailouts, then government should receive a commensurate equity stake in the companies.
Financing
Ramaphosa says South Africa will pay for all this from ���local sources, such as the UIF, and from global partners and international financial institutions���.
This is the weakest element of the package.
The plan is silent on additional tax measures. (The IEJ has estimated that ���solidarity taxation��� on rich people could yield R48 billion.) It is also silent on a special COVID-19 solidarity bond that would secure funds, on favorable terms and at low interest rates, from public and private institutional investors. Private local finance must step up to the table.
Increasingly it seems as if the South African government is leaning towards seeking financing from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other development banks. The first two are viewed, rightly, with great suspicion in South Africa. They are notorious for accompanying loans with anti-poor, pro-market measures of deregulation and slashing government and social spending. The IMF appears to have somewhat stepped back from this during the crisis but a flashing neon ���proceed with caution��� sign is required.
While progressives should support global transfers from developed to developing countries, we should ensure that these loans come without strict anti-poor conditions, and that the loan terms are agreed to by all major social partners.
This is particularly important in South Africa, because the Minister of Finance seems hellbent on using such loans as a means to push through his pre-existing pro-market agenda.
The bigger picture
Mr. Ramaphosa���s address is bookended by references to the need to ensure ���structural reforms��� in the post-COVID-19 recovery phrase. While economic reform is certainly needed, ���structural reform������as articulated by the Minister of Finance���is usually code for privatization, cutting wages, and slashing spending. In line with this logic, the rescue packages do not include the necessary measures to stabilize the economy���further reducing borrowing costs, stabilizing the exchange rate, and imposing measures to limit money leaving South Africa.
These worrying elements are, however, at odds with more progressive pronouncements by the President, for example that we should not ���merely return our economy to where it was before��� but ���forge a new economy���.
The COVID-19 crisis is teaching the world that there is a need for more effective governance and a more proactive role for the state. It is showing South Africa that despite a decade or more of waste, corruption, and mismanagement, the state can play a developmental���and life-saving���role.
Unpacking the ���rescue package��� from South Africa���s government
[image error]
President Cyril Ramaphosa visiting South Africa's COVID-19 Information Centre. Image via Government of South Africa on Flickr.
On Tuesday night, April 21, 2020, South Africa���s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, announced the country���s first major COVID-19 economic rescue package, amounting to R500 billion ($26 billion USD). This occurred towards the tail end of a five-week long lockdown, which has pushed the already ailing economy into further crisis.
The announcement follows weeks of intense lobbying and debate within the country. Until this point the government���s intransigence was best represented by the Minister of Finance, Tito Mboweni, blocking increases to social grants, which civil society groups and researchers had pushed. It took an independent think tank���the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ)���to present the first coherent, costed emergency rescue package before the government had put anything on the table. Prior to the announcement, South Africa had allocated 0.1% of GDP to COVID-19 relief, compared to a G20 average of 10.1%.
The plan announced by Ramaphosa therefore represents a major step forward. If effectively implemented, it will make a material difference in the lives of millions of people and support tens of thousands of businesses. However, although the absence of details makes the package difficult to analyze, a number of weaknesses exist.
The size
As a rule of thumb, special COVID-19 government spending announced around the world has been roughly equal to the size of the expected economic contraction in each country. This is because, in the economics of lockdown, each dollar spent is likely to have less of a stimulatory impact than in normal times.
In South Africa, estimates of the economic contraction have increased from 4% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) two weeks ago, to 6 to 8% last week, to around 10% before the announcement of the package. 10% of GDP is just over R500 billion. This is the total the President announced.
But not all of it is new spending, nor necessarily government spending at all.
R200 billion comes in the form of loan guarantees, and R70 billion in the form of tax deferments or deductions. This is not additional government spending, though it will be an important lifeline for businesses and households. This means there is R230 billion in actual spending, or 4.5% of GDP (shown in the table below).
This means there is R230 billion in actual spending, or 4.5% of GDP���R20 billion to health spend and municipalities each, R50 billion to social grants, R100 to job support, and R40 billion to wage guarantees.
On the revenue side, R130 billion of this comes from ���reprioritizing��� existing planned budget expenditure. It makes sense to use money that may have been saved during the lockdown. But shifting money from one budget line to another will not necessarily be a long-term net gain for the economy. This is particularly true if we underfund long-term ���capital expenditure��� (investments in roads, ports, trains and so on).
A further R100 billion is likely to come from the surplus sitting in the country���s Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF).
This means that the logic of austerity���which appears to have a death grip on South Africa���s National Treasury���remains in place, as the package doesn���t necessarily cost the fiscus anything. It also means that far greater spending should be leveraged for additional rescue measures and to set the economy on a new footing in the medium term.
Income support
Researchers, activists, and some admirable government officials, fought a month-long battle against the National Treasury to dedicate additional spending to social grants, i.e. social security transfers to the poor. These grants directly benefit over 18 million people, and indirectly another 14 million.
The announced plan increases the child support grant by R500 ($26) per month, and other grants (such as, old age pensions, disability grants, and foster grants) by R250 ($13) per month.
A new special COVID-19 grant, of R350 ($18) per month is introduced to benefit those ���who are currently unemployed and do not receive any other form of social grant or UIF payment���.
Unfortunately, the numbers announced don���t add up, and the President didn���t tell us how many people this new grant will reach, so it���s difficult to tell what���s going on here.
The most recent proposal on the table covered 8 million people���aged 21 to 59, earning below R3,500 ($260), not employed, and not getting another social grant. Those who proposed the grant originally sought to cover between 13 and 15 million people.
This package will cushion the rise in extreme poverty and hunger. But depending on the fall in incomes in both formal and informal economies, a rise in poverty may still occur. Further, despite proposals on the table, the COVID-19 grant is too little, and its targeting will be complex to administer. A universal basic income grant, at a significantly higher level, would be a better option.
Protecting jobs
President Ramaphosa announced R100 billion ($5 billion) set aside ���for the protection of jobs and to create jobs.��� How this is to be spent is unclear.
R40 billion ($2 billion) has been set aside to support wage payments for businesses unable to pay their workers. It���s unclear whether this includes the R30 billion already allocated for this purpose, or is in addition to it. The IEJ showed that the original R30 billion did not guarantee a minimum wage and would only be enough to cover about 2.4 million workers, a share of those affected.
It is also uncertain whether the other challenges facing this scheme will be attended to. It is slow, cumbersome, and difficult to access. The UIF, mandated to administer it, seems ill-equipped. And the current, illogical, requirement that it only covers businesses who have experienced a total or partial closure of operations as a direct result of COVID-19, must be removed. Restrictions on other funding streams, for example, a requirement of local ownership, also need to be relaxed.
Tax
Bringing South Africa in line with other countries, an amount of R70 billion (just under $4 billion) is dedicated to tax relief. Most of these measures delay the payment of taxes, although there are some tax deductions and holidays. How households (as opposed to businesses) will benefit is unstated.
There is also, it seems, no concrete package of compulsory measures around deferral of rent, mortgage or other loan payments. To date, this has been left to the goodwill of the private sector to offer, coordinated by the banks themselves. The state must step in and regulate this.
Loan guarantees
The largest chunk of money���R200 billion���is dedicated to a loan guarantee scheme. Essentially, banks will extend special loans to struggling businesses and the National Treasury and South African Reserve Bank will bear the risk of default.
This is an important step forward and the commercial banks should be effective at getting this relief to businesses. But there are four issues to consider:
The Reserve Bank, not the Treasury, should stand behind these loans and absorb any losses, protecting funds for future expenditure.
Some businesses need bailouts not loans. As the IEJ notes: ���additional debt, even at concessional interest rates, will not be appropriate for businesses facing a risk of insolvency. Similarly, it may prove optimistic that short-term tax deferrals will be an adequate or effective measure given the likely persistence of severe disruption and low demand beyond the end of the lockdown.���
Strict conditions should accompany these loans. For banks, the loan guarantee scheme should impose maximum interest rates and fees, limiting the scope for profiteering. For the businesses, borrowing conditions restricting executive bonuses, safeguarding jobs, and promoting equity requirements should be considered. These should not be so onerous as to discourage businesses from making use of the scheme.
There doesn���t seem to be a provision for big business (with turnover above R300 million a year). How many of these businesses are in trouble isn���t clear, but support may be needed. This support should also come with strings attached, and if the money is in bailouts, then government should receive a commensurate equity stake in the companies.
Financing
Ramaphosa says South Africa will pay for all this from ���local sources, such as the UIF, and from global partners and international financial institutions���.
This is the weakest element of the package.
The plan is silent on additional tax measures. (The IEJ has estimated that ���solidarity taxation��� on rich people could yield R48 billion.) It is also silent on a special COVID-19 solidarity bond that would secure funds, on favorable terms and at low interest rates, from public and private institutional investors. Private local finance must step up to the table.
Increasingly it seems as if the South African government is leaning towards seeking financing from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other development banks. The first two are viewed, rightly, with great suspicion in South Africa. They are notorious for accompanying loans with anti-poor, pro-market measures of deregulation and slashing government and social spending. The IMF appears to have somewhat stepped back from this during the crisis but a flashing neon ���proceed with caution��� sign is required.
While progressives should support global transfers from developed to developing countries, we should ensure that these loans come without strict anti-poor conditions, and that the loan terms are agreed to by all major social partners.
This is particularly important in South Africa, because the Minister of Finance seems hellbent on using such loans as a means to push through his pre-existing pro-market agenda.
The bigger picture
Mr. Ramaphosa���s address is bookended by references to the need to ensure ���structural reforms��� in the post-COVID-19 recovery phrase. While economic reform is certainly needed, ���structural reform������as articulated by the Minister of Finance���is usually code for privatization, cutting wages, and slashing spending. In line with this logic, the rescue packages do not include the necessary measures to stabilize the economy���further reducing borrowing costs, stabilizing the exchange rate, and imposing measures to limit money leaving South Africa.
These worrying elements are, however, at odds with more progressive pronouncements by the President, for example that we should not ���merely return our economy to where it was before��� but ���forge a new economy���.
The COVID-19 crisis is teaching the world that there is a need for more effective governance and a more proactive role for the state. It is showing South Africa that despite a decade or more of waste, corruption, and mismanagement, the state can play a developmental���and life-saving���role.
A storm is coming
Still from Anunciaron tormenta.
The near-blinding white light hits you early in the film. Cinema goers grimace, cower or cover their eyes. A narrator hums a story in Spanish about a village, a chief and a tragedy that occurred a long time ago. The light slowly begins to fade revealing the outline of a non-descript image. Like a polaroid photograph, the outlines and shapes gradually become less washed out and opaque, shedding their milky indistinctiveness to briefly reveal an archival sliver, a picture or a fragment of a text, records from the Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea (known as Fernando Poo prior to independence in 1968) on the island of Bioko from the early twentieth century.
This searing mise-en-scene, of light, of hypnotic voice overs, and of washed out archival fragments characterizes Javier Fern��ndez V��zquez���s debut feature, Anunciaron tormenta, known in English as A Storm Is Coming. The film was inspired by the short film “The Embassy,” by Portuguese director Filipa C��sar, which documents the scant archival records of the Portuguese colonial project in Guinea Bissau. It is a self-reflexive steadily paced documentary that reprises the circumstances behind the death of Chief ��s��asi Eweera, ���one of the last kings of the Bubi people of the island of Bioko��� in 1904. It is a film vested with a post-colonial politics of memory that reflects the director���s position on embracing the politics that comes with film making.
Here, V��zquez works with the Spanish archival record preserved by the Catholic Mission and the Spanish State, and the oral history and memory of the indigenous Bubis to interrogate the chief���s untimely death. To illustrate the Spanish account he uses white, male Spanish actors to read extracts of the record. Mostly, their backs are turned to the viewer, but when their faces are shown they are cloaked in shadows that crowd in the claustrophobic recording studio. Their dispassionate narration tells us about life in the village, the social and political conditions following the arrival of the Spanish and the unhappiness of the indigenous Bubi people who refuse to be ruled.
Repetitive and almost mind-numbing, the narration is suggestive of a historian painstakingly working their way through a repository that clings to its complex and difficult truths. We hear the Bubi chief arrived at the doctor���s barracks of his own accord. His people who mysteriously disappeared, did so voluntarily, leaving “for a better life” in another part of the colony. The doctor relates how ill the chief was upon arrival, and how, despite their best treatment, he died of natural causes. A colonial officer recounts them renaming him upon baptism just before his death.
As their clearly false, and sometimes absurd narrative unspools, white light regularly blitzes across the screen, as old photographs and yellowed documents are ���revealed��� to supplement a story that disintegrates in the very process of it coming together.
In Bioko, the director uncovers a different version of those times. He finds Bubi interlocutors who come forward to tell the passed down story of Spanish oppression, a lust for vengeance and the humiliating death of Chief ��s��asi Eweera. Whereas the Spanish narrators reveal their faces, the Bubis���, for the most part remain off-screen, keeping their faces hidden for cultural and political reasons. Theirs are disembodied voices that cut through scenes of the jungle where the village once was or bounce off the walls of dusty deteriorating haciendas that once housed Spanish colonial officials.
The Bubis tell a story of a massacre in the village at night, of the capture and enslavement of the women and children “for public service,” and of the arrest, imprisonment, and torture of their chief who they say resisted until the very end. It is a local story gathered at a site very near the historic location of the chief���s village. But it is narrated in Spanish, one further sign of how the presence of Spanish fundamentally disrupted indigenous linguistic and cultural life. The film conveys this troubled relationship between past and present through the juxtaposition of historical images of the village under Spanish rule with more contemporary footage that shows the entangled, yet also broken relationship between the two eras.
The narration, light, and juxtaposition of archival and present-day footage amplify the sense of tension freighted by driving metaphors of revelation and concealment that run throughout the film. Devices like sharp cuts and light serve as a poetic indictment of the self-assuredness of the colonial archival record as closed and true, showing it to be partial, unfinished, and even duplicitous in its claims to authority.
Once the matter of the chief���s death is concluded as having been unjust and left unpunished, the cinematic scope opens up, and the pace slows slightly to allow the Bubi to speak back. We���re introduced to the poet, historian and Bubi linguist, Justo Bolekia Bolek�� and his daughter, Reha-Xustina Bolekia Bueriberi, who jointly recite a Bubi poem, revealing in a very intimate way the inter-generational transmission of language and cultural knowledge. With the struggle for the recovery, growth, and development of the language still in its early stages, partly revived by Justo in 1986, the Bubi recovery from the historical trauma of colonial violence is still ongoing.
While we learn the truth of Chief ��s��asi Eweera���s death, the film does not entirely resolve the matter. Certainly, there is no justice forthcoming. Paying attention to the edges, the gaps, and the blank spaces in the assemblage of photographs and documents that bring his story home, the film also takes us beyond this case, to tell a bigger story about archive, language, and memory. Anunciaron tormenta is vertiginous in cinematic innovation, sensitive and moving; that is to say, it is a profound reflection on colonial violence brought to life as a gritty visual meditation on archive.
Anunciaron tormenta debuted at the 70th edition of the Berlinale Film Festival.
April 21, 2020
Solidarity under quarantine
Image credit Steven Vacher via Flickr CC.
In March 1956, Nelson Mandela received a banning order for his activism with the African National Congress���already the third order he received of this kind, though well before his sentence to life imprisonment at the end of the Rivonia Trial in 1964. As he recounts in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, ���For the next sixty months I would be quarantined in the same district, seeing the same streets, the same mine dumps on the horizon, the same sky.��� This five-year period of house arrest ran concurrent to the Treason Trial, in which 156 activists, himself included, were accused of planning to overthrow the state. All were eventually acquitted. What is important here, however, is that political life continued. Mandela did not go silent, nor did he stop organizing for a coming revolution. Being quarantined was not the end of politics, but a time for the regeneration of politics���a lesson that can be applied to our current moment.
Versions of quarantine are not uncharacteristic of political struggle; they are an indispensable feature of it. The exile of Lenin, the imprisonment of Gramsci, and the incarceration of Angela Davis, among many examples, underscore the urgency of this fact. The practice of medical quarantine under COVID-19, which has been forcibly imposed in countries like China, Italy, and South Africa, while still remaining voluntary in the US, Britain, and elsewhere, is different in scope and purpose from these preceding political examples. It has been underscored that social distancing and self-isolation at home amount to a new form of class and racial privilege under emergency conditions, with medical, sanitation, and transportation workers, many of whom remain on the frontlines of the crisis, being unable to adhere to these safety measures for reasons of social urgency and economic livelihood. This developing form of pandemic inequality should not be disregarded. Neither should a global rise in domestic violence nor episodes of state brutality committed in imposing quarantine in South Africa, Uganda, and elsewhere be ignored.
Against this backdrop, and in contrast to expressions of isolation, of being alone, we should recognize the long, if scattered and seldom synthesized, history of quarantine politics and its potential for emergent forms of solidarity. Taking such a stance isn���t to equate the present with the past, but to learn from the past and put the present in context. This recognition can reframe what is at stake. Apart from arguments against quarantine made several weeks ago by the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who viewed it as only enabling an authoritarian ���state of exception,��� we should recognize instead that the time of quarantine can equally facilitate a collective effort against such state measures; that united actions are essential for establishing and sustaining solidarity against the aforementioned issues of eviction, police brutality, and the reinforcement of social inequities. Quarantine is not a political interregnum, but a time requiring innovative forms of critical engagement and activism.
In the case of South Africa, Mandela was not alone, of course. For countless anti-apartheid activists, political quarantine was a stark rite of passage across generations. To be banned, placed under house arrest, or imprisoned following the passage of the Suppression of Communism Act (1950) and related legislation from the 1950s through the 1980s meant that you were doing something right. These actions by the National Party government were designed to blunt the momentum of the struggle, and in the short term, it worked. A number of leaders and activists passed away prematurely in these circumstances. Both Albert Luthuli and Robert Sobukwe died under house arrest. Rick Turner was assassinated by a sniper���s bullet while under house arrest. Steve Biko broke his banning order, which led to his arrest and death at the hands of the Special Branch.
But, in the long term, such measures failed. A different form of politics took hold���critical, tactical, and creative���that continued to undermine the dictates of white minority rule. These quarantine politics remain instructive. Indeed, rather than turning to so-called ���pandemic literature��� while under the confinement of COVID-19, the writing and memoirs of these activists and others can provide not only a salve, but also a framework for enduring the uncertainties of the political present.
Beyond the autobiography of Mandela are many accounts of imprisonment and house arrest that detail not only the experience and mechanisms of political oppression in microcosm, but also the critical and creative agency that could take hold under such conditions. During his five-year banning order starting in 1962 for membership in the South African Communist Party (SACP), when he, too, survived an assassination attempt by an unknown government assailant, Alex La Guma wrote his short novel And a Threefold Cord and drafted his later novel The Stone Country. These two works of fiction depicted the plight of shack dwellers and political prisoners, respectively, thus contributing to the struggle by amplifying to an international audience the systemic racism and repression of ordinary life in South Africa.
Another example is fellow SACP member Ruth First, who wrote about her detention without trial (for possession of illegal propaganda) in her prison memoir 117 Days. As Angela Davis emphasizes in the introduction to a recent edition of the book, First sought to depict her personal story of incarceration in such a way that it would be emblematic of ���a radical community of resistance.��� First herself was married to Joe Slovo, a leader of the SACP who, along with Mandela and the ANC, established Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the ANC-SACP alliance. Published in London shortly after her release and departure for exile, 117 Days outlines the perils and absurdities of detention: the precarious routine of police interrogation, the perversity of racial segregation within the prison system, and the maddening passage of time. As her narrative proceeds, she incorporates the voices and histories of other imprisoned activists, creating a polyphonic text that decenters and exceeds her own detainment. Yet her account retains an immediacy throughout. The psychological torture of questioning and misinformation eventually lead her to a mental breakdown. As she writes at one point, regarding the dehumanization of incarceration, ���Prisoners became the unnumbered, the nameless, the scattered, the lost.���
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela recounts a similar set of feelings in her dossier of journal entries, correspondence, and reflections collected in 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69. With regard to her detention and solitary confinement at the Pretoria Central Prison in 1970, she recalls, ���I had horrible nightmares and woke up screaming in the night. I discovered I spoke aloud when I thought of my children and literally held conversations with them. I cried almost hysterically when I recalled their screams on the night of my arrest.��� And yet, despite this harrowing experience, she boldly undertook the risk of breaking her house arrest in Brandfort during the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to recruit for the ANC. ���Especially over the weekends, I would sign in at 6pm and then get back to the house, change, dress like an auntie who was selling apples and get into the car, a different car,��� she remembers. ���I sometimes went to Soweto. I recruited right through the night in Soweto from Brandfort.���
Unlike a certain rhetoric at present, the lesson to be drawn from these stories is not that a sense of normality should persevere, nor that a status quo should be returned to in the future. Rather, it is to recognize and seize upon the ways in which the experience of confinement can further reveal the structures of social injustice and cultivate sharper critical sensibilities toward such systemic conditions. Embracing this lesson in the present is not to imply that the medical quarantine under COVID-19 is the same as a five-year house arrest, or a sentencing of life imprisonment under the apartheid regime. But neither should the understanding, creativity, and communal endurance of political life under these former conditions be marginalized or overlooked.
Ruth First was later assassinated in 1982 by a letter bomb in Maputo, Mozambique. Alex La Guma died from a heart attack in Havana, Cuba, where he lived in exile as the ANC representative for the Caribbean and Latin America. Unlike Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, they never lived to see the achievement of non-racial democracy in South Africa, despite its flaws in the present. Nonetheless, as with Lenin, Gramsci, and Davis, these activists together recognized the ongoing importance of organizing, of the continuing possibilities of political solidarity, that political quarantine was not a time of inaction, but a time of attention, planning, and continued discipline, whatever the cost, if not under conditions of their choosing. Such focus and collective insistence are needed now as we confront measures of social repression in the COVID-19 era, whether evictions among informal settlements in Durban, anti-LGBT arrests in Uganda, or the recurrence of anti-Asian violence in the US.
Mandela captured this potential, his commitment to it, and his acceptance of the indeterminacies of time in a poignant moment contained in a letter to Winnie, during his period of imprisonment on Robben Island. Dated November 16, 1969, he wrote, ���Already the months you spent in detention have been a severe test for you and when you come to the end of the case, you will have got a deeper understanding of human nature and its frailties and what human beings can do to others once their privileged position is endangered.���
Just over two decades later, his own test would come to an end.
A democracy of chameleons
Image credit nchenga nchenga via Flickr CC.
On Monday February 3, 2020, the Malawian High Court ordered the nullification of the presidential election that had taken place in May 2019. The court found ���widespread, systemic and grave��� irregularities, notably the widespread use of correction fluids on tally sheets. What���s more, the court stated that the current arrangement whereby the President is elected through simply having the largest vote share is unconstitutional and parliament should make arrangements for a 50+1 model to be implemented.
The judgement was hailed internationally as ���historic,��� displaying the independence of the Malawian judiciary and, read alongside the nullification of the Kenyan elections in 2017, setting a strong legal precedent. (Take for example, this piece in the Washington Post and this opinion from Institute for Security Studies in Africa.)
However, the judgement arrived at a moment of profound national crisis. A crisis over the very legitimacy of the democratic state itself. A crisis engendering both hope and anxiety, and one that is perhaps only just beginning.
The characteristics of Malawian electoral politics are familiar to many African contexts. Malawi held its first multi-party elections in 1994. This ended the 30-year rule of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) in a single party state under the life President Hastings Banda. Since then, political parties, with uncertain ideological differences, generally receive support from regional support bases, with parties associated with the southern region winning every presidential election. A small number of individuals have tended to dominate politics, shifting parties and allegiances in baffling and unpredictable ways, in what social anthropology Professor Harri Englund referred to as a ���democracy of Chameleons.���
In the now nullified presidential election of last May, Peter Mutharika and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), associated with the southern region, ended up being declared winner with just a 3.16 percent lead over MCP���s Lazarus Chakwera. However, even before the results were officially announced, both Chakwera and the leader of the other main opposition party, the UTM, Saulos Chilima, publicly disputed the legitimacy of the process. Eventually, they both challenged the legality of the election in the Malawian high court, starting the now concluded constitutional drama.
Meanwhile, their parties, the MCP and UTM, along with the NGO Human Rights Defenders Coalition (HRDC), organized countless demonstrations in urban centers. In this period, as the constitutional court case perpetually beamed out on the radio and the demonstrations persisted, it became clear that something had changed.
Violence and unrest spread and persisted across large areas of the country. While there had been incidents of violence before, the scale and scope were new. In some areas, especially in the central region, it seemed like the authority of the government was beginning to collapse.
Significantly, this also included rural areas. Living in a rural constituency in the central region, strongly associated with the MCP, I witnessed a sudden eruption of violence. On one day, houses of the ruling party (DPP) supporters were ransacked by a mob. Trucks of tense-looking soldiers sped past and plumes of tear gas could be seen in the near distance. To see such scenes in rural Malawi was spoken about as highly novel and created shock and dismay among many people I knew.
The reasons for this sudden breakdown of order are complex, but one interesting catalyst of this crisis appears to be the widespread usage of social media on mobile phones, especially WhatsApp and Facebook, by an increasingly young population. A host of sardonic and irreverent posts challenging the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) circulated rapidly. Whether fairly or not, Jane Ansah, the Chairperson of the MEC, and Tipex, a brand name of correction fluid, were introduced in the popular lexicon as powerful terms denoting corruption. Despite being rural, there was enough of a base of social media users where I lived, allowing national counter-discourses to develop rapidly outside of the mainstream media or the purview of the state.
This has important implications for the legitimacy of any future government. As the communications and media researcher, Levi Manda, wrote soon after the election, the ���networked citizen���, this ���new citizen, not the media or politicians is today���s real opposition to abuse and theft,��� whether it be from politicians, chiefs, religious authorities or police.
Indeed, it is a crisis clearly over more than simply the management of the elections, but the very ability of the democratic regime to meet the basic needs of its population. The prominent Malawian academic, Blessings Chinsinga, in August last year, at the height of the demonstrations, noted, ���it is very clear that beyond the anti-Jane Ansah demonstrations, the demonstrators have a host of complaints that they would want to be addressed …���, and the problem is that there has been ���more emphasis on procedures and not necessarily the substantive benefits of democracy.���
Corruption and poverty have persisted in Malawi���s democratic era. I witnessed widespread hunger and, to many people I spoke to, dissatisfaction with the elections was not expressed independently of a range of concerns, such as the cost of farm inputs, especially fertilizer, the lack of jobs and opportunities, and police abuse.
In this context, the court judgement holds out a much broader promise than electoral procedures. To many, it is likely to be seen as an indictment of the status quo of theft and hunger, and a hope for social justice.
Yet the future is uncertain. After the passing of the electoral reforms bill in parliament, new presidential elections will take place on May 19, 2020. The new voting system, whereby the victorious presidential candidate must receive over 50 percent of the vote, may at least force candidates to seek a broader mandate, and the main political parties have begun to negotiate alliances. At the time of writing, one big question mark is whether the main opposition parties, the MCP and UTM, will manage to form an alliance.
Whatever the shape of the government to come, there is one certainty; their legitimacy will be increasingly open to challenge by a young and galvanized population.
April 20, 2020
Out of sight
Long Street, Cape Town, South Africa, April 2017. Image credit Hans-B. Sickler via Flickr CC.
More than a week ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a two-week extension to South Africa���s 21-day lockdown. Many South Africans took to social media to express relief for this announcement and appreciation for the president, with the word ���leadership��� being bandied about. What this sentiment suggests is that Ramaphosa���s shiniest hour is arriving as the world enters a blinding darkness. It wasn���t hard for Ramaphosa to rise to this occasion, considering the low standards being set by the likes of Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, and Donald Trump. In this moment of profound disorientation, leadership has been depoliticized���people aren���t looking for leaders to hold accountable, but for a figurehead to tell them convincingly that ���things will be okay.���
What does it even mean for things to be okay during a systemic crisis? The first casualty in an unprecedented crisis such as this one is any standard for measuring what it means to be handling the crisis well. At first, the lockdown strategy seemed doable in South Africa, provided one���s fingers were tightly crossed of course. More than three weeks have passed, and although it was arguably necessary, it has revealed the extent to which South African society was in some keyways ill-equipped for it. What it has revealed, to be more exact, is that there is no South African society to speak of in the first place.
To date, scant measures to protect South Africa���s poor and working class have been taken. Compared to the rest of the world, South Africa is one of the stingiest relative to other middle income countries such as Mexico, Turkey, and even Brazil in introducing measures to mitigate the lockdown���s effects on its poor and vulnerable. A proposal to increase South Africa���s child support grant as a means of effectively distributing urgent, additional income to precarious households has been before Ramaphosa���s cabinet for weeks, but they���ve faltered. Reportedly, finance minister Tito Mboweni is the one insisting on keeping the public purse tightly closed, hammering an outdated dogma of fiscal prudence (an article of faith in that ministry and the treasury since a few years after the end of apartheid) that appears to be successfully subduing his colleagues into paralysis.
Amidst all this, citizens continue to face brutality from the police and soldiers, who subject residents in townships and informal settlements to cruel and unusual punishments on the streets, and have now begun carrying out forced evictions under the pretense of a ���de-densification��� program. The state has so far responded to these facts with a shrugging indifference. Although the media continues to report on countless incidents of brutality, Ramaphosa���who initially presented the role of security as one to ���save lives������has so far failed to reign in the bellicosity of Minister of Police Bheki Cele, who continues to encourage a heavy-handed approach to law enforcement.
South Africans are historically primed to overlook these failings. The forever ruling ANC government has always fashioned itself as beyond reproach, and who blames them. They have, after all, managed to get away with murder successfully on one too many occasions. One of these, lest we forget, is our own president���s role in instigating the killings of 34 miners at the Marikana mine in 2012. Now, the government clings single-mindedly to a narrow logic of emergency, one pre-emptively absolving them from the consequences of their own irresponsible governance. Any shortcoming becomes justified through the rhetoric of ���sacrifice��� that Ramaphosa has ensured features in every address to the nation. But just how far should these sacrifices go?
As of writing it is difficult to have hopes that the crisis will prompt a more progressive direction in our politics. Already weakened by years of disorganization, the South African left now has to confront an era of demobilization. What hope is there for mass politics if the masses can���t take to the streets, the arena where it has most power and visibility? Although civil society has quickly coalesced around forming coalitions, to ensure that the interests of the vulnerable are protected and the state is held accountable (the most visible of these is the COVID-19 People���s Coalition), the role played here is a necessary albeit terminally limited one: to serve as a check and balance on the state rather than to be a vehicle for its transformation. In other cases, it has once again fallen on civil society to do the government���s job through organizing food parcels for the poor and other such measures.
The fighting battleground is now social media, the assembly points WhatsApp and Zoom. For the time being, politics has to be replaced by ���raising awareness.��� The audience for these pleas are the government and the South African public, the message simply being to not forget about the poor and needy. Protests become petitions, songs and chants are likes and retweets. If social media is a reliable barometer of public opinion then, a surprising number of South Africans have cheered some of the lockdown���s harshest restrictions. Many have supported the alcohol and tobacco prohibitions on purely moralistic grounds, and at their worst have already defined a troublesome ���them������the millions of South Africans in crowded living conditions who, spilling over into the streets, ���get what���s coming to them.��� Their daily plight under the lockdown generates not compassion, but contempt.
Whether COVID-19 has dealt neoliberalism its final death blow remains to be seen. It���s shadow, however, still looms in the crisis���s main injunction for people to ���stay at home.��� In South Africa, this is still viewed in the mainstream as ultimately an individual responsibility, hiding from view the limitations of circumstance faced by many, and the government���s clear lack of a strategy to ease these limitations���at the moment it���s too little, and by the time they���re ramped up it���ll be too late. This is not just a humanitarian concern, but affects the success of quarantine measures which are likely to continue periodically into the future. Compliance has to be made possible, not simply demanded. Although, for those who can comfortably stay at home, compliance has become a glamorized act, producing a new collective subject of sorts���a community of the great indoors, of law-abiding citizens, juxtaposed against the law-breaking.
The cultural artifacts of this community are already in production, and consist mostly of viral TikTok memes, Instagram live-streams and commentary about Netflix shows (the flavor of this month is the docu-series Tiger King). Here the goal is simply to distract, to soothe and placate, to foster belonging simply through content that is ���relatable.��� And what can be more relatable than millions of people around the world being in their homes at the same time? Make no mistake, the togetherness felt by the privileged in this moment is illusory, a community formed out of the precise lack of it, the inability of us to take part in that basic human action of socializing. As the political theorist Anton Jager recently tweeted: ���The fact that we collectively agreed to call it ���social��� instead of ���physical distancing��� shows we were all already secretly yearning for the pod.��� Put differently, we have normalized our anti-social desires.
But this anti-social tendency takes a decidedly South African shape. In our racialized society, this form is in white melancholia and black Afro-pessimism. This phenomenon is perhaps best exemplified by the South African government���s decision to ban dog walking during the lockdown. A fierce debate was unleashed, wherein walking dogs was viewed as a symbol of whiteness. Some relished in the fact that this could no longer happen, while others lamented the loss of an enjoyable, recreational activity. A similar debate followed the food retailer Woolworths��� decision to ban its popular rotisserie chicken, following a warning from government that prepared food should no longer be sold.
In manically defending these items of everyday suburban life, white South Africans reveal their self-imposed position in South African politics���that of defense. That longstanding complaint, that white South Africans are always having to justify their existence and habits, in fact betrays a sense of guilt and responsibility���of which one wonders, for what exactly? Yet, rather than prompting action, the responsibility to do anything to transform this position is suppressed all the same, since it is conveyed fundamentally on the basis of race���the one fact people hopelessly do not control.
On the other hand, a black Afro-pessimism is poised in relation to and depends on white melancholia. This takes issue not with generalized exploitation and domination, but rather with who appears not to be subjected to it. And so, it wants an equal distribution of repression instead of taking issue with it in the first place. For this reason, when an errant white woman was caught walking her dog by police in Cape Town, it was this that dominated the whole of social media for an extended period, with her imminent arrest and detention widely cheered. The logic of this, is one that thinks it impossible to create a non-racialized world, instead accepting as ontological fact the suffering of black people. The most we can hope for, is that this suffering is not mitigated, but inflicted also on others. These squabbles are at best middle class preoccupations, an intra-class war between the one of old, and a new or aspirant one.
The more important point, is that to focus too much on who isn���t suffering, means we too easily forget those actually suffering, and the important question of why they are suffering. To ask that question means to discover that this suffering can be changed. What the pandemic has exposed is how hollow our concern for the poor is. To think of the plight of poor South Africans as something to primarily be angry about, only entrenches an affective politics where what matters is how we feel about the issues facing us, and not what we collectively do about them. Righteous anger without a proper target quickly fizzles out into apathy. Compare the start of the lockdown, when social media was buzzing with viral images of squatter settlements with questions of how social distancing was supposed to happen there, to now being mostly indifferent to the continuing struggles of people living in those conditions. For instance, calls for the child support grant to be increased have been met largely with conservative tropes about the money being mis-used for drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.
To be sure, the mediatization of politics which has birthed this style of facile political engagement is nothing new. Indeed, the pandemic arrives just in time at the end of a decade of intense and emotive political activity, most of it online. At this juncture in most of the globe, the right is consolidating its power, with the progressive left in sharp decline after suffering a series of big, symbolic defeats; Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders have been rejected whether by the electorate as a whole or in political party leadership contests. In South Africa, the verdict of our fiercest political struggle in recent history, the student movements of the mid-2010s, also seem apparent now. Fees have not fallen, but society���s political spirit and enthusiasm has.
And so, at the heart of pandemic politics, is the collective urge to withdraw. This urge has been in the making by years of neoliberalism which devastated social bonds by postulating that the individual competing for their interest is the only way for people to exist alongside one another, as isolated atoms. The social order here takes on an anarchic quality, as a nasty war of all against all. It is the sheer rootlessness of social identity which is being uncovered now, and in times of uncertainty makes a further retreat into the private realm seem all that we can do.
And this presents one of the gravest dangers of the status quo���that suspension means the suspension of interest in what happens around you. That the injunction ���stay at home��� becomes, as we are already seeing, a new iteration of that old South African pathology: ���Stay at home and mind your own business.��� During this, the pandemic is giving states in collaboration with profiteering communications companies the opportunity to strengthen technologies of surveillance, an indication that far from weakening them, the pandemic is strengthening ties between the state and capital. Already, Ramaphosa has enlisted donations from South Africa���s super rich towards a ���Solidarity Fund,��� and has adopted a business-centric approach in economic relief packages, paving the way for a new Covid corporatism where government and the private sector explicitly collaborate in managing and administering life as co-partners in governance.
Under our noses, Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe published regulations to the Mineral Petroleum and Resources Development Act which defines consultation with affected parties in ways falling short from the standard established by the Constitutional Court. Environment Minister Barbara Creecy has greenlighted the expansion of an Australian mine on South Africa���s West Coast. That this very pandemic is borne from ecological devastation is lost on our government.
We must insist on the possibility of politics again, to not withdraw, but to demand more���from the government and fellow citizens, and for everything to be subjected to vigorous democratic scrutiny rather than executive and technocratic fiat. It is here where historian Benjamin Fogel���s simple corrective is crucial: ���That we embrace a collective hope for a better future as united subjects rather than isolated individuals.��� Once again, to view political struggles in South Africa as framed only through race, has proved a dead-end, unable to grasp that the driving force of our inequalities is class, imbricated with race���and although the racial composition of our country is something that cannot be changed, we can work to abolish class divisions. It is this that can form the basis of a solidarity politics, towards a shared political goal that begins by insisting that there is an alternative: a society constructed in common without exploitation, domination and alienation.
Anything else risks giving impetus to what political psychology calls ���the authoritarian personality.��� After the horrors of World War II, critical theorists like Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno became interested in exploring the origins of fascism in democratic societies. What they found, was that the psychological patterns characteristic of this included a tendency to be on the lookout for people who violated laws, a disposition to think in rigid distinctions of good and bad, and the conviction that life is determined by occluded and irrational forces outside the person, outside their wishes and interests, and that the only possible happiness consists in submission to forces that can bring about order.
It is impossible to predict what comes next. But nothing good comes out of a society that mostly chooses to look away, where its population surrenders to the impossibility of change, lowers its expectations and lives by resignation. Our apartheid history means that we know this quite intimately. And it is in large part owing to the legacies from that which means we have no South African society to speak of. But we must insist again and again, on our ability to build one.
Locating African agency in Africa-China relations
[image error]
South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane at a bliateral meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, 2017. Image via Government of South Africa Flickr CC.
The heightened interest in Africa-China relations is prompted by the increasing trade, investment, and aid between China and several African countries. Entry by China���s government and private and public enterprises into Africa came with increased foreign direct investments (FDI), mostly in the telecommunications, hydropower, transport, manufacturing, and construction space. Such ventures were greeted by African publics with skepticism and embrace. Obviously, embrace was, and still is, predicated on investments and technology transfers. Although academic and media debates explore some of the negative and positive aspects of the relationship, the way we discuss these issues frequently overlooks African agency.
Present China-Africa discourses have two broad lines of thought. The first explores the challenges surrounding Africa-China relations. The second emphasize the obstacles that face Africa-China relations.
On the first: It remarks on China���s neocolonial aims that harvest strategic mineral resources while violating global governance norms, environmental concerns and African independence. Namely, in the telecommunication space, it emphasizes China���s uniqueness as a global actor and raises questions about the extent to which the Chinese government is supplementing and promoting repressive practices. For instance, Huawei, a private corporation with connections to the People’s Liberation Army, built Uganda���s closed-circuit television camera (CCTV) system. Many opposition leaders instantly underscored how such introductions will enable the police to target demonstrators. Critically, these new technologies are accompanied by loans to enable African governments the means to purchase them. In other words, loans mostly from China���s Exim bank, make Huawei���s technology affordable. China���s Exim bank in particular follows Chinese foreign policy and has performed a critical role in advancing the expansion of Chinese trade and investments in Africa. More to the point, such observations speculate China���s autocratic ambitions; they find substantiation in China���s use and selling of surveillance technology worldwide. Global experts claim that Chinese companies are working with the Communist Party to export authoritarian tech.
The above trepidations are audible. Yet, it is also true that advanced democracies distribute surveillance technology. AI surveillance equipment is sold by US corporations. IBM has sold its monitoring tools to eleven governments. Other liberal democracies like Israel, Germany, Italy, France, and Japan have also contributed to the global trade of surveillance technology. It must be said that we currently occupy a critical technological inflection point, which is marked by surveillance mechanisms that go beyond arrested scales and duration. As such, nation-states like Uganda, regardless of their meager circumstances, now have greater means to conduct broad, invasive, and targeted surveillance.
The increased application of surveillance practices does not signal the end of democratic regimes in Africa and abroad. Whether these instruments are being deployed for legitimate or illegitimate ends can only be determined on a country-by-country basis. Future investigations must identify which countries possess the devices to pursue security goals and autocratic practices. More pressingly, while these above discussions are useful in examining asymmetric power in China-Africa relations, they privilege Chinese actions, focusing on how Chinese vectors are deployed in the African arena. Indeed, the imbalances between Africa and China should inspire judicious skepticism. Yet, such fears should not rest on assumed African ineptitude. The truth is that African governments and people exercise greater agency than is purported.
African agency is illustrated by how Ethiopia used Chinese financial investments to pursue development goals on their own terms. For example, the Woredanet project stands for ���network of district (worreda) administrations��� and uses the same protocol that the internet is founded on, but rather than allowing individuals to freely search information, it connects minsters and cadres in Addis Ababa to video conference with regional offices. This empowers minsters to instruct district offices on how to conduct quotidian tasks. Woredanet helps build the state���s capacity in rural areas by training government staff to enable regional offices to provide better services.
As for the second discourse on Africa-China relations, it accents the obstacles that face these relationships. This work tends to center on African state actors. More precisely, it is less interested in discerning the oppressive practices of China and more chiefly interested in the applicability of Chinese economic strategies in the context of African development paradigms. This inquiry underscores the political and economic milieu of African states. It principally illustrates how African interest in China primarily stems from investment and trade opportunities, as instruments to support regime stability and strategic development on the continent.
Likewise, in terms of economic tools, beyond foreign direct investment and trade, the China Africa Development Fund and Special Economic Zones play salient roles. Critical attention is paid to the Economic Zones for their role in technology transfers. Notedly, another contested instrument is the Export-Import Bank of China, which is criticized for the lack of loan conditions. The absence of loan conditions, which would demand domestic political reform, further adds to suspicion about coordinated efforts between the Chinese Communist Party and Huawei. More to the point, exclusive focus on state-level action, regardless of whether it is lauded or rebuffed with acrimony, is a singular framework to capture African volition. Considering African actors from various levels, within and beyond the state, will illustrate a broader sense of agency and how Africans have influenced, and in some ways, driven Chinese engagements in Africa-China relations.
Research and coverage need multi-layered perspectives on the issue of African agency. Such contentions will challenge overly simplistic analysis that ignores African efforts in molding China-Africa developmental relations. Additionally, beyond the work that explores the actions of African state elites, limited efforts examine African non-state actors at multiple levels of engagement and negotiation with Chinese equivalents. These remarks do not wish to exaggerate African volition. It is appropriate to be wary of gratuitous readings which overestimate African power in China-Africa relations. Nevertheless, we must attempt to find a balance by pursuing work that demonstrates the degree to which African agency is expressed within these developing relationships.
April 19, 2020
Uganda’s People Power in the age of COVID-19
Bobi Wine. Image credit Sam Broadway.
Over the past month, Bobi Wine has again made headlines in a number of major US media outlets. And again, those outlets (with the exception of Rolling Stone) have failed to push beyond their own preoccupations and narrowness, settling instead for coverage that not only sidelines nearly every other figure on the Ugandan political scene, but wholly ignores���gleefully, it seems���the larger circumstances in which Wine���s presidential bid is unfolding. The individuals orbiting the People Power leader remain critical to our understanding of the movement and the importance of Ugandan politics going into elections in 2021, but the circumstances���like everywhere else���are rapidly changing. Though the number of confirmed coronavirus cases remains quite low for the time being, the government���s response to the outbreak will have an impact on politics for as long as it is convenient to the Museveni regime.
It seems largely true���and many of the Ugandans I interviewed for my own research last June would agree���that Wine, as Peisner writes in Rolling Stone, will not win Uganda���s 2021 presidential election. The reason for this is simple: Museveni���s grip on power is too firm, and his influence over institutions and the individuals within them too pervasive. As Moses Khisa, a professor of political science and regular contributor to Uganda���s Daily Monitor, told me:
[Wine���s] thinking that he can defeat Museveni in an election to me is a manifestation of failure to understand the political dynamics of Uganda. There���s no way nobody [sic] is going to win an election that is organized and superintended by Museveni himself ��� That electoral commission can never, never declare any other person president-elect other than Museveni.
On the question of his electoral viability, Wine himself remains either naive or is conscientiously projecting confidence for the sake of his movement. One need only look to the recent past, and to Wine���s political predecessor, to understand this. As Museveni���s long-time opponent and the former figurehead of the opposition before Wine, Kizza Besigye���who continues to be erased from history by every Western publication (even in the surprisingly lengthy Rolling Stone article, the Forum for Democratic Change leader only receives a single sentence)���knows all too well, the machinations used by the Ugandan state will disrupt and undermine any challenge to Museveni���s authority.
While Wine���s 2018 treason charges continue to sour in the courts, we should revisit the false allegations of rape foisted on Besigye during his 2006 bid. Having had the experience of running against President Museveni four times since 2001, Besigye, despite repeated presidential runs, has long given up hope in the efficacy of democratic change under Uganda���s current dispensation. This fact is but one of the major differences, and indeed one of the key points of disagreement between Besigye and his younger counterpart. ���We have never said that we don���t believe in contesting elections,��� Besigye told me when we spoke last June, responding to criticism from both Wine and a number of other political entities. ���I don���t believe for a moment [however] that we are going to win an election and be declared winners, and Museveni is going to come and hand over power formally at a function and he goes home ��� he���ll have to be forced out of office in one form or another,��� he continued. Fully aware of the impossibility of winning, Beisgye has instead used election cycles as opportunities to build the political consciousness of Ugandans more generally.
���One [reason for contesting elections] is that it���s a period when the regime is forced to relax some of the controls on the political processes,��� explained Besigye. ���The environment is a wonderful environment ��� for [ ] conscientization ��� one can go all over the country giving the message about how to free ourselves.��� Simply put, the Ugandan government needs to conduct elections in order to regularly re-establish the legitimacy of its authority, and because of the significant increase in attention paid to Uganda���s internal issues (by foreign governments and press, NGOs and supranational government organizations alike) elections open a window to the sorts of political messaging and activity that would normally be scrutinized and almost certainly punished. ���For example, in the campaign even in 2016, my message has been ��� I have not come to ask you for a vote, because you don���t have it,��� said Besigye.
It is debatable whether or not these electoral campaigns have really led to the mass raising of political consciousness, which Besigye believes has reached ���a critical level.��� What is certain, however, is that elections in Uganda, and in all repressive or dictatorial states, represent a decisive and clear rift in the authoritarian continuum. This facet of elections is remarkably similar to the rupture supplied by any crisis, especially the one now being faced across the globe. Understanding the nature of such phenomena is particularly crucial to our understanding of its potential impact, not only as it applies to Uganda, but to domestic politics the world over.
In “The Ideology of Crisis,” Danish scholar Soren Mau gives insight into how crises function politically. ���Crisis always denotes a transition,��� writes Mau. ���A crisis signifies a certain relation to the future in the sense that in a crisis, the future is open and undetermined. Crisis marks the moment in the course of time in which it becomes difficult to imagine the future as a continuation of the present.��� In thinking of crisis as a temporal rupture, it follows that elections function similarly���imbued as they are with their own sort of political liminality���in that they manifest as crises for ruling parties and leaders of authoritarian states. But while in the past elections-as-crises have been used by Uganda���s opposition to raise consciousness, the additional crisis of a global pandemic complicates the moment. As Mau elaborates: ���Crises are situations in which possibility exists as possibility ��� The possibilities inherent in crises point towards ��� the necessity of the act that decides which possibilities will come into existence.��� The added crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the already Sisyphean task of beating Museveni in a presidential election with demands of its own (the necessity of self-isolation among others) that necessarily work against electoral politics as such.
This is not to say that Wine���s path to electoral victory has been irreversibly closed, nor that it must remain so narrow; in fact, and as Mau suggests, the very opposite could be true. ���When you have a rupture, anything is possible,��� said Khisa in reference to Uganda���s elections. ���Nobody can defeat Museveni under the current circumstances, but the election could lead into a crisis that ��� could trigger something that we don���t know.��� With the coronavirus outbreak, the circumstances have changed, considerably. However, the nature of this surprising turn of events is, again, one that presents possibilities more or less favorable to the regime in its project to maintain power, more than it does to the forces attempting to end it, electoral or otherwise. Nevertheless, Wine and People Power have made several attempts to capitalize on the political opening provided by the coronavirus outbreak.
Among the variety of measures taken by People Power to address the pandemic, it was of course the release of Wine���s latest single, ���Corona Virus Alert,��� that received the most attention. The song has been shared widely, but it cannot be said with certainty that it is making much of an impact politically. Wine���s music is largely banned from radio airwaves, and with the recently declared shutdown, the public transportation and vendors that would have previously acted as vectors for the dissemination of its message are currently inactive, rendering the song merely symbolic. People Power, however, has also been pursuing relief activities with more material objectives, such as donating hand washing stations and delivering small amounts of food. These activities, if they are widespread enough, may engender the sort of support that Wine still hopes to cultivate in the run up to the 2021 elections, turning a medical emergency into lemonade, as it were.
Perhaps this is a rather cynical reading of People Power���s efforts, but they are, after all, still involved in an election cycle. Wine or People Power should not refrain from using the rupture presented by the outbreak to push their political agenda of democratic change. In fact, it seems that the coronavirus has, perhaps for the first time, offered People Power the opportunity to demonstrate how they might actually function as an alternative to the Museveni regime. And though the giving out of food is only marginally distinguishable from the sort of vote buying that Museveni has been accused of orchestrating through Operation Wealth Creation (by People Power���s own Joel Ssenyonyi no less)���a concern that should raise the eyebrows of anyone seriously interested in the direction of Uganda���s politics���it is nonetheless an example of Wine���s attempt to make use of the moment. People Power, however, cannot hope to match, at least in kind, the power of the state in such a time of crisis.
Mau describes the concept of crisis as one that can be utilized as a ���kind of reserve of legitimacy.��� He argues that the 2008 financial crash was used by the European Union and the IMF ���as an ideological tool that [aimed] at making austerity appear as the necessary and only feasible answer to the economic situation.��� In other words, certain actors (i.e. multinational corporations, governments, ruling parties, etc.), select their ideologically preferred outcome from among the myriad possibilities presented by a crisis, and then determine and enforce the necessities required thereby. In fact, these powerful actors already have their desires planned well before crises ensue. This is precisely the process of the ���shock doctrine,��� a term coined by Naomi Klein (in her book by the same name), who argues that the Bush Administration���s War on Terror and prolonged state of emergency following 9/11 provided the political screen to start���and largely privatize���the Iraq War. ���Political and economic elites understand that moments of crisis [are] their chance to push through their wish list of unpopular policies that further polarize wealth,��� said Klein in a recent interview with VICE. The shock doctrine is a universal blueprint of sorts, and despite the uniqueness of Ugandan politics, the Museveni regime will almost certainly use���indeed, is already using it to its advantage.
The regime���s contempt for Bobi Wine and People Power is well-established. Though the recent striking down of Section 8 of Uganda���s Public Order Management Act (POMA), which gave broad authority to the police to shutdown campaign events, was a victory for People Power, the prior months of crackdowns on their campaign events is proof enough of the government���s sentiment. Silencing Wine and his movement has long been on Museveni���s personal wish list, and the coronavirus outbreak provides the perfect cover for increasing repressive efforts. The shutdown, first announced on March 30 and originally scheduled to last for 14 days, is likely to become the vehicle for just that.
People Power���s electoral strategy has always relied heavily on both the visibility of its candidate and the freedom of movement of his supporters���not to mention overwhelming voter turnout. Without this, the campaign can have little hope in receiving a large enough share of January���s vote total to challenge Museveni���s legitimacy, let alone his leadership. The government has taken a particularly strong and proactive, perhaps even outsized stance on combating the spread of COVID-19. Rational minds can certainly imagine the state of emergency continuing well beyond its immediate usefulness, and once a ���new normal��� is established, vis a vis the curtailing of certain civil liberties, it is all the more difficult to revert to the ���old normal.��� In other words, Museveni���s shutdown, and the severe punishment with which it is already being enforced, may very well extend up to and past the upcoming presidential election. Indeed, as of April 14, the lockdown had already been extended for an additional three weeks.
No one knows yet exactly to what extent Uganda and the broader continent will be affected���a youthful population and warm climate may be advantageous���but with the ubiquitous lack of testing, the true spread may never be fully determined. And though it would be a somewhat quixotic confession for a developing country, one could imagine a politically opportunistic Museveni government claiming a higher rate of infection than officially reported. The coronavirus is the perfect pretext by which to drastically shrink People Power���s political space (in a very physical sense), doing so without the threat of any serious push-back from the international community.
Certain autocratic regimes have already seized on the opportunity presented by the outbreak to expand their power. Even in societies typically thought to be free of authoritarianism, the coronavirus pandemic has altered the public���s perception of what is and is not acceptable in order to ���flatten the curve.��� In other words, the temporal and political ruptures initiated by the crisis and its economic afterbirth have been accompanied by another: a psychological rupture in our individual and collective psyches. COVID-19, as a crisis, has produced in all of us the acute awareness of the necessity for survival, and with that our wholesale acquiescence to survival���s demands. Museveni and his regime will not only be able to argue that the continued repression of civil society is for the sake of public safety, but rather than being criticized and pressured they will be applauded for their responsibility and competence by an international community that is largely enacting similar policies. This is, unfortunately, the power of a crisis in the form of an infectious disease.
This is not to say, of course, that the political project of Bobi Wine and People Power is dead on arrival. Rather, it is to suggest that within the rupture that is the coronavirus pandemic, old realities have died and new possibilities are being born. Who is to say just how long Museveni���s increased authoritarian privileges will last? We cannot know from where we now sit. Though Wine���s cohort has long expressed that other forms of political mobilization, like mass protests, may be required to unseat Museveni, the regime���s defense against, i.e. dispersal of, such activities no longer requires the overturned POMA law. That is because public gatherings are in direct conflict with the demands of survival. Now more than ever, it is time for the opposition to assess its possibilities.
With the political moment in constant flux, much more is required in the way of conscientization. The class dynamics displayed by the initial spread of the virus, as well as the lack of access to and availability of medical treatment, food, finances, and overall comfort during quarantine, may produce new forms of political consciousness. Maybe, by virtue of its own incompetence, the regime will illustrate country’s inequality in stark relief. Or perhaps Wine and his movement���s treatment of common people, which we���ve witnessed in their response, will be enough to show Ugandans that there is an altogether different way to wield power. If and when change will come is anyone���s guess.
People power in the age of COVID-19
Bobi Wine. Image credit Sam Broadway.
Over the past month, Bobi Wine has again made headlines in a number of major US media outlets. And again, those outlets (with the exception of Rolling Stone) have failed to push beyond their own preoccupations and narrowness, settling instead for coverage that not only sidelines nearly every other figure on the Ugandan political scene, but wholly ignores���gleefully, it seems���the larger circumstances in which Wine���s presidential bid is unfolding. The individuals orbiting the People Power leader remain critical to our understanding of the movement and the importance of Ugandan politics going into elections in 2021, but the circumstances���like everywhere else���are rapidly changing. Though the number of confirmed coronavirus cases remains quite low for the time being, the government���s response to the outbreak will have an impact on politics for as long as it is convenient to the Museveni regime.
It seems largely true���and many of the Ugandans I interviewed for my own research last June would agree���that Wine, as Peisner writes in Rolling Stone, will not win Uganda���s 2021 presidential election. The reason for this is simple: Museveni���s grip on power is too firm, and his influence over institutions and the individuals within them too pervasive. As Moses Khisa, a professor of political science and regular contributor to Uganda���s Daily Monitor, told me:
[Wine���s] thinking that he can defeat Museveni in an election to me is a manifestation of failure to understand the political dynamics of Uganda. There���s no way nobody [sic] is going to win an election that is organized and superintended by Museveni himself ��� That electoral commission can never, never declare any other person president-elect other than Museveni.
On the question of his electoral viability, Wine himself remains either naive or is conscientiously projecting confidence for the sake of his movement. One need only look to the recent past, and to Wine���s political predecessor, to understand this. As Museveni���s long-time opponent and the former figurehead of the opposition before Wine, Kizza Besigye���who continues to be erased from history by every Western publication (even in the surprisingly lengthy Rolling Stone article, the Forum for Democratic Change leader only receives a single sentence)���knows all too well, the machinations used by the Ugandan state will disrupt and undermine any challenge to Museveni���s authority.
While Wine���s 2018 treason charges continue to sour in the courts, we should revisit the false allegations of rape foisted on Besigye during his 2006 bid. Having had the experience of running against President Museveni four times since 2001, Besigye, despite repeated presidential runs, has long given up hope in the efficacy of democratic change under Uganda���s current dispensation. This fact is but one of the major differences, and indeed one of the key points of disagreement between Besigye and his younger counterpart. ���We have never said that we don���t believe in contesting elections,��� Besigye told me when we spoke last June, responding to criticism from both Wine and a number of other political entities. ���I don���t believe for a moment [however] that we are going to win an election and be declared winners, and Museveni is going to come and hand over power formally at a function and he goes home ��� he���ll have to be forced out of office in one form or another,��� he continued. Fully aware of the impossibility of winning, Beisgye has instead used election cycles as opportunities to build the political consciousness of Ugandans more generally.
���One [reason for contesting elections] is that it���s a period when the regime is forced to relax some of the controls on the political processes,��� explained Besigye. ���The environment is a wonderful environment ��� for [ ] conscientization ��� one can go all over the country giving the message about how to free ourselves.��� Simply put, the Ugandan government needs to conduct elections in order to regularly re-establish the legitimacy of its authority, and because of the significant increase in attention paid to Uganda���s internal issues (by foreign governments and press, NGOs and supranational government organizations alike) elections open a window to the sorts of political messaging and activity that would normally be scrutinized and almost certainly punished. ���For example, in the campaign even in 2016, my message has been ��� I have not come to ask you for a vote, because you don���t have it,��� said Besigye.
It is debatable whether or not these electoral campaigns have really led to the mass raising of political consciousness, which Besigye believes has reached ���a critical level.��� What is certain, however, is that elections in Uganda, and in all repressive or dictatorial states, represent a decisive and clear rift in the authoritarian continuum. This facet of elections is remarkably similar to the rupture supplied by any crisis, especially the one now being faced across the globe. Understanding the nature of such phenomena is particularly crucial to our understanding of its potential impact, not only as it applies to Uganda, but to domestic politics the world over.
In “The Ideology of Crisis,” Danish scholar Soren Mau gives insight into how crises function politically. ���Crisis always denotes a transition,��� writes Mau. ���A crisis signifies a certain relation to the future in the sense that in a crisis, the future is open and undetermined. Crisis marks the moment in the course of time in which it becomes difficult to imagine the future as a continuation of the present.��� In thinking of crisis as a temporal rupture, it follows that elections function similarly���imbued as they are with their own sort of political liminality���in that they manifest as crises for ruling parties and leaders of authoritarian states. But while in the past elections-as-crises have been used by Uganda���s opposition to raise consciousness, the additional crisis of a global pandemic complicates the moment. As Mau elaborates: ���Crises are situations in which possibility exists as possibility ��� The possibilities inherent in crises point towards ��� the necessity of the act that decides which possibilities will come into existence.��� The added crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the already Sisyphean task of beating Museveni in a presidential election with demands of its own (the necessity of self-isolation among others) that necessarily work against electoral politics as such.
This is not to say that Wine���s path to electoral victory has been irreversibly closed, nor that it must remain so narrow; in fact, and as Mau suggests, the very opposite could be true. ���When you have a rupture, anything is possible,��� said Khisa in reference to Uganda���s elections. ���Nobody can defeat Museveni under the current circumstances, but the election could lead into a crisis that ��� could trigger something that we don���t know.��� With the coronavirus outbreak, the circumstances have changed, considerably. However, the nature of this surprising turn of events is, again, one that presents possibilities more or less favorable to the regime in its project to maintain power, more than it does to the forces attempting to end it, electoral or otherwise. Nevertheless, Wine and People Power have made several attempts to capitalize on the political opening provided by the coronavirus outbreak.
Among the variety of measures taken by People Power to address the pandemic, it was of course the release of Wine���s latest single, ���Corona Virus Alert,��� that received the most attention. The song has been shared widely, but it cannot be said with certainty that it is making much of an impact politically. Wine���s music is largely banned from radio airwaves, and with the recently declared shutdown, the public transportation and vendors that would have previously acted as vectors for the dissemination of its message are currently inactive, rendering the song merely symbolic. People Power, however, has also been pursuing relief activities with more material objectives, such as donating hand washing stations and delivering small amounts of food. These activities, if they are widespread enough, may engender the sort of support that Wine still hopes to cultivate in the run up to the 2021 elections, turning a medical emergency into lemonade, as it were.
Perhaps this is a rather cynical reading of People Power���s efforts, but they are, after all, still involved in an election cycle. Wine or People Power should not refrain from using the rupture presented by the outbreak to push their political agenda of democratic change. In fact, it seems that the coronavirus has, perhaps for the first time, offered People Power the opportunity to demonstrate how they might actually function as an alternative to the Museveni regime. And though the giving out of food is only marginally distinguishable from the sort of vote buying that Museveni has been accused of orchestrating through Operation Wealth Creation (by People Power���s own Joel Ssenyonyi no less)���a concern that should raise the eyebrows of anyone seriously interested in the direction of Uganda���s politics���it is nonetheless an example of Wine���s attempt to make use of the moment. People Power, however, cannot hope to match, at least in kind, the power of the state in such a time of crisis.
Mau describes the concept of crisis as one that can be utilized as a ���kind of reserve of legitimacy.��� He argues that the 2008 financial crash was used by the European Union and the IMF ���as an ideological tool that [aimed] at making austerity appear as the necessary and only feasible answer to the economic situation.��� In other words, certain actors (i.e. multinational corporations, governments, ruling parties, etc.), select their ideologically preferred outcome from among the myriad possibilities presented by a crisis, and then determine and enforce the necessities required thereby. In fact, these powerful actors already have their desires planned well before crises ensue. This is precisely the process of the ���shock doctrine,��� a term coined by Naomi Klein (in her book by the same name), who argues that the Bush Administration���s War on Terror and prolonged state of emergency following 9/11 provided the political screen to start���and largely privatize���the Iraq War. ���Political and economic elites understand that moments of crisis [are] their chance to push through their wish list of unpopular policies that further polarize wealth,��� said Klein in a recent interview with VICE. The shock doctrine is a universal blueprint of sorts, and despite the uniqueness of Ugandan politics, the Museveni regime will almost certainly use���indeed, is already using it to its advantage.
The regime���s contempt for Bobi Wine and People Power is well-established. Though the recent striking down of Section 8 of Uganda���s Public Order Management Act (POMA), which gave broad authority to the police to shutdown campaign events, was a victory for People Power, the prior months of crackdowns on their campaign events is proof enough of the government���s sentiment. Silencing Wine and his movement has long been on Museveni���s personal wish list, and the coronavirus outbreak provides the perfect cover for increasing repressive efforts. The shutdown, first announced on March 30 and originally scheduled to last for 14 days, is likely to become the vehicle for just that.
People Power���s electoral strategy has always relied heavily on both the visibility of its candidate and the freedom of movement of his supporters���not to mention overwhelming voter turnout. Without this, the campaign can have little hope in receiving a large enough share of January���s vote total to challenge Museveni���s legitimacy, let alone his leadership. The government has taken a particularly strong and proactive, perhaps even outsized stance on combating the spread of COVID-19. Rational minds can certainly imagine the state of emergency continuing well beyond its immediate usefulness, and once a ���new normal��� is established, vis a vis the curtailing of certain civil liberties, it is all the more difficult to revert to the ���old normal.��� In other words, Museveni���s shutdown, and the severe punishment with which it is already being enforced, may very well extend up to and past the upcoming presidential election. Indeed, as of April 14, the lockdown had already been extended for an additional three weeks.
No one knows yet exactly to what extent Uganda and the broader continent will be affected���a youthful population and warm climate may be advantageous���but with the ubiquitous lack of testing, the true spread may never be fully determined. And though it would be a somewhat quixotic confession for a developing country, one could imagine a politically opportunistic Museveni government claiming a higher rate of infection than officially reported. The coronavirus is the perfect pretext by which to drastically shrink People Power���s political space (in a very physical sense), doing so without the threat of any serious push-back from the international community.
Certain autocratic regimes have already seized on the opportunity presented by the outbreak to expand their power. Even in societies typically thought to be free of authoritarianism, the coronavirus pandemic has altered the public���s perception of what is and is not acceptable in order to ���flatten the curve.��� In other words, the temporal and political ruptures initiated by the crisis and its economic afterbirth have been accompanied by another: a psychological rupture in our individual and collective psyches. COVID-19, as a crisis, has produced in all of us the acute awareness of the necessity for survival, and with that our wholesale acquiescence to survival���s demands. Museveni and his regime will not only be able to argue that the continued repression of civil society is for the sake of public safety, but rather than being criticized and pressured they will be applauded for their responsibility and competence by an international community that is largely enacting similar policies. This is, unfortunately, the power of a crisis in the form of an infectious disease.
This is not to say, of course, that the political project of Bobi Wine and People Power is dead on arrival. Rather, it is to suggest that within the rupture that is the coronavirus pandemic, old realities have died and new possibilities are being born. Who is to say just how long Museveni���s increased authoritarian privileges will last? We cannot know from where we now sit. Though Wine���s cohort has long expressed that other forms of political mobilization, like mass protests, may be required to unseat Museveni, the regime���s defense against, i.e. dispersal of, such activities no longer requires the overturned POMA law. That is because public gatherings are in direct conflict with the demands of survival. Now more than ever, it is time for the opposition to assess its possibilities.
With the political moment in constant flux, much more is required in the way of conscientization. The class dynamics displayed by the initial spread of the virus, as well as the lack of access to and availability of medical treatment, food, finances, and overall comfort during quarantine, may produce new forms of political consciousness. Maybe, by virtue of its own incompetence, the regime will illustrate country’s inequality in stark relief. Or perhaps Wine and his movement���s treatment of common people, which we���ve witnessed in their response, will be enough to show Ugandans that there is an altogether different way to wield power. If and when change will come is anyone���s guess.
Sean Jacobs's Blog
- Sean Jacobs's profile
- 4 followers
