Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 183
April 12, 2020
Praying through the pandemic
Canaanland, outside Lagos, Nigeria. Image credit Seamus Murphy/VII Photo.
On February 28, as COVID-19��spread across the globe, Enoch Adejare Adeboye, General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), posted a��short video��online to his millions-strong following across Nigeria. ���I want to assure you,��� he��announced��to the camera in his distinctively calm and cavalier manner, ���that there is no virus that is going to come near you at all.��I believe that this is a time for God to show you clearly that there is a different between those who serve him wholeheartedly, and those who do not.���
At the time of this broadcast, the pandemic appeared to most Nigerians like a distant phenomenon. In late February,��few cases had been recorded and health officials, though braced��for a sudden outbreak, were confident in their ability to contain it. Just over a month later, things look less certain. As of early April, cases were appearing across several states (including Lagos, Osun, Oyo and Kaduna), and numerous government ministers were��self-isolating. Despite this surge, many��remain confident��in the government���s ability to contain the situation given their handling of the 2014 Ebola outbreak.��Others have speculated��that Nigeria���s youthful population may lead to herd immunity that stems the spread.
Alongside such optimism, however, is a growing realization that decades of underinvestment, privatization and political short-termism has left both the healthcare system and the economy��poorly-equipped��to cope with such a far-reaching crisis. A conflict over limited resources���with��the rich hoarding supplies and pharmacy stocks dwindling���has laid bare stark economic inequalities in cities like Lagos and Abuja.
There is also growing concern that a largely privatized and chronically underfunded health service will quickly buckle. Others have questioned whether lockdowns are sustainable��in cities where many livelihoods depend on mobility, and where large sections of the population live in close proximity, often with poor sanitation. A deep economic shock also��seems inevitable, given the size of Nigeria’s informal economy as well as its continued dependence on rapidly-devaluing��oil exports.
As COVID-19 has gripped Nigeria, it has shaken Adeboye���s congregations���emptying church services usually attended by thousands. But the virus has also transformed worship in Nigeria. For RCCG and most other churches, daily sermons have moved online, with communal worship now taking place in private isolation, mediated by bibles and digitalized lists of prayers. Hours-long services are now live-streamed, motivational psalms tweeted, and financial contributions payable digitally. But while the RCCG has adhered to a ban on large gatherings, other Pentecostal pastors have resisted social��distancing measures,��in one case��arguing that given the importance of worship in Nigeria, shutting churches would be equivalent to shutting hospitals. Though the RCCG were quick to comply with social distancing measures, the church has demonstrated concern about the extent of government provision for communities affected by COVID-19.
State support for citizens affected by coronavirus has been slow to materialize. Moreover, such efforts are often distrusted by citizens when they do arrive. The RCCG,��conscious of this distance between state and citizen,��has extended their corporate social responsibility program��(retitled as��Christian Social Responsibility) to distribute food packages to neighborhoods and supply PPE and ventilators to hospitals.��Alongside these small-scale efforts intended to fill the gaps left by a disjointed and dysfunctional public health system, the church has continued its wider campaign of positioning itself as the chief provider of social security and dependable leadership in Nigeria. Despite moving worship online, the RCCG has therefore been able to restate its��profound social and political reach��within Africa���s biggest democracy because of the crisis���rather than in spite of it.
As the pandemic has advanced and the situation evolved, the church���s central message has remained the same. In line with his early pronouncements, Adeboye has declared the pandemic part of God���s plan; a test of faith in which the power of prayer will shelter true believers from the virus. Portrayed as part of a divine unfolding rather than an unforeseen tragedy, Adeboye has been able to frame the pandemic as a divine wake-up call. ���God��� he��proclaimed��in late March, ���is using coronavirus to show the world that he is still in control of the affairs of men.��� In fact, he subsequently announced, God had warned him about the coming deadly plague��some months ago, though he had resisted telling followers about it for fear of interrogation by state authorities.
For Adeboye, the pandemic is more than just a virus; it’s a divinely sanctioned opportunity to test one’s faith.��The virus, he recently said, is a ���public holiday declared from heaven.��� Good Christians should therefore take the opportunity to fast diligently, donate to the church abundantly, and pray as hard as possible for salvation. ���Your testimony,��� Adeboye told followers on March 30, 2020 will be that ���a thousand have fallen by my left and ten thousand by my right, but none has come near me.���
In professing the power of prayer to combat complex social problems, the RCCG, like many other Pentecostal churches, emphasizes individual responsibility. In placing such strong emphasis on prayer and personal discipline rather than on state deficiency or social inequality, Pentecostal churches depoliticize the COVID-19 crisis and distract from enduring socio-political realities. Putting prayer before politics, Pentecostal leaders continue to divert attention from the structural problems that make crises such as this one so potentially destructive. By talking past the continuing realities of wealth disparity, inadequate public healthcare, global inequality and the absence of a welfare state, and instead prioritizing immediate, localized, and surface-level solutions, Pentecostalism effectively directs the negative outcomes of such crises towards society���s most vulnerable���away from those that can afford to shelter away from its biological and economic effects. Although a focus on prayer is not exclusive to Pentecostals, many such churches mark themselves by their prioritization of prayer as the most effective tool for achieving radical change.
While individual actions, taken collectively, can cause a spiritual revolution that may then have political outcomes���for Pentacostals, it is never the other way around. The Pentecostal version of a political��revolution is an interiorized neoliberal one, prioritizing the agency of the individual rather than the political power of the collective. And as COVID-19 advances, Pentecostal churches continue to encourage self-isolation and prayer as the best inoculation against this disease. As Adeboye told online worshippers during a Sunday service in early April, ���One more time, I���m telling you my children, relax, all is going to be well. What you should do is praise God.���
April 11, 2020
Reading List: Dionne Searcey
Selling fish in Yoff, Senegal. Image credit Sandro Bozzolo via
Bioversity International Flickr CC.
In my new book, In Pursuit of Disobedient Women, I wrote about my experiences moving my family from the US to Senegal to become the West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, a position that put me in charge of coverage of more than two dozen countries. The book chronicles my new family dynamic as I became the main breadwinner and the extraordinary lives and struggles of women I encountered who were navigating patriarchal societies where men ruled nearly every aspect of life. My book also discusses my efforts to get an American audience subsumed by the age of Trump and inspired by a feminist revival to pay attention to incredible women, including conscripted teen-girl suicide bombers who bravely defied terrorists, and young women in small villages shaking up social norms by getting out of bad marriages because they wanted to be loved.
To help me get to know my new area of coverage as I moved from New York City to Dakar, I started by reading the criticism of reporters from the West who parachute into African countries and fumble when they fall into a clich��d line of reporting. The best of those critiques is the essay in Granta, ���How to Write About Africa��� by Binyavanga Wainaina. Many readers of this blog know the essay well. But it���s worth a re-read. Over the course of my nearly four years on the beat, I returned to this piece many times as a gut check to make sure I wasn���t falling into using stereotypes in not just the way I went about my writing and reporting, but also in the stories I chose to pursue.
A young student picnicking with his girlfriend in the zoo in Maiduguri, Nigeria, led me to the poet, novelist, and surgeon Lenrie Peters, who was born in the Gambia and later moved to Sierra Leone. I was trying to put together a story on dating relationships in Maiduguri, where the Boko Haram movement began, so that led me to a few very intimate discussions with strangers. I asked this particular couple how they met, and the young man, Kefas, explained that he had tried to court the woman, Ruth, for the better part of a year at the University of Maiduguri, but she couldn���t make up her mind whether she liked him. Kefas had recited one of Mr. Peters���s poems, ���The Fence,��� to Ruth to explain the torture his heart was going through, being kept on the fence while he waited for her to decide whether she loved him. It won her over. The poem, along with other great work, can be found in A Selection of African Poetry, from K.E. Senanu and T. Longman.
One of my favorite stories I wrote involved camping out with Fulani pastoralists in Gombe State in Nigeria. I had seen numerous articles in the Nigerian media that seemed biased against the herders, and I wanted to hear their point of view about an explosion of violence between nomadic cattlemen and farmers as they fought over land���a manifestation of massively shifting global forces (climate change, a growing population, a rise in extremism and over-development)���even as their lifestyle remained largely the same as it has been for centuries. Author Anna Badkhen wrote about nomadic herders in her book, Walking with Abel, but my favorite piece of her writing is an essay published last year in The New York Review of Books, ������Almost All of Us Here Are Widows���: Searching for Words in Mali,��� which so poignantly captures the senselessness of violence in these battles and the lives upended for those who survive.
Late in my stint in West Africa I started reading the Senegalese novelist, screenwriter, and journalist Boubacar Boris Diop. I was embarrassed I hadn���t read him sooner. His writing on the Rwanda genocide, Murambi, The Book of Bones, first published in France in 2000, blends the story of victims with that of one persecutor. But my favorite is his book of essays, Africa Beyond the Mirror, with topics that criticize how Africa is portrayed in the media and, among other things, praise for Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese historian of precolonial culture in Africa. My favorite is a heart-breaking and brutally honest chapter that is a letter from Mr. Diop to a friend discussing the tragic shipwreck of the Joola in Senegal in 1992 when more than 1,800 people were killed. Mr. Diop is now engaged in a critical effort to get African authors to write in their own languages instead of colonial languages.
April 10, 2020
The need for a people-driven response to the coronavirus pandemic
Image via The Kremlin.
This is the first post in a new partnership between the Kenyan website The Elephant and Africa Is a Country. We will be republishing one post from their site every week. Posts are curated by Contributing Editor Wangui Kimari.
The scenes of police viciously assaulting citizens while enforcing a nighttime curfew, as well the death by suicide of a South African woman after being forced into a deplorable government quarantine facility, have exposed the brutal face of Kenya���s coercive response to the coronavirus pandemic. While many have condemned the incidents, some have also felt that coercion is necessary given the extreme threat posed by the virus, the need for urgent action and the failure of people to comply with the government���s directives. There is no time to debate the response, goes the argument. There is only time to act to save lives.
Yet there is a grave flaw at the heart of this argument. These very factors are what make it necessary that there is more, not less, public involvement. The threat is to the whole of society, and the response needs to involve the whole of society. Trying to move fast without having a cooperative public in tow is a recipe for failure, as the Kenyan government is learning. And the way to get a cooperative public as well as mobilize society is to engage with the people, not just order them about.
���Epidemics are tests of social and political systems,��� writes the Zimbabwean academic and Associate Professor of African Politics at the University of Oxford, Simukai Chigudu, in a fascinating article for Africa Is A Country. Citing his book, The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe, which looked into the roots of the 2008 cholera outbreak in his country, he notes that it is the ���political, economic and social processes that ��� shape the trajectory of [an] epidemic,��� not just the biological properties of the virus or bacteria involved.
This is not to say that the actions of governments are not important. The trajectory and the evolution of the pandemic so far have been largely dictated by the actions of states. The thousands of lives coronavirus has so far claimed are not evenly distributed globally, but rather concentrated in countries that for a variety of reasons either didn���t take the pandemic seriously or were slow to react to it. In a very real sense, it is not just the virus that is killing people; people are also dying from state inaction, incompetence and malfeasance.
The legacy of colonialism
Similarly, as the virus menaces Africa, it has been the actions of African governments���past and present���that have so far determined how the pandemic is unfolding on the continent. When fighting the disease, a crucial constraint for many African societies is the near universal failure to address the legacy of colonialism. In fact, as Prof Chigudu explains in relation to 21st century Zimbabwe, ���the long-term factors that led to the cholera outbreak can be traced as far back as the late 19th century when Salisbury [today known as Harare] was founded as the administrative and political capital of Southern Rhodesia [the predecessor of what is now Zimbabwe].”
He goes on to write that rather than undoing the discriminatory nature of provision of public facilities, ���colonial era by-laws, plans, and statutes largely remained in place, indicating the apparent tension between overturning the racial and socio-economic segregation of Rhodesian city planning and maintaining an inherited sense of modernity and orderliness in urban space.���
This experience will be familiar to many across the continent where, in the words of one of Kenya���s politicians speaking in Parliament in 1966, ���Today we have a black man���s government, and the black man���s government administers exactly the same regulations, rigorously, as the colonial administration used to do.���
The persistence of colonial states and their twin logics of authoritarian exploitation and classist exclusion means that African governments begin with a deficit of public trust, as well as diminished capacity to implement policies. Just three years ago, Kenya was jailing doctors��� representatives for going on strike to demand a pay rise and improvements to services in public hospitals.
Corruption���another gift of colonialism���has focused attention on vanity projects that provide opportunities for looting, rather than on investments in basic health services. The result is high-end, expensive machines lying idle in hospitals that lack even basic amenities. The entire country, for example, only has around 400 isolation beds, and 155 intensive care unit beds for a population of over 48 million people.
The authoritarian and exclusionist streaks are also evident in the manner in which African governments are currently responding. In Kenya, rather than implementing a holistic approach that would mobilize all communities and civil society, the government has opted for a China-style top-down, dictatorial approach, one that decades of hollowing out of the state is now difficult to impose. Prominent activist Jerotich Seii has noted the ������elite gaze��� that deploys a language of enforcement.��� David Ndii, one of the country���s top economists and public intellectuals, has similarly decried the consequences of what he describes as a ���boneheaded securocratic approach to a complex emergency.���
A holistic approach
Yet this need not be the case. Kenya has a long history of indigenous not���for���profit organizations, self-help societies and community-based organizations that it could leverage to win consent and mobilize society. In fact, in many communities, NGOs have become surrogates for the government, offering services that the state was either unable or unwilling to provide. They have even managed to penetrate into policy and decision-making levels.
As Professor Jennifer Brass noted in her PhD thesis a decade ago, ���Contrary to both normative arguments that government should ���steer��� the ship of state (make policy) while private actors ���row��� (implement policy), and the belief that government is eroding or becoming irrelevant to the governance process, this dissertation shows that NGOs are now joining public actors and agencies at many levels in decision and policy making regarding service provision.���
Sadly, however, there is little evidence that the Kenyan government is doing much to incorporate the expertise and experience of nonprofits and other civil society actors into its planning for COVID-19. When President Uhuru Kenyatta established the 21-member National Emergency Response Committee on Coronavirus at the end of February, he did not reserve a single seat for civil society. In this, the President went against his own National Contingency Plan which recommended the establishment of a National Public Health Emergency Steering Committee to ���provide policy, strategic directions��� which would include heads of ���responding NGOs.���
Perhaps the Kenya government���s reluctance to engage with civil society organizations should not come as a surprise. After all, this is a government that for the best part of the last decade has made the demonization of civil society (which its mouthpieces on social media happily branded ���evil society���) a cornerstone of its propaganda efforts. Still, it is clear that the state alone cannot address this crisis.
Non-governmental actors, including professional associations, churches and volunteer, community and civil society organizations, will need to be involved in the ���whole-of-society approach��� that the World Health Organisation (WHO) says is required to successfully face the threat posed by COVID-19. And not just as ���rowers.��� Across the continent, governments will need to urgently recognize that involving others in the formulation, as well as in the implementation, of policy need not be perceived as a threat to their own legitimacy. As Prof Brass writes, ���Governance is not the removal of government, but the addition and acceptance of other actors, including NGOs, in the steering process.���
How effective are lockdowns?
The absence of non-governmental actors at the decision-making table may also be manifesting in the choices that African countries are making. For example, many have opted to go the way of China and other (though by no means all) European countries by imposing ���lockdowns������ shuttering factories, businesses and markets; banning mass events from church services to political rallies; and forcing people to stay at home or imposing stringent restrictions on their movement. These lockdowns are an attempt to curtail the rate of spread of the disease and ensure that already fragile health systems are not overwhelmed. Beginning with Rwanda, the lockdowns have swept the continent, affecting economies large and small, from Nigeria to Uganda. In addition, by the end of March, nearly all countries had some form of travel restrictions, with more than half imposing full border closures.
However, in an article for The Conversation, Professor Alex Broadbent and Professor Benjamin Smart argue that a one-size-fits-all approach may have lethal consequences for Africa. They note that the ���the major components of the recommended public health measures���social distancing and hygiene���are extremely difficult to implement effectively in much of Africa��� and that the net effect of lockdowns ���may thus be to prevent people from working, without actually achieving the distancing that would slow the spread of the virus.��� They also question the value of ���flattening the curve��� in a scenario where at the best of times public healthcare is inaccessible to a huge proportion of the population.
Similarly, in an interview with Africa Report, John Nkengasong, the director of the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, which is part of the African Union, also pointed out that lockdowns are not only difficult to sustain but would also ���lead to other consequences, such as shortages of food, medicine and other basic supplies.��� He also said that the shutdown of air travel and closing of borders across the continent was making it more difficult to coordinate the distribution of desperately needed medical supplies and equipment. Making much the same point on the Kenyan news program Punchline, Dr. Mary Stephens of WHO said that blanket travel bans and border closures would prevent African countries from accessing external medical experts needed to plug gaps in their health systems.
The resort to force by governments across the continent to counter the resistance of their populations to such measures speaks to the lack of a social consensus for the necessity of such measures. It is the poor, for the most part, who will bear the pain of the lockdowns, especially the many working in the informal sector who cannot afford to stay at home for a day, let alone for weeks. Yet they are almost completely excluded from the decision-making table.
If communities were allowed to have a say, perhaps they would point out that there are other options and examples that African countries could look to. In the Far East, for example, countries and cities like Japan, South Korea as well as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, while not yet out of the woods, have managed to tackle the pandemic within their borders while largely avoiding crippling lockdowns.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen famously declared that ���no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy���. He noted that democratic governments, ���facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers,��� would be compelled to take decisions to avert disaster.
Democracy may not be such a sure shield against epidemics, but it is clear that, at least on the African continent, its absence, and the prevalence of governments used to wielding clubs and guns against their citizens rather than listening to them, may be turning a looming disaster into a catastrophe.
The devil coronavirus
Image credit Leo D'lion via Flickr CC.
When my former employer, The Citizen newspaper, issued its now-infamous public��notice, informing its honorable stakeholders that I was no longer part of the company, many in Tanzania and even beyond, associated it with a Twitter post I had recently published. In it, I criticized President John Magufuli, and what the Head of State thought was a rational response to counter the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
In late March, while attending a service in a church in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania���s commercial capital, Magufuli called the coronavirus pandemic ���a diabolical disease.��� He then proclaimed that he cannot order the closure of churches and mosques because nowhere can the devil, who���s responsible for the pandemic, be dealt with as vigorously and successfully as in these houses. Ironically, the statement was made against the backdrop of a call for people to avoid unnecessary gatherings and stay home. (Following an online backlash and on the very same day, the President was wise enough to give an official address to the nation where, although he did not retract his earlier statement, he warned the people of the seriousness of the pandemic and the importance of taking all necessary precautions to prevent its spread.)
In Tanzania, it is almost a taboo to criticize the president. Here, a president is perceived as a father whose statements and actions, no matter how dangerous they are to the people, cannot be called out���they have to be taken as a rule. This is why when I said in that tweet that if any Tanzanian dies of COVID-19, President Magufuli will be held responsible. I was urging him to show some leadership, especially now that the country was bracing for the worst. I was reminding the devout Catholic that people elected a president and not a pastor. Many people assumed that the tweet was responsible for my dismissal from my former employer. (It was not as I explained here in detail.)
In a WhatsApp group, of which I am a member, that tweet���not the President���s mishandling of the pandemic���stirred fierce debate, with some, with good intentions of course, urging me to be careful. To ���be careful��� is the euphemism for watching out. This short anecdote, if you haven���t noticed so far, speaks volumes of the current political environment that many Tanzanians find themselves in, and is the context within which the battle against the spread of the coronavirus is being waged.
With all fairness, Tanzania is not alone in the issue of having a slow national response, or in being unequipped to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Cases from across the African continent and the world at large have shown, vividly, how the decades of neoliberal assault on countries��� socioeconomic systems have left them dangerously unprepared to deal with any crisis. What makes the Tanzanian case unique, I think, and what compounds the already existing problems within our society���the broken public health system, massive unemployment and underemployment, the almost non-existence of public policy to help the poor���is the government���s resolve to keep the general population in the cold and impregnable dark in regards to which strategy it will employ to manage an increase in COVID-19 cases.
Years of relentless war against transparency in governmental affairs, involving the suppression of such essential institutions as the free press, civil society, and the political opposition, have left a strange and numbing contemporary reality in their wake. Since coming into office in late 2015, the Magufuli administration has been treating these institutions as nuisances, making the government the sole source of information with almost nobody left to challenge its messaging.
Unlike neighboring Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, Tanzania is not on lockdown, at least at the time of publication. The country currently has a total of 32 confirmed cases of COVID-19, three deaths and five recoveries. What has been missing from announcements of government data around COVID-19, however, is the number of people who have been tested. The absence of mass testing, a practice recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) to make efforts to curb the spread of the virus, had a former��cabinet minister along with several health professionals, like this one��here, worried.
While it is true that Tanzania as a whole is not on lockdown, this does not mean that business is going on as usual. Some smart businesses and organizations, which know the seriousness of the pandemic, did not wait for the government to call for a lockdown. Dozens of businesses and organizations have closed down already, directing their staff to work from home, and many more are expected to follow suit. In this business of staying home, the ones who will be hit hardest are the ones who make a living by staying outside: boda boda (motorcycle) riders, food vendors, and millions of others in unemployment and underemployment.
Take the sector to which I belong, the media, as an example. Most people who work in the media are underemployed, many of them working without even contracts. This is the rule in Tanzania, not the exception. Many reporters “employed” by the country���s media companies are paid per story. Already because many cannot survive by this payment system, most of them rely on “brown envelopes” given to them at press conferences. Working from home will deprive many exploited journalists of this income, a source that has until now enabled them to make a living.
With everything else going on normally���bills to clear, rent to pay, etc���and no source of income, life for the of majority working-class families in Tanzania, especially in urban areas, is going to quickly resemble a hell on Earth. And currently, there is absolutely no pressure on authorities to provide relief packages to the people or even a plan to do so if the worst happens. The last time the Dar es Salaam regional commissioner, Paul Makonda, begged landlords to slash rent for tenants by 50 per cent, there was no discussion on its feasibility or how it could be rolled out.
Against this terrifying background, it surprises no one that the Tanzanian authorities have chosen to concentrate their efforts on its war of ���misinformation.��� They have threatened jail terms and huge fines for people suspected of spreading ���fake news,��� and have not shown readiness in thinking about the impact the pandemic will have on people���s lives. They have not shown how they can save the country from a public health disaster. Many in Tanzania think that the pandemic has exposed the government���s incompetence in a manner that nothing else could, and where few expect the authorities to save them from falling in the abyss, perhaps, we should rest our hope on the people themselves. As the Kenyan writer and activist Nanjala Nyabola correctly points out: ���public health is as much about people as it is about facilities, and I believe in African people, if not African governments.���
The world has lost a giant of development economics
Thandika Mkandawire. Image credit UNICEF.
With the passing of Thandika Mkandawire on March 27, 2020 the world has lost a giant of development, a towering economist, a brilliant thinker, and a committed fighter for social justice.
Born in 1940, Thandika first experienced the slap of injustice in early childhood. One night, trucks came with soldiers and removed Thandika���s family from their farm in Malawi. They resettled in a town in the Copperbelt of Zambia. There, he attended school (for blacks only) and was protected by his family from the brutal inequalities of the time, until the day he and a friend walked into an opulent white residential area to sell vegetables, and white children insulted and laughed at them.
As a young man, Thandika began writing for newspapers, but in 1965, he was made ���persona non grata��� in his country, the newly independent Malawi, then governed by pro-apartheid dictator, Kamuzu Banda. He managed to study in the US (at Ohio State University), South Africa (Rhodes University) and Sweden (Stockholm University), where he eventually settled as a political refugee���living proof that refugee policies work.
Soon Thandika excelled as a brilliant researcher. He realized that he did not have to spend his years in exile out of Africa, waiting for Malawi’s liberation (he would only return in 1994 after 30 years in exile). In 1982 he moved to Harare, working at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies, and in 1986 to Senegal, where he became Director of the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).
From 1998 to 2009, he was Director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva, and later Professor at the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm and Chair of African Development at the London School of Economics (LSE). It was in Geneva that I first met Thandika who, unlike many academics and UN bureaucrats, was passionate and full of life. His writings are so powerful because he had experienced the problems of development and social injustice first-hand.
His work on “Targeting and Universalism in Poverty Reduction” (2005) was an eye opener���and remains relevant today. While developing countries were trying to build their universal welfare systems after independence, the 1980s debt crisis and adjustment period interrupted the process and made governments abandon universalism for less costly, minimal, targeted safety nets for the poor, accompanied by private services for the wealthy. The inequitable US model was imported into developing nations. At a time when the world was shifting ideologically towards neoliberalism, blind to its shocking inequalities, Thandika bravely stood up for social policies and the developmental state, as shown in his excellent work on Social Policy in a Development Context (2004).
Thandika had an inquisitive, sharp mind, committed to the difficult truths, as evidenced in his works such as ���Disempowering New Democracies��� (2006), ���Maladjusted African Economies and Globalisation��� (2004), and ���The Spread of Economic Doctrines and Policymaking in Postcolonial Africa��� (2014), among many others. I should also mention his very important book, African Intellectuals, Political Culture and Development (2002, 2005).
Thandika Mkandawire was a humble human being. He was truly a kind soul, modest, warm, laughing about everything, and generous with his time to people. He could move from serious analysis to a hilarious observation in a second, and he always had human stories to share. There has been a cascade of sad messages on social media since his passing; he was loved by so many people.
The last time we met, he was tired (I did not know he was ill), but after a couple of drinks he explained with the same passion as always his research on African industrialization: ���Nobody realizes that all the pre-conditions are there!��� I asked his advice about a few things at the UN and we ended laughing about bureaucrats, their ridiculous ideas, and the way things are���the same as always. ���Don���t compromise��� he told me, ���you start compromising on a small thing and soon you are one of them ������ This was Thandika���he was a mentor and an inspiration to many of us.
The world has indeed lost a giant, an exceptional economist committed to social justice. He was an intellectual hero, fighting against the current, one of the best ever Directors at the United Nations. Few on this planet have made such gigantic steps���from a little village in Malawi to distinguished professor at some of the world���s top universities. What would the ignorant white children who laughed at Thandika think now, if they knew?
Heartfelt condolences to his wife Kaarina, his family and friends. He will be sorely missed. But his thoughts and memories stay with us. Hasta siempre, Thandika.
April 9, 2020
Death���s new rules
Image credit Lars Ploughman via Flickr CC.
Whenever I see news stories of all the people who continue to live their lives as though nothing in America has changed, I find that I can���t perceive them exactly as they are in that moment. Faces sunburnt from the beaches they found suddenly cheap tickets to; hugging their roommates and friends as they teeter down the street; unsteady on their feet after several hours at a crowded bar. Instead I see funerals. Not necessarily theirs, but funerals nonetheless���the red in their cheeks no longer sunburn, but flushed from emotion in the post-ceremony receiving line; their hugs not of happiness but of sympathy; their unsteadiness not from a steady stream of margaritas but from the imminent possibility of collapsing beside the casket. Try as I might to have compassion for what drives people to deny the truth of the reality around them, I haven’t been able to find it.
Yet how would they know what disaster is like, unless they have lived it? My mother tells me that when our family first returned to our home country of Malawi after living in the US and then Canada for nearly 13 years, my siblings and I���all of us born and raised in North America until 1994���would dependably ask, whenever she left for funerals, how old the person was who had died. In our minds, she explained, only old people died, and infrequently so, because that���s what we had known in our American and Canadian childhoods���the deaths of our friends��� grandparents, great-aunts, church elders, and senior citizen neighbors. In this new life we were in, though, death seemed to happen all the time, and to anyone���a young aunt, a baby cousin, a middle-aged employee at my father���s office. Whether from AIDS, cancer, or just the woeful inadequacies of a barren post-authoritarian healthcare system, death in Malawi felt ubiquitous and indiscriminate. My mother says that one day as she was leaving for a funeral about a year after we���d returned to Malawi, she noticed we hadn���t asked the age of the person who had died; that was when she knew we finally understood where we were. The rules of death, for us, had changed.
Only contextual experience can sow the knowledge of the rules of how people die into one���s spirit; only novel contextual experience can change one���s internal understanding of those rules. Everything before that point is speculation, however well-informed. Even for those of us who have heeded the warnings of multiple doctors-cum-social-activists and boarded ourselves into our homes���I am currently writing from a small one-bedroom apartment in West Philadelphia���the trepidation we feel is not so much from the deaths that are already here, but from what we know is coming. What we fear from behind our sealed windows and obsessively refreshed social media timelines is not the lived reality we know, but the specter of a future that we don���t. But it is hard to maintain the fear of an immaterial thing indefinitely, and I find sometimes that even for me���a person from a country where funerals are so normalized that a ���culture of death,��� as my father used to call it, has irrevocably shaped our language and ways of life���the inevitable arrival of a new reality can start to feel almost tiresomely unreal.
My father hated the idea of his children at funerals, and so he forbade our attendance at them. He felt they were too traumatic; the fact that the person had died, he believed, was plenty disruptive enough. I only went to my first funeral in Malawi in 2012, the year I turned 28. To the extent that I use the phrase ���we���ve already been to too many funerals,��� then, is my imagining of myself with my family at those funerals rather than actually being there, putting together the picture of what happened from the stories my parents and cousins tell me afterward: a form of historical speculation. Until recently all the losses I had been informed of, but not seen in their finalized forms, had maintained a certain unreality about them���as though it had just been a very long time since I had last seen my loved ones. If I didn���t see them buried, they weren���t really gone.
But that, of course, is a fallacy, wrought of the same illogic that drives so many people to continue with their lives as though nothing has changed except that they can���t go out for dinner anymore. For even though I didn���t attend many funerals, the weight of those losses is nonetheless real. The holes in our family fabric are real, the absences at family weddings and holiday celebrations so glaring that the presence of the departed feels almost perceptible. And because of the weight of what I have lost, I intuitively feel the cost of my actions in my still-unfolding American future; knowing this I can, and do, refuse to be a factor in the adding of this kind of a weight to someone else���s life.
As I watched my father���s own casket be lowered into the ground behind his parents��� home in Dedza, Malawi, a rainy day two Novembers ago, I realized he had been right all those years before about the trauma of that moment. That it was one thing to know in your heart that someone was dead, but another thing entirely to watch them disappear into the dust while a choir sang them home. Though I mostly want for the people still living their normal lives to know the cost of that choice, a part of me envies their levity, is glad for the absence of such dark gravity in their lives. The day will soon enough arrive when the twin realities of hospital capacity and funeral home availability will change that. For death���s new rules in these American lives, the indiscriminate rules of an incurable virus, will irrevocably and brutally change us all.
A jaula de a��o do Presidente Jo��o Louren��o
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President Jo��o Louren��o. Image via Eu sou Joa��o Lourenc��o Flickr CC.
For English click here.
O t��tulo desse texto ���jaula de a��o��� refere-se ao ���pesadelo��� do pensador alem��o Max Weber no que �� racionalidade burocr��tica diz respeito. Weber na sua incessante busca sobre os marcos da burocracia nas sociedades modernas viu-se enjaulado nos seus prop��sitos anal��ticos face �� realidade e ao percurso dessas sociedades. Eu fa��o uso dessa met��fora da ���clausura weberiana��� para visualizar aquilo que o cen��rio pol��tico angolano nos tem dado a ver. Eu visualizo a mesma clausura propiciada pelo sistema pol��tico no que atua����o do combate �� corrup����o levada a cabo pelo presidente angolano diz respeito.
O combate �� corrup����o principalmente no interior do partido que governa Angola amea��a abrir uma fissura pol��tica ou, no m��ximo, a implos��o do MPLA. Louren��o seguramente ter�� de escolher entre manter-se aliado �� sociedade abrindo-se ao debate democr��tico e plural, libertando o Estado ou a manter-se enjaulado no interior do seu pr��prio partido, protegendo os novos grupos econ��micos �� sua volta e afastando os antigos grupos dominantes colaboradores diretos de Dos Santos.
O descaso da pol��tica e desgaste de Jos�� Eduardo dos Santos abriram as portas para a sucess��o na presid��ncia da rep��blica e no interior do MPLA. Em 2016, Dos Santos, sob o cerco apertado devido �� press��o social fez a promessa de abandonar a vida pol��tica ativa, o que originou que no interior do seu partido escolhesse ele pr��prio o sucessor. Previa afastar-se da presid��ncia da rep��blica, mas mantendo-se na presid��ncia do MPLA, controlando o poder pol��tico a partir dos corredores da sede do partido e dos monop��lios econ��micos. Enganou-se nas apar��ncias.
Em 2017, nas v��speras das elei����es gerais, Jo��o Louren��o assumiu-se como o escolhido de Dos Santos e de forma a capturar aten����o dos eleitores angolanos desencantados com o seu partido prometeu combate cerrado �� corrup����o e �� impunidade no pa��s, principalmente no interior do seu partido. Pois, para as condi����es atuais de Angola, o seu partido foi a principal porta de entrada a partir do qual alguns indiv��duos obtiveram facilidades e privil��gios durante o per��odo que desempenharam fun����es de destaque na estrutura do Estado. O Estado, no que lhe concerne, foi o meio por excel��ncia do qual pouqu��ssimos se tornaram a classe pol��tica dominante que enriqueceu economicamente associados ao desejo de Dos Santos de criar, em tempo record, uma burguesia nacional que seria o motor da prosperidade econ��mica e social dos angolanos.
A partir do momento em que aten����o de Louren��o se voltava para o interior do seu pr��prio partido, aquilo que parecia uma concerta����o de camaradas, transformou-se numa luta interna para o controlo quer da m��quina do Estado, com a presid��ncia da Rep��blica, quer do MPLA, partido que suporta o governo. Desde esta ocasi��o que pelo menos dois grupos se t��m confrontado no campo pol��tico e econ��mico. Louren��o encabe��a um desses grupos, ao passo que o seu antecessor e colaboradores diretos (por exemplo, os filhos e os generais, sobre quem j�� escrevemos) encabe��am o outro grupo.
Ora, a jaula de a��o de Jo��o Louren��o �� precisamente o facto de, por um lado, pretender combater �� corrup����o e �� impunidade no interior do seu pr��prio partido, em que poucos se tornaram ricos e poderosos �� custa do er��rio p��blico e com o apoio de empresas, multinacionais, consultoras estrangeiras, de bancos privados internos e externos, e, por outro, atrair investimento estrangeiro cuja a moeda de troca �� a depend��ncia de Angola desse capital, com garantias fort��ssimas da sua exporta����o para o exterior. Ocorre, por��m, que os n��veis de vida e as condi����es materiais da sua estrutura social fazem de Angola um pa��s fortemente dependente n��o s�� da exporta����o do petr��leo, mas tamb��m da importa����o de produtos diversos para o mercado interno. H��, por conseguinte, um n��vel elevado de depend��ncia externa da economia angolana.
Jo��o Louren��o encontra-se enjaulado numa heran��a maldita deixada por Dos Santos. Pretende, por isso, desfazer-se a todo o custo dessa jaula de a��o com uma pol��tica de aumento da austeridade com a b��n����o do Fundo Monet��rio Internacional e do Banco Mundial, que tem resultado na corros��o da moeda nacional face ao d��lar norte-americano e no desinvestimento p��blico na economia. Se, por um lado, com a m��o esquerda combate �� classe dominante que tinha em Isabel dos Santos o seu rosto mais vis��vel internacionalmente, por outro, com a m��o direita entrega de bandeja importantes investimentos p��blicos em sectores estrat��gicos para grupos com reputa����o no m��nimo duvidosa e a ele pr��ximos.
Passados tr��s anos desde que se tornou Presidente da Rep��blica, Jo��o Louren��o n��o tem conseguido dar respostas pol��ticas as graves car��ncias sociais, greves de trabalhadores, sal��rios miser��veis, empresas a dispensarem trabalhadores, desvaloriza����o da moeda, problemas nos sectores da educa����o, sa��de e assist��ncia social a popula����o mais vulner��veis. Em suma uma onda gigantesca de desinvestimento p��blico na economia que aplicado em sentido contr��rio ajudaria para retirar do sufoco milhares de angolanos. A pen��ria tem sido agravada sobretudo nos segmentos da popula����o mais carenciados, o n��mero de pessoas paup��rrimas tem aumentado no interior do pa��s, reeditando o fen��meno de pedintes nas ruas de Luanda, uma marca flagrante e escandalosa dos tempos da guerra civil dos anos 90 do s��culo passado.
A alternativa a essa jaula de a��o que se lhe apresenta ser�� olhar para a sociedade angolana sobretudo jovem e vibrante tendo como base um programa pol��tico realista e democr��tico���uma vis��o de pa��s���encaminhando-se para escolha de op����es pol��ticas aceit��veis e economicamente recomend��veis, dialogando com as for��as sociais dispon��veis de forma abertura, criando, por via disso, condi����es mais seguras para desfazer-se das muralhas pol��ticas que persistem nas estruturas do aparelho do Estado desde o judici��rio ao parlamento, onde se encontram personalidades com perfis e reputa����o no m��nimo duvidosos. Pela via da sociedade civil Louren��o encontra uma gera����o jovem, muitos dos quais n��o viveram a guerra civil, com vontade de mudan��a e altera����o das antigas estruturas pol��ticas e c��vicas que j�� nada significam para a sua vida e para o seu futuro pela forma como olham para o pa��s.
Movidos pelas reivindica����es sociais de melhoria das suas condi����es de vida, mas tamb��m pela autarquiza����o do pa��s, as (plataformas) juvenis que pululam por pelo menos tr��s munic��pios de Luanda ( Cacuaco, Cazenga e Viana) e de algumas capitais provinciais (Malanje, Benguela e Luena) constituem formas alternativas (Movimento Revolucion��rio, em Malanje, Benguela e a Associa����o C��vica Laulenu no Moxico) renovadas de pensar e agir politicamente fora dos palcos pol��ticos partid��rios tradicionais (FNLA, MPLA e UNITA), assim como das antigas associa����es c��vicas. O forjar de formas alternativas da a����o pol��tica via cidadania entorno da sociedade angolana encontra visibilidade em Cacuaco, com o ���projeto Agir���, no Cazenga, com o ���Cazenga em Ac��o��� e no ���Movimento Estudantil Propinas Not���, que estando voltadas para a reivindica����o de direitos sociais e pol��ticos marcam passos cruciais na esfera p��blica angolana.
Esta for��a juvenil aparentemente desarticulada que se mobiliza para pensar e agir como alternativas aos espa��os de participa����o pol��tica e c��vica estende-se tamb��m para outras regi��es de Angola. A mesma mobiliza����o social que assume forma vari��vel verifica-se em Malanje, contra a gest��o p��blica do governador da prov��ncia Norberto dos Santos; em Benguela, contra a gest��o do governador Rui Falc��o; e no Moxico, prov��ncia do leste, contra a gest��o p��blica do governador Gon��alves Muandumba.
Sucede que, em pelo menos quatro prov��ncias com Luanda inclu��da, ao n��vel municipal, esses jovens influenciados pelas din��micas do passado e do presente t��m pressionado Jo��o Louren��o que mant��m no seu elenco parte consider��vel dos gestores p��blicos do regime de Dos Santos. A quest��o ��: Louren��o percebe que esses jovens���irreverentes e sem interesses pol��ticos pessoais���podem ser os melhores aliados que ele tem no atual contexto pol��tico?
President Jo��o Louren��o���s iron cage
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President Jo��o Louren��o. Image via Eu sou Joa��o Lourenc��o Flickr CC.
Publicado originalmente em portugu��s aqui.
This post takes as its title the term ���iron cage��� that refers to the German thinker Max Weber���s nightmare in analyzing bureaucratic rationality. Weber, in his incessant search for how bureaucracy marked modern societies, found himself imprisoned in his own analytical propositions. I use this metaphor of ���a Weberian prison��� to describe the current Angolan political scene and suggest a way out. I see the same prison created by the current political system led by Angolan President Jo��o Louren��o in his attack on corruption.
The fight against corruption inside the MPLA threatens to open a political fissure or, at the extreme, to cause the ruling party to implode. Louren��o will have to choose between either aligning with society, opening plural and democratic debate, and freeing up the state or remaining imprisoned within his party, protecting the new economic powers around him, and distancing from the groups dominant under former president Jos�� Eduardo Dos Santos. This is precisely the iron cage within which Louren��o finds himself.
The political decadence and waste under Dos Santos (in power from 1979 to 2017) opened the doors for presidential succession in Angola and in the MPLA. In 2016, Dos Santos, under social pressure, promised to abandon active political life, creating the possibility for his party to choose a successor. At first he hoped to maintain his position as MPLA president, while stepping down from his position as state president in order to control political power from the halls of party headquarters and through economic monopolies. He was mistaken.
In 2017, on the eve of a general election, Louren��o became Dos Santos���s chosen successor and in an attempt to capture the attention of Angolan voters disenchanted with the party, the former promised a serious fight against corruption and impunity in the country and within the ruling party. We���ve written about this here, here, and here. In contemporary Angola, the MPLA has been the main port of entry for economic advantages and privileges. The state was the means through which a dominant political class enriched itself in the hopes of fulfilling Dos Santos��� expressed desire to create, in record time, a national bourgeoisie that could be the motor of Angolan economic and social prosperity.
From the moment that Louren��o���s attention turned to the party itself, what had been the connivance of comrades suddenly became an internal struggle over control of the state machinery, with the presidency of the republic, and over the MPLA party on which it was largely built. Since then, at least two groups have confronted one another in the political and economic spheres. Louren��o heads one of these groups while his predecessor and direct collaborators (namely, Dos Santos��� children and a set of military generals) constitute the other group.
Louren��o���s ���iron cage��� is, on the one hand, his intention to fight corruption and impunity within the MPLA in which a few became rich and powerful at the cost of the public treasury���with the help of companies, multinationals, foreign consultants and national and foreign banks���and, on the other, his need to attract foreign investment in exchange for Angolan dependence on that capital underwritten by strong guarantees of foreign export. Given the abject living conditions of the poor and the lacking social infrastructure, Angola is an economy with a high level of external dependency.
Jo��o Louren��o finds himself imprisoned within dos Santos���s legacy. He intends, therefore, to get himself out of this prison at any cost by implementing a policy of increasing austerity (with the blessing of the IMF and World Bank) that has resulted in the devaluation of the national currency (the Angolan kwanza) relative to the US dollar, and in economic privatization. If Louren��o hits the dominant class���whose most visible face internationally was Isabel dos Santos���with his left hand, he delivers with his right hand a suite of important public investments in strategic sectors to a group of political allies with dubious reputations.
In the three years since he became head of state, Louren��o, has not managed to offer political solutions for the grave social and economic conditions that most Angolans have to cope with: workers��� strikes, miserable salaries, businesses firing employees, the devaluation of the national currency, problems in education, health, and social assistance for the most vulnerable in the population. Jo��o Louren��o has overseen a giant wave of public disinvestment in the economy. The situation is worst for the poorest sector of the population and the number of desperately poor in the interior is rising. This has resulted in the reappearance of beggars on the streets of Luanda, something not so evident since the hardest period of the civil war in the late 1990s.
The alternative to the iron cage would be to look to Angolan society, especially the young and vibrant, with a realistic and democratic political program���a vision for the country���that would lead it to acceptable political options and economic policies, in open dialogue with the available social forces. Such an alliance between Louren��o and civil society would create more secure conditions for taking down the political walls that shore up the structures of the state, from the judiciary to parliament, for personalities with questionable profiles and reputations. In civil society Louren��o finds a younger generation, many of whom do not know the civil war, and who have a great desire for change in the old political and civic structures that hold no meaning for their lives or futures.
Youth platforms like Movimento Revolucion��rio (Revolutionary Movement) in Malanje and Benguela and the Associa����o C��vica Laulenu (Laulenu Civic Association) in Moxico have mobilized in some provincial capitals (Malanje, Benguela, and Luena) and in at least three of Luanda���s municipalities (Cacuaco, Cazenga, and Viana) to protest social conditions and to advocate for the decentralization of power to municipalities. These groups constitute alternative and new forms of thinking and acting politically, outside the narrow channels of the traditional political parties (FNLA, MPLA, and UNITA) and older civic associations. New forms of political action by citizens are also visible in Cacuaco with Projecto Agir (Project Act), in Cazenga with Cazenga em Ac��o (Cazenga in Action), and the Movimento Estudantil Propinas ���Not��� (Student Movement No to Fees); they mark a sea change in Angolan society.
This youthful force mobilizing to think and act as alternatives to existing spaces for political and civic participation extends to other regions of Angola. In three provinces, youth have mobilized to protest poor public management by provincial governors: Norberto dos Santos in Malanje; Rui Falc��o in Benguela; and Gon��alves Muandumba in Moxico. In at least four provinces (including Luanda), youth influenced by the dynamics of past and present have criticized President Jo��o Louren��o for having maintained a considerable group of public administrators from the Dos Santos regime. The question is: does Louren��o realize that these youth���irreverent and without personal political interests���may be the best allies he has in the current political context?
April 8, 2020
At the limits of inequality discourse
Khayelitsha, South Africa. Image credit Frerieke via Flickr CC.
That South Africa is one of the most unequal nations in the world is a given. This is a reality one need not consult reports of the World Bank or Stats SA (South Africa’s official statistical service), to determine. A simple glance at any city or town in the republic lays bare the material and social divisions that typify the nation. Yet, for a country often defined by its inequality, our conversation around the topic remains facile. As my colleague, Jeff Rudin, points out much of this has to do with how inequality discourse in South Africa almost always reduces the phenomena to its racial dimensions.
A consequence of this��race reductionism��is that the potential to explore a politics of radical change is stunted at its roots. This stunting is��of particular significance in a society that so desperately needs to re-build itself after centuries of rampant exploitation and oppression.
Although the tendency to reduce inequality to its ���racial��� factors is both limited and limiting, it does not mean that wealth, income, and social status are completely ���deracialized.��� What it means is that a wide array of people are reduced to their racial category, their wealth and income is measured and then compared to those of other ���racial��� groupings. In doing so, we are supposed to have a clearer understanding of the nature of inequality. Despite the obvious drawbacks of this Verwoerdian lens of analysis, South Africa seems to suffer from material disparities between these so-called racial groupings.
Whites, the data tells us, earn three times more than their black counterparts. Households consisting primarily of black descendants make up 93 percent of all poor South Africans. A whole host of other economic disparities exist between the population groups as they would have been divided under apartheid.
These observations, and their underlying assumptions about the world,��offer us little insight into what��produces��and��reproduces��South Africa���s rampant inequality. The greatest challenge to the conventional wisdom around inequality is the glaring reality that�����intra-racial��� inequality has for the past few years contributed more significantly to total inequality. As the 2018 World Inequality Report states: ���Rising black per capita incomes over the past three decades have narrowed the interracial income gap, although increasing inequality within the black and Asian/Indian population seems to have prevented any decline in total inequality.���
In racialized language this means that the economic gap between Sipho and Vukosi contributes more to generalized inequality than the gap between Sipho and Johan. And not only that, this gap has widened while the gap between ���races��� continues to contract. This reality is both enlightening and challenging to the current policy paradigm and the dominant discourse. Yet these basic facts rarely, if ever, make the headlines. The dominant approach merely paints a picture of the��complexion��of inequality, while running away from the��actual complexities��of inequality. This crucial limitation inevitably interacts with the material forces at play. As Michael Nassen Smith, the editor of Confronting Inequality: the South African Crisis points out,�� ������ discrimination, systemic or individual, is only one���and a limited one at that���way of understanding [���] inequality in post-apartheid South Africa.���
To demonstrate the limitations of reducing inequality to its racial dimensions, let us imagine an anti-racist capitalism. Under such a system, South Africa���s distribution of income and wealth would��look��slightly different. But it would simply be a matter of appearance, an economy embedded in an extractive and parasitic road to accumulation. The problem with inequality in South Africa is not that it is racialized, but that South Africa remains a society built on the extraction of surplus value from both paid and unpaid labor performed by the majority. A discourse meant to highlight material and social inequalities should move away from the narrow particularism that currently defines it; it should transform into a universal approach that takes issue with the existence of material and social inequalities, and not just one form of inequality.
The discursive limits surrounding inequality move us from a question of data analysis to a political one. This shift moves us towards a discourse that is sensitive to the legacy of racialism in South Africa, while cognizant of the need to build a just society. That the��Motsepes and Ramaphosas��of the nation��do not hold the same level of wealth, or power as their paler counterparts the Ruperts and the Openheimers is of little significance for the 30 million South Africans who live below the poverty line. To argue otherwise is to engage in a shallow racialist version of trickle-down economics. And if there���s one thing the past 30 years have shown it���s that wealth doesn���t trickle down.
The ways in which we understand a problem determine the ways in which we approach the problem. The status quo serves to worsen an already terrible level of inequality. It is for this reason that South Africans need to revisit their understandings of race and inequality lest we keep repeating the same mistakes.
At the limits of inequality discourse in South Africa
Khayelitsha, South Africa. Image credit Frerieke via Flickr CC.
That South Africa is one of the most unequal nations in the world is a given. This is a reality one need not consult reports of the��World Bank��or��Stats SA, the country���s official statistical service,��to determine.��A simple glance��at any city or town in the republic lays bare the material and social divisions that typify the nation. Yet, for a country often defined by its inequality, our conversation around the topic remains facile. As my colleague, Jeff Rudin, points out much of this has to do with how inequality discourse in South Africa almost always��reduces the phenomena to its racial dimensions.
A consequence of this��race reductionism��is that the potential to explore a politics of radical change is stunted at its roots. This stunting is��of particular significance in a society that so desperately needs to re-build itself after centuries of rampant exploitation and oppression.
Although the tendency to reduce inequality to its ���racial��� factors is both limited and limiting, it does not mean that wealth, income, and social status are completely ���deracialized.��� What it means is that a wide array of people are reduced to their racial category, their wealth and income is measured and then compared to those of other ���racial��� groupings. In doing so, we are supposed to have a clearer understanding of the nature of inequality. Despite the obvious drawbacks of this Verwoerdian lens of analysis, South Africa seems to suffer from material disparities between these so-called racial groupings.
White descendants of European nationals, the data tells us,��earn three times more than their black counterparts. Households consisting primarily of black descendants make up��93 percent of all poor South Africans. A whole host of other economic disparities exist��between the population groups as they would have been divided under apartheid.
These observations, and their underlying assumptions about the world,��offer us little insight into what��produces��and��reproduces��South Africa���s rampant inequality. The greatest challenge to the conventional wisdom around inequality is the glaring reality that�����intra-racial��� inequality has for the past few years contributed more significantly to total inequality. As the 2018 World Inequality Report states: ���Rising black per capita incomes over the past three decades have narrowed the interracial income gap, although increasing inequality within the black and Asian/Indian population seems to have prevented any decline in total inequality.���
In racialized language this means that the economic gap between Sipho and Vukosi contributes more to generalized inequality than the gap between Sipho and Johan. And not only that, this gap has widened while the gap between ���races��� continues to contract. This reality is both enlightening and challenging to the current policy paradigm and the dominant discourse. Yet these basic facts rarely, if ever, make the headlines. The dominant approach merely paints a picture of the��complexion��of inequality, while running away from the��actual complexities��of inequality. This crucial limitation inevitably interacts with the material forces at play. As Michael Nassen Smith, the editor of Confronting Inequality: the South African Crisis points out,�� ������ discrimination, systemic or individual, is only one���and a limited one at that���way of understanding [���] inequality in post-apartheid South Africa.���
To demonstrate the limitations of reducing inequality to its racial dimensions, let us imagine an anti-racist capitalism. Under such a system, South Africa���s distribution of income and wealth would��look��slightly different. But it would simply be a matter of appearance, an economy embedded in an extractive and parasitic road to accumulation. The problem with inequality in South Africa is not that it is racialized, but that South Africa remains a society built on the extraction of surplus value from both paid and unpaid labor performed by the majority. A discourse meant to highlight material and social inequalities should move away from the narrow particularism that currently defines it; it should transform into a universal approach that takes issue with the existence of material and social inequalities, and not just one form of inequality.
The discursive limits surrounding inequality move us from a question of data analysis to a political one. This shift moves us towards a discourse that is sensitive to the legacy of racialism in South Africa, while cognizant of the need to build a just society. That the��Motsepes and Ramaphosas��of the nation��do not hold the same level of wealth, or power as their paler counterparts the Ruperts and the Openheimers is of little significance for the 30 million South Africans who live below the poverty line. To argue otherwise is to engage in a shallow racialist version of trickle-down economics. And if there���s one thing the past 30 years have shown it���s that wealth doesn���t trickle down.
The ways in which we understand a problem determine the ways in which we approach the problem. The status quo serves to worsen an already terrible level of inequality. It is for this reason that South Africans need to revisit their understandings of race and inequality lest we keep repeating the same mistakes.
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