Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 300

What’s a national anthem got to do with anything?

The singing of national anthems is an intrinsic part of international and professional sporting events around the world. Yet, the content and messages contained in the average anthem are rarely considered more than in passing. The recent decision by American Colin Kaepernick, a National Football League player, to remain seated or kneel during the singing of the “Star Spangled Banner” to protest police brutality, marks a significant shift, fueling strong debates about its violent and racist lyrics.

The U.S. is not alone. The average European anthem also traces its origins to conquest or colonialism. For example, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise”, dreams that the “blood of the impure” will “irrigate our fields”. In South Africa, the national anthem is a confused mixture of two anthems, sung in four different languages, and includes portions of the Apartheid-era national anthem. Like in the U.S., it has also been called into question publicly.

After the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners in 1990 along with the unbanning of a range of political organizations, South Africa’s sports team were welcomed back into the international fold. One of the first high-profile sports events in the country was a rugby test match in August 1992 between South Africa and New Zealand at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium. The match was to take place under three conditions stipulated by the African National Congress (ANC), which could claim to represent the majority of South Africans: 1) that the Apartheid flag was not to be flown; 2) ‘Die Stem’, the Apartheid national anthem, was not be played; and 3) a minute’s silence was to be observed for victims of political violence in the country. Louis Luyt, the then president of South African rugby, ignored the agreement and the national anthem was played over the stadium’s public address system. Large sections of the mostly white crowd and all-white players joined in the singing. Moreover, the Apartheid flag was visible throughout the stadium and the minute’s silence was jeered.

After a period of difficult and protracted negotiations with increased levels of political violence across South Africa, the ANC was democratically elected in 1994. A new constitution was enacted in 1996, a new flag adopted and a range of Apartheid-era symbols was replaced. One of the more contentious compromises agreed to during the period of negotiations was the retention of parts of “Die Stem,” which was to be sung in conjunction with “Nkosi Sikelel’iAfrika,” the hymn first adopted by the ANC as its official song in 1925 and which subsequently became the de facto national anthem for most South Africans outside Apartheid’s supporters. By 1997, the two songs were combined to form one anthem. Furthermore, the Apartheid era sports logo – the Springbok – was replaced as the national symbol with the Protea (the national flower), with the exception of rugby which includes both symbols.

The compromise on the anthem and the Springbok symbol for rugby can be understood in the context of a period of reconciliation and nation building. This was optimized by Mandela wearing the Springbok jersey during the 1995 Rugby World Cup final, hosted by South Africa. His decision to wear the jersey was enthusiastically welcomed by the overwhelmingly white crowd at the final. As a result, during the game refrains of ‘Nelson, Nelson’ could be heard from the stands. But in the same crowd a number of Apartheid era flags were also visible. As a result, Mandela’s gesture towards white rugby fans was not universally accepted in South Africa.

More than 20 years have passed that rugby final (since immortalized in a movie, “Invictus”) and increasingly political actors are calling for the removal of “Die Stem” from the current national anthem. One is Julius Malema, the leader of the populist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which has steadily increased its share of the vote and is now the third largest party in parliament. Malema argues that “Die Stem” is a symbol of Apartheid and equates it to “asking the Jews to sing a song about Hitler.” During a session of parliament Malema sat down during the singing of the Apartheid era verses of the anthem. The veteran journalist, Max du Preez, similarly has called for its removal. Du Preez, a white Afrikaner, contends that singing the Apartheid-era anthem reminds South Africans of an “era of injustice” and is a “prime symbol of Afrikaner nationalism.”

Symbols are potent reminders and place holders of experience, identity and power, especially in countries with such contentious histories as South Africa and the United States. Colin Kaepernick is illustrating this as the NFL season kicks into gear and violent confrontations between police and protestors over police brutality continue across the U.S. In South Africa, while some symbols of Apartheid remain, resolutions have been adopted to remove Apartheid-era logos, anthems and names. These actions signal a step towards change, beyond the symbolic, and the opportunity to address structural inequalities more generally.

Africa: Why Western Economists Get It Wrong

Morten Jerven, image via Wikimedia

Development economics as a field of study was formally launched in the 1950s by the Afro-Caribbean economist Arthur Lewis who, out of necessity, wanted to understand how his own country, Saint Lucia, could transform from an agro-based economy into a modern industrial state (later, in 1979, Lewis was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for this work, the only black person to have won the prize to date). For Lewis, the key to providing a satisfactory answer to the problem of underdevelopment lay in studying those societies as they were and not in comparing them to some mythical ideal. Saint Lucia, like all developing countries, had a lot of underemployed labor in its agricultural sector. The question was how best to marshal this valuable resource into driving industrialization.

Sadly, development economics has moved away from Lewis’ pioneering contribution of studying poor countries on their own terms. For example, today’s development economists explain Tanzania’s lack of development as stemming from its inability to be more like Sweden. This way of studying development, termed the “subtraction approach”, has led us down a dark alleyway where there is more confusion than elucidation. That, at least, is the charge leveled by economic historian Morten Jerven in his book Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong published in 2015, but still circulating and prompting debate in academia and amongst practitioners.

Aided by the revolution in computing power and by the supposed triumph of neoliberal thinking, a certain type of influential development economics arose in the 1980s whose dominant methodological approach was the compilation of cross-country datasets for the purposes of statistical analyses. These studies, termed the “first generation growth literature” by Jerven, set out to show that economic growth depended on a standard set of globally relevant factors. For instance, government involvement in the economy was hypothesized to be a key factor explaining why poor countries had grown slowly, betraying the extent to which the ideological currents of the time influenced economic research.

Jerven shows that much of this research was flawed at a conceptual level. First, the data for most African countries was collected at a time when their economies were in crisis. This data was therefore not a typical representation of how these economies functioned in normal times. If anything, the data were an outcome and not the cause of the crisis. Second, the data for industrialized countries was reverse-engineered into the models to fit the story. For example, industrialized countries would automatically be presumed to have zero government involvement in the economy even though this was not the case (subsidies to US and European farmers, anyone?). Lastly, the economists working in the 1980s and 1990s were trying to explain a “chronic failure of growth in Africa”, something that had not happened in reality. African economies grew healthily in the 1960s and 1970s and did not grow at all in the 1980s and 1990s.

As a way of rescuing this literature from its conceptual malaise, a new literature arose in the early 2000s. This literature claimed that the answers to Africa’s failure to implement good policies (read: failure to be more like Sweden) were to be found in history. The continent was “trapped in history”.

The most famous account of the “history matters” school was a 2001 scholarly article by economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson. The article argued that the reason why African countries relied on “extractive institutions” today, such as unsecure property rights, was related to patterns of colonization in history. Because Africa was not “conducive” for settlement, Europeans introduced institutions that would facilitate the extraction of natural resources. Elsewhere, such as Canada and Australia, they introduced “inclusive institutions” precisely because these places were conducive for their settlement.

Quite apart from the hubris contained in thinking that the universe of institutional types was only to be found in historical Europe, Jerven levels a series of conceptual criticisms at the “history matters” school. If Africa is “trapped in history” and, therefore, condemned to a perpetual lack of growth, how is it that the continent grew rather spectacularly in the 1960s, 1970s and more recently in the 2000s? Even more damning, Jerven shows that growth in Africa has been a recurring phenomenon over the last 400 years. So a theory that tells us that a single historical event explains Africa’s slow growth today doesn’t take us far. We want to know why Tanzania has grown, slowed down, grown and then slowed down again throughout its history.

Sadly, the “history matters” school is very influential. Ask any member of the thinking class to tell you why Africa is poor and they will likely refer you to Why Nations Fail, the 2013 book that summarized Acemoglu et al.’s work.

So what’s to be done? Jerven thinks development economics should engage more historians given their unique skills for interrogating historical data sources and narratives. This is welcome. Surprisingly, Jerven does not call for the active engagement of African economists given that most of what he critiques has been authored by North American and European economists (his book should really have been titled Africa: Why Western Economists Get It Wrong). This oversight is telling because his critique clearly builds on the often neglected contributions of the Malawian economist Thandika Mkandawire.

This last pickle aside, Morten Jerven’s book is a refreshing contribution to the debate about development scholarship on Africa and it deserves to be read by all.

Africa is a Radio: Episode #18

Today, is the last official day of summer in our Northern Hemisphere headquarters of New York. So, let’s mark the passing of the earthly seasons by revisiting our Africa is a Radio live broadcast from The Lot Radio in Brooklyn this past June.

Africa is a Country contributor, New York city resident, social media guru, and Zimbabwe specialist Shona Kambarami was our very special and enthusiastic guest. Listen back, and check the track list below.

Rihanna – Work (DJ Bboy Afrobeats Remix)
J Hus – Lean and Bop
P2J Music – T.O.T.T  ft Moelogo
Wizkid – Ojuelegba (Uproot Andy Remix)
Booba – Validee feat. Benash
Sali Sabibe – Wale Gnouma Don
Jojo Abot – Stop the Violence
Al Sarah – Soukura (Boddhi Satva Ancenstral Soul Remix)
Indigenes – Da Hoti (Osunlade Yoruba Soul Mix)
DRC Music – Lingala
DJ X-Trio – Africa (Rancido Noite Angola Remix)
Kondi Band – Belle Wahalla
J Martins – Touchin Body feat. DJ Arafat
MHD – Afro Trap pt. 3 (Champions League)
Tchobari – Quem Mando me Nascer?
Djeff – Piluka (DJ Satxibala Remix)
Ziminino – Intermitência (Boima’s Capoeira Angola Remix)
Baiana System – Playsom (Remix)
Mauro Telefunksoul – AjeumbaSS (Tributo ao Cortejo Afro)
– Interview and song selects with Shona Kamari –
Nonku Phiri – Things we do on the Weekend
Poe – Who You Epp? [T.A.P Remix]
Oga’Silachi – Leona
Burna Boy – Soke
Sarkodie – Dumsor
Jules Henry Malaki – Makiyaj

#MindYourOwnBusiness

Paul Kagame. Image via Veni Markovski Flickr

I shook Paul Kagame’s hand yesterday. A colleague and I were discussing the difference between historical and anthropological approaches to politics, there was a bit of hush, and there he was – a person of world historical importance, hand outstretched.

I am historian of 20th century Africa; I teach and work at Yale University and I’m enormously privileged to do so. Yale, and in particular Yale’s Africa Initiative, has made Africa a priority on campus, which has resulted in rich events like Yale’s spring Africa Salon and in the increasing number of fiercely intelligent and tremendously talented African students in my classes. The latter have made our campus an immeasurably richer place and me a better teacher, and I have the Africa Initiative to thank. It was the African Initiative that invited Paul Kagame to campus, as part of Yale’s Coca Cola World Fund lecture series. So it was that I got to shake the hand of a man many observers and human rights activists the world over consider a dictator at best and a war criminal at worst.

The Internet has had a field day with Kagame’s visit to Yale, especially since it came under Coca Cola’s corporate brand. Rwandan dissidents, their allies and others have heaped scorn on our administration for laying out a carpet that might as well be soaked red with the blood of the millions of Congolese whose deaths the Rwandan government has at least abetted, if not instigated. The circumstances of his visit were extraordinary: the lecture was announced only six days before Kagame came to campus, seats had to be reserved by registered attendees in advance, no bags were allowed in and the only media in attendance were photographers and videographers working for the Rwandan government. Given these headwinds, I was impressed to learn that Yale human rights activists were organizing a teach-in to protest Kagame’s arrival on campus.

I do not want to rehearse Kagame’s human rights record, nor his crimes, nor rehash the debate about whether he should have been invited to campus.  Nor should we be surprised that he was invited or that he received a standing ovation upon entering the hall. I learned today what I had always suspected – Paul Kagame is an enormously talented politician. He’s confident, charming and disarming, and he is the perfect spokesman for the story his government wants to tell – about a country that has suffered and has, under his leadership, overcome the darkness of its past to become an economically vibrant, gender and environmentally conscious, technocratically proficient model of what an African state can be. I also know and must acknowledge what an absolute thrill it must have been for many of my African students – and especially the Rwandans – to see their president, an African head of state, feted on our campus – on their campus. Over the past year Yale’s struggles to be a home for its black students have been widely publicized; our struggles to be a home for African students in particular is too frequently overlooked. The Yale Africa Initiative is designed in part to combat this neglect and we should take the pride that many students felt seriously.

So I’m not going to rehearse the critiques. I’m only going to report what I heard. Kagame spoke for a bit more than thirty minutes and took questions for a little less than that. His message was simple, and summed up in a hashtag I found in a tweet defending Kagame’s visit: #MindYourOwnBusiness.

Kagame noted that he had come to have a frank exchange, so he addressed the critiques he knew were coming. The weight of evidence suggests that he has crushed political dissent and dramatically curtailed the media. No matter, Rwanda’s results – measured in ending poverty and delivering services – matter more than what he called “processes.” Where we are going is more important than how we get there, in other words. Rwanda’s critics condemn human rights abuses in the name of development and state consolidation; no matter, they are racists, unable to see clearly when an African success story is right in front of them. Rwanda has fomented war in neighboring countries – no matter, the international community sat on its hands when we died and suffered so they have no standing to critique us now – and on this point, actually, yes it matters.

In Kagame’s narrative, the only history that matters is the history that began 22 years ago this past April. The suffering of the genocide and the RPF’s role in ending it is where Kagame’s government draws its legitimacy to condemn foreign hypocrisy (which exists in spades, to be sure) and to shut down its critics. We suffered and you did nothing – so how dare you say something now. Kagame delivered this message in confident, uncompromising tones before the first person had a chance to ask him a question. The questioners asked the right ones – about democracy, about human rights, about his pending decision to ‘run’ for yet another term, about Congo. But they needn’t have bothered. He had preempted their questions. #MindYourOwnBusiness.

Like I said, I’m not interested in disproving these points. I’m only interested in relating what I heard when Mr. Kagame came to Yale. But as a historian, I do have to note that Mr. Kagame’s message sounded awfully familiar. Were Mr. Netanyahu to come to campus, I imagine that he would said something quite similar. We have suffered, we have been wronged. #MindYourOwnBusiness. And here’s the thing: that’s the same message Mr. Verwoerd would have brought to Yale, had we invited him. We have suffered, you have not, you have no standing, #MindYourOwnBusiness. I note this not to say that these men are one and the same. That would be ridiculous. But Verwoerd drew from the well of past suffering to foreshorten history to shut down critiques of reprehensible policies. Benjamin Netanyahu has made an art form of doing the same. And today I heard Paul Kagame charmingly remind an audience of privileged Ivy Leaguers and Americans that their ivory towers are glass houses, and thus that we cannot know the truth, and that we should mind our own business.

Paul Kagame came to my campus today. I did not condemn my university for inviting him and I did not boycott him. Instead I shook his hand and I smiled at him and I thanked him for sharing his thoughts with us. Because I needed to hear him to confirm what, as a historian, I have long suspected – we’ve seen his kind before. And, apologies Mr. Kagame, but you know that – because you correctly condemn my country for minding its own business in April, May and June 1994. People like you are our business precisely because people who tell others to mind their own business tend to be the sorts of people who leave bodies in their wake. And bodies and human suffering are the cursed currency of history, as Paul Kagame’s Rwanda has taught and regrettably continues to teach.

‘Til death do us part

Ali Bongo image via Wikimedia

The Bongo family has ruled the central African country of Gabon uninterrupted for 49 years. This past August, President Ali Bongo – whose father, Omar, was in power from 1967 to 2009 when Ali took over – secured a second seven-year term in presidential elections. Since the announcement of official election results, violent clashes have erupted between Gabonese opposition supporters and police forces.

Gabon is the third richest country in Africa and one of the most stable countries in the central Africa region. It is strategically important to France, a former colonizer, as an oil producer and the site of a permanent military base since 1960.

In this year’s election, according the official results published by the Interior Ministry, President Bongo won with 49.8 percent of the vote, while his main challenger Jean Ping received 48.2 percent. Bongo defeated Jean Ping by a meager 5,594 voters. The victory included a bizarre 99.93 percent voter turnout in the President’s family stronghold in Haut Ogooué in the south of Gabon, while the national average was 59 percent.

Following the results, Ping said that the vote was “stolen” by Bongo. Separately, Ping wrote in the New York Times: “We have seen “results” like these before, but only from sham elections, most often in dictatorships.”

Normally, Bongo would get away with it (he still has some enthusiastic supporters in the West), but this time France and the European Union both echoed Ping’s doubts over the integrity of the results in Bongo’s hometown. They recommended a recount of the vote. Bongo refused, so Ping filed a voter fraud complaint with the constitutional court, hoping for a recount.

With the exception of seven years immediately following independence, Gabon has been governed by the Bongo family. During this time, government has been characterized by corruption, kleptocracy and widespread patronage.

Ali Bongo’s path to power was smoothed by a constitutional amendment in 1997 by Omar Bongo that removed the country’s run-off system, replacing it with a single round of voting in presidential, legislative and senatorial elections. Omar Bongo won that 1998 election before he was elected in 2005 to a sixth term. All these elections were marred by irregularities and violence, which allowed Omar Bongo to stay in office even while he was losing ground to the opposition.

One-round electoral systems are seemingly less challenging for incumbent presidents and their designated successors. A divided opposition spreads out votes, while an incumbent president’s patronage system can guarantee an immediate victory in a one-round voting system. One-round electoral systems also make unity among opposition political parties an ultimate requisite for a potential victory. For the 2016 Gabonese presidential election, the three main opposition parties decided to pool resources and support Jean Ping.

Such electoral systems are exceptional on the continent. Out of 54 African countries, only seven hold presidential elections using it. But, the results are clear: Togo has been ruled by the same family for more than 40 years, Cameroon has been ruled by Paul Biya since 1982 and the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo has been entrenched since he came to power in 2001.

However, while one-round presidential elections can sometimes explain long presidential rules on the African continent, more than half of current presidents have been elected in first rounds of despite the existence of two-round systems. As such, it is not so much that one-round systems are favoring one candidate, but that electoral systems may be biased from the get-go, and may make it virtually impossible to defeat the incumbent.

Gabonese don’t trust the electoral system. Two days before the publication of official results for the 2016 presidential elections, Ali Bongo tweeted that he was awaiting his victory “with serenity and confidence.” Meanwhile, the president of the supreme court, who makes the final decision on the election, is Bongo’s stepmother.

By many measures, Jean Ping is a surprising choice as a democratic reformer in Gabon. He is very much part of Gabon’s political establishment and served in Omar Bongo’s cabinet for more than a decade, including as foreign minister. He was also related by marriage to the Bongo family – he has two children with Pascaline Bongo, also a government minister. Ping’s popularity, however, reflects frustration with the Bongos, and reflects a political landscape that is changing. For the first time in the country’s history, a united opposition has had a realistic chance of unseating an incumbent president and to end a family dynasty. This was achieved because of the opposition’s unity around a consensual candidate.

Change is what Gabonese seem to be looking for. They have little interest in a president ‘til death do us part.

Good luck checking on the health of an African president

Image via Center for American Progress Action Fund Flickr

For those with more than a passing interest in African politics, the incessant 24 hour news and social media chatter about the health of U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and that of her rival Donald Trump, may appear quaint. Because, when it comes to electoral politics or the health of a head of state in Africa, the physical condition of the dear leader is basically off limits and subject to much obfuscation and mystery, in some cases even after they’ve long left us.

Earlier this month, Robert Mugabe — who has served as either Prime Minister or President of Zimbabwe uninterrupted since independence in 1980 — arrived back from a trip to East Asia. Rumors quickly spread that he had gone for medical treatment. He had made secretive trips to East Asia before to be treated for prostate cancer or cataracts. A 2008 American diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks confirmed most of this. Mugabe made a similar trip in 2012. During his most recent trip, rumors swirled in local media that he had died. On arrival back in Harare after a few days, Mugabe tried to make light of the situation: “Yes, I was dead, it’s true I was dead. I resurrected as I always do.”

Speculation over Mugabe’s health is an all-consuming topic for Zimbabweans, as The New York Times reported earlier this month. The main reasons are because the government doesn’t choose to release any of his medical information, Mugabe doesn’t seem to trust local doctors (an odd position for someone who is such an ardent Pan-Africanist) and there is no annual check-up for the President. So, there’s nothing else to do but speculate. When the 92 year old Mugabe was caught on video stumbling or literally falling asleep while giving a speech at a meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister, the media frenzy began afresh. More recently, enterprising Zimbabweans with access to the internet, have come up with a novel way to measure his health: They follow the flight plans of Mugabe’s plane, using information that is freely available online.

In March this year, Mugabe was scheduled to travel to India on official business. After the host government confirmed it knew of no such trip, a group of Zimbabweans followed the direction of Mugabe’s plane to Singapore. (The internet, by the way, is lately becoming a big factor in Zimbabwean politics.) During his most recent trip, Zimbabweans figured out where he was by doing the same thing again. The government usually denies the President’s whereabouts, then later makes up some bogus reason for his absence. The favorite one is that he is visiting with one of his children on family business – as if it is common for a head of state to just up and leave the country to attend to personal business without telling anyone. Zimbabweans aren’t impressed.

But Mugabe is stubborn and he has not expressed any desire to step down from office. He has already announced that he will run again in elections scheduled for 2018. His wife, Grace, once told supporters Mugabe would rule until he was 100 years old, even from a “special” wheelchair if need be. Where senior leaders in Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, have dared raise the question of succession (ZANU-PF assumes it will win elections in perpetuity), they are immediately accused of plotting a coup (that was the fate of one of his vice-presidents, who left the party) or declared factionalists (the label attached to current VP, Emmerson Mnangagwa).

Cameroon’s Paul Biya has been less inconspicuous about his failing health. Biya has been Cameroonian president since 1982 when he replaced President Ahmadou Ahidjo, due to the latter’s failing health. Biya has a habit of leaving Cameroon for long periods – last year, for example, he was out of the country for at least one month without any explanation provided. In October 2008, two days short of being absent for the 45-day limit that would have required him, constitutionally, to be replaced, Biya returned, thus ruining parties celebrating his death.

Two weeks ago, Biya left for “a private visit to Europe.” Some Cameroonians joke that Biya visits Cameroon from Europe. Cameroonians abroad have called, multiple times, for the Inter-Continental Hotel in Geneva, Switzerland to evict their leader who travels there with delegations of top level ministers and their families, spending nearly $40,000 per night while the average Cameroonian subsists on less than a dollar a day. The rumor recently doing the rounds was that Biya has prostate cancer, but good luck investigating that. In 2004, journalist Pius Njawe was sentenced to 10 months in prison for revealing that the president had an undisclosed illness. The most surprising departure was in March 2015, when in the middle of a war against Boko Haram (which had spilled over into Cameroon), Biya left for Switzerland. Pressed about last summer’s month-long “private” visit to Germany, presidential spokespeople said Biya went to personally interview investors.

Had I known former president of Ghana Atta Mills was sick in 2012, I would have laughed less at ecomini (economy) and his other gaffes. The problem is that no one in Ghana knew he was ill and his administration did everything they could to cover it up. In 2012, after returning from the United States for medical checks, Atta Mills jogged around the airport to show how healthy he was. A month later he was dead. Until then, rumors of his failing health and rumors that he had gone blind were met with derision. In interviews, his communications team and government staffers would actually insult anyone who suggested Atta Mills was not at his best. After his death, the Committee for Social Advocacy in Ghana submitted detailed questions surrounding his death. To date, there is no clarity on how Atta Mills died.

Then there is the case of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria. Bouteflika came to power in 1999 and is credited with ending Algeria’s bloody civil war of the 1990s. In 2013 Bouteflika suffered a stroke and was hospitalized in France. At the time there were rumors that he had died. Claims of his ill health were not new.  Since his 2013 stroke, Bouteflika has been confined to a wheelchair and is rarely seen in public. Nevertheless, his party announced in 2014 that he would again be its presidential candidate. Bouteflika barely campaigned or said a word (when he did, he spoke in a whisper through a microphone attached to his wheelchair), but still won a disputed election. Since then, Algerian journalists report any appearance by the president  as an exclusive. Earlier this month Bouteflika made a public appearance outside his presidential residence for the first time in two years. He was in a wheelchair and didn’t say a word. There is an argument that Algerians tolerate rule by a leader who can’t speak over what they perceive as the chaos of the Arab Spring (“the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know”). It is unclear who or what kind of political system comes after Bouteflika, which is probably the way Algerian elites want it.

Mwai Kibaki, President of Kenya between 2002 and 2013, was believed to have had a number of strokes and suffered one during his first year in office. For the rest of tenure, he ruled essentially by proxy. Pundits who covered Kibaki’s 2002 election campaign (when he defeated longtime autocrat Daniel arap Moi), characterized that time as that of the “two Kibakis: the early Kibaki, engaged, focused, acute; and the later Kibaki, vague, distracted, struggling to maintain a coherent chain of thought.” John Githongo, the Kenyan whistleblower who recounted his story in Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat corroborated this. Githongo had to flee the country when halfway through setting up the transparency unit Kibaki had recruited him to lead, he was pursued by members of the executive who knew he would expose their corrupt dealings. As Wrong wrote in her book, Githongo became alarmed about the president’s mental state when upon confronting Kibaki with the fact that the corruption cases being investigated stemmed from people close to the president’s office, the evidently incoherent president congratulated him and suggested he keep up the good work. By the end of his term, Kibaki made great fodder for Kenyan satirists and comedians, falling asleep at the podium and losing his train of thought midstream while giving speeches. This was cold comfort for Kenyans worried about the health of their country.

But none of above compares to Nigeria’s President Umaru Yar’Adua. Before he died in 2010, he had not been seen in Nigeria for more than three months, leaving Africa’s most populous country without a leader and deep in constitutional crisis. He was being treated for an undisclosed illness in Saudi Arabia (his trips were classed as “medical checkups,” though there was rumor that he had a heart condition or kidney illness). Like Atta Mills, Yar’Adua tried to show in public that he was well: In 2007, as the Guardian reported, dismissed rumors of continued ill health by challenging his critics to a game of squash. By early March 2010, a cousin of Yar’Adua would confirm to Al Jazeera English that the president had returned to Nigeria. Although he wasn’t seen in public, he was “recovering and drinking tea” in the villa. Four days later, he was dead.

Zambia, Malawi and Ethiopia are some other African countries where speculation and obstruction accompanied the deaths of their heads of state. Regularly vetting a candidate’s  health and capacity to meet the physical and mental demands of the job would seem an obvious requirement. But, in the case of the average African president, it would seem, evidently, too straightforward, making for less intrigue, and discriminating against the cadre of power-hungry men who consistently put themselves before the interests of their people. Indeed, if the tradition of the last few decades is the rubric, it would be too unAfrican.

Anti-racism without race

Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi and his wife Chinyery.

Earlier this summer in Fermo, Italy, 36-year old Nigerian asylum seeker Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi was beaten to death by Italian Amedeo Mancini, a known soccer ultra, who was also associated with the local chapter of the neofascist CasaPound political movement. Emmanuel and his wife Chinyere had fled the violence of Boko Haram (they lost their parents and a daughter in a bombing) and had undertaken a harrowing journey through Libya and across the Mediterranean, finally arriving in Palermo. They had been hosted by the bishop’s seminary of Fermo since last September.

On the afternoon of July 5, Emmanuel and Chinyere were walking down a street when two men began to shout insults at them, at one point calling his wife a scimmia africana (African monkey). When Emmanuel reacted in an attempt to defend his wife from this abuse, Mancini proceeded to attack him with a street sign ripped out of the ground. He fell into a coma, and died the following day. Chinyere generously donated her husband’s organs for transplant, in a gesture showing a great sense of humanity and ability to go beyond a more-than-justified resentment for what had befallen her husband. (There is also a campaign to name a room at the medical school of the University of Bologna after Nnamdi.)

In Italy, anti-racist work is compatible with a broader trend in post-World War Two anti-racist work in Europe: because race does not exist at the biological level, and is thus unscientific, it is best to avoid its harmful effects by looking for the cause of violence elsewhere, namely in the realm of sentiments such as fear. In the quest to do away with the term “race,” many in the antiracism movements in Italy have preferred to use terms such as “xenophobia,” focusing on fear of “foreigners,” or have sought solace in the concepts of “difference” and “alterity”,  disregarding that both posit a normative state of being against which the “other” or the “different” stand out.

Italy also lacks a fully developed movement against racism led by people of color. Anti-racist mobilizations remain primarily in the hands of white Italian “allies” and, at least in the past, were subject to the powerful influence of political parties and labor unions. Furthermore, the last decades have seen a conflation of questions of racism with migration. Although a growing number of scholars working in Italy are now engaging with the concept of razza via race-critical and whiteness studies (for instance, the InteRGRace research collective and the edited collection Il colore della nazione), this crucial work is only just beginning to be put in conversation with both mainstream anti-racism and emerging forms of autonomous black organizing in Italy.

Some have argued that the casting of antiracism in Italy as a “solidarity movement” (with both Catholic and Marxist undercurrents) is necessary given the small size of the country’s black population, but this argument is insufficient. While the Italian government does not collect official statistics on race, there are more than one million Africans living in Italy, about one-third of whom hail from sub-Saharan Africa countries (this figure does not include undocumented residents or people who have acquired Italian citizenship).

Clarity on these issues is of the utmost importance in a country that still refuses to reckon with – or perhaps, as Italian historian Alessandro Triulzi writes – selectively and nostalgically reconfigures its own colonial past and forecloses any discussion of race and white privilege in the public sphere.

For example: In Affile, Italy, the authorities have allowed the construction of a mausoleum dedicated to General Rodolfo Graziani, known as “the butcher of Fezzan.” In a 30-year span of colonial wars in Libya and the Horn of Africa, Fezzan used mustard gas on the Ethiopian population and bombed Red Cross hospitals; he was thus listed by the United Nations as a war criminal.

Still, some self-professed leftists continue to suggest that it is intellectually lazy to describe incidents such as the murder of Emmanuel Chidi Namdi as racism, because doing so only reifies the scientifically delegitimized category of “race.” But the problem here isn’t with the term “racism.” After all, race was never solely about blood or skin color; this ever-shifting concept emerged to legitimate the violent world-making projects of colonialism, imperialism, and enslavement. Just because race is a biological fiction does not mean that it doesn’t continue to shape people’s lives in profound ways as a social reality and axis of domination.

Even the project of Italian national unification involved serious contestations over the racial character of the nascent Italian nation, and birthed its own homegrown school of Italian racial theorists, including Cesare Lombroso (commonly referred to as the father of modern criminology) and statistician, sociologist, and criminologist Alfredo Niceforo. At the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th, Italy was defining itself in racial terms in relation to both its internal North/South divide and its growing overseas empire in Africa.

After World War Two, race was disavowed in mainstream European anti-racism because of its ties to the horrors of fascist eugenics and racial laws. This “racial evaporation,” as David Theo Goldberg describes it (and as elaborated further in the Italian case by Gaia Giuliani and Cristina Lombardi-Diop), however, functions by conveniently relegating the idea of race to the past in an attempt to metaphorically seal the books on fascism and colonialism. But of course, the past is never dead. “Anti-racism without race,” scholars such as Dace Dzenovska, Alana Lentin, and Kamala Viswewaran have argued, makes the goal of anti-racism projects the elimination of the term “race,” rather than the destruction the historically-sedimented structures of power underlying the creation of racial categories through which groups are differentially subjected.

In other words, Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi was murdered by a racist system that legitimates the vile actions of individual fascists. He was a casualty not of one person’s aberrant phobia of difference, or of the word race, but rather of a racist global system that relies on the social construction of race to render Black lives killable. Hence, banishing the word “race” does not make racism go away. It only weakens anti-racist activism by denying the legitimacy of Black people’s lived experiences of racism. Turning to alternative categories, such as ethnicity or culture only causes those terms to harden as they come to effectively fill the echoing void leftover by race.

For that reason, we simply cannot start from the perspective that “we are all human” if some groups have never been recognized as fully human in the first place. This is why Amedeo Mancini felt justified in calling Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi’s wife Chinyere an “African monkey” before he beat Emmanuel to death on the street in Fermo. Tragically, we are not all in the same boat – some of our boats are leaking, while others of us are cruising leisurely on mega yachts.

*A version of this essay was first published in Italian for the web magazine Frontiere News

What do the Portuguese make of Cristiano Ronaldo?

The Portuguese star, Cristiano Ronaldo, is, as anyone who follows football knows, a polarizing figure. His detractors and critics point to his allegedly selfish play on the pitch, propensity to dive, prioritization of individual – rather than team – goals, and his constant preening, which somehow, it’s implied, undermines his footballing efficacy. Although the Portuguese are, in general, more forgiving towards Cristiano Ronaldo – someone who regularly “puts them on the map,” – than are many other football fans around the world, there is no shortage of domestic detractors.

This past summer, while in Lisbon (which coincided with Euro 2016, which Portugal won), I spoke to many Portuguese who were, rather remarkably, “rooting for the national team (or selecção, as it’s known in Portugal), but not necessarily Ronaldo.”  Some of this antipathy was rooted in Ronaldo’s inconsistency as a long-time member of the selecção and, ultimately, his inability (prior, of course, to this past summer) to have ever led the squad to a major tournament trophy.

Anyone in Portugal who watched Euro 2016 endured a barrage of advertisements featuring Ronaldo, the country’s most famous, and arguably most controversial, soccer player. “CR7,” as he is known by his initials and jersey number, was the pitchman for seemingly every product sold: from banking to high-speed internet services; some associated with multinational corporations, but many others offered by local companies exclusively for the domestic market.

With the passing of the legendary Mozambican-born Eusébio in 2014, Ronaldo is now the undisputed face of Portuguese soccer (Luís Figo would be the only other candidate worth mentioning – and he, too, serves as the pitchman for a number of Portuguese companies). Yet, despite Ronaldo’s commercial prominence and his virtually incomparable footballing skills, he is not universally embraced by the Portuguese population.

Long before he became “CR7,” Ronaldo was an exciting, promising player, who first drew significant international attention as a 19-year-old on Portugal’s Euro 2004 squad (which ended in tears for Ronaldo, when Portugal lost 1-0 to Greece in the final) and, again, two years later at the 2006 World Cup (Portugal made it to the semi-finals to Zinedine Zidane’s France). But, Portugal’s successes in these two tournaments were essentially the high-water marks for the squad. Unmet expectations prevailed in the decade, or so, that followed (a semi-final loss to Spain in 2012 being the exception). As Ronaldo was raising trophy after trophy with Manchester United (where he played from 2003-2009), and then Real Madrid, many domestic fans felt some disappointment, perhaps even a tinge of bitterness.

Of course, Portugal’s national team lost a number of supremely-talented players – teammates of Ronaldo – during the decade that followed the 2006 World Cup. And, even this year’s Euro-winning squad was conspicuously devoid of the type of talent that featured in past squads. Moreover, during these challenging years, Ronaldo was often asked to play out of position – most often as a lone striker – which limited his effectiveness and, thus, his contributions. Consequently, Ronaldo rarely made the type of impact while playing for Portugal that he did as a member of his club teams – understandably so, one might argue, given that his teammates at United and Madrid were and are all world-class players who starred or star for their own national teams.

Beyond criticism for his perceived shortcomings as a footballer for the selecção, however, are the blatant attacks on Ronaldo as a person. Leading these defamation efforts has been Correio de Manhã, a Portuguese tabloid newspaper, which enjoys the highest circulation in the country. This antagonism came to a head in June when Ronaldo grabbed the microphone of a reporter from television station, CMTV, whose operator also owns Correio de Manhã, and threw it in a nearby pond as the reporter was aggressively posing a question to the Portuguese footballer. Some five years earlier, Ronaldo won a court case against the newspaper for publishing personal material about him that the judge ruled “failed to serve the public interest.” Hardly chastened, the tabloid continues to aggressively seek to dig up stories of Ronaldo’s personal life and has persistently suggested that he is gay in attempts to question his masculinity.

If Ronaldo is scrutinized both domestically and internationally, he seems to have avoided these same levels of criticism in Madeira, his birthplace, (population less than 300,000). Born in 1985, in Funchal, the capital city of the archipelago, which enjoys “autonomous region” status within Portugal, Ronaldo grew up poor, in a household with an alcoholic father, who passed away some eleven years ago. Despite these hardscrabble beginnings, which generate some empathy for the player, Ronaldo has become, by far, the most famous Madeiran. With a museum highlighting his career, the recently-opened Pestana CR7 hotel, and an impressive – if rather odd – bronze statue of Ronaldo, Funchal was already a mecca for supporters of the superstar footballer. However, the decision this summer to rename the international airport in Funchal to the Madeira Cristiano Ronaldo Airport suggests that CR7 is approaching something resembling immortality in the land of his birth.

If only mainland Portugal was as uniformly, and uncritically, supportive.

King Ronaldo of Portugal

The Portuguese star, Cristiano Ronaldo, is, as anyone who follows football knows, a polarizing figure. His detractors and critics point to his allegedly selfish play on the pitch, propensity to dive, prioritization of individual – rather than team – goals, and his constant preening, which somehow, it’s implied, undermines his footballing efficacy. Although the Portuguese are, in general, more forgiving towards Cristiano Ronaldo – someone who regularly “puts them on the map,” – than are many other football fans around the world, there is no shortage of domestic detractors.

This past summer, while in Lisbon (which coincided with Euro 2016, which Portugal won), I spoke to many Portuguese who were, rather remarkably, “rooting for the national team (or selecção, as it’s known in Portugal), but not necessarily Ronaldo.”  Some of this antipathy was rooted in Ronaldo’s inconsistency as a long-time member of the selecção and, ultimately, his inability (prior, of course, to this past summer) to have ever led the squad to a major tournament trophy.

Anyone in Portugal who watched Euro 2016 endured a barrage of advertisements featuring Ronaldo, the country’s most famous, and arguably most controversial, soccer player. “CR7,” as he is known by his initials and jersey number, was the pitchman for seemingly every product sold: from banking to high-speed internet services; some associated with multinational corporations, but many others offered by local companies exclusively for the domestic market.

With the passing of the legendary Mozambican-born Eusébio in 2014, Ronaldo is now the undisputed face of Portuguese soccer (Luís Figo would be the only other candidate worth mentioning – and he, too, serves as the pitchman for a number of Portuguese companies). Yet, despite Ronaldo’s commercial prominence and his virtually incomparable footballing skills, he is not universally embraced by the Portuguese population.

Long before he became “CR7,” Ronaldo was an exciting, promising player, who first drew significant international attention as a 19-year-old on Portugal’s Euro 2004 squad (which ended in tears for Ronaldo, when Portugal lost 1-0 to Greece in the final) and, again, two years later at the 2006 World Cup (Portugal made it to the semi-finals to Zinedine Zidane’s France). But, Portugal’s successes in these two tournaments were essentially the high-water marks for the squad. Unmet expectations prevailed in the decade, or so, that followed (a semi-final loss to Spain in 2012 being the exception). As Ronaldo was raising trophy after trophy with Manchester United (where he played from 2003-2009), and then Real Madrid, many domestic fans felt some disappointment, perhaps even a tinge of bitterness.

Of course, Portugal’s national team lost a number of supremely-talented players – teammates of Ronaldo – during the decade that followed the 2006 World Cup. And, even this year’s Euro-winning squad was conspicuously devoid of the type of talent that featured in past squads. Moreover, during these challenging years, Ronaldo was often asked to play out of position – most often as a lone striker – which limited his effectiveness and, thus, his contributions. Consequently, Ronaldo rarely made the type of impact while playing for Portugal that he did as a member of his club teams – understandably so, one might argue, given that his teammates at United and Madrid were and are all world-class players who starred or star for their own national teams.

Beyond criticism for his perceived shortcomings as a footballer for the selecção, however, are the blatant attacks on Ronaldo as a person. Leading these defamation efforts has been Correio de Manhã, a Portuguese tabloid newspaper, which enjoys the highest circulation in the country. This antagonism came to a head in June when Ronaldo grabbed the microphone of a reporter from television station, CMTV, whose operator also owns Correio de Manhã, and threw it in a nearby pond as the reporter was aggressively posing a question to the Portuguese footballer. Some five years earlier, Ronaldo won a court case against the newspaper for publishing personal material about him that the judge ruled “failed to serve the public interest.” Hardly chastened, the tabloid continues to aggressively seek to dig up stories of Ronaldo’s personal life and has persistently suggested that he is gay in attempts to question his masculinity.

If Ronaldo is scrutinized both domestically and internationally, he seems to have avoided these same levels of criticism in Madeira, his birthplace, (population less than 300,000). Born in 1985, in Funchal, the capital city of the archipelago, which enjoys “autonomous region” status within Portugal, Ronaldo grew up poor, in a household with an alcoholic father, who passed away some eleven years ago. Despite these hardscrabble beginnings, which generate some empathy for the player, Ronaldo has become, by far, the most famous Madeiran. With a museum highlighting his career, the recently-opened Pestana CR7 hotel, and an impressive – if rather odd – bronze statue of Ronaldo, Funchal was already a mecca for supporters of the superstar footballer. However, the decision this summer to rename the international airport in Funchal to the Madeira Cristiano Ronaldo Airport suggests that CR7 is approaching something resembling immortality in the land of his birth.

If only mainland Portugal was as uniformly, and uncritically, supportive.

Corporate tax is a feminist matter

EU Tax haven protest via GUE/NGL Flickr

CitiGroup, Coca Cola, ExxonMobil, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Verizon, Wal-Mart, Pfizer, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Microsoft; of all the things these multinational corporations (MNCs) agree on, two things stand out: a proclaimed devotion to the feminist agenda and a penchant for tax dodging.

On the former, all MNC’s claim to dedicate some part of their corporate responsibility and philanthropy duties to the “economic empowerment” of women and girls in poor countries, and to that end, promote business skills, good saving practices and access to loans as a panacea for women’s empowerment and their countries’ development. The steps these corporations take “to advance and empower women” make them role models for gender justice among MNC’s, according to the United Nations Global Compact.



But then there’s the tax issue. A few months ago, the NGO Oxfam calculated that between 2008 and 2014 alone, the 50 largest public companies in the US accumulated some $337 billion in tax breaks, while holding a whopping $1.4 trillion in offshore cash reserves. All the companies mentioned above are on the list.

Tax dodging by MNCs represents “integral components of [their] profit-making strategies,” and a huge force of socio-economic devastation in particular for the Global South, where such taxes represent a larger share of overall government revenue (16%, according to the IMF, versus 8 % for their high-income counterparts), and where the technical capacity to deal with complex tax offshore investment hubs and other loopholes is weaker. Here, Oxfam argues, unpaid corporate taxes can make the “difference between life and death, poverty and opportunity.” The practice costs poor countries around US$ 100 billion dollars a year.

The result, predictably, is that across Africa, the working poor, (over 38% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa) often end up carrying the burden of raising tax revenue while the multinationals go scot-free. In Malawi, for example, where tax incentives for the mining sector allegedly suck out eight times the amount the government collects in revenues every year, some say that “it is the order of the day for small businesses to pay more tax than multinational companies.”

Meanwhile, as a new investigation reveals, South African companies make extensive use of tax haven benefits in the Netherlands, where, apparently, “an office with a house plant is enough to satisfy tax inspectors that a company really has operations in [Amsterdam],” rather than just a letterbox company. (By routing money through the Netherlands, companies reportedly push down their tax rate from to as low as 0,6 %. Of the 20 largest companies listed on the Johannesburg stock exchange, 14 have one or more subsidiaries in the Netherlands).

Within progressive feminist groups and anti-poverty NGOs, tax justice is now treated as a key development and human rights concern, with many feminists pointing out that it’s women and children who suffer the most, when social services are not provided.

Chiara Capraro worked for Christian Aid, whose Death And Taxes report estimated, as early as 2008, that developing countries lost more to false invoicing and trade mis-pricing by corporations (more on that later) than what comes in as development aid. Later, in partnership with Tax Justice Network Africa (who tweet here), they published “Africa Rising” which (amongst other things) outlines steps on how to stop corporations and other elites from abusing tax loopholes. To Chiara, who is now Policy and Advocacy Manager for Women’s Economic Rights at Womankind in London, corporate tax is a feminist matter and a huge potential source of empowerment for women, if given the chance to learn about, and organize around it.

Given that this type of gender-responsive tax literacy typically doesn’t make it into conventional financial literacy curriculums or economic empowerment classes, we asked Chiara to give us an idea of what such lessons may look like.



We read that the “tax system is rigged” and that it allows western corporations to dodge their tax contributions in Africa. But what IS this international tax system? How does it work? Who controls it? Can you make it easy for us?



It’s important to clarify from the outset that most of the practices that fall under the umbrella of “tax dodging” are currently not illegal. This is due to the fact that the rules governing how companies are taxed have not kept pace with the changing nature of global business. These rules were designed in the 1920s when big global conglomerates did not exist as we know them now. As a result, the various subsidiaries that are part of a single transnational corporation are now taxed as separate companies. This enables them to shift profits to low or zero tax jurisdictions (tax havens) and minimize tax payments. Not only profits can be shifted to wherever it’s most convenient, but also they can be inflated or deflated – this is called “trade mis-pricing.” Since currently 80% of global trade takes place within transnational corporations this practice has huge consequences.

So, to make it simple, if I inflate the profit I make from selling a product or a service between two subsidiaries of my company and I book that profit into a low tax jurisdiction I make sure I minimize my tax payments. This is currently legal to do. Still confused? At Christian Aid we tried to explain it with a banana, and in this video we explain where all the money has gone. In addition to the ability of minimizing their tax bills with their own strategies, corporations have also enjoyed falling tax rates over the past decades:  according to KPMG the average corporate tax rate worldwide went down from 38% in 1993 to 24.9% in 2010. And the boon doesn’t end here:  in their competition to attract foreign direct investments, many developing countries are using further tax incentives for corporations, which has created a “race to the bottom.” To illustrate this, the IMF found that in 1980 no low-income country in sub-Saharan Africa had tax free zones but 50% did so in 2005. Whereas 40% of sub-Saharan African countries were offering tax holidays in 1980s, 80% did so by 2005. Tax incentives are most often offered on an ad-hoc basis, without adequate cost benefit analysis. The special economic zones that are created for these companies often have poor labour conditions, bans on trade unions and environmental pollution.

The question of “who makes the rules” is a good one, because this is at the heart of why the tax system is seen as broken. Largely it’s the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of northern and large middle-income countries that governs the global tax system. Developing countries are currently excluded from decision making processes on global tax rules and the OECD itself has acknowledged that its reform efforts do not respond to the particular concerns of poorer countries. Tax justice campaigners feel that decision making needs to be democratized and brought under UN auspices to truly represent the concerns and needs of all countries. Discussions on establishing a Global Tax Body dominated the 3rd Financing for Development Conference, which took place in Addis in July 2015. It revealed the deep fault lines between northern powers and southern countries on this issue. 

Recently, the Zambian tax activist Cecilia Mulenga said that her friend, who was eight months pregnant when she died of complications, would still be alive “if these corporations were paying their fair dues.” And a nurse from Malawi blames the long waiting hours for patients and her own feeling of failing as a nurse on corporate tax breaks. Is the issue that simple? It’s not as though corporate tax revenue would actually go straight into health or education budgets, right? What’s your view on this? 

This is a fair concern – would additional revenue be spent where it needs to be spent? For example, to fund programs to prevent violence against women or maternal health nurses? Unfortunately, we cannot draw an automatic causal link. We know that neoliberal economic doctrine predicates both tax cuts for the rich and cutting back on public expenditure so both sides of the coin need to be challenged. Often the lack of a precise causal link between revenue raising and expenditure is used to dismiss claims for tax justice. Corruption is often used as well as a reason for why we shouldn’t bother too much about raising more revenue, as it will all be squandered. However, research by Global Financial Integrity has found that bribery and theft by public officials represent only 3% of cross-border illicit financial flows. In contrast, the proceeds of commercial tax avoidance represent 60%-65%. So although corrupt public officials are an issue, this can’t be used as an excuse to skirting around the issue of tax. Publicly funded, universal essential services led to huge progress in human development in Europe after the Second World War. And tax revenue is the most accountable source of funding, which should be raised and spent to realize the rights of all.

You’ve said that tax justice is a feminist issue. How does that apply to Africa?

Yes, I believe tax justice is a feminist issue for at least three reasons. Firstly, because the immediate consequence of tax dodging is a loss of resources needed to realize women’s rights. Over the last 30 years we have seen many good laws for women’s rights.  However, resources have not followed so such plans have very often remained on paper.  Secondly, women’s economic activities are disproportionately impacted by the current unfair tax system. Over 70% of women in sub-Saharan Africa work in the informal economy, mostly without access to contracts, maternity and sick leave and social protection. However, they still pay tax in the form of Value-added Tax (VAT) and an array of local taxes. Christian Aid’s research in Ghana found that 96% of women traders who worked in markets in Accra paid up to 37% of their income in taxes, with no access to social protection. If we don’t tackle the big players it is these women who keep shouldering an unfair tax burden. Very often discussions on women’s small businesses focus on access to credit, financial literacy and skills but it’s critical to also look at tax issues.

There is also a third and more radical feminist issue. Corporations are currently reaping the benefits of women’s unpaid care work, which subsidizes the productive economy and reproduces the workforce of today and tomorrow. Since this work is generally invisible in economic policy there is no assessment of the resources needed to support it and where they should come from.

Given that Western corporations seem particularly harmful, do you believe there is a special responsibility for the Western women’s movement? Is it on their agenda yet? 

Tax is a global issue, so I believe it is critical to build solidarity across borders between feminists on these issues. While it is true that transnational corporations are able to avoid paying their fair share of tax in both northern and southern countries, the effects are felt much more in southern countries, which have greater need to collect resources to provide health and education services and build social and physical infrastructure. In the UK, where I live, there has been an increased concern from feminists around the impact of austerity measures on women’s rights, but I think we still need more awareness on the issue of tax. Feminists can take up this cause first of all by educating themselves on why this issue is critical, learning the impact of tax dodging around the world, holding corporations and governments to account on their practices and pushing for political reform. There is a huge need to demystify issues of tax. It’s not something that only experts can talk about, it matters for us all, so we have to understand and engage with it.

From what you’re telling us, tax justice seems connected to literally every social justice issue – from gender justice and development to health and education. This suggests that whenever we talk about women’s empowerment, health and education in Africa, we cannot leave tax out of the equation. Is that right?

That’s exactly right. I feel very strongly that as feminists we need to interrogate much more whether economic policy is working for women’s rights and broader human rights. Tax policy really is a crucial piece of the puzzle. It has to do with who has power and who doesn’t. With who gains and who loses. There is strong scholarship and activism on these themes from feminist economists, but there is a need to demystify the issues them and make sure we feel confident in talking about them. Gender justice ultimately is not going to come for free, the same can be said for health, education, preventing violence and redistributing responsibility for unpaid care – all necessary steps along the way.