Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 308

Do US presidential candidates care who Kwaku the plumber will vote for?

Waiting for a cab in The Bronx. Image by Damon Winter (NY Times).

The lack of a distinct “African” category in polls or surveys in the United States make it impossible to definitively talk about the “African” perspective. However, according to “The Newest New Yorkers Study from 2013,” a study by New York City’s Department of City Planning, the city has the highest concentration of Africans nationally. That coupled with the fact that Africans are driving the recent growth in the number of black people here, means African immigrants are, and will be an important demographic in elections to come. From talking to Ghanaians in the Bronx, one day after the much discussed Bernie Sanders rally, there have few attempt to reach the proverbial “African man on the street.” In no stump speech will you hear about “Kwaku the plumber.”

Malata African Market off 167th and Grand Concourse is ostensibly a grocery store but its main function is really as a community center with goods on display for decoration. Dilys Wireko, who has owned the market for 12 years, calls it “the politics store.”

Behind us, between aisles of assorted local beverages, fufu powder andBlack Stars jerseys so common to many stores in Ghana, a group of men, in a mixture of Twi and Ga, loudly debated the upcoming Ghanaian elections. Ms Wireko shrugs,

I love my customers, we’re all family here. They come gather here and watch matches together. When there is a big soccer match, I don’t even sell anything! I have to turn on this TV, the TV at the back, and the place is full.

Ms Wireko doesn’t often discuss politics herself, but regarding the American elections, she says firmly, beaming with a smile “I am for Hillary, full stop.”

Her 13 year old son and 6 year old daughter are the ones with whom she discusses the presidential race, usually as they watch commentary on CNN. They’ve taken to chanting “Donald Trump, Donald Trump,” knowing it will irritate her.

For many African immigrants, the Clinton name is a reminder of the 1990s economic boom. As a self-described man-of-the-streets or Asraini), Kofi Antwi Okoh, told me:

Clinton was the best president I ever had. When I came to this country in 1995, when someone gave you one dollar, it was like today’s $100. When she comes, the life of Ghanaians will be better.

Samuel Osei, a local fashion designer echoes this saying:

I had a job at the post-office and everything was okay. Now everything has changed…. When Bush came, he came to kill people. He took all the money Clinton had saved and spent it on the war and brought the debt.

American dream, I heard about America, I want a good business. So I am going to America, now all my businesses have collapsed, I have only been able to lay blocks for my house in Ghana.

Bill Clinton’s first trip to Africa was to Ghana in March 1998, where over half a million people gathered to see him at the Independence Square. Ghana then president, Jerry John Rawlings, would reciprocate and visit Washington the next February.

The only Sanders fan to be found here, is a chartered accountant. Moses Mensah explains that “when it comes to economics, his ideas produces better jobs than Clinton’s.” Mr. Mensah who is the New York chairman of the National Democratic Congress party in Ghana, finds that Sanders appeals to his socialist ideas like the NDC’s in Ghana, inherited from the first president Kwame Nkrumah. “Clinton used to be my lady” he explains “but as Sanders came on board, I shifted to this guy.”

When I brought up the question of US-Africa policy, Mr. Mensah nodded:

America has a special foreign policy. They go where they can gain something. They don’t have permanent friends. They have permanent interests. That is the underlying principle of American foreign policy.

To be sure, On the 21st April the Africa America Institute will hold a forum on “Setting U.S. Policy in Africa for the Next U.S. President” with representatives from each campaign and where “congressional leaders, U.S. government officials, policy experts and Members of the African Diplomatic Corps to discuss and propose U.S.-Africa policy priorities for the next Administration.”

But events like this don’t make up for the lack of outreach to the communities here, and perpetuate the problem of overlooking voices and opinions from members of the communities who see a connection between their livelihood here and an ability to contribute back to the continent.

For Bobby Digi, an activist of Nigerian descent involved in Staten Island’s African-American-Caribbean community and the owner of the first African-Diaspora gallery Canvas@Studio150 in the borough, the political outreach and conversations to convince the people in the African community to organize must come from the bottom up.

After attending Bernie Sanders’ rally in Harlem with Harry Belafonte, former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner, Erica Garner (the daughter of Eric Garner, murdered by police), Digi planned on allowing the Sanders campaign to use his gallery space and give them any resources needed to reach the diaspora community there.

Having worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign and as a guest at one of his debates. Digi is one of the few links between the national campaign, and the local communities on the ground.

Sadly, for the majority of people I spoke to, there isn’t the general feeling that there is a permanent interest in the African communities in the U.S. For the amount of attention and organizing looking at electoral democracy in Africa, the effort towards America’s Africans here leaves much to be desired.

Nigeria’s economy is doing like this. It’s blinking, shaking

This week we’re all about Naija. (BTW, the title will make sense by the end of this post.)

(1) Nigeria, like many African countries, relies on the export of a single commodity, oil, to earn foreign exchange. Lately, the gods of oil haven’t been kind to Nigeria (nor to Angola). The price of oil has fallen by about 60% over the last two years throwing the country’s budgeting process into disarray. The government has an expenditure gap of about $11billion that needs filling. The scarcity of foreign exchange (primarily U.S. dollars) means it’s becoming increasingly costly to import foreign goods into Nigeria – including refined petroleum (like you, we too wonder why Nigeria has to re-import the oil that it exports).

(2) It’s also increasingly becoming difficult for the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to continue propping up the value of the Naira, the country’s currency. The IMF wants the CBN to devalue it (i.e. let its value fall versus the U.S. dollar and thereby preserve precious foreign currency). President Buhari’s response has simply been to say “NO!” He worries that a devaluation might lead to an increase in the local price of imported goods with devastating consequences for the poor (and his approval rating). The Naira is trading at more than half its official value in the parallel market.

(3) Nigeria should have put money away when oil prices were high. But it didn’t. And former Minister of Finance Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, whose job was to do the saving, now blames former president Goodluck Jonathan. Jonathan probably thought the price of oil would forever remain high.  Okonjo-Iweala should have known better than to trust the optimism of a guy named Goodluck.   

(4) Anyways, given that help from the IMF is likely to come with conditions (devaluation of the Naira, for example), President Buhari last week travelled to China to seek alternative help. He’s now back in Nigeria and his press secretary claims the visit yielded $6billion worth of investment pledges from China.

(5) The $6billion China is offering won’t require any paperwork. We didn’t make that up. That’s exactly what Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama told Reuters: “It is a credit that is on the table as soon as we identify the projects. It won’t need an agreement to be signed. It is just to identify the projects and we access it.” If only banks were this lenient with everybody. 

(6) One of the more exotic outcomes of the trip was an agreement for a currency swap transaction between Nigeria and China. With the swap, Nigeria will exchange Nairas for the Yuan, China’s currency. The Yuan will now constitute part of Nigeria’s foreign exchange reserves and will “flow freely across banks.”

(7) The swap does make economic sense because Nigeria has a great deal of trade with China. Previously, a Nigerian importing from China would have to buy U.S. dollars and then send these over to China. But with the currency swap, the Nigerian importer can pay their Chinese supplier directly in Yuan putting less pressure on the demand for the already scarce U.S. dollars. This whole swap thing is also beyond our heads, but this piece by Nigerian economist Feyi Fawehinmi was one of the best explainers we read on the internet. Nonso Obikili’s piece is also worth reading.      

(8) Still sticking with Nigeria was this story in The Africa Report about the success of former Lagos State governors Bola Tinubu and Babatunde Fashola in raising tax collections from $4million in 1999 to $100million in later years. That’s a 2,000% increase!  Tinubu and Fashola then used this money to upgrade Lagos State’s infrastructure. So how did Tinubu and Fashola pull it off? Well, by using a company with links to Tinubu to collect taxes on a commission basis. Don’t laugh. It got the job done, right?

(9) The point is African governments need to find innovative and contextually relevant ways of collecting taxes to build effective states – states that provide decent healthcare, education, security, infrastructure, et cetera. African governments collect about 15% of GDP in taxes (compared with about 40% in high-income countries). We are in no way suggesting that the “Tinubu formula” is the way to go about it. But there is something to be said about it being a response to a local reality. A reality in which tax evasion and corruption are pretty widespread.

(10) Finally, our resident economist wishes he was half as eloquent as Nigerian lawmaker Muhammed Kazaure Gudaji in explaining that country’s economic woes (see the video below):

Maestro Sidibé

 

I have never been to Bamako, never been to Malick Sidibé’s studio in that city. In the later years, he would receive visitors, and his son would take their pictures against those famous Sidibé backdrops. But the heyday of the work had been in the 60s and 70s in that post-independence ferment that one also heard in the silvered and world-knowing tunes of the Super Rail Band and Boubacar Traoré, that galaxy of greatness.

The Maestro Sidibé, the Eye of Bamako, was blind in one eye. That is a time-saver for a photographer, to see the world with monocular vision as a camera does. An optical faculty ever-ready to pounce, economical as a cat.

Observe the immediacy of “Regardez-moi!” Could a photograph be more audible than this? This young man of fifty four years ago is full of life, zest, display, and joy, and the Eye of Bamako catches with unerring sympathy that irrepressible presence. Sidibé prised photographic practice from its classic studio precincts, where it had been brought to perfection by Seydou Keïta. They were of the line of great duos that sometimes haunt the arts, Picasso and Matisse, Hokusai and Utamaro. Keïta worked during the day. Sidibé made the night real: parties, dancing, flash photos. He was the obverse, keyed in to the unexpected point of view.

And the stamina! “At night, from midnight to 4 am or 6 am, I went from one party to another. I could go to four different parties. If there were only two, it was like having a rest. But if there were four, you couldn’t miss any. If you were given four invitations, you had to go. You couldn’t miss them.” He drank the full draught, and retained the evidence.

In “Je veux être seule,” a beautiful young woman has asked specifically to be shown without the man who was in the picture. The photographer is at her service, and so the man is dodged away into a ghostly nothing. No questions asked.

Malick Sidibé made many great pictures of African modernity. They will outlive him, and us. He showed us as we were, between the desire for solitude (Je veux être seule) and the wish to be seen and celebrated (Regardez-moi!), between the contained and the exuberant. All of it is there.

I received the sad news today that Malick Sidibé has died, at the age of 80. May his soul rest in peace.

Africa is a Radio: Episode #16

Africa is a Radio is back for April with both classic and contemporary sounds out of Africa and its diaspora.

Tracklist:

1 Ricardo Lemvo – Habari Yako (Rumba Rock)

2 Papa Noel – Bon Samaritain

3 Fuego & Sango – Se Me Nota

4 Wyclef Jean – Leve’l Pi Wo feat. Power Surge

5 Willie Colon – Eso Se Baila Asi (Uproot Andy Remix)

6 Shadow – Killing Me (Subculture Sounds Remix)

7 Hugh Masekela – In the Jungle

8 Carlos Lamertine – O Dipanda Sondo Tula Kia

9 Amara Toure – Salamouti

10 Neg’Marrons – La Voix du Peuple

11 Booba – Validee feat Benash

12 MC Soffia – Menina Pretinha

13 Khuli Chana – Money

14 Serge Beynaud – Okeninkpin

15 Linegras – Malandra

The Power of Prayer

Last week, in a two to one majority decision, judges of the ICC’s Trial Chamber V (a) decided to drop the cases against Kenya’s deputy president William Ruto and former journalist Joshua Arap Sang. Ruto and Sang were charged with crimes against humanity, in the aftermath of the late 2007, early 2008 post-electoral violence in that country that left 1,200 dead and over half a million people displaced.

It is notable that the Chamber declined to acquit the suspects, ruling instead to vacate the charges because the prosecution case had broken down and the evidence available was too weak to convict them if the trial had continued. It’s worth reading the dissenting opinion of Judge Olga Herrera Carbuccia. The presiding judge, Chile Eboe-Osuji, declared a mistrial, citing “serious tainting of the trial process by way of witness interference and political intimidation of witnesses.”  Judge Robert Fremr agreed that:

There was a disturbing level of interference with witnesses, as well as inappropriate attempts at the political level to meddle with the trial and to affect its outcome.

But in Kenya, the details of this ruling are lost amidst the jubilation and celebrations that followed this announcement. The mood here is overwhelmingly that Kenya won, and the ICC lost. Lost in this process, is also the fact that Kenya was never in the dock at the ICC. Six individuals were. Six Kenyan citizens, not Kenya as a state or a nation.

Basically, over the past five years, we went from the “Ocampo Six” to the “Ocampo Zero” (in reference to Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first chief prosecutor of the ICC, and the six individuals he targeted for crimes against humanity). Six individuals were charged with crimes against humanity in relation to the post electoral violence (PEV) of 2007-2008, and in the end, only two of them stood trial. Now the charges against those men have been vacated. This essentially forecloses on any hope for accountability, whether at the ICC or before Kenyan domestic courts.

Upon hearing that he was off the hook, Ruto reacted with a “Hallelujah! God is great! Our God is Faithful,” before adding “My wife snuck out at midnight, to pray for me.” Thousands of supporters of the ruling Jubilee Coalition poured onto the streets to celebrate the final whistle on the Kenyan ICC cases. Joshua Sang has already proclaimed his political ambitions. President Kenyatta has called for a national prayer and thanksgiving rally at the stadium in Nakuru on April 16.

But one would be foolish to believe that this outcome was just delivered by the power of prayers. In fact, over the last few years, the Kenyan state and its leaders have relentlessly obstructed the work of the ICC and undermined the prosecution case. The Kenyan administration has refused to hand documents that the Office of The Prosecutor had said were important to prove the culpability of President Kenyatta. Witnesses have been intimidated, disappeared, and have refused to testify. When forced to appear before the Court, witnesses have recanted their earlier testimonies, saying that they were coached by ICC investigators.

The Kenyan state has also deployed an unprecedented diplomatic offensive against the ICC, enrolling both the African Union and individual African states. But above all, Kenyatta, Ruto and the Kenyan state had won the narrative battle on the ground, here in Kenya. By joining forces, and running on an anti-ICC platform, not only were they able to snatch victory at the 2013 elections, but also convinced the majority of Kenyans, even some victims of the post electoral violence, that the ICC was the enemy.

Over the past three months, I have been conducting interviews across Kenya, about the ICC. At the Nakuru Pipeline IDP camp, Daniel – not his real name – told me, “My own son was pierced by an arrow by one of his classmates. So saying Uhuru and Ruto were the perpetrators is sheer nonsense.” Another man, Samuel said:

An old man like Francis Muthaura, a man of seventy something years, being charged with rape, displacing people? Don’t you think that that was done to irritate people? Charging him with rape and killing people was aimed at annoying the community. That was a way of making the country go into war.

Not everyone needs to understand what command responsibility and being charged as an indirect co-perpetrator means in international law jargon, but if the victims themselves don’t get why is the ICC involved, there is a problem.

Speaking of the ICC proceedings, Daniel added:

All we hear is Witness 1, Witness 5, Witness 19 …What’s that? I asked Bensouda in person when she was here, why they hid the witnesses’ identities. If I was asked to give a statement, I would identify myself … and identify the perpetrators.

In any case, this is a good time for the ICC’s Office of The Prosecutor (known by its initials, OTP) to get into some serious soul searching. From the start, it was clear that Ocampo had engaged in some political calculation and a balancing act, when naming the six suspects. It is not clear it was the actual evidence that lead to the naming of those specific six individuals.

Moreover, had the OTP built its case on material evidence rather than relying mostly on witness testimonies, it would have made the political interference and witness intimidation less lethal to the prosecution case. I was sitting in the court room in The Hague almost two years ago when Judge Eboe-Osuji, visibly annoyed, chastised the prosecution and told them “you need to get your ducks in a row, we expect to see your witnesses lined up here.”

As for Kenya, it is clear now that the page has been turned, the books of accountability for the 2007-2008 PEV have been closed. At the domestic level, virtually no one has been prosecuted for their role in the violence that had engulfed the country. The establishment of the International Crimes division within the Kenyan judiciary did not happen and probably won’t. Even if that court sees the light of the day, it will not address the 2007-2008 violence.

Even more worrisome, the transitional justice process is stalled. Three years after the Truth, Reconciliation, and Justice Commission (TRJC) submitted its 2,000-page report, the Parliament has still not read and debated it, let alone implement its recommendations. Maybe Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto are counting on the power of their prayers to deliver peace in Kenya for the upcoming next year’s elections.

Building a living archive of struggle

Throughout 2015, on our campus outside central Cape Town, we were involved in an uprising around tuition fees, outsourcing and student accommodation. Unlike the elite “white” campuses, such as the nearby University of Cape Town or Stellenbosch, where campus struggles often took on a symbolic form, ours was a struggle against the ongoing marginalization of students and the exploitation of workers at one of South Africa’s historically black universities. This marginalization was apparent in the absence of media coverage of our struggle, until dramatic scenes of police violence played out on national television.

The University of the Western Cape – or UWC as the university is popularly known – mainly serves black (colored and African) students. This is partly a function of its history under apartheid. South Africa inherited a three-tiered university system. Elite, white “liberal” universities at the apex (UCT, Wits), Afrikaner campuses (Stellenbosch, Pretoria) and “historically black” universities (basically campuses constructed by the apartheid regime for specific “ethnic” groups. Throughout the 1970s and 80s the university was known for student resistance against both the apartheid government and Afrikaner senior management and staff. Under the leadership of Jakes Gerwel, the university attempted to transform itself from an apartheid university to “the intellectual home of the left” through the recruitment of radical scholars and intellectuals. In his 1987 inaugural address, Gerwel (later Mandela’s Chief of Staff) outlined the university’s role in the wider political struggle against apartheid:

I am becoming rector at a time when the crisis of authority, the crisis of validity – some people call it the crisis of legitimacy – of the state and the government is not any longer just a theoretical construction but is written in huge letters in every house, every school and every university.

Today we once again find ourselves confronted by a state that is increasingly paranoid, repressive and facing its own crisis of legitimacy. Off-campus the growth of protests against the lack of services, housing shortages and rampant unemployment occurs against a backdrop of corruption, patronage and state capture. Over the last month, we’ve reflected on the dramatic events on our campus, exploring the themes, contradictions, highlights and tensions that emerged and are ongoing. From these reflections we have compiled a report that highlights the experience of students at UWC during the #FeesMustFall struggle and some of the unresolved issues, particularly the question of labor outsourcing.

Students at UWC during its shut down last year. Image Credit: Ashraf Hendricks

Our report draws attention to the differential experiences of students at UWC in a number of ways. First, the spatiality of UWC is such that it is strongly shaped by apartheid geographies of race and class. Located on the edge of Cape Town and surrounded by colored working class neighborhoods, the campus itself was designed to be locked down in the event of protest action. Like South Africa’s townships there are few entry and exit points. The university administration and reactionary elements among the student body also attempted to use socio-spatial divisions between black and colored students to demobilize our movement. Like other campuses the ruling party, the ANC, and its allies used a variety of smear tactics to discredit the intellectual capacity of students, insinuating that we were led by some shadowy “third force.” This apartheid-style paranoia was reinforced by the militarization of our campus by security forces, some of which have direct ties to the old racist regime. Like other working class campuses, our struggle has foregrounded the role of outsourced workers. Interviews with workers reveal that they make poverty-level wages, and commute long hours to work each day. Ours is not a selfish struggle for lower tuition, but one that speaks to the ongoing oppression of black workers across this country.

Our university holds vast archives of the liberation struggle. There is however, a crucial difference between these archives and our report. Ours is a living archive, a document of a struggle that is ongoing, not a dusty memento of struggles gone by, and one that will intensify in the coming years. We are not interested in lionizing heroes or waxing nostalgic. We are developing the theory necessary for a new generation of activists to take the struggle forward.

More than #FeesMustFall–Building a living archive of struggle

Throughout 2015, on our campus outside central Cape Town, we were involved in an uprising around tuition fees, outsourcing and student accommodation. Unlike the elite “white” campuses, such as the nearby University of Cape Town or Stellenbosch, where campus struggles often took on a symbolic form, ours was a struggle against the ongoing marginalization of students and the exploitation of workers at one of South Africa’s historically black universities. This marginalization was apparent in the absence of media coverage of our struggle, until dramatic scenes of police violence played out on national television.

The University of the Western Cape – or UWC as the university is popularly known – mainly serves black (colored and African) students. This is partly a function of its history under apartheid. South Africa inherited a three-tiered university system. Elite, white “liberal” universities at the apex (UCT, Wits), Afrikaner campuses (Stellenbosch, Pretoria) and “historically black” universities (basically campuses constructed by the apartheid regime for specific “ethnic” groups. Throughout the 1970s and 80s the university was known for student resistance against both the apartheid government and Afrikaner senior management and staff. Under the leadership of Jakes Gerwel, the university attempted to transform itself from an apartheid university to “the intellectual home of the left” through the recruitment of radical scholars and intellectuals. In his 1987 inaugural address, Gerwel (later Mandela’s Chief of Staff) outlined the university’s role in the wider political struggle against apartheid:

I am becoming rector at a time when the crisis of authority, the crisis of validity – some people call it the crisis of legitimacy – of the state and the government is not any longer just a theoretical construction but is written in huge letters in every house, every school and every university.

Today we once again find ourselves confronted by a state that is increasingly paranoid, repressive and facing its own crisis of legitimacy. Off-campus the growth of protests against the lack of services, housing shortages and rampant unemployment occurs against a backdrop of corruption, patronage and state capture. Over the last month, we’ve reflected on the dramatic events on our campus, exploring the themes, contradictions, highlights and tensions that emerged and are ongoing. From these reflections we have compiled a report that highlights the experience of students at UWC during the #FeesMustFall struggle and some of the unresolved issues, particularly the question of labor outsourcing.

Students at UWC during its shut down last year. Image Credit: Ashraf Hendricks

Our report draws attention to the differential experiences of students at UWC in a number of ways. First, the spatiality of UWC is such that it is strongly shaped by apartheid geographies of race and class. Located on the edge of Cape Town and surrounded by colored working class neighborhoods, the campus itself was designed to be locked down in the event of protest action. Like South Africa’s townships there are few entry and exit points. The university administration and reactionary elements among the student body also attempted to use socio-spatial divisions between black and colored students to demobilize our movement. Like other campuses the ruling party, the ANC, and its allies used a variety of smear tactics to discredit the intellectual capacity of students, insinuating that we were led by some shadowy “third force.” This apartheid-style paranoia was reinforced by the militarization of our campus by security forces, some of which have direct ties to the old racist regime. Like other working class campuses, our struggle has foregrounded the role of outsourced workers. Interviews with workers reveal that they make poverty-level wages, and commute long hours to work each day. Ours is not a selfish struggle for lower tuition, but one that speaks to the ongoing oppression of black workers across this country.

Our university holds vast archives of the liberation struggle. There is however, a crucial difference between these archives and our report. Ours is a living archive, a document of a struggle that is ongoing, not a dusty memento of struggles gone by, and one that will intensify in the coming years. We are not interested in lionizing heroes or waxing nostalgic. We are developing the theory necessary for a new generation of activists to take the struggle forward.

The Radical Historian

Until the 1970s, South African historiography – on elite, white English-speaking campuses – was dominated by liberal historians. These historians traced South Africa’s history of racism to the frontier settled by Dutch descendants, refusing any links to British imperialism, even as they had begun to integrate Africans into their histories. A group of mostly young, white and radical South African historians based in Britain broke this hold by the liberals on the academy and historical analysis.

Known as revisionists, these historians questioned the assumption that modern South African racism constituted a hangover from the frontier encounter of the Boers with Bantu-speaking peoples. They offered a materialist analysis. In their work, they linked the rise of segregation and formalized state racism to the “mineral revolution” of the late 19th century, the penetration of Southern Africa by British capital and imperialism and the accompanying growth of the migrant labor system. Post-1948 apartheid, they insisted, was an adaptation and refinement of previous patterns of racial segregation rooted in the migrant labor system. The revisionists made connections between apartheid and post-war capitalism, in the process offering an alternative to the liberal faith that economic development would erode racial domination.

One of the most important of these revisionist historians was Martin Legassick, a former Rhodes scholar who did his PhD at UCLA with the pre-eminent liberal South African scholar, Leonard Thompson. By the 1970s, he was back teaching in the UK (he couldn’t return to South Africa because of his anti-apartheid activity). At the end of February this year, Legassick passed away in Cape Town.

I first met Martin when I travelled to South Africa in 2000 to serve as a Fulbright scholar at the University of the Western Cape. At UWC, I was assigned to co-convene a post-graduate seminar on comparative US and South African history with Martin and Mohamed Adhikari, a historian of colonial and early 19th-century Cape Town. Sixteen years later, my understanding of South Africa’s past remains deeply imprinted with Martin’s approach, theoretical framework and political commitments – all quite inseparable as anyone who knew him will attest.

Martin had an ability to conjoin rigorous scholarship with full political engagement. In the time I was at UWC, Martin placed his forensic research skills at the service of dispossessed people in the Northern Cape who sought to reclaim land stolen from them by apartheid and colonialism. This, I thought, was exactly what left historians should do with their talents. But Martin’s talent and legacy is much more than after-hours political activism.

My lengthy discussions – and on occasion, disagreements – with Martin, both inside and outside the classroom, forced me to rethink many of my  assumptions about the now ruling ANC, the Communist Party (the SACP), and so-called “two-stage revolution” in South Africa (first nationalism, then socialism). Martin’s political interventions of the 1980s as an exiled activist constituted, in their own way, an important rethinking of the trajectory of the anti-apartheid movement. After our seminars, I often found myself in the library perusing back issues of the journal Martin and his comrades in the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC produced during that crucial era, Inqaba ya Basebenzi [Workers’ Fortress]. In those pages, I found the kernel of the analysis that later made Martin such an astute critic of the post-apartheid order: the need for the political autonomy of a working-class movement.

Those ideas, advanced with great force and clarity in the last decade of his life both in historical scholarship and political activism, made more sense than ever as the ANC consummated its embrace of neoliberalism and crony capitalism. Martin had recognized before many that as a national liberation movement the ANC had long privileged a rising bourgeoisie over the liberation of the Black working class. Moreover, as a dedicated Trotskyist, he had always rejected the Communist Party’s insistence on the subordination of revolutionary trade unions to its infallible leadership – a view shared by many on the anti-Stalinist left. Finally, during the 1980s, Martin and his comrades insisted that an organic workers’ movement inside South Africa – not the SACP from exile or a quixotic armed struggle – would serve as the battering ram against both apartheid and capitalism. His most recent writings on South African labor and socialist history have offered mountains of evidence upholding the possibility of this missed opportunity.

When I first met Martin, all of this translated into a very specific political position: the only hope for the South African working class was a break with the Alliance, and the creation of an independent workers’ movement that could fight for socialism. In 2000 the emergence of an independent trade union movement looked like a very remote possibility. Yet, at the close of Martin’s life that development now looks like a promising prospect. It is a damn shame that Martin will not be here to witness it, to help push it along and to explain it to the rest of us.

On a final note, in November 2000, I conducted an interview with Martin that was published in Radical History Review. The journal and its publishers, Duke University Press, have made review of the interview public at Africa is a Country’s request. It’s worth revisiting. You can access it here.

The #PanamaPapers are everywhere…

And this week we’ll spend sometime talking about them. First up, however, we’ve got some nice things to say about a conference held in Addis Ababa (31 March-5 April).

(1) The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), a progressive organization based in Addis and a favorite of ours, held its annual Africa Development Conference this past week. The conference brings together policymakers, academics and other development experts. Attendees are largely African-based and the topics of discussion, because of this, tend to be rooted in African realities.

This year was no different – the main discussion point was how to get the continent to industrialize. If you follow this series, you’ll know we’ve talked about the importance industrialization before on Africa is a Country (see here and here).

(2) One of the highlights of the conference is the delivery of the Annual Adedeji Lecture named after Professor Adebayo Adedeji, a Nigerian economist who headed the ECA in the 1970s and a fascinating personality.

This year’s lecture was delivered by Professor Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge University and buster-in-chief of myths about the glorious wonders of capitalism. Professor Chang has spent a good part of his academic career dispelling fairytales like the one suggesting that the rise of his native South Korea (and that of the other East Asian Tigers) is wholly attributable to the magic of “free markets.”

The organizers of the lecture could not have picked a better candidate to honor Professor Adedeji than Professor Chang.

(3) The title of Professor Chang’s lecture was “The Industrialization Imperative: Why does Africa still have to industrialize?”. The lecture is based on a 190 page report that Chang has prepared for the ECA that we are still swallowing. We hope to do a full blog post once we’ve digested it.

The long and short of Professor Chang’s lecture is that African governments need to resuscitate the usage of “Industrial Policy” in growing industry. By “Industrial Policy,” Chang is advocating for a greater role for the state in planning for industry–using trade barriers to protect “infant industries,” providing subsidies to strategic sectors and state provision of large-scale infrastructure. By the way, and as Chang reminds us, this is precisely how that so-called bastion of capitalism, the United States, industrialized.

The entire lecture is on YouTube and the lecture slides are downloadable here (scroll to the bottom).

(4) Also launched at the conference was “The Measuring Corruption in Africa” report that indicts the many perceptions-based corruption indices that the cognoscenti like to spout (something we’ve talked about before here and here). Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary of the report:   

The current predominantly perceptions-based measures of corruption are flawed and fail to provide a credible assessment of the dimensions of the problem in Africa…The present report calls upon African countries and partners to move away from purely perceptions-based measures of corruption and to focus instead on approaches to measuring corruption that are fact-based and built on more objective quantitative criteria.

This is diplomatic speak for: “Please throw all those perceptions-based indices in the rubbish bin.”

(5) Relatedly, and a nice segue into the Panama Papers, is this story about Gonzalo Delaveau, the former president of the Chilean branch of Transparency International. Delaveau was forced to resign this week after the leaks showed he was connected to at least five offshore tax evading companies.   

Delaveau, as president, must have been intimately involved in the production of Transparency International’s flagship Corruptions Perceptions Index.

(6) The release of the Panama Papers has confirmed what many of us already know about the tax dodging habits of the global elite. We aren’t surprised to see David Cameron’s name come up. Nor are we surprised to see Africans on the list. But the apparent absence of Americans has led some to conclude that this says something about the high ethical standards of the American brand of capitalism. Here’s Megan McArdle writing for Bloomberg:

What we’ve seen from the [Panama] papers so far is not so much an indictment of global capitalism as an indictment of countries that have weak institutions and a lot of corruption. And for all the outrage in the United States, so far the message for us is pretty reassuring: We aren’t one of those countries.

Yes, she wrote that.

(7) Sorry to shutter Ms McArdle’s fairytale: Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley and the world’s leading expert on tax havens tells us that the Panama papers are only a tip of the iceberg. It would be folly to make generalizations on such a tiny sample (Statistics 101).

Further, Zucman estimates that about 4% of U.S wealth is held offshore in tax havens. In the same way that we at Africa Is A Country have a taste for Malawian tea (sorry Kenya), U.S evaders tend to prefer to hide their stash in Bermuda, Cayman Islands or Singapore.  

(8) And let’s not forget that the U.S is itself increasingly becoming a tax haven of choice.

(9) How to make sense of the fact that Nigeria, Africa’s largest producer of crude oil, is currently facing a grave shortage of petrol?  

(10) Hustling for fuel has become such a nightmare that our Nigerian friend, Olumayowa Okediran, uploaded the picture to the left onto Facebook with the following update: “I feel like a king. Fuel is bae”. Things ain’t good when fuel becomes your bae.       

(11) Finally, how to make sense of the fact that Nigeria, a country that recently misplaced $16billion, is set to borrow $2billion from China?

To paraphrase that Briton whose name we don’t like to mention: Nigeria is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

 

Weekend Music Break No.93

Welcome back to our Music Break, after it took a bit of a break itself. Enjoy this selection of tunes from around the African diaspora, and beyond.

This week, we kick off with Afrikan Boy and his latest video for his song “Kunta Kinte”; then, Eazzy brings the neo-Alkaida Hiplife vibes via Ghana; Tanzania’s Vanessa Mdee goes neo-Soukous Afrobeats style with “Niroge”; and Temi DollFace rounds out our Afrobeats section with School Your Face. Off to the Francophone world where Collectif Bassam brings Coupe Decale uplifment vibes after the March attack by extremists on their beach in Cote d’Ivoire; Uganda via London’s Michael Kiwanuka travels to LA, channels Mississippi, and contemplates being a “Black Man in a White World”; then, Africa is a Country favorite Badi performs “Na Lingi Yo” on the Dan Late Show to great effect. Bahrain via London psychedelic rock act Flamingods give us insight into a cultural side of Dubai that is not only often overlooked, but difficult to see in their video for “Rhama”; and we round it out with some cool Latin vibes — joining in the Cuba fever sweeping the former Western Bloc nations with Alexander Abreu y Havana D’Primera’s “Me dicen Cuba”; and Paulo Mac on his sweet Kizomba tune “Perfeita Demais”. Enjoy!