When Mwalimu was mistaken: Nyerere’s failure to read Africa’s political-economic future By Patrick Bond (December 2010) Can it be that a man many justly consider the most important African nationalist leader, a regional visionary, a global humanist, a humble democrat who relinquished power to a successor no questions asked, and a profound force for good in the post-colonial era, would soften towards traditional enemies near the end of his life? It would be logical, but if those enemies took advantage of Nyerere’s lapse to gain unwarranted credibility, how might one draw attention to his mistake without sounding petty or ultraleftist? By the time of his death, at least three huge problems - residual Northern imperialism, South African subimperialism and control of African states by venal elites (often using nationalist rhetoric in the manner predicted by Fanon, 1961) – had become so vast that Mwalimu Julius Nyerere apparently could no longer comprehend them, and decided to downplay the threats, to the extreme detriment of Tanzania and indeed the continent. It is striking to reconsider arguments made over a decade ago, when Africa was being sucked into the global capitalist circuitries faster than ever and needed a strong political backbone, of the sort that Nyerere had so often provided in the liberation era and the 1980s with his critiques of Northern power and African dictatorships. One of the most important speeches given to the new democratic parliament in Cape Town was in October 1997. Nyerere and Nelson Mandela were probably the greatest African political figures alive. For the one to tell the other that it was time for South African corporate investment because democracy was flourishing and the world geopolitical situation was much improved, was a U-turn from prior critical thinking, no matter Nyerere’s protestations to the contrary. Any notions of imperialism or neocolonialism that we might once have used to describe power relations were apparently no longer relevant to Nyerere (1997): My thoughts, unfortunately, dont change, so a lot of what I am going to say some of you will have heard before, but some of you have not. I am going to say two things about Africa. One, that Africa south of the Sahara is an isolated region of the world. Ending Africa’s ‘isolation’ This theme excited the neoliberal bloc in the new South African government, especially deputy president Thabo Mbeki, finance minister Trevor Manuel (who was then embarking on financial liberalization to make Johannesburg’s Sandton financial district the preferred destination of ‘hot money’ fleeing African capitals), and trade minister Alec Erwin (who was a ‘Friend of the Chair’ within the most exploitative World Trade Organisation meetings in subsequent years). Nyerere bought into a fiction, namely that Sub-Saharan Africa was not sufficiently globalised. In reality, there was no other region of the world with a higher ratio of trade to Gross Domestic Product. Four years later, in the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) (2001, 2), Mbeki (the document’s main author) put the argument in similar terms: The poverty and backwardness of Africa stand in stark contrast to the prosperity of the developed world. The continued marginalisation of Africa from the globalisation process and the social exclusion of the vast majority of its peoples constitute a serious threat to global stability. In Fanon’s Warning: A Civil Society Reader on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, a group of us wrote back to deconstruct these two sentences: The automatic presumption is that the poverty and backwardness of Africa are as a result of exclusion and marginalisation from globalisation. A different presumption, not even considered, is that mass poverty is an intrinsic feature of globalisation, generated within the logic of the system, much as it was a corollary of apartheid in South Africa (Bond, 2005, 96). The uneven development of Africa, through which some sites grow richer because others grow poorer, is a long-standing matter of research. This is not a return to 1960s dependency theory, but an acknowledgement that certain accumulation processes establish superexploitative practices. The attraction and repulsion of migrant labour These exploitative practices don’t simply ‘change’ because the location of production or employment of labour changes, a point Nyerere (1997) failed to grasp when considering US-Mexico and West Europe-East Europe-North Africa migrancy relations: The United States had decided to change its policy. They have invited Mexico to join NAFTA, and now they are working together to create jobs in Mexico to prevent poor Mexicans from looking for jobs in the United States. I think they will succeed and Mexicans will now want to remain in Mexico. Some will still want to go to the United States, but the flood can be stemmed. There will not be a flood of Mexicans going to the United States. What is happening between Mexico and the US is happening in Europe. Europe is a powerhouse -- not a political powerhouse or even a military power house like the US, but an economic powerhouse, and one of these days, I think, they are actually going to be a bigger powerhouse than USA. They are a power and are attracting people: again there is osmosis there, the economic osmosis. Who are pulled there? East Europeans are pulled towards Europe. But the others who are pulled towards the economic power are from Mediterranean Africa, Africa north of the Sahara. That is why I was talking about Africa south of the Sahara being the isolated region in the world. So Eastern Europe and Mediterranean Africa are to Europe what Mexico is to the US. For Nyerere (1997), ‘the logic of geography’ and the migration from poorer to wealthier countries means that the latter’s ruling classes will try to keep them out. They will not try to keep them out by building fences or putting up another wall. They will try to help East Europeans to stay at home by creating jobs in Eastern Europe, and they are already doing that. They will do the same with regard to the Africans of North Africa. Uneven development meant that what Nyerere mistook for a lasting trend – the brief rise of Mexican maquilladores (border factories that began generating large manufacturing output) – was just a moment in the construction of a fluid global assembly line where power of location was determined by footloose capital. By the early 2000s, Mexican border industries began losing hundreds of thousands of jobs to China, and the flood of Mexicans to the US continued apace. As for Europe, consider the analysis by Slavoj Zizek at a time, October 2005, when North Africans were expelled from the Moroccan-Spanish border at Granada by lethal force, and the supposedly progressive Zapatero government in Madrid announced it would build the equivalent of Israel’s notorious apartheid wall at the border: A couple of years ago, an ominous decision of the EU passed almost unnoticed: a plan to establish an all-European border police force to secure the isolation of the Union territory, so as to prevent the influx of the immigrants. This is the truth of globalization: the construction of new walls safeguarding the prosperous Europe from a flood of immigrants… The segregation of the people is the reality of economic globalization. This new racism of the developed world is in a way much more brutal than the previous one. Its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the ‘natural’ superiority of the developed West) nor culturalist (we in the West also want to preserve our cultural identity). Rather, it’s an unabashed economic egotism - the fundamental divide is the one between those included into the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it. Contrary to Nyerere’s optimism, the harsh reality is that racism and xenophobia have increased dramatically in Europe and the US since 1997. From Arizona to Denmark to France to Switzerland to the United Kingdom and many other sites inbetween, resistance to immigration by right-wing populists and religious bigots has been extremely influential in generating state policy and legislation, as well as the consciousness of the North’s labour aristocracy. The parallels to South Africa are unmistakable, with the long-standing xenophobia of SA rulers (dating to Jan Smuts but also including the xenophobia-denialist Mbeki) as well as working class and poor populations together turning deadly in May-June 2008, when more than 60 people were killed in pogroms. (In July-August 2010 the problem reoccurred though with far fewer deaths, thanks to police and army blankets in hot spots.) Shortly before Nyerere’s speech to parliament, a speech was given to the same body by a Zulu regional leader who often turned to SA’s version of right-wing populism, namely macho-traditionalist ethnicism, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was then Minister of Home Affairs: With an illegal population estimated at between 2.5 million and 5 million, it is obvious that the socio-economic resources of the country, which are under severe strain as it is, are further being burdened by the presence of illegal aliens… [citizens should] aid the Department and the South African Police Services in the detection, prosecution and removal of illegal aliens from the country… the cooperation of the community is required in the proper execution of the Department’s functions (Buthelezi cited in Crush, 2008, 17-18). Nyerere (1997) completely missed the growing crisis of xenophobia in subimperial South Africa, as he missed it in the imperialist US and Europe. In the SA parliament, he argued, Africa south of the Sahara is different - completely different. Its not in the orbit of any of those big areas. If you people here are unemployed, very few of you will want to go to the US. The unemployed here will stay here. But so will unemployed in Tanzania. Here Nyerere fails to contemplate the pull from a South Africa whose capitalist class both deindustrialised Southern Africa during the structural adjustment era, especially after 1994 when Johannesburg capital could more readily move up-continent, and drew in a vast reserve army of labour from the region to raise the relative return to capital (Bond 2006). Consider the admission of self-interest by First National Bank chief economist Cees Bruggemann, regarding Southern African workers, at the height of the xenophobic violence: ‘They keep the cost of labour down... Their income gets spent here because they do not send the money back to their countries’ (Comins 2008). Many migrant workers didn’t send back remittances to Dar es Salaam (because their SA wages are low and the cost of living soared since 1994), and this in turn reminds us of how apartheid drew cheap labour from Bantustans: for many years women were coerced into supplying unpaid services - child-rearing, healthcare and eldercare for retirees - so as to reproduce fit male workers for the mines, factories and plantations. It’s in part because because of South African subimperialism that this factor of labour pull has become so important. Imperialism, the International Monetary Fund and their helpers Nyerere (1997) seemed not to grasp this problem in his parliamentary address: I think, to some extent the urge of imperialism has gone. So you could easily be forgotten… Africa south of the Sahara is isolated. Africa south of the Sahara, in the world today, is on its own -- totally on its own. Thats the first thing I wanted to say. The second thing I wanted to say is that Africa is changing… We went through a neocolonial period in Africa. It nearly destroyed all the hopes of the struggle for the liberation of the continent, with a bunch of soldiers taking over power all over the continent, pushed, instigated and assisted by the people who talk about this stereotype of Africa… According to Nyerere (1997), the dictator installed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Belgium and the US Central Intelligence Agency, Mobutu Sese Seko, was the worst of the lot. He loots the country, he goes out, and he leaves that country with a debt of US$14 billion. That money has done nothing for the people of Congo. So I sit down with friends of the World Bank and IMF. I say, You know where that money is. Are you going to ask Kabila to tax the poor Congolese to pay that money? That would be a crime. Its criminal. And that was the type of leadership we had over a large part of Africa. They were leaders put there either by the French or by the Americans. When we had the Cold War, boy, I tell you, we couldnt breathe. But Africa is changing. Unfortunately, not. In 2002, a deal was done between elites in Pretoria, Kinshasa and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, illustrative of Nepad. According to a press statement following a South African Cabinet (2002) meeting: The meeting noted the provision by South Africa of a bridge loan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) 75 million (about R760 million). This will help clear the DRC’s overdue obligations with the IMF and allow that country to draw resources under the IMF Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility. What this meant was that the earlier generation of corrupt IMF loans made to Mobuto would be codified by Pretoria. In an earlier era, residents of the DRC were victims of Pretoria’s apartheid-era allegiance with Mobuto, an arrangement that especially suited ecology-destroying mineral extraction corporations headquartered in Johannesburg. The new ‘changed’ era simply replaced the old-guard of apartheid with Pretoria’s new black elite, but this process of sanitizing the Mobutu debt now allowed IMF staff back into Kinshasa with their own new loans, and with neoliberal conditionalities again applied. The same day’s South African Cabinet (2002) announcement from Pretoria also revealed that SA would generously fund the World Bank’s main lending subsidiary for impoverished African countries, on behalf of a special constituency: Cabinet approved South Africa’s contribution to the replenishment of the resources of the [Bank-subsidiary] International Development Association (IDA), to the tune of R83 million. This amount, which would be drawn down over a nine‑year period, would benefit our private sector, which would be eligible to bid for contracts financed from these resources. Here we find underway the recapitalisation and legitimisation of perhaps the most hated, powerful institutions in Africa, the IMF and World Bank, with Pretoria politicians running cover for both Washington financial bureaucrats and Johannesburg capitalists. Similar IDA loans had recently gone to Lesotho, for example. At the precise moment Pretoria was seeking expanded IDA-based contracts for South African businesses across Africa, the courts in Maseru were preparing to prosecute a range of foreign firms, including several from Johannesburg, for bribing the head of the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority. The World Bank, whose loans had made the bribes possible, had declared itself uninterested in pursuing the bribers beyond a middleman or two. Pretoria had many opportunities to police its own firms and the multinationals by barring them from contracts, but made no moves to do so. Nyerere’s democratic Africa As a result of South African subimperialism, this second aspect of Nyerere’s (1997) message to the parliament, namely that Africa was democratizing, can be looked on with equal skepticism: You can make a map of Africa and just look at the countries stretching from Eritrea to here. Just draw a line and see all those countries. You still have a Somalia and a Burundi there, but its a very different kind of Africa now, it has elected governments, it has confident governments. Actually, most of those countries with the exception of Uganda, have never been under military rule. Never! And since your coming onto the scene, this is completely different kind of Africa. The harsh reality is that since 1994, while there was an upsurge of rhetoric about a new generation of allegedly democratic rulers who would leave power peacefully, as did Nyerere, Mandela and even Mbeki, much of the continent remained under the thumb of venal elites. One example might be Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister of Ethiopia, a man who conspired with George W. Bush to invade Somalia in 2007 with the connivance of Mbeki; this, after the senseless war over a strip of sandy land on the Eritrean border between 1988-2000 killed at least 70 000 combatants and civilians. According to the lobby group Ethiopian Americans for Justice (2009), Zenawi’s government hosted the ‘African Guantanamo,’ participating in the illegal kidnapping, imprisonment and torture of Africans. In return for its services for the ‘war on terror’, the Bush Administration rewarded the Zenawi group both financially and diplomatically. Most importantly, the Bush administration looked the other way when Ethiopia’s rulers stole elections, tortured and killed many innocent people… Mr. Zenawi stole the 2005 elections, destroyed all opposition, muffled the press, banned advocacy for human rights and made a mockery out of the rule of law. Following the elections, his troops shot and killed 193 people who protested electoral fraud, massacred innocents in Gambella and the Ogaden. They had also bombed civilians in Somalia on many occasions. Mr. Zenawi’s government has been one of the worst violators of human rights in Africa. Zenawi was unanimously chosen as Chairperson of Nepad in 2007 and also as Chairperson of the Committee of Heads of State and Government of Countries Participating in the African Peer Review Mechanism. In early 2009 he pushed the Charities and Societies Proclamation law, ‘designed to strictly control and monitor civil society in an atmosphere of intolerance of the work of human rights defenders and civil society organisations’, according to Amnesty International (2009). South African subimperialism Finally, the question of South Africa in the region also came up in Nyerere’s (1997) parliamentary speech: When we were struggling here, South Africa still under apartheid, and you being a destabiliser of your neighbours instead of working together with them to develop our continent, of course that was a different thing. It was a terrible thing. Here was a powerful South Africa, and this power was a curse to us. It was not a blessing for us. We wished it away, because it was not a blessing at all. It destroyed Angola with a combination of apartheid; it was a menace to Mozambique and a menace to its neighbours, but that has changed. South Africa is democratic. South Africa is no longer trying to destroy the others. South Africa is now working with the others. And, boy please work with the others! And dont accept this nonsense that South Africa is big brother. My brother, you cant be big brother… So this is a different Africa. I am saying that this Africa now is changing. Neocolonialism is being fought more effectively, I think, with a new leadership in Africa. And I believe the one region which can lead this fight is our region. With the end of apartheid and South Africa having joined SADC, this area of Africa is a very solid area. It is an extremely solid area. It is strong, it has serious leaders and these leaders know one another… dont be isolated from the rest of Africa. What you build here because of your infrastructure and the relative strength of your economy, you are building for all of us here. In another address, at his 75th birthday celebrations at the University of Dar es Salaam a few weeks later, Nyerere (2000, 23-24) expanded upon this theme: Post-apartheid South Africa has the most developed and the most dynamic private sector in the continent. It is white, so what? So forget it is white, it is South African, dynamic, highly developed. If the investors of South Africa begin a new form of trekking, you have to accept it. It will be ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous, for Africans to go out to seek investment from North America, from Japan, from Europe, from Russia, and then, when investors come from South Africa to invest in your country you say, a! a! These fellows now want to take over our economy – this is nonsense. You can’t have it both ways. You want foreign investors or you don’t want foreign investors. Now, the most available foreign investors for you are those from South Africa… So, if your South Africa is going to be your engine of development, accept the reality, accept the reality, don’t accept this nonsense of sovereignty, South Africa will reduce your sovereignty… What sovereignty do you have. Many of these debt-ridden countries in Africa have no sovereignty, they’ve lost it [to IMF & the World Bank]… I believe the South Africans will be sensitive enough to know that if they are not careful there is going to be the resentment of big brother, but that big brother, frankly, is not very big. It was this green light from Nyerere that helped empower Mbeki’s Nepad and APRM projects, both destined to veil neocolonial ‘globalisation’ as somehow ‘homegrown’ (Bond, 2005, 2009). Though there was heated debate at Nyerere’s December 1997 conference on this point (Bond 2000, Othman 2000), the destructiveness of South African mining, banking and brewery capital in Tanzania is something for others to remark upon. But suffice to say, South African capital took the opportunity offered by Pretoria’s exchange control relaxations during the 1990s to relocate the largest firms’ primary stock market listings from Johannesburg and Cape Town to London, Melbourne and New York. That meant all the major mining houses (Anglo, DeBeers, Gencor/BHP Billiton), two of the three largest insurance firms (Old Mutual and Liberty Life) and fifth largest bank, Investic), the monopolist brewer (SABMiller), and other capitalists ran away from Africa, in terms of exported profits. This left South Africa with the largest current account deficit in the emerging markets and led The Economist (25 February 2009) to name South Africa as the riskiest of 17 peer economies. The outflow of resources unforeseen by Nyerere would now start from the meager savings of Tanzania’s poor and working people and the country’s natural resources, to Dar es Salaam and Arusha branch-plant operations, to Sandton’s continental financial export platform, and finally to London, just as always but now ‘changed’. Nyerere’s great leadership on so many aspects of geopolitics, nation-building and post-tribalism, regional solidarity and international development critique had, by his 75th year, reached the limits of Pan-African consciousness. His failure to see South Africa as a lubricator of imperialism and exploitative force is, as in so many offerings from Mwalimu, an unforgettable lesson – but this one not to be emulated.
Posted on: Wed, 14 May 2014 17:12:53 +0000
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