Volume 34 2007 Issue

Review of African Political Economy No. 114:613-618 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2007 Class, Resistance & Social Transformation Ray Bush Much has already be made in the post-Africa Commission years of the over-weening optimism regarding growth and development in Africa.. The continent, we are now regularly reminded, can indeed claim the 21st century. After all, isn’t average per capita growth improving, trade in raw materials once more booming and stability returning to a once unstable and violent continent? Yet despite the pop-star hype and the G8 announcements of policy for Africa, we know all too clearly that the Millennium Developments Goals (a much used but inappropriate measure of ‘development’) will not be met in the poorest of continents. The real overall gross domestic product rate of growth of 5.7 per cent in 2006 may have been better than that recorded in Latin America. Yet continued external debt of about $250 billion remains. It is like a rock around the necks of Africa’s poor and the conditionality it engenders prevents even the few enlightened governments from reducing poverty and promoting sustainable and autonomous development. The reality that the whole of sub-Saharan Africa has an income of not much more than Belgium, blights prospects for human development now and prevents any opportunity to generate growth with social justice from domestically available savings and investment. Forty-five per cent of the continent live on less than $1 a day with a target for 2015 of just 22 per cent living in such misery. Would that continued suffering be something to be proud of? One-third of Africa’s people are undernourished and rates of stunting are around 40 per cent. The West’s repeated mantra to ‘save’ Africa is to try and integrate the continent more fully into the world economy – an economy that has generated the uneven incorporation of the continent in the first place. One thing is clear, the handwringing by western leaders and by African politicians intent on capturing the crumbs of aid, debt relief and expanded trade will not, under the circumstances of existing capitalism, deliver sustained growth and justice in Africa. Many in Africa realise this. The smoke and mirrors of NEPAD, the AU and failure to promote poverty reduction, justice and redistribution of scarce resources for sustainable development is well known. And the struggle against western donors and African officials is expanding dramatically. Of course just what this opposition means, how it can oppose capitalist development and promote an alternative that is not barbarous is often mute. Yet the resistances that are evident and the struggles that do shape political programmes and economic alternatives need to be explored more fully, in Africa and beyond. Resistance is at fever pitch in the Niger Delta. It is opposition to international oil companies and Nigerian state collusion with exploitation in the region. It is opposition to corrupt local politicians and leaders and it is driven significantly by the youth. The young in Africa are so much neglected in debates about the ISSN 0305-6244 Print/1740-1720 Online/07/040613-06 DOI: 1080/03056240701819475 614 Review of African Political Economy continent’s future and about their felt needs rather than those of ‘traditional’ leaders intent on seeking benefits of spoils and proximity to the agents driving exploitation – companies, donors and officials. Michael Watts in this issue of ROAPE explores the many different dimensions to Nigeria’s oil complex, directing us to a close examination of the Nigerian state’s role. Elsewhere this issue examines the way in which the ‘development state’ in South Africa is making a comeback, although this is without the active involvement of the majority of black South Africans able to set and enforce an agenda around justice and equality. Instead, as Freund documents, while the ANC’s embedded elite have many records of important achievement they are unable, or unwilling, to deliver radical improvements in the life chances and opportunities of South Africa’s poor and historically dispossessed. Freund uses comparisons with Malaysia to examine the efficacy of policies in South Africa that drive ‘Black Economic Empowerment’. While he concludes that different sectors of the black population have clearly benefited from BEE the majority have not. It is an important time to ask questions of the developmental state. Just what might it mean in the contemporary period? What might its new social base look like, might there even be an ‘African model’ to drive alternatives to existing capitalism in the 21st century? Can progressive forces prevent the state from being hijacked by neo- liberal advocates, many of whom are now at least rhetorically keen to revisit ‘poverty’ and ‘the poor’ using a human face? It is clear that the familiar declarations by international agencies, donors and others that Africa is set for sustained growth, cautiously embrace the need for state social safety netting – as long as the developmental state does not impede private capital accumulation. There is political space here for resistance, to mount campaigns revisiting what it is that the state can, and should deliver and how decisions about state intervention are decided upon democratically. It is also important, of course, to open up the agenda of whether, and under what circumstances, the state can match the power of international capital in determining national strategies for development with justice. Nielsen in this issue asks important questions of just how such opposition or resistance to ‘dysfunctional’ states might emerge. In a challenging debate about neo- patrimonialism, or the pathologising of African politics, Nielsen argues that poor and ineffectual or incoherent state practices do not automatically mean that states lose their legitimacy. They can moreover, remain vehicles for socialism. He notes how people in Mozambique generate their views of the state to define their entitlements to it and to evaluate the efficacy of state and donor driven agendas. This has the consequence, he argues, of establishing opportunity for critique of the mainstream, as ideas about the state can become the basis for social action and form elements of the critique of the state itself and also donor policy and intervention. Zimbabwe may be viewed as a dysfunctional state par excellence in terms of the damage that Mugabe’s regime has brought in its wake. Alternatively it has been effective in securing the interests of high ranking military commanders, party henchmen and other clients. It has done this by strategies of capital accumulation locally and in the southern African region with intervention in Congo. Henning Melber’s short briefing in this issue raises fundamental issues at the heart of struggles in Zimbabwe for the reintroduction of the rule of law, human rights and the ability to promote criticism and political debate. Denied the right to deliver his briefing in person to a meeting in Zimbabwe, Melber demonstrates why criticism of Editorial: Class, Resistance & Social Transformation 615 Mugabe and his regime is neither nor necessarily part of an imperialist agenda. Instead he reminds us that the struggles for basic rights in contemporary Zimbabwe are similar to the struggles fought during national liberation. This is because they are struggles around, and conflicts between those with power and wealth and those without it. Views on struggles internal to the state, factional conflict within the ruling party and attempts locally to develop a post-Mugabe development agenda cannot be dominated by the regional superpower, South Africa, or imperial forces of the UK/EU, US or China. A major struggle in Africa will inevitably be how to ensure that the outcome of local struggles in Zimbabwe do not create conditions for the demise of sovereignty and opportunity for development agendas shaped by local democratic struggles. One line of resistance to Mugabe has been the exodus of Zimbabwe’s citizens. Many have gone to South Africa and many as farm workers to the South Africa’s northern border with Zimbabwe. The changing position of these farm workers is documented here by Rutherford and Addison. Their work also exemplifies one of the dimensions of social and economic policy that confronts the ANC government in South Africa. They look at the harsh conditions that Zimbabweans escape to in northern South Africa. While the neo-liberal restructuring of agriculture and paternalistic rule is harsh and arduous, the labour regime in the border zone also creates a ‘state of exception’ where farm workers establish new patterns of survival and resistance. The question nevertheless needs to be raised: how effective is this ‘exit resistance’? What is learnt and mobilised politically, as well as economically through the life- line of remittances, and how do experiences in ‘exile’ serve to generate progressive political consciousness about reform and transformation inside Zimbabwe? These patterns of survival and resistance in southern Africa and the forms that they may take elsewhere on the continent need to be recorded and understood in terms of the relationship between opportunities for struggle and transformation on the continent. This theme is central to this journal. We welcome contributions that explore the dynamics of contemporary resistance and the character of obstacles and opportunities that protagonists in struggle have. This also involves the importance of theoretical and empirical analysis to ascertain which struggles in

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