Volume 22 1995 Issue 64
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Review of African Political Economy No.64:147-150 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 1995 ISSN 0305-6244; RIX #6401 Democracy, Development and Defence Chris Allen This issue returns to several themes which have been the concern of this Review since its foundation: democratisation, popular organisation, agrarian policy and (post)apartheid South Africa. Democracy and Civil Society From its inception, the contemporary debate on democratisation has focused on three themes: the viability of democratic transformation, the role of external forces, and the role of civil society. As Eghosa Osaghae argues in his contribution, the debate has been narrowed and effectively undermined by failing to see the present struggles for democratisation as part of a long history of such struggles, and by viewing the present instead as a discrete episode in African politics. Part of the reason for this lies in the imputed role of civil society in democratisation. For most writers, and especially for those unaware of the history of this concept, 'civil society' consists of those private (non-state) organisations that (within each one's limited sphere of competence) mediate their members' relations with each other, with other organisations and with the state. There has been such an extraordinary growth in these organisations in the last ten years, and they have been so visible within democratic struggles (see ROAPE 54) that it has often been assumed that they constitute the driving force behind what is taken to be a process of democratisation. It has also been assumed, as Bjorn Beckman points out in ROAPE 58, that civil society seeks to 'liberate itself from the suffocating grip of the state', and thus has the same project as that claimed by neo-liberal international institutions and neo-liberal academics. Rather than take it for granted that civil society underpins democratisation, we must examine whether, why and how it may come to do this (and in what if any sense this capacity and function has changed since the period around Independence). Beckman and Jega tackle this question by examining the recent history of two Nigerian organisations, representing students and university teachers. They demonstrate how the nature and demands of conflict with university authorities, supported by the state, have promoted democratic practices and values within the organisations, and led them to broaden their campaigns for accountability, representativity and the rule of law within tertiary education to cover the Nigerian state as a whole. They warn, however, of the continual dangers posed for internal democracy by co-optation of leadership by the state - as occurred for example throughout the labour movement in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s - and by certain exigencies of struggle, notably the need for secrecy. While intelligentsia, students and organised labour have been at the centre of most struggles for democratisation in Africa for the better part of this century, they constitute a minority within civil society, sometimes a small minority. More 148 Review of African Political Economy representative of civil society as a whole, and of its ambiguity within democratisation, is Mboscuda, a new popular organisation among the Mbororo of Northwest Cameroon, studied by Lucy Davis. While there has been a substantial literature on the democratic struggle in Cameroon, and much of it has focused on the 'anglophone' West notably John Fru Ndi's Social Democratic Federation, relatively little has dealt with the far Northwest and with its Fulani inhabitants. Itself as much the product of the struggle as a contributor to it, Mboscuda can be viewed and understood from two perspectives. Like the other organisations involved in the struggle, Mboscuda has an antagonistic relationship to the Cameroonian state and its supportive institutions, such as the patronage networks that have formed the main connection between the Mbororo leadership and the national political leadership. To a considerable degree its early and active membership was drawn from groups excluded from this relationship - young men, especially urban young men, the educated, and women. At the same time, it seeks to represent the Mbororo as a whole, as a self-conscious community, and it shares certain cultural assumptions about Mbororo (political) behaviour, assumptions which supported the older relationship between the Mbororo and the state. Thus for Davis it remains uncertain whether Mboscuda can become an effective component of a national, democratic, movement, or will instead develop into another vehicle for ethnic chauvinism. Civil society has also suffered considerable external intervention in the name of development. As the capacity and will of African states to perform a full range of functions has dwindled or been circumscribed, so elements of civil society, notably NGOs, have moved to take over those functions. International financial institutions and Western governments have increasingly diverted funds and training schemes into NGOs, directly or through Northern NGOs. This has created the prospect of the co-optation of civil society not by the African state as in the past, but by the inaptly named 'donor community', and its diversion away from a role in democratisation. To this theme we must return in future issues. South Africa: Disarming Armscor or Disarming the ANC? South Africa's Government of National Unity (GNU) began life in an atmosphere of painful optimism, but always dogged both by the inheritance of apartheid and the need - as at all times since Mandela's release - to accommodate minority parties. These parties, or the state forms they once represented were responsible for much of the violence that marked the eighties and early nineties. Committed to policies contradictory to those of the ANC, and to class and other interests hostile to those of the ANC's social base, they have fought for retention of elements of the apartheid system, and to undermine the ANC. As in 1991-92, this has fostered divisions within the ANC, between leadership and base, centre and locality, and within the leadership itself. So also have the very largely unreconstructed nature of the state (still with the same institutions and - to an extraordinary degree - the same personnel), pressures from external investors, IFIs and the 'donor' community and the short-term expedients arising from inherited foreign debt, low gold prices, high production costs and other features of the economy. A significant illustration of the ANC's dilemma is the conflict over the purchase of four naval corvettes, designed to strengthen the country's tiny navy, neglected in the eighties but without an obvious sea-borne enemy to confront (with the possible Editorial: Democracy, Development and Defence 149 exception of vessels illegally fishing off its coasts). Though the original decisions were made by the National Party government of 1989-94, the proposed purchase gained enthusiastic support from Ronnie Kasrils, deputy Minister of Defence, and no less vehement opposition from Jay Naidoo (in charge of reconstruction and development) and Trevor Manuel (trade and industry). Despite considerable pressure from several foreign governments in support of national firms bidding for the contract (including Britain, Spain and Germany), and senior officers in the SANDF behaving as if the purchase were already agreed, President Mandela had to suspend negotiations and order the cabinet to reconsider the proposal. Susan Willett's article underlines the significance of this episode (and of recent revelations about private South African companies offering military training to African states). She outlines much of the background to it in discussing the broader debate over arms policy, and especially arms exports. One by-product of the pre-1992 embargo on arms sales to South Africa was that the National Party government developed a domestic arms industry to supply its massive security forces, headed by the arms parastatal, Armscor. In turn this industry entered the international arms trade, at first selling covertly or to other pariah states, and then more widely and openly - though still to customers like the Habiyarima government of Rwanda, responsible for the 1994 massacres there. Now the apparent potential of arms exports is being used to defend both the arms industry and more broadly the entire defence budget, a large chunk of which is devoted to arms procurement. The debate over arms exports divides the ANC, pitting Joe Modise (Minister of Defence) against colleagues from the development and social ministries. Hitherto it has been presented largely as an argument between economic expedience - 'we need the jobs and the foreign exchange' - and political principle - 'the arms trade is immoral, a particularly vile legacy of apartheid'. Willett argues that this misconceives the economics of arms production and sales. Opponents of an arms trade need not, she asserts, abandon the economic side of the argument. Deliberately focusing on the limited terms in which the arms trade is customarily defended, she shows that it is hard to find enough significant benefits - in revenue, employment, technological spin-off etc - to match the undoubted costs of arms production and the impact of the diversion of funds from supporting the RDP into sustaining the armed forces. There remain, of course, the moral arguments, to which ANC ministers seem less and less disposed, and the political debate, which includes the possible role of the SANDF in regional peacekeeping and conflict resolution.