A united Africa will conquer

African leaders like President Mugabe have been declared eternal enemies of the West. President Mugabe’s crime has been ring-fencing the interests of the majority blacks through a well crafted indigenisation programme, premised on reversing all advantages that the whites had enjoyed against black for long periods since the advent of colonialism.
Over the past year, Africa has seen the decomposition of states from coast to coast. A belt of war, coups and large-scale spontaneous demonstrations has emerged across the Sahel, from Guinea-Bissau to Somalia. The situation represents a significant global security threat, which for some will justify the increasing militarisation of the continent by especially, the United States of America.
These political processes have a variety of localised causes, yet they have some commonalties. All of them emerge in a context of failed agricultural markets and a boom in mineral and oil extraction. Fundamentalist Islam is merely a complicating factor: not a cause, so much as a response to the destabilisation we are seeing.
It is not a coincidence that African governments are falling apart while Europe and North America face financial crisis. We are witnessing the declining hegemony of African states and at the same time the competition for spoils intensifies, while the potential rewards of capturing the centre become ever more valuable.
The Chinese factor of business has meant that the US tries by all means to effect regime change on all leaders who show that they are pro-Chinese or who adopt the Look East Policy. This is one of the major reasons why President Mugabe will not be forgiven by the Unites States, yet the look east position had largely benefited the country, beyond doubt.
Capital is not withdrawing from Africa, but instead, the processes of extraction are becoming more obvious as the economic basis of societies are under severe strain. This is the context in which the US is devoting more resources to its Africom division.
Africom is the US superior military outfit, established to specifically open up Africa for resources exploitation through several military interventions, that include setting up rebel groups and supporting them, technically, materially and financially, like in the DRC.
Frantz Fanon wrote in 1959 that: “Colonialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contends itself with bringing to light the natural resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country’s industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of underdevelopment and poverty, or at all events, sinks more deeply into it.”
This is the basis of “combined and uneven” development: a state in which most of the continent still finds itself. The aid industry has masked some of these effects, yet in the current moment it has been forced into retreat, as country contributions are cut away in austerity budgets. At a recent launch of The Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa in Accra, the editors of the esteemed volume were at odds over how to assess the consequences of three decades of “Washington Consensus” neoliberal economic policies. While they debated whether or not these policies had brought growth to the continent, the only point they agreed on was the fact that they have resulted in growing inequalities and increasing poverty throughout Africa.
Elections have therefore only offered the electorate a chance to choose politicians who continue to impose increasing poverty upon them. As a result, in some places, people are actually nostalgic about the years they were living under dictatorships — because they remember them as times when they had more food.
What we are witnessing now is, in part, the blowback from years of neoliberalism and military interventions in places such as Somalia and Libya. This blowback is revealing the shallowness of the “Third Wave” democratisation processes in Africa that the US political science establishment was so keen to ride. Larry Diamond, for example, influenced much of the Clinton administration’s thinking about the democratic transitions and now boasts having authored 27 books on it.
The liberal triumphalist thinking of the 1990s was, of course, forced into revision from events that ensued. Neo-liberal thinkers in places like the World Bank had thought movements for democracy, supported by Washington, would chop away the burdensome state, freeing natural propensities to trade, allowing capitalism to flourish. The reality is that neo-liberal policies destroyed existing local markets while highly sinister elements flourished.
African state borders contain a wide variety of variables. They have diverse geographies, cultural histories and economic foundations. Nevertheless, Boone’s work (along with others such as Mamdani, Jean-Francois Bayart and Robert Fatton) shows that peasant-based economies have integrative tendencies.
Hegemony is more firmly rooted in land-tenure patterns and cultural institutions of labour mobilisation.
These patterns stem from various alliances and forms of indirect-rule set in place between colonial governments and “strong men”. — DayAfrica.com
Dr Mathew Otinga is a Nigerian political scientist based in South Africa.