adminBissau to Somalia. The situation represents a significant global security threat, which for some will justify the increasing militarisation of the continent.
These political processes have a variety of localised causes, yet they have some commonalities. 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 are facing 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.
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.
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.
“While they debated whether or not (neoliberal economic) 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.”
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. Neoliberal 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 neoliberal policies destroyed existing local markets while highly sinister elements flourished.
Thinking at the World Bank then turned policy orientation toward building “institutions for markets”, “capacity building” and eventually a complete about-face to “state-building”. The occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan were most influential in forcing this shift cutting back the sate, to now build them up as bulwarks against Islamic fundamentalists, rampant corruption and those who might want to consider re-nationalisation as a development tool.
While US political scientists were obsessed with liberal triumphalism in the 1990s, others were offering far more powerful tools for understanding African states, even if the empire had no use for them. Some of the most powerful analyses have been published in Review of African Political Economy.
Works by people such as Catherine Boone, Mahmood Mamdani, and the late Chris Allen among others, examine ways that material processes of extraction impact political processes.
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 (ie: unpaid family labour, or working for the chief or marabout).
These patterns stem from various alliances and forms of indirect-rule set in place between colonial governments and “strong men”. Alternately, extractive industries around valuable commodities have greater tendency toward disintegration. — – Pambazuka News.
Along with agro-pastoralism, states in West Africa have forms of mercantilism that have extended back many centuries. Mining has also taken place there for hundreds of years. Until very recently, in most cases, it has been conducted by artisanal miners, who find sustenance largely through farming and herding.
One does not need to look far to see that agriculture across the region is in crisis. Famine has already been declared in Somalia. The Sudans are at war, while refugees have fled their herds and any crops they could scrape from the ground after years of drought. UN FAO notes that last year the Horn of Africa experienced a food crisis that left an estimated 13 million people dependent on humanitarian assistance. Currently there are 15 million people facing food insecurity in the countries of the Sahel.
These famines are compounded by refugee crises. Altogether some 284,000 Malians have fled Northern Mali, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: 107,000 of them are thought to be displaced within Mali; 177,000 in neighbouring countries. New arrivals have pushed refugee numbers to 56,664 in Burkina Faso, to 61,000 in Mauritania, and to 39,388 in Niger, according to UNHCR.
Around 810,000 Senegalese are facing hunger, according to a joint study in February 2012 by the Senegalese government and the World Food Programme (WFP). In the 2011 harvest season, cereal production fell by 36 per cent compared with 2010, and the production of peanuts, Senegal’s main cash crop, fell by 59 per cent. One figure shows the latest harvest was 120,000 tons, down from a previous yearly average of 800,000.
It is tough to say what is happening in Guinea in the midst of its protracted electoral crisis, though it seems recent demonstrations called by opposition candidates tap into spontaneous displays of anger among a large population of highly disenfranchised youth. These demonstrations are acts of desperation among people whose anger can be easily exploited by self-serving politicians with fiery rhetoric. In this way, it holds some similarities to the more sophisticated Senegalese movements that emerged last year against former president Abdoulaye Wade. The Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo is an example of how unsavoury they can become.
Guinea Bissau’s coup has disrupted the marketing of cashews – an important plantation crop in that country – but the story not being told is that the indigenous rice economy has already been seriously battered. This is the case with all the rice-growing economies in West Africa, as shown by USDA figures. Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Ghana and Senegal all show declines in production. In the past year, imports have soared to meet local consumption. Mali’s importation has risen 50 per cent. The Ivory Coast is importing a massive 80 per cent of their consumption. – Pambazuka News.
—
Online Reporter