Postmodern intervention & human rights: Report of the Commission for Africa
Ankie Hoogvelt
In the historical development of world capitalism there have been, time and again, seemingly dramatic turning points in the relations between rich and poor countries, between the core and the peripheral areas. Such turning points were the abolition of the slave trade, and the associated transition from mercantile pre-colonial to formal colonial relations, and the great independence struggles and the ensuing post-war dispensation of national sovereignty and self-determination within a framework of what came to be known as modern, or informal imperialism. We are once again at a historic juncture where we may discern a transition from modern imperialism to a new, post-modern, imperial formation. But each of these great changes did not fall from the sky, did not come from on high, or by divine inspiration, and were for all the genuine moral passion of their advocates, not radical emancipations in the human condition, but were more modestly a predictable outcome of structural contradictions engendered by the previous arrangements.
I was reminded of the dialectics of capitalist history in June/July 2005 when hearing the deafening roll of the bandwagon of the Make Poverty History campaign (debt cancellation), the Live 8 concerts, the G8 Summit and the Commission for Africa Report. In a forthcoming publication (Hoogvelt, 2005) I have tried to analyse just where these progressive sentiments are coming from and how they are almost certainly unwittingly but nonetheless successfully being co-opted and, and even driven by, the structural contradictions between, on one hand, the material forces of globalisation, and on the other, the now obsolete institutional arrangements of ‘modern’ imperialism.
The task which I set myself in that paper was to try and grasp the ‘coherent conjunction’ between on one hand, the dominant characteristics of globalisation at the level of material capabilities and social forces, and on the other, the ascent of postmodern imperialism as an institutional framework governing the relations between the core and periphery of the world capitalist system, including the new moral principles, world views or ideologies, that are emerging to underpin this framework. This is a task that leaves aside grander ethical examinations of questions of ‘right’, of ‘justice’, or ‘progress’.
In other words, just as I am not saying that the abolition of slavery was a bad move, so I am not saying that the current passion for Making Poverty History is to be condemned. What I am saying is that by studying how this new emerging dispensation fits in with the directional tendencies of global social forces, we will be in a better position to judge where the limits are of these progressive sentiments, at which junctures they are being co-opted, and how compromises struck in the interest of one objective might close down avenues toward alternative futures. When the rock star Bono says that Warren Buffett (second richest man in the world) and Rupert Murdoch are amongst his most helpful supporters, and when Gordon Brown, according to his civil servants, was ‘surprised’ at the ease with which his G8 colleagues swung behind the debt cancellation idea, then its only right for us to pause and reflect what is going on here.
In brief, what I argue in my paper is that the world economy is characterised by an emerging social hierarchy of core-periphery relations rather than – as before – a primarily geographic one. Under conditions of globalisation the functions of the state become reorganised to suit global rather than domestic capital accumulation priorities. As a result, the political and economic integrity of the national territorial state is eroded, and domestic peripheralisation and exclusion become a principal source of instability.
However, domestic instabilities translate into international insecurity, as social exclusion within nations builds up pressures for the territorial expulsion – or fleeing – of excluded groups. The resulting spectre of economic and political refugees in turn threatens the social stability of the rich nations to which they flee. And thus, globalisation, paradoxically, reinforces the need to maintain, at all costs, the de jure interstate system and to uphold the legal sovereignty of states so as to enforce the obligations of states to keep within their borders the people who carry their passports. At the same time, globalisation also makes more pressing the need for state sponsored and militarily backed strategic control over vital resources in foreign lands, as host nations in the periphery collapse into zones of instability, and fracture into rivaling factions and groups, warlordism and banditry.
This then is the circle that has to be squared in postmodern imperialism: how to combine the legal and administrative sovereignty of states in the periphery with the emasculation of economic state capacity consequent upon imposed privatisation and liberalisation programmes, and the simultaneous hollowing out of political state capacity, consequent upon military-backed strategic interventions.
In search of the answer, I concluded my paper with a few notes on the discourse of the revitalised aid agenda for Africa which encompasses Gordon Brown's G8 debt relief package, Tony Blair's Commission for Africa Report, the Make Poverty History campaign and the Live 8 concerts. It may seem churlish to knock what is undoubtedly a deeply felt humanitarian spirit that has commendably moved millions around the world. It would also be wrong to ignore the differences between disparate groups; some more critical and aware than others of the destabilising economic and power relations that undermine the sustainability of any aid effort however well intended. Nevertheless, the coming together of corporate and G8 leaders with the human rights world of NGO's from Oxfam to ActionAid and World Development Movement (WDM) in an apparent new moral consensus, should make us wary. As George Monbiot writes:
The G8 leaders and the business interests their summit promotes can absorb our demands for aid, debt, even slightly fairer terms of trade, and lose nothing. They can wear our colours, speak our language, claim to support our aims, and discover in our agitation not new constraints but new opportunities for manufacturing consent. Justice, this consensus says, can be achieved without confronting power (Monbiot, 2005).
The first thing that strikes me about this 450 page Report, is the overwhelming focus on Africa as the cause of its own problems. Corruption on the part of domestic leaders and governments is a relentlessly recurring theme accompanied by repetitive emphasis on the need to improve both governance and transparency. Adverse past or present links with the rest of the world are given either scant attention as structural causes of poverty and underdevelopment (pp.108109) or dwell on capital flight and debts incurred by past dictators (p.114). And, though there are two minuscule paragraphs on the role of foreign companies in conflict zones (p.40), what is entirely missing is any recognition that the rich world's lifestyle and rapacious use of Africa's resources has created, and continues to create, unsustainable economies on the subcontinent in the first place. The loud and clear message is: Africa is at fault, and Africa has to change with our help.
The second important message of this Report is that the change needed and the aid given is to be primarily (even if not exclusively) focused on the social infrastructure. The Report offers an analysis that – besides corruption – attributes causes of poverty to poor health (particularly HIV/AIDS) and education, with the path to economic growth to come primarily from investing in people. Poverty reduction strategies and addressing the HIV/Aids pandemic are repeatedly signalled as the most important goals of development intervention. That is okay as far as it goes. What is missing though are any thoughts on national develop-mentalism, on a comprehensive agenda for economic development, including industrialisation and the backward and forward linkages, that so dominated the economic growth perspectives of a bygone age. Indeed, on reading the Report one gets the impression that the economic agenda is relegated to third place (after governance and health) and that it deals only with creating a better investment climate for the private sector, on transport, and on diversification of agriculture for exports. There is some mention of developing local and regional markets and encouraging small enterprises but this is dwarfed by the repeated emphases on reducing trade barriers and market opening. As I have argued in another paper, instead of trying to make Africa pay its way in the world economy with old-economy prescriptions (i.e. an expansion of traditional agricultural products of obsolete comparative advantage), African economies should be assisted to proceed from a dynamic resource concept and start not with what they have, but with they might have along the trajectory of ever-faster technological change (Hoogvelt, 2001). Alas, there is not one single imaginative idea on economic development in the entire report.
A third most significant theme of the Report it seems to me is the emphasis on developing state capacity and public administration at all levels. On first reading this is a refreshing departure from the preceding neo-liberal (the Washington) consensus. The World Bank and the IMF come in for some stick over their dogmatic conditionalities of macro-economic stability and fiscal rectitude which have disabled social programmes and downsised bureaucracies. This Report seems to be doing a U-turn. There is an understanding that the delivery of targeted sectoral aid requires capable administrations at national and local levels and that therefore capacity building programmes should include, besides civil society organisations, also government ministries. Indeed, the Report bends over backwards to place African leadership at the head of the ‘Partnership with the World’, and to commend the progress in good governance already achieved (p.370; pp.322–323). In a further reversal of recent past practice it suggests that the most efficient way of giving aid is through Direct Budget Support wherever there is a capable state apparatus with transparent and accountable development priorities in place. In fragile states where this is not the case, it might however be necessary to continue to provide support direct to NGO's and civil society organisations. (p.312)
But there is a sting in the tail. The new conditionality that is proposed to accompany the debt relief agenda and the generous (intention of) a doubling of aid monies, homes in on the process of local disbursement with transparency and accountability of allocations paramount and subject to scrutiny by the international multilateral organisations and international NGO's. For example, ActionAid and Oxfam together with the multilateral institutions will sit on a steering committee monitoring a special Nigerian anti-poverty fund set up with the proceeds of its debt relief programme.
Put in the context of the lacklustre ‘business-as-usual’ economic prescriptions, the nannying governance agenda, and the primacy of the social protection goals, the new Africa aid agenda, in my view, describes the contours of an emerging ‘social services’ model of sovereign states in the periphery. In this social services model the NGOs human rights agenda serves rather than contradicts the security and privatisation priorities of global capitalism in relation to the periphery. It may be the case, as Michael Barnett (2005:25) writes, that for many humanitarian organisations there is incredible discomfort in knowing that their agenda of transforming failed states coincides with part of the strategy of Bush's war on terrorism, but the fact is that for a variety of reasons, e.g. the privatisation of donor funding, and competitive contracting under neo-liberalism, core nation states are depending more and more on NGO's to get things done, and donor funding is increasingly being redirected from multilateral organisations to international NGO's. Both the US and the EU now disburse 2530% of their aid budgets through private groups (Smillie, 1997:564). Between 1985 and 1995, private aid agencies expanded their international operations by 150% affecting the lives of 250 million people worldwide (UNDP estimate cited in Charlton and May, 1995:240). As a result, the hallowed space between humanitarianism and politics, has become narrowed and porous, and international NGO's have become principal agents of imperialism.
The new moral consensus around core-periphery relations that I have sketched out is as yet only an emerging one. It is true that there has been – this summer – a coalescence of disparate forces, core governments, business leaders and NGO's, with some mass participation thrown into the mix in the Live 8 concerts. But credit has also to be given to the various critical voices, including within the Make Poverty History campaign and the NGO world, of the shortcomings of the Commission for Africa report, and the limitations of the debt relief agenda. The issues of Trade Justice as opposed to Free Trade, of Real Aid as opposed to Phantom aid, and of the burden of responsibility for corruption on the part of multinational corporations, all these remain strong campaigning targets, and rightly so. Some NGO's (for example WDM) are even beginning to distance themselves from the UK Government's successful co-optation strategy. But all these do not detract from the fact that the NGO movement's engagement with the Government led African aid agenda is in serious danger of accepting the globalisation agenda rather than opposing it.
Ankie Hoogvelt , e-mail: a.hoogvelt@123456sheffield.ac.uk
Academic freedom & the crisis of neoliberalism: Some cautions
George Caffentzis
The consequences of a decision to adhere to what I understood to be your earlier determination that the Geneva Convention III on the Treatment of Prisoners of War (GPW) does not apply to the Taliban include the following: some of the language of the GPW is undefined (it prohibits, for example, ‘outrages upon personal dignity’ and ‘inhuman treatment’), and it is difficult to predict with confidence what actions might be deemed to constitute violations of the relevant provisions of GPW (memo from Alberto R. Gonzales [US Attorney General], to President George W. Bush on 25 January 2002; Greenberg and Dratel, 2005:120).
This article concerns academic freedom in the context of the war on terror.1 I want to make four points at the start and then I will elaborate on them:
1) There are two concepts of academic freedom current in the field that need to be distinguished: (a) the neoliberal notion of academic freedom which takes knowledge to be a commodity, education as a service to be privatised and academic freedom the ability to market knowledge and education services without governmental regulation; (b) the ‘commoner’ notion of academic freedom which takes knowledge as a common resource for all, education as a public good, and academic freedom as the enlarging of the capacity of all to access and produce knowledge.
2) The USA Patriot Act and other directives and laws meant to support the war on terrorism are ironically undermining the neoliberal knowledge regime it was meant to save.
3) The epistemology of torture and espionage that is being introduced in the war on terrorism is an archaic one that is built on the notion of the ‘secret’ that must be extracted from unwilling bodies or spied upon by unseen eyes. This epistemology has been repudiated by the contemporary conception of knowledge as social production and is not only inhuman, but also futile.
4) The knowledge workers in the African Studies Association (ASA) who are being mortally threatened by the laws and epistemology of the war on terrorism, must find a credentialization process that would publicly differentiate themselves from the mercenary intellectuals that do the imperial masters' bidding in Africa.
Clash of academic freedoms
I approach this topic on the basis of more than a decade of work with the US-based Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA). CAFA has devoted much effort in investigating and protesting the World Bank's Structural Adjustment Programmes' (SAPs) impact on African universities (Federici et al. 2000). That experience immediately forces me to ask, ‘What kind of academic freedom are we talking about?’ For CAFA's work has made me realise that our notion of academic freedom is antagonistic to the World Bank's neoliberal notion of academic freedom (Caffentzis, 1994). It is important to differentiate between these two understandings since they involve different political antagonists and interests and, hence, the type of struggle we wage. There is a real danger that if we confuse them, we could end up defending a notion of academic freedom that we abhor.
The neoliberal notion of academic freedom arises from viewing knowledge as a commodity (i.e., as so many pieces of intellectual property to be bought, sold or leased) and education as a path to income generation that must be privatised and made profitable in order for it to be maximally effective. Academic freedom in the neoliberal perspective would thus be equivalent to reducing government restrictions on the commodification of knowledge and on the privatisation of education. Thus, the World Bank views many of the provisions of the SAPs (that it has designed and imposed on African societies) relevant to universities and knowledge as increasing academic freedom, i.e., the freedom to make money from ideas in an international market for intellectual property goods.
For example, from its perspective, the SAP provisions that require African governments to subscribe to the copyright and patent policies of the US and to open their markets to intellectual property items (from films, to software, to the molecular structure of pharmaceuticals, to music CDs, to video games, to genetically modified seeds, etc.) appear as ways to guarantee that Africans would be academically free to buy (or sell) any intellectual fare they can afford – unhindered by government restrictions (World Bank, 1998:145). Similarly, the SAP requirement that forces African governments to allow private, for-profit universities to open their doors on their territory is another ‘blow for traditional academic freedom’ in the World Bank's eyes since it increases the choice of educational institutions available and increases competition (World Bank, 2002). Finally, the SAP proposals reducing the subsidies for university students and requiring that the students ‘share’ the cost of their education is another forward step for academic freedom, since it recognises that the end of education (knowledge), increases personal income and its institutional costs should be paid for by the eventual benefactors.
In the last two decades, students and faculty members all across Africa have responded to the World Bank's imposition of neoliberal policies as an attack on their academic freedom with demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts. They have paid for their resistance with hundreds killed, tens of thousands beaten, arrested and tortured by African governments eager to show their commitment to the World Bank's programmes in order to keep their credit line open to save themselves from bankruptcy. We at CAFA have chronicled anti-SAP student and faculty movements across Africa and have admired their tenacity and ubiquity (Federici, et al. 2000). The notion of academic freedom these militant students and faculty were fighting for at such great cost was clearly antithetical to the neoliberal conception of knowledge, education and academic freedom. The World Bank was, in effect, ‘enclosing’ knowledge, education and academic freedom. In their view, they were fighting back.
But what was their notion of knowledge, education and academic freedom? After reading many documents of the struggle and interviewing many students and faculty members involved, we concluded that these anti-SAP protestors viewed knowledge as a commons, education as a public good and academic freedom as an effort to preserve and expand the commons of knowledge and to increase access to education as a public good (Caffentzis, 1994). They saw neoliberal agencies' use of money as a barrier to knowledge and education and hence the World Bank was an enemy of their academic freedom. These anti-neoliberal conclusions have been shared by many outside of Africa, of course, who have increasingly seen the effort to sanctify intellectual property rights (with draconian penalties for the violators) in many recently negotiated ‘trade treaties’ (like the WTO, NAFTA, MIA (Multilateral Agreement on Investment) FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas)) as a sort of ‘second enclosure movement’. The free software to the creative commons movements, for example, increasingly recognise knowledge as a common good that must be preserved against the stifling of its production by commodification. Thus the anti-SAP African students and faculty have been part of a growing worldwide ‘commoner’ movement to preserve the commons of knowledge and to keep education a public good.
As a result of these considerations, we should distinguish two kinds of attack on academic freedom qua the commons of knowledge. The first is the neoliberal ‘enclosure’ of the knowledge commons and of education as a public good; the second is the US government (and its allies) ‘war on terrorism’ attack on the neoliberal form of academic freedom, which is increasingly restrictive. The urgency of the latter attack has undoubtedly inspired the Roundtable (ASA, 2004) from which this paper emerges, whereas the former ‘enclosure’ has become a chronic feature of contemporary reality in African universities and is increasingly losing its salience because of its prevalence. These are two quite different struggles, however, with different political antagonists and interests. If we confuse them, we might well discover that we defend a notion of academic freedom that we abhor.
The very fact that the US government is increasingly restricting the movement of ideas, academics and students within and across its borders and hence is becoming antagonistic to the neoliberal notion of academic freedom should make us allies neither of the ‘war on terrorism’ nor of the neoliberal knowledge regime. The enemy of my enemy is definitely not a friend in this conjuncture. Consequently, the academic freedom struggles of the immediate future will be ideologically murky. They will require the defenders of the commons and opponents to the war on terrorism to be measured in their words and strategically decisive in their actions. In the rest of this paper I hope to raise issues which will help clarify this murkiness. I start by examining how the war on terror impinges upon the previously hegemonic neo-liberal view of academic freedom.
Unintended consequences of the ‘War on Terrorism’
Throughout history imperial politics has been filled with deliberate ironies. They are often encapsulated in cynical aphorisms such as the description of the Roman devastation of Carthage, ‘They made a desert and they called it peace’, or the famous Vietnam-era US military quip, ‘We had to destroy the village to save it.’ But there are many unintended consequences of imperial policy that are unheralded by cynical bon mots since they were not even observed until long after they had completed their acidic work. I think, in this regard, of the consequences of recruiting barbarians into the Roman armies so that the very boundaries between Rome and non-Rome disintegrated. I believe that we are in a similar situation today with respect to neoliberalism and the war on terrorism. On the one side, the war on terrorism was first declared by the Clinton Administration in order to ‘save’ the neoliberal order from a general crisis that began in 1997; but on the other, the prosecution of this war has had many unforeseen damaging consequences for neoliberal economics as well as for academic freedom.
A good example of this duplicitous effect is in the USA Patriot Act which was hurriedly passed to carry the war on terrorism forward. Civil libertarians have objected to its provisions concerning guilt by association, ideological exclusion, unilateral executive detention and secret searches without probable cause (Cole, 2003). Using an extremely vague definition of terrorism, the USA Patriot Act legalises, for example, searches and seizures of people's homes and offices without their knowledge, the wholesale surveillance of private citizens' library records and internet communication, and the arrest and detention without hearing or trials of anyone deemed by the President to be a terrorist.
The USA Patriot Act and its cousins might justly be called ‘the laws that ended neoliberal academic freedom’. Neoliberalism promised to the academic community a sense of ‘no borders’ to academic discourse through organising open, ‘global’ universities and scholarly networks where knowledge and information could circulate ubiquitously at the speed of light. The war on terrorism legislation is now restricting and even blocking the information channel. Indeed, the result is becoming the exact opposite of the neoliberal ‘deal’ that promised a small increase in ‘user fees’ and ‘licenses’ for intellectual property in exchange for a huge increase in the flow of information and diffusion of knowledge. The ideology of neo-liberalism is being strangled by the war on terrorism's effort to save it.
The clearest example of this is in the dramatic collapse of the so-called ‘global universities’ in the US. They were one of the most visible examples of the globalisation of knowledge in the 1990s, since their existence was premised on the increased movement of students from Asia, South America and Africa to US universities. Indeed, the money these foreign students (their families and/or governments) expended to finance their university education in the US was the equivalent of $13 billion dollars of US exports (Dillon, 2004a). These students certainly embodied the free movement of knowledge promised by neoliberalism. Moreover, the scientific and technical intellectuals that came to the utopias of neoliberalism – global universities in the US whose ‘catchment area’ was the planet – often stayed and became the theoretical backbone of the computer and genetic engineering ‘revolutions’ of the 1980s and 1990s (given the refusal of US-born students to enrol in demanding scientific and technological fields). After all, in 1998 foreign citizens earned 44 per cent of the doctorates conferred by US universities in engineering, 30 per cent of the physics and chemistry doctorates, 39 per cent of the mathematics doctorates, 36 per cent of the computer science doctorates, 22 per cent of the biological science doctorates and 43 per cent of the agricultural sciences doctorates (US Census Bureau 2001:517). As one journalist frankly put it, ‘America does not produce enough doctoral candidates in the sciences and related fields to meet its own needs’ (Freedman, 2004:B10).
But with the increasing scrutiny of student visas, the mass arrest and indefinite detention of foreigners (including students and intellectuals), the increased existential irritations of politically-sanctioned racism and xenophobia, the threat of tuition funds being confiscated because of purported connection with terrorism, and all the other allied anxieties stirred up by the war on terrorism's legal and political environment, students are no longer flocking to US global universities. For example, after three decades of uninterrupted growth, total enrolment of foreign students in US colleges and universities fell in 2003 by 2.4 per cent. The graduate schools have been especially affected and faced a 28 per cent drop of foreign applications and a 6 per cent drop in foreign student enrolments during 2004 followed by a 5 per cent enrolment drop in 2005 (Dillon, 2004b), (New York Times, 2005b).
Moreover, those foreign students who have studied in scientific and technical fields are increasingly refusing to remain in the US and are returning to their ‘homes’ partly because of the fears the war on terrorism has inspired. These phenomena will have an important, though diffuse, negative impact on the US corporations' role as the centres of scientific, technological and cultural innovation for the planet as well as on the US balance of payments (since one of the largest exports is the sale of ‘intellectual property’ leases and licenses on these innovations). This development has even evoked cries of concern from establishment voices like columnist Thomas Friedman (who titled a column ‘Losing our Edge?’) and the New York Times editors (‘Sanity on Visas for Students’), (Friedman 2004; New York Times, 2005a).
The war on terrorism has also involved increasing surveillance of US-based academics with the ensuing restriction of knowledge exchange leading to a situation reminiscent of the national state security organisation at the height of the Cold War. Many scientists in the 1950s and early 1960s were caught in a ‘crossfire’ since they were convinced both that ‘free exchange of information was the lifeblood of scientific progress and that restrictions of this flow were either foolish or destructive’ and that secrecy was justified since ‘threats to national security overshadowed concerns for openness in science’ (Bok, 1983:156). There was widespread concern that knowledge production would be harmed by the ethos of secrecy imposed by the state (Bok, 1983:154–155). Indeed, Thomas Kuhn, in his immensely successful typology of the history of scientific communities (in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), addressed this tension in an indirect but powerful way (cf. Fuller, 2000 for the Cold War context of Kuhn's work).
Kuhn pointed out that it was perfectly possible to have scientific advances in periods of what he called Normal science (Kuhn, 1996:35–42). These periods do not need to have open communication and free movement of scientists for these advances to occur since they involve ‘puzzle solving’ activity, i.e., the rules of solution of the puzzle and its role in the accepted paradigm are already known. Consequently, puzzle solving activities could take place independently of each other and their results could be accumulated at a higher level without horizontal communication in the way that much of the research and production of the Manhattan Project was carried out.1However, periods of revolutionary science required a publicly acknowledged crisis, an increasing set of recognised anomalies, and the widespread presentation of alternative theories that could become the core of a new paradigm. Thus at the very moment of crisis in a scientific community, the greatest openness is required for its resolution. Although Kuhn's theory of the structure of scientific revolutions has been justly criticised on a number of counts, this contrast between normal and revolutionary periods of science and the different impacts censorship, political repression, and secrecy has on them, I believe, is still relevant to our thinking about knowledge as it was in the 1950s and early 1960s when it was the centre of a major national debate on secrecy (Dickson, 1984:134–139). This rekindled debate undoubtedly is just another aspect of the increasing conflict between the war on terrorism and neoliberalism, because the latter is dependent upon and is legitimised by the increasing pace of knowledge production and the institution of a state of permanent scientific revolution.
This debate about knowledge also has immediate consequences for African Studies, since it is obvious that normal science and research concerning Africa is in crisis. Whatever your view of neoliberalism, it is evident that the revolutionary knowledge necessary to deal with the social, economic, and ecological problems of Africa (which are the problems of an unconstituted humanity in extremis) are as sorely lacking as are the material resources devoted to resolving them. To add to this obscurity a shroud over much of Islamic Africa that the war on terrorism legislation threatens to do, is to put the finishing touches on a plan to make Africa again (and even for Africans) a terra incognita with terrible consequences for all, including neoliberals.
Torture & espionage: the tyranny of the secret
The development of a new set of laws, administrative directives, and legal categories since the beginning of the war on terrorism has an epistemology driving it that is crucial to our understanding of the challenges we face. It is important to understand that there is a conception of truth behind this revival of the justification of torture. Elaine Scarry presents the now standard view of torture as a technique of power and not a method of truth seeking. For her, ‘the final product and outcome of torture’ is that ‘the conversion of the enlarged map of human suffering is an emblem of the regime's strength’ (Scarry, 1985:56–57). This is an accurate description for the torture of inmates in the Nazi concentration camps by guards demanding either work or docility from its death-bound residents, but the present war on terror works with a different relationship between truth and power.
The war on terror we are living through today has an epistemology that is rooted in the notion of the Secret. The prime object of knowledge in the war on terrorism is to uncover the secret X, whatever the X might be (the location of person O, the plan to destroy Y, assassinate Z or overthrow government W, the money that financed action A, etc.). This type of epistemology is inevitably seeing the problem of knowledge to be one of overcoming deliberately designed resistance and obscurity to get at the truth. It is not an epistemology indigenous to our time, of course, but a revival of the epistemology of the Renaissance (Yates, 1964). Foucault richly described this epistemology by deploying Paracelcus' notion of a ‘signature of all things’ (Foucault, 1970:17–45). In this epistemology, the world's treasures are hidden secrets. But there are similitudes between the secret treasure and what can be observed providing the clue that can be read by a careful investigator. To illustrate this, Foucault quotes Paracelsus' scientific methodology that compares the world with the power of a man's speech:
Just as the secret movements of his understanding are manifested by his voice, so it would seem that the herbs speak to the curious physician through their signatures, discovering to him their inner virtues hidden beneath nature's veil of silence (Foucault, 1970:27).
The revival of torture and the explicit identification of knowledge with spying in the early twenty-first century is an inevitable consequence of the epistemology developed in the ‘war on terrorism’ that is rooted in the Secret. This epistemology has arisen in an intellectual atmosphere generated by the conjunction of the increasing influence of Leo Strauss' esoteric hermeneutics and various forms of creationism in the ideological formation of many in the present politically hegemonic Bush Administration. For Strauss and the Straussians, most important political texts have an esoteric message that can only be deciphered by specially trained minds. This thesis has now been merged with the creationist arguments of the past and takes the form of ‘intelligent design’ arguments intended to combat evolution theory. These creationist arguments underpin much of the intellectual framework of the Bush Administration (Strauss, 1952, 1968; Rosen, 2000; Behe, 1996; Shanks, 2004). Hence, the popular leftist view that the Bush Administration is a cynical intellectual vacuum is not accurate. It is simply that the elements of this superstructure are self-consciously obscurantist.
In the midst of this ‘back to the future’ intellectual world of esoteric meanings and theological designs of the Bush administration, the war on terrorism proclaims that the terrorist opponents in this war are resolute, subtle, and theologically informed evildoers acting from a hidden demonic substratum. Terrorists, unlike all other human adversaries, apparently do not have a social constitution whose causes can be investigated and countered. They can only be spied upon, tortured to find their inner sanctum and then be killed. That is why Alberto Gonzalez could write so frankly to President Bush (in the portion of a memo that is the epigraph of this article) that notions like ‘outrages upon personal dignity’ and ‘inhuman treatment’ are ‘undefined’ when applied to the Taliban and other terrorists, since, apparently, they are not subjects of the predicates ‘dignity’ and ‘human.’
Post-‘signature of all things’, Enlightenment epistemology of the seventeenth and eighteenth century provided a critique of the Secret as the object of knowledge by questioning the ‘design conception of nature’. For it was recognised that there need be neither an inner preformed truth hidden in the ‘recesses of the mind’ to discover nor an outer truth craftily embedded in nature. This critique undermined both torture and spying as models of truth revealing. On the one side, it was pointed out by Beccarria that torture, instead of revealing the truth, invariably made the body in pain susceptible to any suggestion, hence the ‘knowledge’ gained from the tortured is tainted and can as easily be false as true. Torture produced confessions, but they were all too often confessions of production (Beccaria, 1963). On the other side, spying presumed the ability to provide a non-interpretive and non-interactive channel between the object (the content of the secret) and the subject of knowledge. Yet it was realised that knowledge of the human universe, at least, was always interpretative and interactive. Spying, instead of being the path to truth, simply led to an illusion of objective knowledge.
Thus, according to most post-similitude epistemologies, the pain of torture and the expensive illusions that knowledge can be generated from one-way interactions create high costs for any citizenry to pay. Not simply because torture is a violation of the most basic concepts of human rights and spying is a fundamental desecration of the minimum trust necessary for all social scientific work. The US government's presentation of its enemy as an almost cartoon-like Satanic nemesis and itself as a sanctified being is setting up a situation that can not lead to the powerful knowledge necessary to create the conditions for the end of terror on all sides.
Therefore, given the horrendous experience that Africa and Africans have experienced with torture and spying in the past, it would be inconceivable that any scholarly organisation involved in African Studies would ever collaborate with any such an enterprise, however it presented itself.
Against mercenary academics
The new war on terrorism conditions of academic work in Africa imposed by the US government are becoming mortally dangerous for US academics who abhor torture and spying, but who are increasingly being confused with the mercenary intellectuals that are now like the contract workers in Iraq: ‘enemy combatants’ for the ‘war on terrorism's’ opponents.
One way to deal with this problematic is to end the torture and spying implicit in the war on terrorism (cf. ACAS's Petition ‘Resolution on the Study of Africa After 9/11’ on its web site: acas.prairienet.org). That, of course, is the basis of the various efforts meant to repeal the USA Patriot Act: to protest the denial of visas to politically involved intellectuals who have been invited to speak in the US, and to reject funding for research that is financed by the CIA, the Defense Department and other organs of US imperialism. However, this is going to take some time to accomplish and, given the result of the recent election, it is possible that it will take years.
Many US-based researchers, however, do not have years to wait. Some are in the midst of research efforts in Africa and others have Africa as their real home. They need to be able to differentiate themselves from their mercenary cousins in the eyes of Africans. How are they to do this? Whenever situations like this have developed a ‘natural’ solution followed: a process of differentiation of interveners that would be guaranteed by a trusted institution much like the Red Cross or Red Crescent (at least in most situations). In other words, the institution in question applies a credentialising seal that guarantees to the observer (or even the participants) that the researcher in question is not a mercenary in the pay of the military or intelligence services of a government. A way to separate science from the state or academic research from purported knowledge based on espionage and torture is desperately needed.
This suggestion is, of course, not so far fetched. After all, most universities' code of ethics for research explicitly rule out any projects that even hint that they employ torture and espionage. The problem is that universities increasingly are being brought into the circle of the ‘war on terrorism’ just as, during the Cold War, universities winked an eye on questionable projects that violated (sometimes scandalously) professional academic ethics in the name of national security. What is required is an institution (something like an accrediting agency) that would vet projects and investigators and declare that they are not in violation of a code of ethics that explicitly prohibits the use of espionage and torture as part of its procedures and that the results of its research would be publicly accessible, especially to the subjects of the research. Can the ASA fulfill this role? If the ASA can not do it, what organization can?
George Caffentzis, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is a coordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and the coeditor (with Silvia Federici and Ousseina Alidou) of A Thousand Flowers: Social struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2000).
Zimbabwe's hide & seek with the IMF: Imperialism, nationalism & the South African proxy
Patrick Bond
Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe's 2005 fight with the International Monetary Fund illustrates adverse power relations in which financial pressure is specifically applied in the interests of economic (not political) liberalisation. However, whereas the IMF has no confessed interest in human rights and political freedom (and demonstrated as much in late 1990s Zimbabwe), Pretoria's discourses do include good governance rhetoric. Combining pro-market and (surface-level) pro-democracy arguments allows Thabo Mbeki to serve as proxy for the IMF, which above all wants repayment on vast arrears, but which also insists on the full range of Washington consensus policy changes. To make those changes would undercut Mugabe's patronage system, and might also generate popular unrest.
For South Africa, meanwhile, the objective appears to be an elite transition that keeps Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union/Patriotic Front (Zanu/PF) party in power after his retirement, maintains the splintering Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) as a token opposition, and imposes severe cuts in the social wage on the citizenry while opening the door for bargain sales of Zimbabwean assets to South African bargain basement shoppers. Yet contradictions in these projects occasionally appear, and it remains for the beleaguered left social forces to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunity to press home the critique of both international finance and regional sub-imperialism.
In southern Africa, the Bretton Woods Institutions have become sufficiently notorious within the political intelligentsia as to attract these words from leading African National Congress official Sidney Mufamadi (2005):
As we speak, the neoliberal orthodoxy sits as a tyrant on the throne of political-economic policymaking. The dominant social and economic forces are doing their utmost to hegemonise the discourse – both materially and in respect of how developmental processes are to be institutionalised and theorised. Among other things, they use such transnational governmental organisations as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation to shape the discourse within which policies are defined, the terms and concepts that circumscribe what can be thought and done.
This judgment followed fifteen years of arm-twisting by the Bank and IMF, culminating in the 1990–95 Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) and a crash of both manufacturing and the social wage. As a result mainly of popular resistance, things began to go badly wrong for Harare's elites soon thereafter. From 1996 to 2000, a series of overlapping worker/peasant/student/war veteran rebellions became a serious threat to the ruling Zanu (PF) party. Mugabe adopted a zig-zag political-economic ‘policy’ based on a mix of carrots and sticks, combining frontal attacks on poor and working-class urban Zimbabweans with fiery anti-imperialist rhetoric.1
At the heart of Harare's fiscal crisis are Mugabe's expensive carrots to disgruntled sections of society: large new pensions for tens of thousands of Liberation War vets (previously ignored or repressed) from September 1997; periodic payolas of various kinds to the army and police, including licence to loot the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the late 1990s civil war; on-again/off-again price controls from 1998 in order to prevent further ‘IMF Riots’ (which had broken out periodically during the 1990s); occasional gifts to key constituents during the early 2000s, such as very inexpensive rural electricity; and state-sponsored land invasions immediately following Mugabe's defeat in a constitutional referendum in February 2000, as the opposition MDC became a threatening electoral force. The sticks we learned much more about during 2005; they don’t need recounting in detail, but include, in the words of South African Communist Party (SACP) general secretary Blade Nzimande (2005):
Durable nationalism
Mugabe's alliances have generally been maintained the past five years, and both external and internecine rebellions have been crushed. Regular predictions that the ruling party will fragment - mainly due to ethnic factionalism – have never reached fruition. After three decades of control over Zanu (PF) and six years' experience harassing a strong opposition party, Mugabe has an even stronger grip on his politburo. Evidence of his dominance during this period includes the expulsion, demotion or jailing of figures with substantial regional or sectoral powerbases, such as the giant old stalwarts Ndabaningi Sithole, Joshua Nkomo and Enos Nkala (1980s); failed party reformers Edgar Tekere, Eddison Zvobgo and Margaret Dongo (1990s); and tycoon Philip Chiyangwa, finance minister Chris Kuruneri, chief spokesman Jonathan Moyo and parliamentary speaker Emmerson Mnangagwa (2000s).
However, with Mugabe apparently now unable to raise basic hard currency for importing petrol, food and other vital necessities, the time is ripe for the next stage of what might be termed ‘exhausted nationalism’. When Simba Manyanya and I began using this phrase in 2002 (in Zimbabwe's Plunge), as shorthand for Mugabe's incapacity to deliver a higher standard of living, it was not clear that the nationalist project could be reinvigorated, at least in a manner the masses would find compelling. We cited Frantz Fanon's (1963:204) Wretched of the Earth:
A bourgeoisie that provides nationalism alone as food for the masses fails in its mission and gets caught up in a whole series of mishaps. But if nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up a blind alley. The bourgeois leaders of underdeveloped countries imprison national consciousness in sterile formalism.
Mugabe spokesperson George Charamba revealed the process on 14 August:
We never asked for any money from South Africa. It was the World Bank that approached Mbeki and said please help Zimbabwe. They then offered to help us (Mberi, 2005).
The issue of the proposed loan from South Africa to Zimbabwe has taken a new twist amid revelations that the US government approached South African president Thabo Mbeki to bail out Zimbabwe, The Herald (Zimbabwe) reported yesterday. A highly-placed Western diplomat in South Africa, who is closely following the deal, told that IMF deputy managing director Anne O. Krueger approached President Mbeki and asked him to advance financial support to Zimbabwe ahead of the IMF summit set for next month, The Herald (Zimbabwe) reported yesterday.
The diplomat said Ms. Krueger made her move in the run-up to the African Union summit in Sirte, Libya, which was held from July 4 to 6. Ms Krueger is reported to have told President Mbeki that a South African loan would enable Harare to pay its dues to the IMF and, in so doing, strengthen the case against Zimbabwe's expulsion from the institution. President Mbeki, the source said, was surprised that a high-ranking IMF official could make a case for Zimbabwe. However, Ms Krueger is reported to have pointed out that South Africa would lose more from Zimbabwe‘s expulsion since no other country would want to assist Zimbabwe after that, and this would have a negative effect on the South African economy.
South Africa has gained market share in exports, tourism and services. SA's share of investment in Zimbabwe has also risen as there has been an element of bargain-basement buying by some mining and industrial groups. SA is also taking significant skills from the country, especially scarce black skills in health, education, banking, engineering and IT. It would be too much to say that SA has benefited in net terms, but there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that it is securing some gains from the crisis (Bisseker & Ryan, 2005).
Setting the fake ‘reform’ rhetoric aside, what is instead revealed by the current crisis is another of Fanon's insights, namely that Zanu (PF's) sterile formalism now sharply contradicts further capital accumulation by Zimbabwe's parasitical ruling class, a key faction of which desperately requires foreign exchange. (All Zimbabweans need foreign exchange, of course, just to spark their bone-dry carburettors, and to acquire essential medicines, spare parts, agricultural inputs, and manufactured goods that are no longer made by local firms following the 1990s de-industrialisation.) For the impoverished Zimbabwean masses, the povo, there is no economic bailout on the horizon, much less democratic leverage, only a choice of which financiers will worsen austerity in future years: the predictable money mandarins of Washington, or the new sub-imperialists of Pretoria, backed by a gullible media and superficially critical opposition parties, or both.
The IMF & Zimbabwe's Povo
Consider the first lot, the Bretton Woods Institutions. Beginning in September 1980, when Zimbabwe formally joined, the role of the IMF was never to benefit ‘Zimbabwean people as a whole’. Five examples are illustrative (details are in Bond 1998):
1) By early 1982, finance minister Bernard Chidzero – later to head the IMF/Bank Development Committee – denied that ‘the IMF would impose any conditions as Zimbabwe was already restructuring its economy.’ Though it was ‘a sensitive issue not for public debate,’ Chidzero made statements to Parliament claiming ‘devaluation of the dollar is not imminent and is not being contemplated.’ Less than three months later, Chidzero announced a 20% decline in the currency, admitting it ‘had been under consideration for some months.’
2) In late 1982, interest rates were raised dramatically, a move Chidzero pointed out with pride to the World Bank in private correspondence.
3) In March 1983, an editorial by the government-owned Herald observed that ‘Zimbabwe has a democratically elected people's government and therefore, the people, its supporters have the right to know what the IMF asked of this country.’
4) By 1984, Zimbabwe was paying vast proportions of export earnings to cover foreign loans, in part because of apartheid destabilisation of the region. As York University economist Colin Stoneman put it at the time: ‘there can be no doubt that Zimbabwe's payments crisis was partly caused by South Africa, and that this was the means whereby the IMF gained a lever on Zimbabwean economic policy’.
5) The IMF soon terminated its $315 million line of credit due to Harare's budget overruns, forcing more painful austerity. By early 1985, Mugabe complained of ‘pressure from the IMF to cut government spending on education and defence but the government has a way of overcoming this pressure’. Yet within a few years, Zimbabwe's vaunted education programme was indeed under threat as Bretton Woods cost-recovery policies gained momentum.
The Bretton Woods Institutions applied neoliberalism across a variety of sectors, and maintained heavy pressure on Mugabe to continue the ineffectual ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ rural land policy. At a July 2005 land conference in South Africa, Mbeki told the audience that Zimbabwe's failure to embark upon land redistribution prior to the chaotic takeovers of 4,000 white-owned farms from February 2000, was because ‘They slowed down to get the negotiations in this country to succeed’ since South Africa's white farmers would be ‘frightened’ about the transition to democracy (News24.com 2005).
In reality, Harare's 1993 Land Designation Act was ‘shelved,’ as Zanu (PF) member of parliament Lazarus Nzarayebani complained in late 1994, because ‘it is not in conformity with the World Bank and IMF’ and instead served government only ‘to save its face’ (Financial Gazette, 9 February 1995). In fact, South Africa's first ANC land minister, Derek Hanekom, invited the same World Bank team that was preventing Zimbabwe's land reform during the early 1990s, led by Robert Christenson, to guide post-apartheid policy. (That policy was also characterised by willing seller, willing buyer neoliberalism, and was publicly recognised as a failure at the state-sponsored land summit.) What of the last batch of IMF credits to Zimbabwe? Did these contribute to the welfare of all Zimbabweans and promote peace and democracy? The opposite conclusion is more logical. The IMF's $53 million loan in 1999 was meant to release another $800 million from other lenders. The IMF's stated objectives were straightforward: reversal of both the luxury import tax and price controls on staple foods. Details were confirmed in a March 1999 statement by leading IMF negotiator Michael Nowak:
There are two issues outstanding and these have stopped the IMF from making the standby credit available to the country. These issues are, one, we want the government to reduce the tariffs slapped on luxury goods last September, and second, we also want the government to give us a clear timetable as to when and how they will remove the price controls they have imposed on some goods (Financial Gazette, 12 March 1999).
The Zimbabweans felt offended, shocked, but they all the same agreed to give us the information, we got all the clarification we wanted. They had no choice … We have had assurances [that] if there is budgetary overspending, there will be cuts in other budget sectors (SAPA, 1999).
The IMF continued giving advice to impose austerity, both from its Harare office and via periodic high-level missions from Washington. The 2000 mission called for ‘tight monetary and wage policies … privatisation, civil service reform and trade liberalisation,’ according to the Herald (9 December 2000) newspaper. By mid-2001, finance minister Simba Makoni confessed to the Southern Africa regional session of the World Economic Forum in Durban:
We are committed to fulfilling these obligations, but it's clear that our economy is in no state to generate sufficient funds to clear these arrears (Financial Gazette, 14 June 2001).
Was Zimbabwe punished for failing to make the most foreign debt payments since 1999? To almost everyone's surprise, Mugabe was able to get away with the de facto default. No new long-term credit has been available, to be sure, but nor did the US Marines or other hostile military forces invade so to collect collateral, as was the practice a century earlier against defaulting Latin American countries. Instead, once Zimbabwe fell into deep arrears to the IMF, a convoluted official procedure began, culminating in the threat of expulsion. From 2001, the Zimbabwean finance ministry scrounged $1.4 million each quarter to make token payments on the debt, but from mid-2003 through 2004 found $16.5 million to send the IMF. This was also the point at which Zimbabwe ran out of petrol and many other essential imports.
Diplomatic scuffle
By August 2005, Mbeki assumed that his offer of a $500 million credit could influence the course of an elite transition, aiming at installing a neoliberal, low-intensity democracy regime. That model would slightly sideline Mugabe by 2008 at the latest; permit Zanu (PF) to retain power – possibly in a government of unity by coopting MDC leaders – with the friendlier face of a technocratic president (the neoliberal former finance minister Makoni is usually tipped for the job) even if Mugabe still controlled the ruling party itself; and then open the economic borders up much more to Johannesburg capital.
Mugabe didn’t play along. Showing an impressive resilience and desire to hold on to maximum power at all cost, he visited China in August and then snubbed Mbeki in a brutal diplomatic manner. At an African Union (AU) meeting in Addis Ababa, according to the Sunday Independent (Fabricius, 2005),
Mugabe built an alliance of other leaders to defeat a South African tactical move to win two permanent seats for Africa on the United Nations security council …
Mugabe, Egypt and others spoke out against a compromise deal which South Africa had helped forge between the AU and the so-called G4, a coalition of four other nations seeking permanent seats on the security council – Germany, Japan, India and Brazil. Mbeki argued strongly at the AU summit in Addis Ababa in favour of the compromise as the only realistic way to get Africa permanent seats. But the Mugabe camp prevailed.
The summit rejected the compromise deal that AU and G4 foreign ministers, including SA's Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, agreed on at a meeting in London … Mugabe and others argued against this, saying the lack of a veto would relegate African permanent members to ‘secondclass status’.
extremely concerned about the danger of a loan amounting to little more than extending the crisis-ridden shelf-life of anti-worker, anti-poor authoritarian policies and practices. We call on our own government to show the maximum resolve in ensuring that there are very clear requirements attached to any loan. These requirements must include guarantees that the loan will not be squandered on elite consumption or repression. But the requirements must also embrace a much wider package of commitments with clear time-lines … These wider issues are, in fact, essential for resolving the present financial crisis.
Paying the piper, ignoring the tune?
And then Mugabe pulled a card from his sleeve no one thought he had: in September 2005 he came up with $135 million from having scrounged all foreign currency available, and paid the IMF a substantial downpayment, enough to earn a six-month reprieve on the expulsion threat (after the September payments, outstanding IMF debt was $160 million). Mugabe promised $50 million more by March 2006, and vowed to repay the full amount. (No one outside Pretoria really believes the IMF would expel Zimbabwe, given that China and many African regimes would oppose this in the IMF executive, where 15% of the vote would be enough to veto such a move.)
By all accounts, this was an irrational and costly gesture. Even high-profile business spokespersons who are ordinarily most aggrieved by Mugabe's dirigisme were opposed to the payment, in part because rumours suggest the Reserve Bank raided Harare capital's foreign exchange accounts. Conservative economic commentator John Robertson complained,
This is just diverting foreign currency from exporters to the IMF at an enormous cost. We are starving local producers of hard currency and this is exacerbating the problem (Zimonline, 2005).
You have the specter of this smashed and abused country – like a mugged man lying in the street and being run over by the passing traffic – actually paying money to the IMF. Money taken from private schools and NGO's, food agencies and exporters. $50,000 here, a million there. Money critically required for food, drugs, fuel – all basic necessisities and the IMF has the audacity to welcome the payments! Shown the source of the funds they express shock and promise to investigate – but they still bank the cheques. I wrote to the Fund and said send the money back – we need the stuff more than you do to keep life and limb together – not even the courtesy of a reply …
Why is the IMF debt so important? The reality is that it is not that important. Paying our arrears to the Fund would not change our status one iota – we could not expect IMF support for any sort of stabilisation programme for some consid- erable time after the issue of the arrears has been dealt with and a workable recovery programme put in place. No, the reason why the IMF threat was finally treated with such deference is mainly political. African leaders – struggling with their image abroad and with eco nomic and financial problems at home, did not want to see an African State expelled for misbehavior … And so we have the specter of the Zanu (PF) regime contra- dicting itself with respect to the IMF issue. One minute they do not matter and can ‘go to hell’. The next we are scouring the country for our last remaining sources of foreign exchange to make a meaningless payment to the Fund which will ensure that we are not expelled but are then left with insufficient resources to import essentials like food.
We have never been friends of the IMF and we shall never be friends of the IMF. The IMF is never of real assistance to developing countries. It is wielded by the big powers. It is the big powers which dictate what it should do (Reuters, 2005a).
Meanwhile, on the same day Mugabe spoke out against the IMF in Cuba, the Movement for Democratic Change issued a pro-IMF statement. The MDC (2005) argument not only unveiled residual neoliberal influences at Harvest House headquarters, but also suggests that the opposition party – which in late October split in half over whether to participate in the November senate elections – does indeed desire a Pretoria-mediated elite transition (notwith standing the overwhelming lack of evidence of Mbeki's bona fides):
As the Mugabe regime gets more and more desperate, its economic and political positions get increasingly incoherent. Having in the past been brazenly disdainful of the IMF, it is now suddenly desperate to remain a respectable fee-paying member. This objective could have been facilitated by accepting the economic lifeline on offer from South Africa, but that would have required political compromises to be made. The regime's desperation is greatest in the political realm, as evidenced by its spurning outside assistance and opting instead to squander the country's extremely scarce foreign currency resources to repay a large chunk of the arrears owed to the IMF. It is like a badly behaved schoolboy offering his pocket money to a rich uncle, rather than improve his schoolwork …
Events in the last two weeks have dramatically underscored the regime's errant schoolboy obstinacy. At the same time that the IMF arrears were being paid, the government forced through the Constitutional amendments which further undermined private property rights, amongst other problems making it impossible for farmers to be able to borrow using land as collateral. In its economic policy-making, the pattern has been for the regime to bring in rapidly changing piecemeal measures to band-aid the economy forward, but leaving the underlying problems to fester. Having one or two of the ‘right’ elements in place is not good enough: it can actually make things worse when the rest of what would be required in a ‘comprehensive and coherent’ programme are missing. 2
The extent of Mbeki's own commitment to getting the IMF back into Zimbabwe was revealed on 15 October. Addressing a forum of African editors, he explained:
We had indeed said that we were ready to assist, and the reason we wanted to assist was because we understood the implications of Zimbabwe's expulsion from the IMF. What it would mean, among other things, is that everybody who is owed something by Zimbabwe would demand immediately to be paid. You would even get to a situation where they would seize anything that was being exported out of Zimbabwe because of that debt (Reuters, 2005b)
The Municipal Financial Management Technical Assistance Project, totaling $15 million is the only active World Bank loan to South Africa. It supports the building of financial management capacity in more than 40 key municipalities around the country. The World Bank country office is also supporting the government in … [its] oversight role in municipal public/private partnerships.
In contrast to activists, the key politicians prefer to ‘talk left, walk right’. Once we dispense with the rhetoric, this surreal financial game of hide-and-seek with the IMF unveils imperial/subimperial/dictatorial power relations uniting Washington, Pretoria and Harare. It remains for critics of the regimes to pursue a democratic, anti-neoliberal strategy – and too, for international protest against the Bretton Woods Institutions to now intensify.
Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society: http://www.uk zn.ac.za/ccs; e-mail: bondp@123456ukzn.ac.za.
Editor's Note: On China in Zimbabwe, see Lindsey Hilsum, ‘Re-enter the Dragon: China's New Mission in Africa’, ROAPE 104/05, June/September 2005; also in the same issue, ‘Development Denied: Autocratic Militarism in Postelection Zimbabwe’ by Sarah Bracking.