It shouldn't be surprising that zombies are ubiquitous in the culture of 2010.1 Rather than producing any drastically new ideas to address the numerous forms of global crisis, the ‘Empire of Capital’ has continued to simply reproduce old ones. ‘Hope’ has been given a media-constructed package like never before with the coming of Obama, but we cannot go so far as to actually alter things. The solution to the problems we face is more of the same; greater freedoms for capital with more retrenchments for workers. That is all neoliberalism has ever offered since the victory of Friedman-inspired economics in the early 1970s, which then received renewed vigour when Jeffrey Sachs prescribed shock therapy on the Eastern European nations in the early 1990s. So upon our earth walk the half-dead: half-dead victims of half-dead ideas. In 2010 the prime-time zombies of development economics have seen Dambisa Moyo arise from the investment bank at the centre of the 2008 contagion. Backed with the United States' cutting-edge showmanship, Moyo can pronounce the end of aid amidst media swooning as she enjoys her €76 hotel breakfast (Edemariam 2009).
Moyo is the latest torchbearer for international bankers who are once again forwarding the old argument that Africa can develop so long as it manages to cultivate a modernising elite with the right entrepreneurial savvy. This time, however, it is not a British administrator or a Paris Club banker, but someone who challenges images of the evil coloniser. Dead Aid is a Goldman Sachs-inspired, rehashed argument that finances toward Africa should stop being given to governments via institutions like the World Bank, but instead should come from ‘smart money’ and be directed toward individuals. At best, the state can issue bonds to international investors that it can judge based on credit-rating agency assessments of whether countries are ‘seriously intent on transforming their economies for the better’ (Moyo 2009, p. 79). Her argument sits amidst a gutted version of history that omits the fundamental rationale behind post-independence economic policies in Africa, leaving only a parody of the past that includes a seriously inaccurate account of the economic history of her own country of Zambia. Moyo then describes fictionalised African entrepreneurs and actually uses a fictional country on which she can base her argument. These supposed entrepreneurs, Moyo claims, are being held back by an oppressive state and need the help of benign capital. Without scrutinising just what forms of capital and capitalists she is imagining, Moyo makes the mistake of conflating the existence of markets with capitalism. The result is an entirely unhelpful book barely worthy of academic debate. The fact it has received more attention than any book on Africa in recent years says more about the nature of ideology than anything else.
The past Moyo omits
Not only is Moyo's argument ahistorical, my own research suggests that it is in fact contradicted by the experience of Zambia. I examine a previous development project that began in the colonial era and continued until the neoliberal transition of 1990. This project sought to build up an entrepreneurial elite among Tonga farmers in Southern Province. My data confirm many previous studies revealing that capitalist farmers were emerging only because of state support along with the help of international aid. Furthermore, my observations show that with the coming of neoliberalism and a reduction in aid, the accumulation of these farmers, and their potential to provide jobs, has largely been eradicated. The experience of indigenous capitalists in this climate no doubt varies depending on specificities of sector and a country's position in the broader global economy. However, the agricultural sector in Southern and Central Africa has not supported capitalist farmers without state involvement, regardless of whether they are settlers or indigenous Africans.
Tonga agropastoralists living on the plateau between Lusaka and Livingstone in Northern Rhodesia were part of a modern experiment, initiated under the British colonial administration, to create a capitalist class among farmers who had only recently adopted plough-based agriculture. After independence many of them moved on to the privately owned land originally set aside for white settlers.2 I have been gathering oral histories from farmers and ranchers who were the recipients of these early development efforts and whose families came to produce significant surpluses: they were expanding, increasingly hiring off-farm labour and were influencing the political climate of the country. This has been shown in the PhD dissertations of at least five important scholars (Dixon-Fyle 1976, Baylies 1978, Vickery 1978, Momba 1982, Chipungu 1988). The desire to tap into the so-called ‘traditional’ sectors to bring out an acquiring class, to nurture an entrepreneurial ethos and promote indigenous investment in Africa, was therefore initially a colonial project. In the post-independence era it morphed into Modernisation theory with figures such as Arthur Lewis actually making the bridge (see e.g. Tignor 2006). The British looked to histories and social customs among particular ethnic groups, seen as malleable clay from which they could construct new beings, with interests in maintaining economic dimensions of empire while simultaneously providing a developmental urge within the country.
In most instances the expected timeline of independence was pushed forward by the disruptive actions of the colonised. Nevertheless, the transitions largely represented a changeover in the elite at a time when state planning was the norm. Moreover, as the Tanzanian scholar Issa Shivji explains, ‘contrary to the current propaganda of the West, which disowns responsibility, it was their institution, the World Bank, that designed the post-independence economic programmes’ (Shivji 2009, p. 5). These programmes were premised on the intensification of monoculture agriculture for export, the establishment of some enclaves of import-substitution industrialisation (ISI), and the ‘throwing open [of] the doors for the multinationals to invest in extractive and resource based industries’ (Ibid.). At the same time, ISI initiatives were financed by the calculated immiseration of the peasantry in an attempt to build up a modernising elite.3
This paradigm was, as Shivji also notes, challenged in some spaces by ‘young academics coming out of post-independence universities’. Development for many was not ‘looking for modernising elites, but rather a process of class struggle’, which sought fundamental transformations of the colonial societies (Ibid. p. 7). Yet as the state became a site of accumulation, any radical nationalists that came to power with alternative visions for transforming their societies were either taken out by military coups or assassinations, became compradors, or else they found pragmatic reasons to tolerate imperialism (Ibid. p. 8). In the first decade of independence many countries did, nevertheless, make some impressive achievements in social policy, creating health and education infrastructure that had never existed in the colonial era. This was of course achieved with loans, and eventually the oil crisis of the 1970s, with declining terms of trade and sky-rocketing interest rates following the Volcker shock,4 compounded to bring on the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. As we know, the structural adjustment programmes were designed to dismantle what little had been built and put it in the hands of apparently better, more entrepreneurial, modernisers.5
A new knight for Sachs and Sachs
Moyo grew up in Zambia and is armed with a Harvard MA and an Oxford PhD in economics. She has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, followed by eight years at the investment firm Goldman Sachs – now famous for its role in the 2008 financial crisis, losing its status as an investment bank and then, after accepting $10 billion in a US federal bail-out, setting aside a reported $20 billion for employee bonuses (Globe and Mail 2009, New York Times 2009). The book has the stamp of approval of the likes of Steve Forbes and Kofi Annan, has been on the New York Times bestseller list and was launched with a high-profile publicity campaign that brought Moyo to media prominence virtually overnight.
Not surprisingly, given Moyo's credentials, the basic message in Dead Aid is that finances for Africa should stop being given to governments via institutions like the World Bank, but instead should come from ‘the hedge funds, the international banks [and] the private equity funds’ (Moyo 2009, p. 153). She enthusiastically declares that ‘Africa's era of private capital is only now beginning, and this trend has to be nurtured in order to continue’ (Ibid.) Who are the targets of this financing? ‘Entrepreneurs’ that ‘need a receptive and user-friendly environment within which to thrive’ (Ibid.). It is a classic position in political economy whereby the natural tendencies of capital need to be massaged into being so they can take hold to then unleash their benevolent powers of progress. It is in some respects, as Hirschman (1977) explains, a process of trying to contain man's dangerous passions by allowing avarice to dominate. Greed may not be pleasant, but the moral philosophers believed it would be predictable.6
Yet in other ways, this argument is an attempt to engineer nothing less than a social revolution. Above all, Moyo claims, ‘the middle class needs a government that will let it get ahead’ (2009, p. 57). The desire to bring the liberal capitalist revolution to Africa, however, is a long-standing colonial fantasy that never manages to address the issues of over-production in the advanced capitalist states and the ways in which capitalist development in one part of the global system disarticulates its possible rise in others. This is what people like Walter Rodney (1982) were trying to address in the post-independence moment that took place in Dar es Salaam (late 1960s to early 1970s), while people like Colin Leys (1975, 1982), Michael Cowen (1982) and Raphie Kaplinsky (1980) were debating accumulation and dependency in Kenya in this journal.
Seen from another perspective, Moyo's book suggests that finance capital is simply interested in changing the group it wants to hold responsible for the next round of loans from the North to ensure that interest payments continue to flow from the continent into Wall Street firms. The governments in Africa simply cannot hold (or repay) more debt. Moreover, most proved to be so corrupt, and, as Fanon predicted, such a ‘little greedy caste, avid and voracious’ that they could no longer be trusted by bankers or their citizens (Fanon 1968, p. 141). Thus perhaps there is a desire among bankers to bypass the potentially protective institutions of nation-states, curtailing a return to inward-looking accumulation regimes that might arise from renewed nationalist sentiments amidst the failures of neoliberal structural adjustment programmes. In the process, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund can, as Soederberg suggests, continue to play a policing role and act as an insurer against the rising volatility of a system free of national capital controls (2004, pp. 20–23). Perhaps it is a move to shed one more level of ‘extra-economic’ forms of domination in favour of ever more pure economic hegemony (Wood 2003, p. 153). Yet recent years have also seen the militarisation of aid, while traditional aid budgets are gutted. Klein (2007) describes a ‘disaster capitalism complex’ whereby corporate interests are lining up for rebuilding contracts in close collaboration with militaries.
Fiction in place of history
Moyo would not see things this way because her account is utterly removed from history.7 The book is mostly a propaganda piece, touting the harmonious benefits that capital can bring to investors from rich nations and to Africans. It is not important that the latter are expected to be pleased with interest rates twice those being paid by Americans (Moyo 2009, p. 80). With a global recession induced by Americans unable to pay mortgages, one wonders why we should expect Africans to do better at double the rates! Moyo's argument is so steeped in ahistorical economics that she in fact even constructs a fictional country of ‘Dongo’ to make her case.8 Upon this country without history she can make use of the jargon that made its way out of the World Bank building over the last decade. Terms like ‘social capital’, ‘strong civil society’, ‘good policy environments’ and ‘good governance’ are treated as if they are self-evident and universal terms that actually provide some analytical capacity to understand reality.9 ‘Good policy’ for the rich is of course ‘good policy’ for the poor (Ibid. p. 40).
Moyo avoids addressing the legions of critical political economy published on aid, indigenous accumulation and dependency (prominent examples being Corbridge 1993, George 1994, Strange 1998, Cheru 2006). Instead, she constructs her opponents simply as ‘proponents of aid’ without actually naming any of them or examining alternate formulations of the world order by people who have lived in and written on Africa in the global economy for decades: Samir Amin, Giovani Arrighi, John Saul, Issa Shivji and Sam Moyo being some worthwhile examples.
One could at least have considered arguments being made by social movements in Africa such as the Jubilee campaign – or, in her own country, the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection that has been acting as a critical voice on issues of debt management in Zambia for 20 years. Moyo might also read some of the academics in her own country to see whether they agree with her description of Zambia, for example, as having apparently made a transition from ‘socialism to capitalism’ (Moyo 2009, p. xiv). Zambia is never once described as having been ‘socialist’ in Bizeck Phiri's Political History of Zambia (2006). Any of Kenneth Kaunda's early socialist pretensions were certainly contrary to the realities portrayed in William Tordoff's edited volume on Politics in Zambia (Tordoff et al. 1974), which still functions as a text at the University of Zambia and provides case studies of local capitalist class formation. Burdette (1988) also explains how the briefly held policy orientation of ‘African democratic socialism’ was in 1967 superseded by ‘humanism’, which, she claims, ‘provided some philosophical support for the introduction of welfare programmes while an incipient Zambian capitalist class was substituted for a foreign one in commerce, and state ownership edged out the multinational corporations in mines and manufacturing’ (Burdette 1988, p. 77). The latter, of course only ever resulted in 51% ownership, with the remaining 49% staying in the hands of companies like Anglo-American and Roan Select Trust. Andrew Sardanis, a Zambian businessman close to Kaunda who managed the state acquisition of Zambian Consolidated Copper Mines, has also written two volumes on his own ventures in Africa, which included the establishment of a continental bank based in the country. Sardanis' Meridian Bank was established and succeeding under Kaunda, while he blames the post-1991 supposedly pro-capitalist Chiluba government for many of the problems that led it to fail (Sardanis 2007). One could go on, but the point is that if Moyo cannot accurately describe her own country's economy, it is hoped that one would question whether we should accept her prescriptions for the continent.
Markets versus capitalism
A critical contradiction in Moyo's argument is that a local capitalist class was actually coming into being as aid was being poured into Zambia. Moyo suggests that there is a nascent middle class in Africa that ‘just needs a government that will let it get ahead’. Perhaps, however, we should examine an actual case of the type of middle class Moyo has in mind. Ample research shows an indigenous, productive, owning capitalist class was coming into being on the Tonga Plateau in Zambia's Southern Province with the active assistance of the state. It was part of a larger business class documented by Baylies (1978, 1979), among others. Once ‘free-market’ policies forced that government to retreat, this class went into a dramatic decline with tragic consequences.
Even the wealthiest farmers, with the greatest ability to take advantage of the liberalisation process, claim the reforms were disastrous. This confirms Craig's (2000) findings that show that Zambians were largely incapable of benefiting from privatisations. Ben Kapita was the President of the Zambian National Farmers Union (ZNFU) when it supported liberalisation, and then came to be the minister of agriculture under the Mwanawasa government. As he explains:
here we did not have the money to enable Zambians to buy into some of these companies. That is what I would have preferred personally. So I have no quarrel with the policy of liberalisation or privatisation but I've got a lot of quarrel with the way it was done from 1992–2001. (Interview, Ben Kapita, Lusaka, 19 July 2007)
Costain Chilala is the head of the Zambian Food Reserve Agency and by his own account the largest independent farmer in the country. He emerged from the successful class of farmers on the plateau. His success is partly attributed to the fact he, like a number of Tonga people, purchased land in Central Province in 1973 when the government was opening up new areas of private title alongside the Tazara railway. Central Province has had greater rainfall and Chilala was able to move into new rust-resistant, tropic-hardy wheat crops made possible by a multi-year breeding programme funded in part by Canadian aid money. However, even Chilala admits that in the area of Southern Province he emerged from, ‘These farms went down, either because sons did not have the know-how in farming, or because of the liberalisations.’ (Interview, Costain Chilala, Lusaka 27 July 2007)
George Cornhill, octogenarian and a Tonga man with a white settler father, has been a prominent independence leader, rancher and businessman. Out of 150 interviews, he is the only significant example of an agriculturalist that has been able to consolidate properties in the aftermath of the liberalisations, now owning a good portion of the buildings in Monze. Even though he has benefited in recent years, he believes that the liberalisation process was disastrous locally, with the government abandoning important roles it played – even if to an unsatisfactory degree. As he states of the process:
that was very bad because, all our people here, the Tonga in particular, they were big maize producers. And the collapse of NAMBOARD [the National Agricultural Marketing Board] destroyed the whole agriculture economy … the diseases that came and the government did nothing. They let the cattle die. Like, Monze district had the highest cattle concentration in the country and then foot and mouth wiped it out completely. (Interview, George Cornhill, Monze, 25 July 2008)
all of the infrastructure we see now was built by Kaunda: universities, hospitals, clinics, roads. You know, he had that vision, but when Chiluba came, he built nothing … people who came [with the MMD], they just went into buildings already found which were built by Kaunda. So Chiluba really did nothing. (Interview, George Cornhill, Monze, 25 July 2008)
I think some of the people who had economic knowledge could have seen it, but we others, we couldn't see it … we thought these things would go the way it was presented to us. It was always on TV. How they were describing the privatisation we thought it was going to work well … when it came it did not benefit everybody. It was meant for top politicians, those that were in authority. Those were the beneficiaries. If we tried to buy one of those companies we couldn't get through. (Interview, Jeremiah Munan'gandu, Monze, 26 July 2008)
There is a perception implicit in social-engineering approaches to development that Africans ‘lack of a culture of modern entrepreneurship’ (Wild 1997, p. xxi). In examining capitalists in Zimbabwe, Wild argues that Africans had not gained familiarity with processes ‘of working with financial institutions, and of using capital and learning economic procedures’ (Ibid.) Yet Tonga farmers do not feel it is a lack of ability that prevents them from producing greater surpluses and hiring labourers. Instead they felt limited by factors such as the lack of loans at interest rates low enough to justify the risks, insufficient transport, limited access to markets, drastically fluctuating commodity prices and extremely expensive inputs. Moreover, they claim their soils were leached of fertility by white settlers before them, with insufficient access to water, cattle diseases, inappropriate breeds and insufficient veterinary services. The United National Independence Party (UNIP) government took actions to address these issues and paid particular attention to the needs of those who managed to acquire privately owned land, but after 1991 most farmers abandoned ambitious plans for cash-cropping. This eventually contributed to massive food shortages to the point that in the 2001/2 season, the price of maize meal increased 500%10 while four million people were at risk of starvation (BBC News 2002a, 2002b, reporting earlier – lower – figures; and, for a broader view, de Waal and Whiteside 2003).
The saddest part of the experiences with neoliberalism is that the retrenchment of the state took place as the HIV pandemic took hold: school access declined, and health clinics were closed down and/or out of medication just as the influx of HIV infections began. Moyo claims that the fact that the number of people on the continent living in poverty nearly doubled between 1981 and 2002 ‘has its roots in aid’ (Moyo 2009, p. 7), but it is more to the point that it had its roots in neoliberalism and the debt crisis. Until then, Zambia's poverty rate had actually halved from its pre-independence days. The practical reality of this for the farmers I spoke with is that all of them had lost many of their children – and therefore a large portion of their workforce.
The new economy
Neoliberalism has of course been met with new areas of growth, but they are not the same as the kinds of production that were being pushed for in the earlier post-colonial period. The most significant accumulation taking place today is in the carrying trade, with people simply buying low in one location and selling high in another. Indigenous profits tend to be tiny because there are so many participants. There has also been widespread entry into transportation with the withdrawal of a publicly funded bus system. This tends to occur as farmers purchase second- and third-hand Toyota and Mitsubishi trucks shipped from Japan, which can be loaded with market produce while paying passengers sit atop. In these instances some have simply colonised functions of the state while no actual ‘development’ takes place. This form of privatisation has negative consequences. Although transport does arrive, people are packed in unsafe conditions on inappropriate vehicles with no safety requirements. There are certainly no schedules and no need for drivers' licences when bribes to policemen are just part of the everyday practice of getting crops past checkpoints on the way to the market. A culture of corruption abounds. Why wouldn't it, when neoliberal policy dictates that rational people should think only of themselves because that is what markets require? Who can argue with markets? They are god-like.
In a couple of cases, enterprising youth, such as Stainford Siatontola, were able to make money early in the liberalisation process by moving into cattle transport, taking cattle up to the Copperbelt when NAMBOARD collapsed. Siantontola has since become the most prominent African wholesaler in Choma, with a store selling goods mostly produced in South Africa and China. Locally he has a reputation for participating in witchcraft because people cannot imagine how someone could become so rich so quickly. Markets are seemingly magical.
Capitalist production can of course not be conflated with market transactions. Everyone in Southern Province can tell you that there are more things available on the market now than there were 25 years ago, but they can also tell you there is less work available where they can sell their labour. The dilemma was explained over and over as farmers stated that ‘before, we had money but nothing to buy, now there is plenty to buy, but there is no money for it.’ Having products dumped on a country in exchange for currency is not the same as having them produced locally within a capitalist wage relationship.
Tonga farmers were largely excluded from the market in feed, seed and chemical inputs. Evidence suggests that before independence some prominent white farmers manoeuvred to maintain control of the seed market. For the most part, however, South African companies have moved in to fill the landscape. Tiger Feeds, for example, is a 13-year-old subsidiary of South African Meadow Feeds, established 67 years ago, and now branches into all aspects of the poultry industry (Interview, Stephen Kyriazis, 23 July 2007). It is ‘the largest feed producer in Africa’, with grains and logistics provided by Cargill. As one of Cargill's managers explains, ‘Meadow Feeds is far and away the most strategic customer for the Grain and Oilseed Supply Chain business in South Africa’ (Cargill News 2009). South African companies have tended to locate their research and management outside the country, while the national research centres have nearly disappeared, and the university struggles to put out students with basic agricultural sciences.
When I met Judith Lungu, Dean of the School of Agricultural Science at the University of Zambia, she was lamenting the unwillingness of companies to contribute to their school. Lungu received her MA and PhD training in Canada under a Canadian International Development Agency programme which allowed about a third of the faculty to get graduate degrees in Canada, and also built the very structure the offices and classrooms sit in. The day I met Dr Lungu, she had printed up posters for broiler chickens that they were selling around campus to raise operating funds. The Dean is selling chickens! Ben Kapita, agriculture minister at the time, was frustrated with the lack of investment made by foreign agricultural companies operating in the country and started to ponder whether some forms of capital controls needed to be invoked. In discussing this, Kapita was unfamiliar with the idea that states could actually place conditions on companies wishing to invest (such as requirements of hiring local labour at the research and development level). Yet it resonated with him, and in response he exclaimed:
we attract them here, we bring them into Zambia, they do business and make a lot of money, but what is their contribution now to the development of the country? Because what happens is they can come here, they make billions, and the billions go out of the country. (Interview, Ben Kapita, 19 July 2008)
The concrete reality that free-market ideology prevents Moyo from seeing is that the entrepreneurial class she describes as being so oppressed does not exist. That was what the UNIP government had sought to address. There were 100 university graduates in the country at independence, and insufficient wealth in the country for people to invest, in part because colonialism thoroughly disarticulated the societies that existed and then kept people in the deepest poverty possible in an effort to push them into the workforce.11 In this context, state ownership was justified all over the formerly colonised world because there was no local capitalist class. Following independence there was a state-led effort to create indigenous capitalists, and some successes were made and then lost with the imposition of structural adjustment. Now, nearly 50 years later, the situation is much as it was at independence, except that now there is none of the hope and political mobilisation needed to address the numerous problems resulting from imperialism. This is tragic when the problems of unemployment, housing, public infrastructure, education and health care are many times greater following decades of neoliberal policy.
It is certainly questionable whether the idea of producing a capitalist class in agriculture has ever been a significant force for investment and rising productivity. However, a workforce must eat and, even in spite of the predatory relationship between the state and agricultural producers, production in such a variable environment has never been upheld without state involvement. Although farmers once decried the numerous problems with the agricultural infrastructure of the UNIP state, they today have fond memories of it and want it back.