Thousands of mainly young Egyptians took to the streets of Cairo and Egypt’s provincial centres on 20 September 2019. They protested against the repressive regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the corruption that is its hallmark. The protest was met with some surprise. Sisi’s repressive regime has clamped down on all dissent since it came to power following a military coup in 2013. Extensive and systematic torture of anyone deemed to oppose the government has become a feature of Egyptian politics and the regime has received support from, among others, erstwhile UK prime minister Tony Blair, and ex-International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief, now head of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde. The message seems clear from Washington and Europe: stability at all costs for the imperial triad irrespective, at least for the moment, of torturous treatment of Egyptians as long as law and (dis)order is maintained and there is no threat from Islamists or challenge to Israel. Continued US military support underpins Sisi’s bestial regime that draws on Egypt’s strategic rent to buttress repression. The heady days of the previous 30-year dictator Hosni Mubarak and his regime of a ‘democracy of newspapers’ where criticism could be voiced, as long as it did not involve the ‘royal’ Mubarak family, may now be lamented.
Street protest and demonstrations in autumn 2019 followed social media posting by a former construction engineer accusing Sisi and his close aides of corruption (El-Hamalawy 2019). The plethora of house building, hotels and palaces, at a time when the government stressed the country’s poverty and advanced IMF-backed austerity, jarred with the country’s youth. Young Egyptians not involved in the 2011 uprising and, it seems, unconnected to any political affiliation, took to the streets with rage. They were greeted with repression. More than 4000 protesters and perceived sympathisers were arrested, including at least 111 children; places of protest, squares, avenues and corniches were militarised and the state used bribes to incentivise counter-demonstrations in support of dictatorship (Amnesty International 2019).
The blanket arrests were indiscriminate, including academics, lawyers and broadcasters who may even have worked for state-controlled media. At least 16 lawyers were arrested while seeking to defend their clients. The director of Adalah Center for Rights and Freedoms, Mohamed el-Baqer, was arrested as he visited the Supreme State Security Prosecution to defend detained activist Alaa Abdelfattah. He was charged with the same ‘offence’ as his client: ‘membership of a banned group’ and ‘spreading false information’. Perhaps one of the most unjust and certainly unlawful moves by the state has been the re-arresting of former prisoners. The well-known activist from the 2011 uprisings Alaa Abdelfattah was arrested on 29 September as he served probation in Dokki police station. He had already been imprisoned for a five-year term for peaceful protest in 2013 and part of his probation was to spend 12 hours a night at a police station for five years. He too was now accused of the infamous crime of spreading false news and being a member of a banned organisation, it seems while he was still incarcerated.
One outcome of the protest was that Sisi reinstated a food subsidy programme to 1.8 million Egyptians who had been removed from the food staples programme (Reuters 2019). Sisi’s direct intervention was revealed as an act of kindness to the poor – the benevolent dictator did indeed understand the poor’s impoverishment. It is more likely that his advisors remembered that a previous cut to bread subsidies in 1977 had led to deadly countrywide protests, and deaths in bread lines preceded the 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak (Ayeb and Bush 2019; Abdelrahman 2014).
What is less discussed is why Egypt needs a programme that subsidises goods to more than 60 million from a population of almost 100 million? Why are so many Egyptians poor and frankly have little chance of ever becoming less impoverished in an economic system that has become more unequal since 2013? There are many reasons for this, but two issues are significant. The first is the consequence of the November 2016 three-year IMF agreement for a US$12 billion loan; the second is the way in which the military has further enriched itself as an institution of capital accumulation.
The IMF agreement, which did not include additional bilateral funding from China and Saudi Arabia, was a traditional and time-weary policy of reducing public expenditure, including subsidies, introducing VAT and liberalising the exchange rate (el-Badrawi and Corkery 2017). There were also swingeing cuts to workers' rights, the introduction of draconian working practices and destruction of meaningful trade union organisation. The inflationary impact has been enormous: costs of imports have mushroomed, and living standards have plummeted as unemployment expanded and repression increased. Early protests occurred after the IMF loan was initially discussed in 2012, but were pushed aside as Sisi refused to consider any alternative platform of reform that could harness a large pool of labour to produce goods for local consumption by workers and peasants who could afford to buy them.
The role of the military in benefiting from Sisi’s compliance with the IMF and drawing on Egypt’s geostrategic rent is crucial in understanding repression and capital accumulation in an economy that has been structurally rooted in three main revenue streams from rent, not productive activities – rent from passages through the Suez canal; oil and gas; and foreign assistance (El-Mahdi and Marfleet 2009; Alexander and Bassiouny 2014). The historically important rent from labour migration remittances has long ceased to be a safety valve after imperialist interventions in Iraq and Libya destroyed, among other things, the regional labour market. Although the Egyptian military is secretive and the parliament is never allowed to see its financial accounts, there is evidence that military-affiliated institutions have gained control of ‘previously state-administered enterprises’ (Madamasr 2016). The Egyptian military has extended and deepened its reach into areas of health, education and energy production, fish farming and restoration of historical sites. In agriculture the Ministry of Military Production has linked with ministries of planning, communication, agriculture and finance to manage and monitor farmer tenure cards and it has sold state land in, among other areas, Kafr al-Sheikh to investors creating a so-called investment hub.
This issue
The current uprising in Egypt is consistent with Christian Henderson’s argument (p. 599) that the inequality inherent to the corporate food regime in Egypt can result in rebellion against the dominant class relations. This issue hosts a Forum, titled ‘Land, politics and dynamics of agrarian change and resistance in North Africa’, reporting on the domestic dimensions of land grabbing in Northern Africa, offering a class analysis of processes of primitive accumulation and land dispossession in Egypt. These themes are introduced in more detail in the Forum Editorial by Mathilde Fautras and Giulio Iocco (p. 535).
Egyptian small farmers and their demand for land and water access were crucial to the 2011 revolution, as Henderson recognises. These farmers are ‘pitted against agribusiness companies owned by powerful Gulf investors. In their struggle, small Egyptian farmers face not only the domestic class structure but also that of the [Gulf Cooperation Council] states, whose capital, intimate relations with US power, and authoritarian nature grant them considerable capacity’ (Henderson, p. 599). More broadly, Henderson argues that there is an important regional dimension to Egypt’s corporate food regime, with a prominent role played by agribusiness capital coming from the Gulf’s states. Henderson makes an important theoretical contribution to food regime literature that underlines the regional scale and the role of state and capital in non-core capitalist regions in the restructuring of agribusiness in the global South. The food regime focus on the global dimension has led to an underestimation of regionalisation processes. The regional has proved a crucial scale in the post-crisis land grabs, for example with South African capital leading in the Southern and Eastern African region (Hall 2011, 2012) and acting as a broker for transnational capital; and Brazilian capital alongside other Latin American national capitals leading in the land grab in Latin America (Borras et al. 2012). More importantly, Henderson argues that analysing the regional dimension uncovers the consolidation of capitalist classes along regional lines, while avoiding reifying the regional by acknowledging the imperialist dynamics at play between the US hegemon and the Gulf states. Henderson also provides a broader analysis underpinned by the class analysis of domestic land grabs in Egypt driven by a national bourgeoisie connected to the army and to politicians. That theme is developed further in the Forum by Saker El Nour and Yasmine Moataz Ahmed.
The centrality of the land question to the national question and broadly to sovereignty is also at the centre of Marie Widengård’s article (p. 615). Widengård documents how a land grab by a Chinese company was initially discussed by the Zambian government, to then be rejected after a change in government following the 2011 elections. Widengård brings to the fore the role different governments can play in negotiating and renegotiating a foreign land deal. This adds nuance to the land grab debate by focusing on domestic political processes and land politics that also take into account the role of customary authorities in Zambia. This fine-tuned account testifies to the centrality of the land question to resource-nationalist models emerging on the continent and often modelled after Latin American counterparts, with more affirmative action over land and natural resources emerging across the mining and agricultural sectors.
Debate Special Issue
Following on from the Debate Special Issues in issues 156 and 158, with their accounts of the Connections workshops in Accra and Dar es Salaam, Peter Dwyer presents contributions from the third Connections workshop, ‘Reflecting on resistance and transformation in Africa: a workshop for movements and scholar-activists’, which took place in Johannesburg. The issue brings together some of the presentations from the workshop, including footage livestreamed and now available on the ROAPE Facebook page and blog pieces published on Roape.net, and reflects on key issues and debates, not least the role of this journal and ‘the urgency of the need to act’ (Dwyer et al., p. 632).
Briefings
In the Briefings section, Maurice Okito (a pseudonym) analyses the Rwanda poverty debate (p. 665), looks at respective historical data, and explains the differences between the poverty estimates produced by different authors in the discussion. He argues, first, that there has indeed been a sharp increase in poverty since 2011 according to all consistent trend estimates; second, this finding is robust, given inflation and price data; and third, the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda’s findings do not tally with their own stated assumptions about inflation. Next, Dirk Kohnert (p. 673) explores the impact of the looming Brexit on francophone Africa, that is, African countries outside the Commonwealth of Nations. He takes into focus both direct economic effects on matters of, for instance, commodity prices and national budgets, and more indirect political effects, such as repercussions for actors that contest the post-colonial CFA currency and the ‘murky network of Françafrique’.
On Roape.net
Lena Grace Anyuolo’s (2019) blogpost, titled ‘Kenya’s Hunger games’ was a striking denunciation of media- and ruling-class sponsorship of the poor, exemplified in the region’s popular TV games show, East Africa’s got talent. Sam Broadway (2019) wrote on Uganda and the famous musician-turned-member of parliament Bobi Wine, looking at the area where Wine grew up and where much of his political operations and support are centred today. Daniel Mains (2019) blogged for us on urban Ethiopia and its investments in public infrastructure. He argues that the construction of infrastructure is a site for understanding the tense relationship between citizen and state in Ethiopia.
In the last quarter we also posted on the (stalled) popular uprisings in Algeria and Sudan. In a series of excellent, sharply analysed blogposts, Emma Wilde Botta focuses on the construction of Algeria’s political order (Wilde Botta 2019a); and the dynamics of the crisis in Sudan (Wilde Botta 2019b). Concluding the three-part discussion, she argues that we are seeing a new surge of global revolt against authoritarianism and austerity (Wilde Botta 2019c). Revolutionaries are grappling with questions of strategy and organisation as the forces of conservation come into conflict with the forces of transformation. Providing clear, balanced, radical coverage of the revolts in Sudan and Algeria, Wilde Botta considers what can be learnt from them.
Other notable pieces in the last quarter include Thomas MacManus’ blogpost on the issues of corporate crimes and killings in Africa. Focusing on the 2006 case of Trafigura – a multinational commodity trading company – who offloaded hazardous waste in Côte d'Ivoire which was then dumped, causing death, and suffering to thousands. MacManus argues that this case is illustrative of many instances of contemporary corporate crime, with African victims let down by international legal systems. Another interesting and innovative piece was Ali Bhagat’s post on refugee camps in Kenya. He wrote how, increasingly, these camps have become sites of finance, debt and neoliberal-led forms of experimentation. Bhagat situates refugees as a new population for neoliberal experimentation as camps are transformed into spaces of untapped profit.
We featured Jörg Wiegratz’ special issue on capitalist fraud in Africa – published at the end of last year – on the website. Wiegratz wrote an introduction to the issue (2019), with a link to the Taylor and Francis site and his full introduction. As part of the online launch of the issue we also published a piece by Ben Fine. Fine’s (2019) piece investigates efforts to curb capital flight and flows of wealth out of South Africa. He argues that capital flight not only shifts resources elsewhere as is commonly presumed, it also shifts speculation elsewhere.
The standout feature on Roape.net in the last quarter of 2019 has been Rama Salla Dieng’s series of interviews with African feminists (Dieng 2019a, 2019b, 2019c; Dieng and Kpeglo Moudouthe 2019). This is a remarkable set of interviews with radical feminist activists and academics on the continent. The interviews draw attention to the role women have played in recent months in the upheavals in Sudan and Algeria. In interviews conducted by Dieng, one of these jointly conducted with Françoise Kpeglo Moudouthe, African feminists have discussed how they are theorising their practice and philosophies and building movements for women’s rights. Kenya’s Lyn Ossomo argues, among many other things, that the façade of stability across Africa rests on the super-exploitation, repression and violation of women and gendered bodies more broadly. Her interview is a tour de force of feminist political economy of the highest order (Dieng and Kpeglo Moudouthe 2019).