This issue focuses on two topics that are central to political economy in general, and African political economy in particular, and that have been intensively discussed in ROAPE over many decades: extractivism and the informal economy. Both are structural economic features all over the continent, and manifold social struggles relate to them. ‘[E]xtractivism is the dominant feature of most African economies. The absence of processes of structural transformation and the persistence of primary commodity dependence create highly porous extraverted economies, organised around extractive cores’, as Elisa Greco outlined in the editorial of ROAPE 166 (Greco 2020, 511). Extractivism is thereby not limited to the exploitation of mineral and fossil resources but also includes agro-extractivism (Benegiamo 2020; see also Ye et al. 2020). Agrarian resources are likewise primary commodities that are widely exported from Africa to create value at other scales and locations rather than used to feed people on the continent.
Informal work is widespread in both mining and agriculture; and not limited to artisanal mining and smallholder farming. Neither is it restricted to the economic sectors that policy and research mostly focus on when it comes to informal work on the continent, such as street trading, transport, or household services. Quite the contrary, global value chains in mining and agriculture, in the supply of goods and services, and on plantations just as on smallholder fields, profoundly rely on low-paid informal work and unpaid (family) labour and of course on reproductive work in households, families and communities.
Relations of capital and labour, class structure, class consciousness and organisation (class formation, as Erik Olin Wright [1997] named it) and class struggles are central to both the extractive and informal sectors. The various ways of organising and claim raising and the numerous struggles may be more or less organised and targeted, spontaneous or planned, punctual or persistent, by informal and precarious workers in manufacturing and agro-industry, street vendors or taxi drivers, or by artisanal miners are variants of class struggle: they are elements that are part of the development and emergences of class consciousness, class formation and eventually class struggle.
Related to the global food price crisis in 2007/2008, it became obvious that food production systems and food prices can become a trigger for uprisings that are far more than riots by a random crowd – they are often spontaneous, but emerge from exploitative class relations, and not only have the potential to promote class consciousness but even to further substantial political-economic change up to revolution (Ayeb and Bush 2019; Bush and Martiniello 2017). This is far from being an insight of recent times, of course – just think of E. P. Thompson’s famous study on the English food riots (Thompson 1971), or of John Walton’s and David Seddon’s book on food riots in times of global adjustment policies pushed through by the international financial institutions (IFIs) (Walton and Seddon 1994). Given the substantial structural relevance of the extractivist and informal sectors and the far-reaching impact that policies related to both have on the lives of the masses in rural and urban settings – which are vividly outlined by the contributions to this issue – it is possible to explore how and to what extent they contain a similar potential to foster radical political-economic change.
The means and strategies of popular struggles vary widely depending on political-institutional conditions, potential for repression, the resources actors have at their disposal, their experiences in struggles, existing alliances, and other factors. Struggles that attempt to overcome capitalism and strive for alternatives may involve a variety of strategies of ‘conscious and combined efforts to build a new kind of economic reality’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, xxxvi). Yet the principal question remains of whether there is a chance to overcome capitalism through gradual institutional change; or do such changes ultimately just cushion the most brutal and direct effects of capitalism and therewith extend its durability? Is it lastly only by revolution that a fundamental transformation of the social and political-economic relations can be achieved? Besides, the strategy exists to try out and practise alternatives with regard to social relations, modes of production and institutions of decision making on the micro level in niches and interstices (see Gibson-Graham 2006; Wright 2010). Plenty of historical and contemporary examples of escapes to the niches of capitalist societies exist (maybe rather in the centres of global capitalism than at its margins), and far from all of them are progressive. Quite the contrary, niche communities exist that are clearly conservative and reactionary. The vast majority are probably rather ‘apolitical’, as far as this can be possible. Indeed, there are ‘examples of “escaping” where people create alternatives to demonstrate that such alternatives can exist and are feasible, and to act out of the interstices in cooperation with others for the accomplishment of radical transformation and the erosion of capitalism’s constraining conditions’ (Dietz and Engels 2021, 10).
However, the extractive and the informal sectors both clearly point out the limitations of the niche strategy and, though maybe less trenchantly, of the reformist strategy. Whereas attempts to create alternatives in niches are somehow common in agriculture and craftmanship, and in domains such as housing, education and health care, when it comes to mining, oil and gas and to the informal sectors, it seems rather difficult to imagine how emancipatory alternatives to capitalism could be created in niches. In a sector such as large-scale mining, which is dominated by capital-intensive transnational companies, niche experiments are virtually impossible. We may in theory imagine such attempts in artisanal mining, which is overwhelmingly an informal activity and tolerated at the margins of large mines (see Radley and Geenen in this issue), but for one thing: artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is likewise fully embedded in global value chains and respective capitalist relations from the local to the international scale (Ibid.; and Vogel, in this issue). Furthermore, ‘escaping’, in practice, is simply not an option when national state authorities grant concessions to mining companies that are unequivocally prioritised against artisanal mining and equally against other needs and interests of social reproduction such as farming, housing, gathering of natural products, and spiritual concerns. This is amplified, moreover, by the fatal and irreversible effects the extractive industries have on global climate change, as they heavily rely on fossil fuels and contribute to the continued usage of climate-damaging energy sources (see Neale 2021). And not only do the effects of climate change disproportionally hurt poor people and marginalised social groups; the speed of global warming and the irretrievability of its impact also create doubts about the effectivity of the niche strategy.
The setting seems not so different in other informal sectors: how could informal sector workers create niches to deconstruct hierarchical relations of production, to overcome class relations manifested in differentiated positions in the production process and unequal access to and ownership of resources? Most informal sector workers hardly have access to the means of production, and at the end of the day it is capital that benefits from the fact that a myriad of people work without a fixed wage and any social security. After all, informal workers are also incorporated into value chains and relations of production – think of street vendors selling cigarettes or mobile phone credits, for example. In light of this, the idea of an ‘informal sector’ turns out to be rather a strategic euphemism constructed by neoliberalists obscuring inequality and exploitation. Graeme Young, in his contribution to this is issue, demonstrates how informal market vendors are embedded in political-economic structures, thus class relations, that substantially constrain their agency. Moreover, in his case study, the associations of vendors, rather than trying to overcome unequal relations, reinforce exclusive and hierarchical political-economic structures.
The reformist strategy, as compared to the niches, seems to be much more practicable with respect to the informal sectors and in extractivism. Indeed, in recent years, many African governments have pursued strategies to create institutions that at least are declared to improve the status and working conditions of informal workers, usually through formalising them. Arguments in favour of formalisation are presented in various logics: apart from criminalisation and control, arguments can be raised in the logic of the moral economy of mass employment, or in the neoliberal capitalist one. Among the most prominent proponents of the latter is Hernando de Soto (2000) who considers the potential for entrepreneurship by informal workers being hindered from unfolding by bureaucracy and state planning. Most of the institutions that have recently been created clearly follow the neoliberal logic of privileging the market against state control. Artisanal mining is a case in point. Either policymakers, development experts, researchers and corporate actors aim to formalise ASM, often also promoting it as a form of local entrepreneurship – ‘for any society to maximise the positive impact of an economic activity, ASM inclusive, it must be formalised, responsible and well governed’, as stated in the Mosi-oa-Tunya Declaration on Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining, Quarrying and Development (ASM18 2018, v). Or they want to eliminate it, by attempting to urge artisanal miners towards ‘alternative livelihoods’ or by criminalising them (or both in parallel), as governments of Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for instance, have recently attempted to do (Huggins 2016; Jønsson and Fold 2011; Lahiri-Dutt 2018).
When it comes to large-scale mining, following the wave of mining law reforms that were part of the economic liberalisation and ‘structural adjustment’ demanded by IFIs from the second half of the 1990s onwards (Campbell 2009), many African states in recent years have revisited their national mining laws. Contrary to the former reforms, most of the new mining codes are oriented towards generating state revenues through mining. Typically, this concerns dues such as taxes, customs and royalties, and the ‘free carried interest’ (FCI), an equity interest that the companies holding a mining concession must grant to the respective national state so that the state will receive dividends from the profits of an industrial mine. FCIs are included in the mining laws of Burkina Faso, the DRC, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, South Africa and Tanzania, among others. In most cases, compulsory FCIs are set at 10% of a mine’s profits; those in the DRC are set at 5%, in Guinea at up to 15% depending on the type of mineral, and in Tanzania at 16%. However, from a more critical perspective, ‘if ten per cent stays [here], this means that the central state takes it, and that 90 per cent does not stay here’, as a community activist in Burkina Faso put it (Interview, 1 March 2018).
A key point is that mining law reforms are the result of continuous pressure by civil society organisations both on national and transnational scales; another key point is that they reflect a global trend, energetically pressed by the World Bank, towards investment-friendly mining laws focusing on revenue transparency and ‘good governance’. The IFIs, since the 1990s, have promoted the extractive sector as a driver for development, based on the idea that foreign direct investment will help poor countries to get out of the debt trap and generate state revenues. ‘In this discourse […] the national scale predominates, at the expense of a loss of livelihoods of specific groups of citizens, namely artisanal miners and local people providing services to them’ (Luning 2014, 73). Consequently, almost all mining laws unambiguously give precedence to industrial mining. Where an industrial mine is installed, artisanal mining is prohibited unless the operator allocates a portion to the artisanal miners (see Radley and Geenen 2021, in this issue).
The most prominent institution on the international scale that reflects this trend in neoliberal ideas of ‘good governance’ in the extractive sector is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Whereas neoliberals cheer initiatives and reforms that aim at increasing state revenues and cushioning the fatal social and ecological effects of mining, oil and gas exploitation as alleged ‘win–win’ solutions, such reformist strategies do not result in any serious change in socio-economic relations, neither do they usually transform the institutions of decision making. Eventually the overwhelming majority of people who are affected do not have any real opportunity to reject the establishment of a mining, oil or gas exploitation project but existing institutions, at best, grant them rights to be informed and consulted. By contrast, to create an emancipatory alternative to capitalism, political institutions that guarantee equal access to democratic decision-making processes need to be created by popular struggles and democratic movements from below. These are distinct and substantially separate paths to the hitherto existing institutions that have been created top-down by governments and international organisations.
Although there are recent examples of African governments that ‘[f]ollowing the Latin American example of neo-extractivism, […] have experimented with resource nationalism’ (Greco 2020), these neither intervene into the global market for extractives, nor do they pursue a strategy of keeping resources in the soil. So far, efforts for serious resource nationalisation that comprise not only the formal control over the soil and subsoil resource by national governments but also their valorisation and radical democratic control over how and whether at all resources should be exploited seem to be absent, on the African continent as is mostly the case worldwide. Governments prove to be unable or unwilling (or both) to endeavour to gain greater national and democratic control over resources. This is unsurprising in view of the fact that their scope of action is defined by systemic constraints both on the national and the global scale, and by local and national class relations. This being said, rather than to governments and states, it seems to be left to the progressive social forces to organise in alliances, bottom-up and across scales, to develop programmes for radically alternative resource politics. It is quite likely that such programmes will not be realised separately, but only as part of a general transformation of political-economic structures.
The articles in this issue
Ben Radley and Sara Geenen, in the first article, investigate the political economy of gold mining in South Kivu, DRC, and related struggles. They start from a critique of global value chains literature. This literature suggests that value will be created through outsourcing the supply of goods and services to firms in the mining countries, which will eventually lead to industrialisation and economic growth in the mining countries. This idea actually sustains the ‘win–win’ myth of large-scale mining: the transnational mining companies win, the mining states win, and the local economy and communities win, too. However, as is well known, there is no ‘win–win’ in capitalism: where there are winners, there are losers. Radley and Geenen argue that the policies of governments to give preference to industrial rather than artisanal and small-scale mining ‘have been political decisions: not just to create value, but to transfer value to foreign firms’ (164, original emphasis), whereby ‘particular production modes have been devalued’ (Ibid.). It is neither by chance nor by nature who the winners and losers in mining are – it is by deliberate decisions made by national governments ‘to take these resources away from communities and/or artisanal miners and give them to foreign corporations to be extracted’ (171). This, at least, does not happen in uncontested ways but is accompanied by individual and collective, everyday and organised struggles, as well as narratives that are constructed to normalise and legitimise the respective political-economic decisions and by counter-narratives that contest this, as is powerfully demonstrated in the case study.
Christoph Vogel’s paper also presents a case study on mining in the DRC. Rather than with transnational companies, he is concerned with artisanal and small-scale mining in the post-conflict context of the East Kivu provinces, analysing the impact of international initiatives to regulate trade in so-called conflict minerals (tin, tantalum and tungsten). Combining the concept of political patronage with the categories network and scale from critical geography, Vogel argues that both ‘peacebuilding and transnational mineral regulation efforts […] reproduce the very patronage networks that have long been operating at the heart of violent politics’ (180). The main figure in his empirical case is the ‘incontournable’ – powerful individuals that cannot be sidelined, such as former rebel commanders, military commanders, and particularly customary chiefs, who controlled trade in ‘conflict minerals’ before and manage to keep this control under the framework of ‘post-conflict’ policies and ‘conflict-free’ mining.
Graeme Young’s article in this issue deals with the urban informal sector, notably the relationship between political-economic structures and the agency of informal sector workers. Neoliberals – most prominently, de Soto (2000) – present activities in the informal sectors as potential entrepreneurship, a deliberate turning away from the state and its regulation, and what they consider mismanagement of the market by the state and ‘bad governance’. More critical authors such as James Scott (1985, 1990) and Asef Bayat (2000, 2010) have framed informal sector activities as individual, uncoordinated and mostly unintended ways of subaltern subjects navigating through the constraints of social, economic and political exclusion – ‘quiet encroachment’, as Bayat (1997) called it, or ‘everyday resistance’, in Scott’s (1985) words. As opposed to this, Young adopts a political economy approach, and argues that political-economic structures, notably class relations, ownership and the entanglement of economic and political power substantially constrain agency. Following Matteo Rizzo’s (2013, 2017) work, Young puts the agency of informal market vendors ‘within the context of broader capitalist hierarchies and systems of production and exchange’ (201).
Empirically, Young investigates the politics of informal markets in Kampala, Uganda, namely Owino Market, one of the biggest informal markets in the city. In the case study, it is demonstrated that economic and political divisions have considerable effects on vendors and present substantial constraints on their capability to exercise agency. A main finding is that vendors’ associations, that in the neoliberal view are supposed to promote self-management and ‘ownership’ in the governance of the markets, are far from enforcing vendors’ agency. Quite the contrary, these organisations can reinforce economic and political divisions, leading to exclusion and oppression.
Edmore Mwandiringana and Jingzhong Ye’s article also deals with contestation over land and natural resources and its entanglement with political power. They examine the case of Zimbabwe, where the protests and land occupations by war veterans in 1998 led to the famous Fast Track Land Reform programme introduced by the government to redistribute land from white farmers to landless black peasants that formally began in 2002. It is hardly surprising that the land reform led to contestation over access to and control over land; and here, too, traditional authorities played a central role. The study focuses on the case of Insiza North in Matabeleland South Province, where war veterans successfully contested the claims to authority of the chiefs. Power in allocating land in this resettlement area was shifted from the chiefs to the veterans, with active support by the state authorities. Veterans benefited from food aid and farming inputs distributed by the state, and state authorities tolerated informal land occupations by war veterans. The authors view the conflict between the war veterans and the chiefs as reflecting ‘a divergence of aspirations between modernism and traditionalism’ (231). Whereas the chiefs base their authority on constructions of autochthony, the veterans refer to the ‘modern’ history of the civil war. The authors emphasise, however, that this is the case only in some – far from all – resettlement areas in Zimbabwe.
Luc Reydams’ article presents a powerful investigation of how fatalities of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda were and are counted, and why numbers vary to such an extent (from 500,000 to more than 1,000,000). Reviewing census and health and fertility surveys, government reports, briefings and academic studies, the author provides an insight into the vast range of estimates of Tutsi genocide victims by various sources. Reydams argues that the prominent phrase of ‘more than a million’ victims of the genocide that is put forward especially by Rwandan government sources was ‘not an actual count but a political statement’ (250). Although, in view of the immense suffering and horror of the genocide, overestimation is better than understating the numbers, and ‘more than a million’ might be read as a symbol for what is virtually unimaginable and unspeakable, the author reminds us that Hutu victims are hardly counted, mentioned and remembered in the actual Rwandan political contexts. He states that the death count of a genocide, rebellion or war is part of how history is written and how the ‘new’ state and society is constructed. In the Rwandan case, he argues, the high number of Tutsi genocide victims also serves to construct a collective guilt of Hutu and to legitimate the current political power of the formerly exiled Tutsi.
Hunger, famine, war, crisis and the like are, as is well known, ever present in discourses on ‘Africa’. It is less well known, probably, that these stereotypes equally shape the discourse on African publishing and reading. Elizabeth le Roux demonstrates this in her analysis on ‘the myth of the “book famine”’. It is not by chance, she argues, that the frame of ‘famine’ characterises the discourse on the state of African publishing, though it does clearly not correspond to the reality of the richness and creativity of writing and publishing on the continent. The author traces back the origins of the term ‘book famine’ and then provides a frame of analysis, based on Robert Entman’s (1993) approach, of documents from UNESCO, non-governmental organisations, and book development programmes and conferences. Language-based analysis of discourses and narratives is of course not an end in itself but reveals how political-economic and social-cultural relations are reflected and perpetuated, and how discourses and narratives function to legitimise policies. In the case of Africa’s ‘book famine’, le Roux argues, this means not only that well-known stereotypes of the continent as characterised by hunger, deficiency and (intellectual) scarcity are reproduced, but also that political agendas are promoted to ‘help’ African countries out of this scarcity, while ignoring and silencing the existing vibrant scene of writers and publishers on the continent.
In the first of two briefings, Ivan Ashaba engages the wider literature on militarised conservation in Africa and then analyses the making of present-day militarised conservation in Uganda. It highlights three factors that are key to understanding the Ugandan case: the legacies of colonialism, a post-colonial history of war and conflict, and the current militarisation under the Museveni government, as exemplified in the collaboration between the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces. Ashaba argues that the debate about militarised conservation in the country has to be situated within the widening mandate of the military institution under the Museveni government. Next, Nataliya Mykhalchenko and Jörg Wiegratz explore anti-fraud measures (AFMs) in Eastern Africa (more specifically Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Madagascar) in the second part of their briefing series on AFMs on the continent. The evidence suggests an expansion of: (i) anti-fraud agencies and initiatives; (ii) collecting and sharing more data within and across borders; (iii) of official governance of financial and product flows; and (iv) of efforts by AFM actors to enable the detection of genuine products, with related controversies among actors with divergent views and interests. They note that current AFMs are supportive of and complementary to agendas relating to the digital economy, data collection, and surveillance capitalism.
Finally, Hesham Shafick's review article engages with two recent books on the financialisation of politics in Egypt and the resilience of its authoritarian regimes in the face of revolutionary challenges. He reviews Sara Salem's Anticolonial afterlives in Egypt and Amy Austin Holmes' Coups and revolutions, showing how each book demonstrates the ways that the Egyptian regime is both fragile and resilient due to its reliance on financial networks and lack of political base. Both works show how recent political crises, including the revolution of 2011 and the coup of 2013, can be traced to this financialised politics, which simultaneously prevents authoritarian governments from gaining full political hegemony in Egypt but maintains autocratic rule despite significant popular mobilisation and resistance.