Celebrated on 25 May each year on the continent and by African diasporas worldwide to mark the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, Africa Day is of symbolic and practical value. It is, as the intergovernmental International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property puts it, an occasion for ‘Celebrations, Reflections and Concrete Actions’ (ICCROM 2022); a day, then, ‘to reflect on the progress Africa has made as a continent, in the face of the many challenges that a global environment brings [and] to recognise the successes of the continent and its cultural and economic potential’ (Africa.com 2021). This year, which also marks the 20th anniversary of the OAU’s transformation into the African Union (AU) in July 2002, has seen Africa Day celebrations during the AU’s Year of Nutrition taking place in the context of a heightened instability in the global order, characterised by the interlinked crises of Covid-19, the cost of living and the Russia–Ukraine war (Dua 2022). Globally, disruptions to food, fuel, energy and mineral supply chains caused or exacerbated by the war are ‘eroding standards of living and aggravating macroeconomic imbalances’ which were beginning to show slight signs of recovery in the wake of Covid-19 (Selassie and Kovacs 2022). Moreover, as the International Monetary Foundation (IMF)’s most recent Regional Economic Outlook for Africa acknowledges, states and governments have little room for manoeuvre in responding to what the IMF describes as a new and exogenous shock (IMF 2022), and which its managing director recognises as involving ‘this food crisis com[ing] on top of a debt crisis’ (cited in Roberts 2022).
The cost-of-living crisis in particular is exacerbating continental food insecurity and malnutrition, in addition to fuelling goods and services inflation, with the most vulnerable economies, households and individuals experiencing the greatest privations across the continent (Akinwotu 2022a; Babalola 2022; BBC 2022a). Indeed, a combination of Covid, conflict and the climate emergency had already precipitated acute hunger in some of the world’s poorest countries, even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its impact on food, fuel and fertiliser prices (Davies 2022a), which has increased the likelihood of some of the worst-hit parts of eastern and southern Africa, among others, being pushed into famine in the absence of appropriate and effective global and local intervention (The Guardian 2022a ; Davies 2022b). And yet, recent Oxfam analysis of IMF Covid-19 loan conditionalities has shown the IMF systematically encouraging countries to plan to (re-)impose austerity as soon as the Coronavirus pandemic subsided (Tamale 2021), although the Fund’s director of its African Department has responded by highlighting, as evidence of good faith and commitment to the continent’s long-term fiscal health, IMF provision of initial funding which helped countries to create the ‘fiscal space’ requiring protection in the wake of economic recovery (AllAfrica 2022). But the IMF also stands accused of adopting ‘double standards’ in its approach to crisis mitigation and management – with Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva reportedly ‘urg[ing] Europe not to endanger its economic recovery with “the suffocating force of austerity”’ (Oxfam 2022a), even as her institution doubles down in its support for the prompt adoption or early resumption of austerity (‘fiscal consolidation’) by African and other peripheral world economies, often before the Coronavirus pandemic has even subsided (Oxfam 2022a; see also AllAfrica 2022). Indeed, as the vice-president of Ghana – which has recently prolonged fuel subsidies and is in the process of negotiating an IMF bailout – has warned already-struggling Ghanaians, ‘[t]he immediate task is to restore fiscal and debt sustainability and this will be through revenue and expenditure measures and structural reforms’, whether the government succeeds in agreeing an aid package with IMF or not (BBC 2022b; Mensah 2022). Prabhat Patnaik has described this as ‘behaviour … reflective of the very nature of capitalism, of its essential inhumanity’, in which not all human life is seen as of equal value, with life in the periphery being worth less than that in the metropolis (Patnaik 2022).
The significance of the 2022 Africa Day theme is thus amplified several-fold by the complex and dynamic nature and differentiated impact of what is in reality a global capitalist crisis, with Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine primarily aggravating structural trends in the global food supply chain which were already under way (Roberts 2022; Africa.com 2021). Not only are ‘the repercussions – in social unrest and political violence – already being seen in some countries’ (The Guardian 2022b ), but there is an increased risk of heightened social friction in others, with voters across Africa, for example, demanding urgent and meaningful intervention from governments and, where national elections are imminent, detailed policy and programme commitments from campaigning politicians and parties (Genga 2022; Kimeu 2022). Yet, increasingly frequent and widespread popular in-person and online cost-of-living protests are either disparaged (blamed on opposition politicians in Uganda, for example), discouraged (for instance, with threatened or actual arrest in Sierra Leone and Sudan) or sometimes, as in Ghana, Malawi or Sierra Leone, forcefully suppressed (Akinwotu 2022b; Crisis24 2022; Genga 2022; Mensah 2022; Oyella 2022). Nonetheless, and local and national particularities notwithstanding, the primary causes of the crisis remain resolutely structural and, like possible or potential responses, complex, multiple and partly global.
Protesters in Kenya demonstrate a good appreciation of this when they link the cost-of-living crisis to increasing public indebtedness pre-dating the Russia–Ukraine war, even though it is the latter which has become the catch-all explanation favoured by privileged and insulated ruling elites (Genga 2022; Kimeu 2022). Similarly, in Sierra Leone, long-simmering economic and political discontent, exacerbated by widespread perception of inadequate official effort to ameliorate the effects of sharply rising local costs of fuel and basic goods caused in part by global food and fuel crises, erupted in ‘anti-government’ protests which turned violent, leading to at least 27 (mostly) civilian and security personnel deaths (Fofana and Inveen 2022, Reuters 2022). An official enquiry into the protests (demanded by opposition parties and forces, among others) has been instituted by the country’s president who is convinced that ‘[t]his was not a protest against the high cost of living occasioned by the ongoing global economic crisis. … The chant of the insurrectionists was for a violent overthrow of the democratically elected government’ (Akinwotu and Sanusi 2022). Social media posts have raised questions about the neutrality and impartiality of the appointees to the Special Investigation Committee. They point out that several members are on record as previously expressing public support for presidential accusations and ministerial claims regarding culpability of opposition political parties and popular diasporic forces for the funding and organising of the protests. Media and other commentators have noted, too, that although the right to protest is enshrined in law, planned demonstrations require official police authorisation, which organisers have long complained is routinely withheld on often spurious grounds of concern for public safety (Keili 2022). Yet, as ROAPE colleague Leo Zeilig observed first-hand earlier this year, in Senegal where the cost-of-living crisis also converges with a deeper political crisis of constitutional and regime legitimacy, periodic demonstrations organised by official opposition forces operate alongside loud weekly popular protests lamenting soaring food and fuel prices, bemoaning government incompetence and seeming indifference to their suffering, and calling for the departure of the president, Macky Sall, with little or no reported cases of serious public disorder.
That African preoccupation with the cost-of-living and associated crises is shared considerably more widely speaks to the global extent and dynamics of these crises. Indeed, an intensification of the cost-of-living crisis into 2023 carries with it the very real risk of global recession, according to the IMF managing director (Farrer 2022). The crisis then has, alongside climate change, dominated agendas and, in practice, overshadowed actual deliberations at both the G7, which met at the end of June shortly after Africa Day was celebrated (G7 Germany 2022a), and ongoing preparatory meetings for this year’s G20 summit, which is due to be held at the end of October (G20 Indonesia 2022). Not surprisingly, therefore, the list of key G7 summit outcomes is headed by an unequivocal commitment to support Ukraine for as long as it takes (and, presumably, whatever ‘financial, humanitarian, military and diplomatic assistance, as well as reconstruction support’ it takes), to include ‘responsible sanctions against Russia’, in the pursuit of a more equitable world (G7 Germany 2022a). Indeed, whether member countries eventually also fulfil their other commitment to global cooperation and health, and food and energy security, alongside their specific pledges of economic support to Africa and the world’s poor, would depend not only on G7 (particularly US) political developments, but also on the outcome of the Russia–Ukraine war and, with it, the prospects for Vladimir Putin’s political survival and continuing authority (Stremlau 2022). In the interim, a joint statement by G7 countries and their invited summit guests at Schloss Elmau, including Senegal and South Africa, strongly ‘reaffirm [their] commitment to the rules-based international order’ (G7 Germany 2022b) – an order which an absent Russia, already excluded following its initial occupation of territory in Crimea in 2014, stands accused of undermining and is sanctioned for abandoning, even if not unequivocally condemned by all summiteers (Bangura 2022).
At the same time, while the main emphasis during the G20 summit is to be global post-Covid recovery (summit theme: Recover Together, Recover Stronger) and the value of multilateralism in solving global crises (G20 Indonesia 2022), both preparatory meetings and the summit itself are either already being, or are shaping up to be dominated, like the G7, by the war in Ukraine and its impact on food and energy security, and the latter’s implications for global political economy (Lamb and Brunnstrom 2022). G20 Indonesia offers a rare opportunity for face-to-face exchanges, not to say direct confrontation, between belligerents (Ukraine will be an invited guest in Bali) and their respective allies and proxies, as well as avowedly neutral parties to the conflict like host Indonesia. Thus, while the G7 claims that the root of the ongoing crisis is to be found in the war crimes committed by Moscow, which also poses an existential threat to a rules-based global political order meriting unprecedented sanctions (Ratcliffe 2022), China and Russia counter with the argument that it is less any direct destructive impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more the disruptive effects of Western-led retaliatory sanctions on global supply chains, which have ‘aggravated an emerging global economic crisis’ whose real origins lay in the Covid-19 pandemic (Qingqing and Hengyi 2022).
Consequently, neutral or ‘non-aligned’ countries, concerned about the Russian invasion but reluctant to openly condemn this in extreme terms favoured by NATO/G7, are being pressured, often none too subtly, to take sides in the conflict in a manner reminiscent of the Cold War era (Stremlau 2022). Deliberations, declarations and media releases during the recent G7 summit, as well as during separate tours of selected African countries by both the Russian foreign minister and US secretary of state respectively in late July and early August, make this clear (Magome 2022; Plummer 2022; Smith 2022), the inevitable official obfuscation and occasional denials notwithstanding (see, for example, the ‘US Strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa’ [US Government 2022] and the ‘Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act’ currently being legislated into law).1 Thus, while seemingly exonerating the US from direct blame in this regard, South Africa’s international relations minister, Naledi Pandor, has decried what she calls ‘a sense of patronising bullying’ from some European and other powers (The Guardian 2022d ). Nonetheless, African countries ‘really have refined the art of playing all these powers’ (Bartlett 2022) and are strategically ‘taking advantage of a reluctance to take sides’ (Ross 2022), given that many have strong Russian and Western ties and are presumably wary of the political and economic fallout for their populations, already in the tightening grip of a serious cost-of-living crisis, from choosing the ‘wrong’ side (Stremlau 2022). Little wonder that Pandor pointedly noted, in response to her US counterpart Antony Blinken stressing his country’s commitment to African agency and autonomy (Bartlett 2022), that she was glad at the recognition of Africa’s right to make her own friends and choices in the world (The Guardian 2022d ).
Furthermore, representatives of both Russia and China repeatedly observe that, first, unlike the G7 which they describe disparagingly as an exclusive Western anti-Russia and anti-China club, the G20 is a platform for emerging powers seeking solutions to global crises and regional challenges (Qingqing and Hengyi 2022); and, second, that the ‘so-called rules-based international order is actually a family rule made by a handful of countries to serve the US self-interest’ (Ratcliffe 2022). But neither G7 nor similar pledges to curb hunger in Africa or help African agriculture and declared commitment to a rules-based international order (Byaruhanga 2022), nor Russia’s promise to help African countries ‘complete the process of decolonisation’ if they continued to maintain a ‘balanced position’ on the crisis (Ross 2022), is likely to translate into what Stefan Wolff describes as ‘immediate and lasting solutions’ to complex ongoing global crises, even if only because resolution of the most deep-seated of these is beyond the control of any single global power or ‘club of states’ engaged in an ongoing struggle for ideological supremacy in a changing world order (Wolff 2022). In any case, direct approaches to President Putin by the presidents of both Senegal and South Africa have thus far not led to the unblocking of agricultural and fertiliser exports destined for African countries (Melly 2022). Nor was there any direct offer of Russian help from foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to mitigate the immediate challenges of the cost-of-living crisis beyond reassuring Egyptians that Russian grain exporters intended to fulfil their contractual obligations (Byaruhanga 2022).
For its part, and in a bid to counter Russian influence and narratives of the Russia–Ukraine war in Africa, Ukraine has adopted a diplomatic and cooperation strategy for the continent which, among several priorities, aims to ‘[strengthen] the role of Ukraine as a guarantor of world food security’ (The Odessa Journal 2022). Grain shipments from the country reportedly only resumed at the start of August under a deal brokered by the UN and Turkey, starting with the Razoni, coincidentally a Sierra Leone-registered ship, sailing from the port of Odessa for Tripoli, Lebanon (Waterhouse and Murphy 2022), but almost certainly containing livestock feed destined for Turkey or Europe rather than Africa-bound cargo for human consumption (Blann 2022). When Black Sea wheat deliveries to Africa did eventually resume in mid August, the earliest beneficiary would be the UN World Food Programme’s humanitarian operations for famine-threatened populations in drought-hit conflict zones in the Horn (WFP 2022). Supplies for considerably larger populations of the ‘merely hungry’ (as distinct from ‘starving’) elsewhere on the continent continue to depend on ongoing recovery of global commercial grain traffic and markets, including a much-anticipated increase in post-blockade Ukrainian exports of grain and vegetable oil. Ukrainian overtures to African countries included a multi-country visit by the country’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba in October, during which Kuleba responded to appeals from Macky Sall, president of Senegal and current chairperson of the AU, for the immediate resumption of grain exports from Russia and Ukraine, with a promise to ‘do our best until the last breath to continue exporting Ukrainian grain to Africa and the world for food security’ (Dione 2022). There was, however, little specific detail on how the Ukrainian government proposed to fulfil this promise, while presumably working in collaboration with a large agro-industrial sector subject to crony capitalism although ‘not controlled by the top-tier business interests that dominate sectors such as banking, energy, metals and transport’ (Lough 2021).
As Michael Roberts (2022) insists, however, limitations in the structure and functioning of specifically global food supply chains, and responses to their periodic structural crises, are to be found in long-term capitalist restructuring and the increasing globalisation of, and corporate control over, the food commodity chain. In the wake of Covid-19 and the Ukraine war, for instance, the four multinationals dominating the global grain trade and three others accounting for nearly two-thirds of the trade in seeds and agricultural chemicals have enjoyed record profits from food price hikes and recovery of food demand and trade, undoubtedly ‘at the expense of farmer incomes, workers’ wages, consumers and the environment’ (Harvey 2022b). Thus, as the Ukraine food market has gradually recovered and an effort to fulfil delayed supply contracts has got under way, the secondary market for trade in grain leaving the country has re-emerged, and many more supply ships have been heading for Europe and other rich world destinations rather than in the direction of Africa (Associated Press 2022a). Given this context, Roberts (2022) is convinced that an increasingly indebted sub-Saharan Africa, with its heavy dependence on global commodity and labour markets, had to have been particularly badly hit by these interlinked crises, while also showing in some detail that ‘mainstream solutions’ to the food crisis favoured by powerful capitalist economies and institutions (debt service suspension, increased special drawing rights, interest rate hikes), to the extent they are pursued at all, are particularly ill-suited to the immediate requirements and long-term needs of poor countries and populations (‘either inadequate or utopian, or both’). It is not just that very limited actual assistance is being offered by the major capitalist powers to starving and malnourished victims of food crises in poor countries, he believes, it is also that ‘[i]ncreasing protests and political upheaval worries the major powers more than people starving’, leading to the neoliberal focus on economic probity rather than socio-economic hardship identified earlier in the editorial (Roberts 2022).
Indeed, activists and campaigners focusing on such hardship advocate ‘strong supply chain regulation’ and curbs on ‘financial speculation on food crops’ as key to expanded food access and increased security (Harvey 2022b). In practice, this would involve, among other interventions, breaking up food chain monopolies, tightening regulation of commodity trading regulations to include price controls and caps, and windfall tax on global food commodity giant profits (Harvey 2022a). It would, in short, compel the food industry to contribute directly to alleviating the suffering of food-insecure economies and populations during emergencies like the ongoing cost-of-living crisis when, as we have already seen, they are likely to be reaping historic profits even while people starve (Harvey 2022b; Roberts 2022). Nonetheless, despite the undoubted global nature of a cost-of-living crisis requiring, like the Covid-19 pandemic and climate crisis, eminently global solutions encompassing coordination between the private sector, governments and international institutions, Roberts (2022) is convinced that effective collaboration of the kind identified earlier will remain ‘impossible while the global food industry is controlled and owned by a few multi-national food producers and distributors and the world economy heads towards another slump’. It is a position which would find strong support from the late Samir Amin. A persistent advocate of the assertion of collective sovereignty by the global south, Amin suggests political economic interventions informed by a strong national and food sovereignty dynamic as alternative to neoliberal globalisation, which he describes, somewhat derisively, as ‘neoliberal rule of an unregulated market, which is supposed to generate social justice through the windfall effects of the expansion of markets’ (Amin 2017). His prospectus for national sovereignty requires much greater attention than it has received to date, particularly in a currently hotly contested world order in which, as he argues, a redefined form of strategic non-alignment by the global south is set to play a considerably enhanced role. Such a role will be indispensable in an era which, as we have seen, is witnessing the intensification of neoliberalism and an accompanying resurgence of its associated power and institutions, maybe above all the IMF in Africa and elsewhere.
The articles in this issue
The articles making up this issue of ROAPE take up elements of the current food, wider cost-of-living, Coronavirus and climate crises which are also all crises of inequality. As the UN secretary-general recently observed, the world currently faces a ‘perfect storm’ of global crises leading to widening inequalities both between and within North and South, but in a way which leads to ‘a serious deterioration in living conditions of the most vulnerable populations’, thereby posing a serious threat to peace and security (McVeigh 2022). These crises are thus heavily implicated in political economies of inequality at both global and lesser scales; the research articles in this issue of ROAPE illustrate this particularly well. All four articles making up Issue 173 are case studies from southern Africa, three from South Africa and one from Zimbabwe. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is a region of extreme inequality, containing the world’s three most unequal countries, including South Africa, and a further three of the 10 most unequal countries globally (Oxfam 2022b). Indeed, according to our ROAPE colleague Patrick Bond, South Africa ‘ranks as having the world’s most unequal society, most corrupt capitalist class, and (from 2012-17) most confrontational working class’ (Bond 2021).
As political economies presided over by former liberation movements turned political parties and governing regimes, as well as sites of intense class struggle in a context of uneven capitalist development, a South Africa and/or Zimbabwe in crisis is at constant risk of social friction as popular and organised forces seek to tame capital in the interests of labour (Bond 2021; Diseko 2022; Harvey 2021; Kana 2022; Ndhlovu 2022). Low-income earners and households in both countries have been the worst hit by the cost-of-living crisis, with widespread popular protests and organised opposition mobilisations bearing witness to the limited scope, extent and effectiveness of government interventions to alleviate its worst effects (George 2022; Ndlovu 2022; Rossouw 2022). Yet both countries remain strongly ‘neutral’ in official declarations on the Russia–Ukraine war, with senior South African government officials being particularly vociferous in defending such ‘non-alignment’, including at both the G7 where South Africa was an invited attendee alongside Senegal, and G20 which meets in October and where it is Africa’s sole representative. In one as in the other country, the Russia–Ukraine war has worsened rather than created complex ongoing political and economic crises which, in South Africa, could well be ‘reasons why the South African anti-apartheid revolution was so decisively truncated’ (Bond 2021). In both countries, then, ordinary people routinely contend with high levels of petty and not so petty corruption, with political leaderships whose hold on power is increasingly contested (The Guardian 2022c ; Burke 2022). In one as in the other country, these are uncertain times within unstable national and regional southern African orders.
Ebrahim Harvey is one of many to argue that the decisive and irrevocable change wrought by South Africa’s 19th-century mineral revolution ensured that political regimes into the present would need ‘to be aligned decisively to serving the needs of mining and industrial capitalism’ (Harvey 2021, 21). This hegemonic role of mining in South Africa’s political economy, alongside capitalism’s power to adapt to changing circumstances, are reflected in and by the papers on South Africa. All three are devoted to mining in this, the ‘richest country in the world in terms of the value of its mineral reserves’ (World Bank 2019, cited in Nxele in this issue), which also boasts some 80–90% of global platinum-group metal deposits, in addition to being the world’s leading producer and exporter of platinum (Garside 2022). The papers by Musa Nxele and Phillan Zamchiya are devoted to platinum mining, while Tapiwa Madimu’s contribution addresses gold mining. They all focus on the post-apartheid era and, taken together, emphasise different elements of the role of capitalist mining, in what for Bond (2021) amounts more broadly to an ‘ever more extreme post-apartheid version of uneven and combined capitalist development’.
In the first of these, Musa Nxele examines the dynamic structures and processes linking crony capitalism and black empowerment in mining in the country’s platinum belt. Using Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), South Africa’s and the world’s largest platinum mining company, as a case study, Nxele assesses whether nationalisation of mineral rights ownership by the African National Congress (ANC) government as part of a wider Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy has achieved its presumed goal of securing adequate investment in a capital-intensive platinum mining industry, while simultaneously creating a black capitalist or business class. In this, it arguably joins much recent research concentrating on BEE policy implementation and outcomes, notably how BEE has benefited a black capitalist elite without transforming unequal power and structural relations with roots in colonisation and apartheid, identified by Makgoba (2022). But Nxele is particularly interested, too, like several ROAPE colleagues whom he cites, in the nature of the emergent ‘state–business relations’, notably the latter’s dynamics and evolution, as well as consequences for wider processes of (dis)empowerment and transformation. Incorporating insights from the full range of actors and agents (successively, the state, Amplats, the emergent black capitalist class, as well as labour and mining communities), the paper’s particular value lies in its tracing of how capitalism adjusts to changing global and local economic and political circumstances.
Nxele is clear about the various and differentiated interests at work and their often complex complementary and contradictory interactions, as well as the latter’s many and varied outcomes. He pays particular attention to documenting crony capitalism as a response to Amplats’ need to resecure mineral rights and the capture of the state as outcome of black elite contestation. He is equally interested in the state’s ‘hollowing out’ and ‘repurposing … systematic looting’ (in this issue, 396), which he considers a particularly egregious example of a larger and worrying phenomenon under wider investigation by the Judicial Commission of Enquiry into State Capture during the Zuma presidency (2009–2018), and which is chronicled in the damning Zondo reports, named after Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, the Commission chair (Burke 2022). However, if the Zuma faction within the ANC was ‘patrimonial’ and ‘corrupt’, that backing Cyril Ramaphosa, his successor, was both ‘neoliberal’ and ‘also corrupt’ (Bond 2021). In practice, therefore, while the origins of labour’s subsistence crises lie undoubtedly in the apartheid era, what Ebrahim Harvey describes as the distinctly neoliberal economic and social policies adopted since 1994 have resulted in ‘ongoing and … deepening poverty, unemployment and class inequalities afflicting the majority black population’ (Harvey 2021). Nxele shows the relevance of much of this as background to the soaring prices, unemployment, widespread corruption, violent crime and popular disillusionment with the ANC (The Guardian 2022c ; Rossouw 2022), and as invaluable context for situating the phenomenon of black political elites profiting from acting as enablers for profit-seeking big business. The paper usefully chronicles the ‘chain reaction’ set in motion by the ANC government’s adoption of measures designed to facilitate BEE, itself a potentially transformative albeit neoliberal attempt to right historic wrongs, and Amplat’ successive adaptive responses, including the co-opting of individuals and factions of the black political elite in a bid to ensure continuing access to rent, while limiting competition.
Metji Makgoba, who is also interested in identifying who benefits and who loses from BEE in the mining sector, and why, has recently demonstrated that both the government and mining corporations in South Africa appropriate BEE discourses of anti-colonialism, anti-apartheid and transformation for competing (but also complementary or mutually reinforcing) political and corporate interests (Makgoba 2022). He has used this insight to explain how BEE ‘preserves … structures of power while masquerading as a contributor to their transformation’ (Makgoba 2022, 201). It will surprise few, then, that the Nxele case study concludes that the system of narrow cronyism which emerged ‘produced limited investment and limited black productive capital’ (in this issue, 395), while poor mining communities and mine workers ‘have largely been left behind’, although not rendered completely impotent, as communities have sought to ‘disrupt operations through protracted wage strikes and blocking of roads to mines’ (Ibid.). Of particular interest for both Nxele and Makgoba is thus the disconnect between the declared state intent to redress historical political and economic wrongs and the somewhat perverse actual or eventual outcome of such state intervention. Indeed, Nxele’s recognition of oppressed individuals and communities exercising their power to control the operating environment of mines in the latter part of his study serves two valuable purposes. First, it links all three of the papers on mining in South Africa, as we see later. Second, and contra-Makgoba, it suggests that the ‘appropriation of BEE discourses for narrow factional interests’ does not lead inevitably to the exoneration of government and mining corporations from blame, criticism, challenge or censure (Makgoba 2022, 215). Amplats’ profitability and commercial security may have been enhanced in South Africa’s post-apartheid political economy and in the wake of global instabilities like the Asian financial crisis, perhaps most notably via the dubious means of co-opting politically influential black elites, organised labour and land-owning black communities capable of influencing government, labour union and community rules to operate decisions in its favour. And the details of the case study undoubtedly illustrate capitalism’s capacity for survival and adaptation. Yet none of this has in any way exonerated it from blame in practice, as a growing academic literature (including Nxele’s paper here), media coverage and organised and popular protests attest.
Still on platinum mining and its contestation, Phillan Zamchiya sets out in his paper to do two things: first, distil the otherwise broad ‘omnibus’ remit of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, credited to David Harvey’s influence, to three core features of coercion, non-voluntary consent and corruption; and, second, use a case study of the dynamics of material and incorporeal dispossession in and around Ivanplats mine in North West Province to demonstrate how this enhances the concept’s local explanatory value. Methodologically, he is interested in how studies of the impact of mining on agrarian livelihoods intersect with this elaboration of accumulation by dispossession, especially in critical approaches to ‘the articulation of struggles over land for alternative agrarian-based livelihoods and incorporeal benefits’ (in this issue, 421). Such struggles are particularly intense, and their outcomes notably complex, varied and far-reaching in locations where, as in the Limpopo study area here, marginalised mining communities who see mineral rights ‘as the preserve of the state’ are already contending with ongoing processes of dispossession.
It is thus to the first-hand experiences of members of these communities, frequently extensively narrated in their own words and usefully interpreted on their own terms, that Zamchiya turns for ‘source’ material to test the explanatory value of the three core features of his circumscribed elaboration of accumulation by dispossession. And it is this material too which provides the basis for his conclusion that ‘violence, non-voluntary consent and corruption remained at the centre of dispossession in ways that captured global interest’ (in this issue, 421). As in Nxele’s study, then, corruption looms large, albeit not as a sole means or tool of dispossession and capitalist accumulation. Zamchiya identifies a cast of familiar agents (mining industry/mines management, state officials and traditional authorities) actively engaged in the dispossession of marginalised mining communities in the pursuit of profit, both corporate and individual/collective. Ivanplats, like Amplats in the Nxele study, is aiming to achieve the status of the world’s largest repository and/or producer of platinum-group metals – for global capitalist domination, in other words. As in the Amplats case study, too, Zamchiya’s Ivanplats research is about corporate securing and resecuring of mineral rights which had been nationalised as part of South Africa’s democratic transition. Both studies, finally, contend with the influence of BEE in the country’s post-apartheid transition, although this is not foregrounded in the Ivanplats study. But while Nxele’s conclusion is that elite deals are best understood via an examination of factional politics within ANC- and black-organised business, Zamchiya looks less at the activities of a black capitalist class and more at the role of rural elites (and their hired gangs), mobilised by mining investors and operating with tacit state backing in frustrating local livelihood aspirations.
Livelihoods of all kinds can, of course, be rendered particularly vulnerable in conditions of uncertain local, national and global orders. Much of this editorial has already demonstrated this, arguably at its most acute during the Ebola, Covid-19 and cost-of-living crises. And, as both Serukuma (2022) and Roberts (2022) have argued for, respectively, the Covid-19 and cost-of-living crises, effective social protection and other measures to mitigate their worst effects on the poorest and most vulnerable were available but not necessarily prioritised as part of the increasing globalisation of, and corporate control over food, fuel and vaccines. This reflects in large measure the dynamics of neoliberal globalisation, notably capitalism’s tendency to reduce everything to a simple monetary value, leading to marginalised and vulnerable individuals and groups of people being considered surplus to (market) requirements and therefore ‘non-essential [and dispensable] humans’ (Serukuma 2022). Thus, we see here Ivanplats land enclosures disrupting individual and household subsistence and market production and exchange; undermining complex diversified local agrarian economies; and creating or worsening regional crises of livelihoods. Dispossession also had the effect of localising and intensifying agropastoral livelihoods in often qualitatively poorer or less productive zones in regional landscapes at increased risk of overexploitation. Ivanplats offers in exchange increasing dependence on paid minework of limited employment prospects, opportunities for career advancement and longer-term job security – all of which, in any case, largely exclude opportunities for female participation.
As Zamchiya is at pains to point out, there is thus a remaining need to counter the capitalist tendency to reduce everything in such circumstances to a simple monetary value. In other words, Ivanplats’s enclosures and accompanying dispossession did also ride roughshod over local cultural and social sensibilities, paying little more than lip service to individual, household and community concerns over the significance of such cultural capital in the pursuit of a meaningful and viable life or existence. Hence his sustained focus, for instance, on what he is convinced is the lack of appreciation for, or maybe even deliberate undervaluing of the significance of ‘incorporeal benefits’ like the sanctity of family graves and ancestral shrines for community solidarity and social reproduction. Significantly, voices from local communities make their case only partly as victims. Zamchiya also profiles them as protesters, litigants, accused and defendants, who are shown to variously contest the ‘day-to-day capitalist relations of domination’ (422) which constitute the basis of Ivanplats interactions with local communities. These relations of domination are manifest – above all, perhaps, in the very functioning of the institutions and processes, such as land and/or village committees, councils or assemblies, which are designed as mechanisms to protect local and communal interests. In the hands of rural elites and their corporate and political collaborators, however, they become invaluable tools for actively facilitating land dispossession, while ensuring that interactions with Ivanplats represent anything but ‘accountable consultative process[es]’ free of corruption and violence.
Much of this is reminiscent of Tony Bebbington’s (1999) argument for combining materialist and actor-centred considerations when conceptualising livelihoods in locations such as the mining settlements here, where individual and household livelihoods depend not just directly on natural resources but also on a variety of ‘income sources and product and labour markets’ (Bebbington 1999, p. 2022). Central to his conceptualisation is therefore a focus on the practical role of livelihoods in countering material poverty, and on how livelihood choices and strategies are closely bound up in individual and group perceptions of poverty and well-being, as well as how, together, these can ‘enhance [people’s] capabilities to confront the social conditions that produce poverty’ (Bebbington 1999, p. 2022). For Zamchiya as for Bebbington, then, livelihoods both allow ‘survival, adaptation and poverty alleviation’ and provide the basis of the ‘power to act and to reproduce, challenge or change the rules that govern the control, use and transformation of resources’ (Bebbington 1999, p. 2022). What emerges from the Zamchiya study is that in the course of resecuring corporate mineral rights, Ivanplats actively dispossesses peasant agropastoralists of their right to social justice, the means for a secure or sustainable livelihood and the means for making their everyday life meaningful (Bebbington 1999). It is hard to disagree with Zamchiya’s observation that ‘[d]ispossession does not always have to be illegal for it to have devastating consequences’ (in this issue, 422).
Tapiwa Madimu’s study, which follows, illustrates particularly well the complex and dynamic links between occupation, possession and (il)legality around zama-zama or artisanal small-scale mining activity and livelihoods. In practice, it chronicles the struggles of capitalist mining’s already dispossessed, its dispensable humans or no-longer essential workforce – the left behinds, retrenched or unregulated gold miners working disused and functioning mines beyond the realm of the state, outside formal mining company control and in seeming breach of national mining legislation. The latter requires formal registration and licensing at prohibitive cost. Yet informality is more acutely attuned to the life and livelihoods of zama-zamas, who already contribute significantly to local household and national economies and, despite state and media ‘(mis)representations’ of disorder and violence, operate according to local governance structures and norms of solidarity or entraide. Madimu questions mining capital and government obsession with assigning monetary or market value to anything and everything. Here, for example, this preoccupation revolves around ‘how much revenue the government has lost in uncollected taxes and quantifying losses made by gold-mining companies due to unregulated gold-mining activities’ (in this issue, 439), the main objective being to advance a case for their ‘official’ regulation under state control.
Like Bebbington (1999), Madimu argues strongly for a wider conceptualisation of zama-zamas and their livelihoods, seeking to make zama-zama activity more ‘legible’ or comprehensible, albeit not from the perspective of the South African government or capitalist mining industry. Zama-zama and artisanal small-scale mining more generally would only be considered as valuable economic activity worthy of official recognition as a direct outcome of ‘the undoubted political revolution that occurred since 1994’ (Harvey 2021), which prioritised enhanced life chances for Historically Disadvantaged Black South Africans (HDBSA) across the national economy. Shades, then, of BEE in capitalist mining. Capitalist gold mining which has historically depended on a favourable operating environment locally, primarily a regional mines migratory labour system which facilitated long-term profit generation into the early 1990s, underwent major restructuring as gold mining became less profitable. But rather than securing profitability through expansion and intensification, as in the cases of Amplats and Ivanplats, mining capital in the goldfields appears to have sought to secure company survival and restore profitability via load shedding, that is scaled-down operations, asset consolidation and cost reduction, involving abandoning entire mines, decommissioning selected mine shafts in working mines and retrenching workers. Indeed, resurgence of zama-zama activity dates to this period of restructuring, which has seen zama-zamas (re)claiming, (re)opening and (re)working abandoned and, sometimes, functioning mine shafts in pursuit of livelihood activities. Zama-zamas, then, are both products and victims of – as well as survivors from – capitalist gold mining, which both the government and mining capital would still like to see formally controlled and their activities officially regulated. Yet, ostensible concern for their supposedly unsafe working environments, unsupported accusations of widespread theft of company mineral ores and assumed but unsubstantiated links to criminal networks and syndicates which are used to justify this stance continue to be contested.
Madimu provides a helpful compilation of evidence, mostly from a range of secondary sources, of the everyday lives and livelihoods of zama-zamas to inform and strengthen such contestation. He shows how zama-zamas occupy interstices of the formal and informalised post-apartheid mining landscape, forging and attempting to sustain complex and meaningful existences from the aftermath of racial capitalism. What he describes is an entire zama-zama economy or livelihood system which is both multi-local and multi-scalar, as well as being transnational, and which also illustrates the significance of questions of access and entitlements to mine compounds, mine shafts and mineral deposits. From his description, for zama-zamas who work shafts in operating mines, the collaboration of employed company mineworkers is indispensable to their very survival. These contacts act variously as conduits, intermediaries, fixers, protectors, gold ore buyers and traders, and grocery suppliers for zama-zamas, both underground in the mines, as well as between zama-zamas and family, friends, acquaintances and business partners in the world outside the mines. Similar networks and interactions are required for zamas-zamas working abandoned mines, although these differ in detail and, as is the case with those active in working mines, tend to be location-/mine-specific. Mines company security guards and privately ‘contracted’ security personnel emerge as central to the functioning of zama-zama life and livelihood, regulating access to mines and mine shafts and protecting life and property, but also providing a range of middleman or intermediary services. Madimu justifiably highlights the fact that zama-zama life and livelihood revolve primarily around relations of trust and entraide, with such interaction taking the form of, among others, commercial transactions, monetary exchange and even bartering.
But the zama-zama working environment is, as Madimu readily acknowledges, often alien and frequently dangerous. He is thus keen to call attention to the ‘elaborate private governance and security arrangements that significantly minimise the incidence of conflicts and promote mutual understanding and respect’ (in this issue, 447), and the mostly ‘orderly and secure working environment’ (Ibid.) thereby created. For their part, zama-zamas highlight not just the income-earning potential of their work (and multiplier effects on neighbouring communities), but also its transformative potential and capacity to give new meaning to the lives and existences of mining capital’s non-essential humans, to borrow Serukuma’s (2022) description. Madimu repeatedly decries the continuing deployment of the ‘gold-buying syndicate bosses’ (442), a favoured media stereotype and government and mining company villain, as the major beneficiary of an informalised mining economy in which zama-zama are no more than ‘mere pawns’ (Ibid.). He recommends in its place the necessity for at the very least contemplating a zama-zama economy requiring constant hard-headed decision-making of myriad participants engaged in potentially life-changing monetary transactions (including proxy house and car purchases, and payment for education and health services) and a range of other exchanges, including in the social, human and cultural livelihood capitals indispensable to minimising inter- and intra-group zama-zama tension, competition, conflict and violence. Madala sites or underground recreational spaces, and the socialising between different ethnic- and friendship-based zama-zama work groups they facilitate, fall into the latter category and ‘[give] a semblance of normal life and significantly [ease] an otherwise difficult underground life’ (447). In highlighting the unusual and challenging nature of zama-zama existence, while also emphasising its enduring ‘normality’ and preparedness, Madimu hopes mining capital and government might be persuaded to incorporate zama-zama into the existing national regulatory framework in a way which legitimises its legal status but preserves its informalised operation and character. After all, as he concludes, zama-zama sites ‘do have proper governance structures, are generally orderly and are not always as violent as presented by the media’ (438).
Yet there might be very little room for complacency. A widely reported incident of the gang rapes of eight models featuring in a music video shoot and armed robbery of their film crew at an abandoned mine in Krugersdorp near Johannesburg in late July has been widely blamed on zama-zamas, who local people accuse of widespread violence and criminality (Davies 2022c). More than 120 suspects (including juridical minors) have since appeared in court (Associated Press 2022b), although fewer than 10 have been charged with rape thus far, while the vast majority face charges of illegal immigration and illegal mining (Murphy and Maseko 2022). A female member of the film crew and ex-police officer who, along with her daughter, were not harmed during the attack, has subsequently been charged with possession of goods stolen from the victims during the attack and perverting the course of justice and will appear in court alongside the rest of the accused at a future date (Luhanga 2022). The original incident, as well as popular and official reactions to it, both reflect and are themselves reflected in South Africa’s wider national crises of violence against women and xenophobic violence. Here, global, regional and national crises of poverty, inequality, mobility and insecurity intersect with legitimate community demands for increased security and law enforcement, and enhanced livelihood opportunities, and are at real risk of being hijacked for purely xenophobic ends. It is therefore vital, as Smith and Bird (2022) note, that those responsible for the crimes should be held accountable; that government and the security forces be obliged to explain the delay in implementing fully the National Gender-based Violence and Femicide Strategic Plan; and that concerted effort is made to deny populist politicians the opportunity to distract from the struggle against persistent and widespread gender-based violence, by scapegoating migrants and stoking anger, prejudice and xenophobia.
These are sentiments that I suspect Madimu would wholeheartedly share. Much of his paper details zama-zama response to a felt need for increased security and enforcement of law and order in their everyday life and livelihood. Reported vigilante attacks on zama-zamas, destruction of their camps and homes, and anti-immigrant protests are unlikely to create an environment conducive to careful consideration of the case he argues: that, government and mining capital reluctance notwithstanding, there is a real need for reviewing the national mining regulatory framework to make it more accommodating to the everyday realities and requirements of zama-zama and artisanal small-scale mining more broadly. There have been audible support and other manifestations of comradeship and solidarity from sympathetic activists, groups and charities to images of South Africa’s poor and marginalised, seemingly scape-goating equally poor and possibly even more marginalised migrant zama-zamas. But it is equally the case that ‘those who speak in opposition to xenophobia, those who assert basic human rights, those who wish to highlight the issue of rape over the issue of the migration status of people have been and are being systematically trolled and attacked online’ (Smith and Bird 2022). This is hardly surprising. It is, after all, the capacity of such acts of rebellion and solidarity for disrupting and transforming the status quo for progressive ends which makes them ready targets, and is why they are at their most potent when they are linked to struggles against capitalism rather than ‘single-issue moments of “advocacy” and protest’ (Bond 2021). At the same time, however, Ebrahim Harvey has lamented the plethora of social miseries which have ‘severely tarnished and undermined the undoubted political revolution that occurred since 1994’ (Harvey 2021). He would no doubt include the ‘popular politics around xenophobia’ here (Pithouse 2022). Sadly, these limit or undermine people’s capability for challenging the social conditions which create or produce poverty (Bebbington 1999). The following paper from Zimbabwe, itself the origin of large numbers of South Africa’s resident migrants, including zama-zamas, provides further illustration of the wider applicability of these and similar observations, even though the precise circumstances of the cases differ in detail.
Thus, in this, the final paper, Prolific Mataruse and Sally Matthews bring us almost full circle to the question of democratic struggles and accountability, specifically foreign intervention in, or influence on national and continental politics, with which this editorial opened. They examine the impact of democracy assistance to opposition forces in Zimbabwe from the late 1990s to 2016, a period of significantly increased local opposition to, and international disillusionment with, the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF), and therefore also in international aid of this kind. Their main focus is, however, the nature of opposition activism which emerges from such foreign aid, and what this says about the effectiveness of this kind of democratic assistance. But the paper is also, as with its predecessors, as much about unstable national, regional and global orders as it is about what Wisner et al. (2004) describe as the social relations and structures of domination which both influence and are influenced by how national, group and individual livelihoods are structured and function. Certainly, livelihood concerns emerge as directly and consistently central to the paper’s main preoccupation, itself imaginatively captured in the primary title, ‘commercialising the struggle’.
Mataruse and Matthews’ paper is clear that the struggle in question is an existential one, and not only for a ZANU–PF which, apart from the 2008–2013 period when it shared power as part of a Government of National Unity, has dominated national politics since independence in 1980. It is equally an existential crisis for an increasingly fractured political and civil society opposition, as well as an electorate for whom a state of prolonged and multifaceted political economic (particularly cost-of-living) crisis has become normalised. The authors establish that, together, a variety of factors inhibit corporate electoral donations to, and curtail private democracy funding for, opposition parties and civil society organisations: national electoral funding laws and practices; ZANU–PF authoritarianism; officially sanctioned political opposition intimidation; and straitened individual and household economic circumstances limiting disposable incomes. And, in constraining sources and levels of local funding for opposition politics in this way, Zimbabwe’s complex and interminable crisis is shown to be both cause and effect of the political economy of foreign democracy assistance described in thought-provoking detail in the paper.
This political economy of democracy assistance is thus implicated in complex ways in local and transnational livelihood patterns and transformations, which are explicable in terms of Zimbabwe’s crisis-ridden extractive and crony capitalist economy. Indeed, ‘the chaos’ associated with the latter ‘comes as a boon to a select few. Widespread corruption and patrimonialism mean that people with connections to centres of power – notably the various arms of government – fare best. In fact, some do very well indeed’ (Jones 2010, 285). At the same time, according to Noko (2022), Zimbabwe’s economy functions in large measure because of intervention by international non-governmental organisations and bilateral donors in social service delivery and remittances from migrants abroad to families at home. Nonetheless, despite strenuous and expensive pre-emptive efforts by officials and hired representatives of the Zimbabwean government (Ndebele 2022a), the EU, UK and USA administrations have all recently extended targeted sanctions initially imposed in the early 2000s and periodically renewed since by a further year, with the US ‘accus[ing] the count[r]y’s leaders of economic mismanagement and undermining democratic processes or institutions’ (Chibamu 2022). ZANU–PF and its supporters counter that what the United States and its Western allies really object to is what Mataruse and Matthews describe variously as the regime’s ‘anti-imperialist … message’ and nationalist ‘ideological stance’, maybe most notably in an ‘anti-colonial’ commitment to land reform. Yet, rare recent public admonishments from senior South African government officials suggest that, even though they undoubtedly share and have steadfastly supported Zimbabwe’s nationalist and anti-colonial stance, they are much less enthusiastic about ZANU–PF’s continuing repression of freedom of the press and of association, distrust of opposition politics, aversion to civil society activism and seeming extreme reluctance to engage with concerns beyond its own immediate survival and narrow factional interests (ICG 2020; Pinto 2022).
Meanwhile, a cross-section of Zimbabwean migrants in the southern Africa region and beyond are reluctant to return home because of limited sustainable livelihood or economic opportunities; opposition supporters and/or critics of the status quo are even more reluctant to return for fear of political persecution. Furthermore, zama-zama activity and violent crime on artisanal goldfields and elsewhere are among livelihood adaptation responses, or kukiya-kiya in Shona, to emerge as mechanisms for coping with austerity and inflation, alongside the long-established and, since about 2000, sharply increased flow of mostly undocumented migrants to South Africa (Jones 2010; Pinto 2022). But it is not just undocumented zama-zamas and other Zimbabweans who face deportation from, or further marginalisation in, South Africa. The Zimbabwe Exemption Permit system which has allowed nearly 200,000–400,000 Zimbabweans to live and work legally in the country for more than a decade ‘as a temporary solution to a growing refugee crisis related to Zimbabwe’ also faces imminent termination in response to populist xenophobic and electoral pressure (BusinessTech 2022; see also Pithouse 2022). Nonetheless, entirely justified discontent among popular forces, organised labour and the political opposition at the Covid-19 and cost-of-living crises, and government corruption and incompetence more generally, continue to be (often brutally) suppressed in the run-up to general elections in 2023 (ICG 2020), which President Mnangagwa has vowed the opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) and its presidential candidate Nelson Chamisa will never be allowed to win (Noko 2022). Put differently, Zimbabwe’s worsening national order poses an increasing threat to a regionally unstable SADC – but particularly South African – order (Pinto 2022). And, as the ‘Western’ targeted sanctions mentioned previously suggest, the ZANU–PF government and party are also considered ‘rogue’ elements within the current unstable neoliberal world order requiring disciplining and/or punishment. Zimbabwe’s political leaders reportedly consider that their country is a victim of and, alongside Russia, a comrade in the struggle against sanctions (Ndebele 2022b).
Much of the foregoing, then, as Mataruse and Matthews make clear, inhibits local corporate and private democracy funding for Zimbabwe’s political opposition, a state of affairs which is in turn used to justify the kind of liberal interventionism whose varied impact on opposition political activism they examine at some depth and with nuance. The interventions in question see foreign aid donors and development partners providing democracy assistance specifically to civil society organisations which collaborate with opposition forces, although not directly to political parties, this being prevented by law. Mataruse and Matthews are careful to contextualise their subject matter, both within the relevant aid-development-democracy assistance literature, as well as in the more limited actual African experience with democracy promotion which targets political opposition forces rather than sitting governments. They demonstrate that the latter has particular resonance in Zimbabwe; show how ZANU–PF’s accusations of opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)/CCC challenges as financed by, and beholden to, Western imperialist rather than nationalist interests receive qualified support from opposition activists interviewed; and helpfully remind us that an MDC (and offshoots) which did not start life as a former liberation movement, and whose fortunes are perceived to be too closely aligned to Western interests, continues to arouse widespread suspicion among southern African political players. This includes the ANC, a recurrent mediator between Zimbabwe’s government and political opposition, which is currently trying to facilitate urgent pre-election rapprochement between these strongly competing interests with only limited success thus far (ICG 2020). This is a paper, then, which raises not only fundamental theoretical and conceptual questions about foreign democracy assistance per se (‘we should be cautious about assuming that democracy can be furthered through foreign aid’, Mataruse and Matthews, in this issue, 455), but also applied queries about its local impact or consequences (‘unexpected negative consequences … can arise when struggles for democracy are funded through foreign aid’, Ibid.), while also highlighting the need for urgently investigating domestic or local alternatives to foreign funding (is it ‘possible to build a struggle without seeking funding for that struggle from overseas donors’?, Ibid.).
It is, however, in the sections devoted to the second of these three main research questions that the metaphor of commercialising the struggle comes into its own – as descriptive imagery, explanatory tool and analytical device. In short, external democracy funding did not just fail to achieve what the authors call ‘hoped-for pro-democratic effects’. Much worse,
It eroded the passion and commitment of activists and attracted the involvement of those more interested in financial gain than political transformation [and] distorted the ideological orientation of opposition organisations, leading them to adopt a position in favour of liberal, procedural democracy rather than the more radical approaches that might better resonate with their constituencies. (Mataruse and Matthews, in this issue, 467)
This is unlikely to come as a complete surprise, given we are dealing with a national political economy dominated by ‘ultra-neoliberal policies’ and ‘authoritarian tendencies’ experiencing a ‘full-on capitalist crisis’ (Bond 2019), which encompasses often significantly increased subsistence risks and livelihood precarity for the majority of Zimbabweans. Mataruse and Matthews are therefore right to merely observe, rather than judge, how ‘[i]n this context, politics became a powerful avenue to livelihoods either through ZANU–PF’s patronage or through the money flowing from democracy assistance’ (458). Not all their respondents are as detached or forgiving, however. Memorably, several bemoan the opposition’s ideological shift from Marxism/socialism to social democratic, human rights and good governance discourses, with far fewer noting that, like ZANU–PF, the opposition had adopted neoliberalism as its modus operandi. Bond (2021) has similarly decried the caricaturing of Marx’s thinking on globalisation and national debt by leading ANC intellectuals to justify the adoption of neoliberalism and austerity in South Africa, and noted how some former Marxists had become ‘deradicalised consultants’ working ‘within and around the state’. Not surprisingly, Mataruse and Matthews conclude that the search for solutions to the challenge of finding alternative non-foreign sources of funding for democracy assistance in practice would need to be led by Zimbabwe’s progressive forces. This would, however, need to be part of a wider assault on the myriad causes and manifestations of the country’s complex political economic crises, including the role of international financial institutions, corporate creditors and country lenders (Bond 2021).
The Briefings and Debates in this issue explore themes linked to characterising dimensions of late capitalism in Africa. Our first Briefing, by Nataliya Mykhalchenko and Jörg Wiegratz, concludes a series of three briefings on the character of anti-fraud measures (AFM) in Africa (the first two in the series are Mykhalchenko and Wiegratz 2019; 2021). They document AFMs in Western Africa and reflect more broadly on the characteristics of AFMs across the continent. They conclude that AFMs have been embedded in many states as part of economic and governance reform. The second Briefing is by Paul Hezekiah Omeh, Ifeanyichukwu Michael Abada, Celestine Chijioke Onah, Ngozika Josephine Anozie and Benjamin Amujiri, and challenges the adequacy of mainstream accounts of bilateral trade. The authors examine the relationship between bilateral trade and politico-administrative border relations between Nigeria and Benin, arguing that border politics drives formal and informal trade relations.
In our first Debate piece, Niamh Gaynor highlights how Asian models of development, recommended in some African political economy literature, emphasise among other things, a strategy of labour-intensive, export-driven manufacturing but the impact is not gender neutral. Low-cost, export-oriented manufacturing increases gendered inequality and discrimination. These consequences, she argues, need to be recognised and more inclusive growth promoted. The second Debate provides an underplayed account of the emergence of the Blue Economy concept. Clare Amuhaya and Denis Degterev review the importance of establishing policies to protect marine life in small island Eastern African states, especially when there continues to be pressure to promote regional economic growth that accelerates the climate emergency and the blue economy.