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African Workers and Scholars Unite
By Patrick Bond
At Workers University in Cairo, a
mid-May gathering of 100 trade union leaders and
intellectuals from across Africa adopted surprisingly
common radical language, exhibiting a pent-up desire to
jointly fight global neoliberalism.
The Council for the Development of Social Science
Research in Africa (Codesria) has been an extraordinary
network for 5000 members who are the continent’s core of
progressive academics. From its head office in Dakar
came the executive secretary, political economist
Adebayo Olukoshi, and Carlos Cardoso, one of the leading
scholars on the work of Amilcar Cabral from his native
Guinea-Bissau.
Cosponsoring was Hassan Sunmonu, the charismatic
Nigerian leader of the 33-year old Organisation of
African Trade Union Unity (Oatuu). He noted his group’s
unusually open relations with social change activists
elsewhere in civil society: as a founding member of the
World Social Forum’s Africa regional network and member
of the WSF International
Council, and founding member of African Trade Network
with twenty NGOs, as well as networks on debt and
economic policy.
Conference speakers attacked a double oppression,
stemming first from international economic pressure and
second from local accomplices in comprador-state
regimes.
Changing these governments was a
perpetual task, said Sunmonu: ‘In our Arusha African
Charter for Popular Participation in 1990, we announced
the need for a people-empowered democracy. Those rulers
elected by the African people must be at their
service, not in the service of multinationals, donors or
the World Trade Organisation, International Monetary
Fund and World Bank. Those leaders unwilling to work on
this basis must now go!’
For Sunmonu, this is a chance to unite with academics,
to remind all Africa’s producers of the unfair
conditions they labour under: ‘France formally
apologised to Africans this last week for participating
in slavery. We want to hear from Queen Elizabeth, the
Portuguese, the Spanish, Brussels, Washington and others
involved in the slave trade… We need reparations for
millions of Africans put into slavery, and for all the
resources and artefacts stolen from us since.’
The challenge of ending contemporary economic slavery is
witnessed in the reluctance of the IMF and World Bank to
fully cancel Africa’s debt, charged Sunmonu: ‘They
imposed the crudest form of neoliberalism on Africa! It
has worked nowhere!’
One rare area where struggles to reform Bank policies
achieved real results was permission for states to fund
education without dreaded cost-recovery provisions,
formerly a ubiquitous condition imposed by Washington.
User fees had drastically cut girl participation rates
in primary and secondary schooling.
Yet new problems soon arose, according to Wanyonyi
Buteyo, secretary general of the Kenyan Union of
Post-Primary Teachers. A 20% increase in teaching staff
is needed to provide quality education for expanding
enrolments following Kenya’s implementation of free
education in 2002, he testified: ‘Government is under
outrageous pressure from the World Bank and IMF not to
employ extra teachers, much as it is known that we
have this urgent need. I believe that advice and
conditionality should be disregarded completely.’
Sunmonu explained, ‘The debt is still the main way that
the IMF and Bank saddle our countries with orthodox
structural adjustments including conditionality. All the
gains made after independence were wiped out. As early
as 1987, the first international trade union conference
on debt was held by OATUU, and called for total
cancellation.’
Seven years earlier, the Lagos Plan of Action - a
progressive, regionalist economic platform – had been
adopted by African leaders. It was countered the
following year by the Bank’s Elliott Berg Report,
codifying the ‘Washington Consensus’ formula for Africa.
Said Olukoshi, ‘We have lived with this neoliberal
experience since Sierra Leone in 1978, with virtually
every other economy in Africa since. In 1983, the
Codesria declaration on why structural adjustment can’t
work spelled out ten reasons. This was very influential
on me. Years later, Joseph Stiglitz says much the same
thing. The wasted time! That’s the basis for our
frustration.’
Periodically, alternatives are suggested by progressive
intellectuals, trade unions and social movements. The
African Alternative Framework was produced at the UN
Economic Commission on Africa in 1989, with drafting
support by this conference’s keynote speaker, economist
Ali Abdel Gadir Ali. Now based at the Arab Planning
Institute, Ali provided a demolition job of the
Washington Consensus, claiming imminent victory in the
ideological wars, as greater attention to planning and
genuine development economics is emerging in the
discipline.
Olukoshi expressed growing confidence in this critique:
‘We’re not appealing any more to the Bank and Fund to
listen. We will reserve the right to go on a campaign
against our leaders who sell out the continent.’
Two additional problems were recorded: the
Pretoria/Johannesburg subimperial axis, and labour’s
sometimes narrow self-interest.
‘Who is the agent of the World Bank in Africa today?’
asked David Nkonjo, a leader of the Ugandan trade union
movement. He answered: ‘South Africa. They have spread
their tentacles everywhere. They come and protect
capital. The agenda is continued exploitation, looking
for the soft ground. The minute you rise up - tear gas,
police. African leaders are working under the dictates
of capital.’
Agreed Mahlomola Skhosana, general secretary of South
Africa’s National Council of Trade Unions: ‘We have no
sentiments favouring the New Partnership for Africa’s
Development [Mbeki’s neoliberal plan for Africa]. We
have not been involved, it is not relevant to us.’
To be sure, there are some in labour, including the
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU),
who advocate ongoing consultations and even work inside
the World Bank. Early this month they issued an insipid
statement designed to show concern about the Bank’s
privatisation advice and public service layoffs (http://www.sarpn.org/documents/d0002006/
).
But in the crucial case of Tanzania’s water – which was
so badly privatised by the Bank and British aid that
last May the London firm Biwater was booted out - the
ICFTU document (quoting a local official) revealed some
of the power relations: ‘The Tanzanian labour movement
did not play a direct role in advocating for the
de-privatization of the water company. . . . The primary
group to work against privatization was the Tanzania
Gender Networking Programme [along with] “the cries from
the general public as water consumers.”’
‘This does not mean that the union was a passive player,
however. Throughout the period of privatization, the
union’s key issues were job security and better terms
and working conditions. As a result of the union’s
efforts, “we managed to ensure that there were no
retrenchments after privatization,” and “no workers lost
their jobs during the era of the private operator.” That
is a triumph in itself.’
Such is the tradition of ‘corporatist’, self-interested
union politics that Oatuu’s broader social change agenda
aims to transcend. Observed Ibrahim Asila from the Union
of Senegalese Workers, ‘Trade unions should go beyond
our classical scope, and more should be done to bring on
board all concerns.’
Meanwhile, the continent’s leaders are getting their
alternative economics information from the likes of
Jeffrey Sachs, at a mid-2004 African Union summit. The
Columbia University professor does at least concede in
his recent book, The End of Poverty, that ‘Little
surpasses the western world in the cruelty and
depredations that it has long imposed on Africa.’ And at
his Addis Ababa hearing, he even advocated debt
repudiation, with payments redirected so as to improve
health and education.
However, Sachs fails in presuming that the critique of
corrupt African elites is a ‘political story line’ of
the ‘right’, instead of giving credence to progressive,
organic anti-corruption campaigning. From there, he
rehearses accounts of malaria, AIDS, landlocked
countries and other forms of geographically-determinist
analysis. Sachs then reconciles these explanations for
African poverty with garden-variety policy advice:
adopting good governance plus ‘implementing traditional
market reforms, especially regarding export promotion’,
revealing his notorious love of sweatshops.
Complained Olukoshi, ‘If Jeffrey Sachs can be given an
hour to speak to our leaders – the Sachs who wrote
privatisation programmes for Eastern Europe and Latin
America, yesterday’s neoliberal who is today’s social
democrat – then at every summit the African Union must
give us a platform.’ But will the rulers listen, if
instead they enjoy their own revolving door
relationships with Washington? Notable is Liberia’s new
president, Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson, a former World Bank
official.
Recounted TS Williams, secretary of
the Liberian union federation: ‘Just before I came here,
government announced it is embarking on major
downsizing. At the same time, of course, people
belonging to her own political party are being brought
in. We need a foreign policy for unions because these
ideas are coming from the World Bank and IMF.’
Olukoshi cited the famous statement by the World Bank’s
chief African economist, Deepak Lall, who in 1984 called
for ‘effective, ruthless governments able to ride
roughshod over public opinion.’ Added Egyptian scholar
Shaheeda El-Baz, ‘Most of our countries have liberalised
economics, but they have refused to liberalise politics.
There is a weak or nonexistent margin of democracy and a
monopoly on policy-making by a state elite, which
resorts to coercive measures.
Globalisation has defeated democracy.
The majority of people are simply excluded.’
Continued Helmi Sharawy, director of the Arab-African
Studies Centre here, ‘We must restore the responsibility
and role of the state but we are not for despotism or
dictatorship.’
In the streets outside, Hosni Mubarak’s half-hearted
commitment to democracy is degenerating into despotism.
This week his regime passed an emergency ban on
demonstrations - ‘any unauthorised protest in Cairo
shall be considered henceforth illegal’ – directed at
the rising democracy protests.
According to a local source who preferred to remain
anonymous because of potential reprisal, ‘Something is
cooking. Last Friday, Mubarak’s son Gamal made a secret
visit to Washington – as discrete as can be - and
fortunately, Al Jazeera reporters were covering a
different event: some generals meeting with Rumsfeld. It
was pure coincidence that they saw the Egyptian
ambassador and Mubarak junior going into the White House
through a side door that leads to Dick Cheney’s office.
They wanted to keep the whole consultation secret.’
The US leaders were probably briefed about Gamal’s
desire to succeed Hosni, a process that may get underway
within the next few months, in the wake of Washington’s
approval of similar successions in Morocco and Jordan.
Vast US aid transfers ($60 billion since 1979) keep the
powderkeg from blowing, but a new popular democratic
movement - Kifaya (‘Enough’) – is pushing hard.
With 500 arrests in last week’s protests – and ten
police deaths when a patrol car crashed on the way to
the scene – the country is boiling hot. Next week, more
protests are likely, in part because of severe state
harassment of two dissident judges who questioned the
legitimacy of the last election (and have strong support
from other judges). Another target is the World Economic
Forum, which is moving its regional meeting to Egypt,
from Jordan.
This terrain, combining neoliberalism and eroded rights,
is familiar to Africa’s workers and scholars. As
Olukushi warned, ‘There are powerful interests behind
the status quo, who are profiting – and they are not
going to leave the terrain to us without a fight. They
are powerful, transnational and sometimes even have our
own governments backing them.’
‘Our strategy must be to make their policies
illegitimate, ungovernable. We have a very strong
advantage. In spite of all the promises of the
neoliberal agenda, people in their daily lives have felt
the failures, which gives both working people and the
middle classes an appetite for an alternative. Our
capacity to connect to the groundswell of protest is
the other advantage we have.’
Olukoshi concluded, ‘Together we can shake the
foundations of the neoliberal forces on the continent.
Our decision to march together and strike together
represents one of the most significant developments. We
will also target like-minded social movements across
Africa, like the African Social Forum, leading to the
World Social Forum in Nairobi next January.’
Source:
Centre for Civil
Society, Durban, South Africa
http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?2,40,5,1019
posted 23 May 2006
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Black World
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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