The arms trade provides the destructive hardware used in conflicts across the world. It undermines development, contributing to the poverty and suffering of millions. A new report by War on Want, Banking on Bloodshed: UK high street banks’ complicity in the arms trade has exposed, for the first time, the extent to which the five main British high street banks are funding this violent trade.

Horn of Africa leaders attending a regional summit have lashed out at Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) for failing to restore peace and order in the war-torn country."Failed they have, as can easily be seen in the lack of progress in all areas in government. This is the truth that neither the Transitional Federal Government authorities, nor we, can sweep under the rug," Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia's prime minister and IGAD chairman told the Oct. 29 summit.

Early results in Zambia’s knife-edge presidential election gave a clear lead to Michael Sata, the opposition challenger whose lavish pledges have unnerved investors, for control of Africa’s biggest copper producer. Totals from 19 of the 150 constituencies showed Mr Sata had secured about 60 per cent of ballots cast, with Rupiah Banda, the acting president, trailing on 30 per cent, and the balance going to two other opposition hopefuls.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned the attack and attempted abduction of journalist and media advocate Geoffrey Ssebagala by unidentified men in the Ugandan capital, Kampala on Monday and called on authorities to ensure his safety. "The attempted abduction of Ssebagala is no doubt orchestrated by those who feel threatened by his work as a journalist and advocate for other journalists," said Gabriel Baglo, Director of the IFJ Africa Office. "

Twenty out of 40 cabinet ministers in Nigeria have been sacked for non-performance. President Umaru Yar'Adua said his decision is to reposition and strengthen his administration for effective service delivery, Presidential Spokesman, Olusegun Adeniyi disclosed on Thursday. According to This Day newspaper, the President after taking a valedictory photographs with the sacked ministers said yesterday’s meeting will be the last for some of them.

African leaders are planning to establish a continental hydro power station to harness its huge energy potential. Country representatives attending the 20th Session of the African Hydro Symposium in Zambia said hydro energy is the cheapest and cleanest for the continent.

Two Malawian journalists have been adjudged winners of this year`s John Manyarara Investigative Journalism Award in South Africa. Charles Mpaka and Mike Chipalasa both work for Blantyre Newspapers Limited. They won the regional award organized by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa), for their impressive coverage on the country’s leakage of the Malawi School Certificate of Education last year.

Along the red dirt roads looping in and out of the jungle, they trooped in their thousands. The women clutching infants to their chests and balancing rolled-up mattresses, blankets and pots on their heads. Any child old enough to walk carried a jerry can of water or dragged a sack of food.

South African women’s rights activists, feminists and students are stepping up pressure on their government and parliamentarians to speak out about the increasing repression in Zimbabwe. Women’s groups in Johannesburg and Cape Town coordinated solidarity actions in support of detained WOZA leaders Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu.

Join Gauteng landless communities (Freedom Park, Protea Glen Bond Houses, Protea South Informal Settlement, Precast-Lenasia Extension 11, Chiawelo, Tembalihle Crisis Committee, Eldorado Park, Harry Gwala Informal Settlement)in a peaceful March demanding free basic services, the removal of the useless ward councillors and a halt to mass evictions.

It’s early days but the conventional wisdom so far has been that Africa will avoid the worst of the backwash from the global financial crisis. Its banks are less over-committed as lenders and its relatively small number of consumers still struggle to find credit. However, as everything is connected globally, Africa is bound to take a hit like every other continent and that hit will impact directly on Africa’s telecom’s sector.

Superinfection among heterosexual couples in sub-Saharan Africa may be surprisingly frequent, according to findings from Zambia presented on Tuesday at the 48th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in Washington DC. Researchers from the Zambia Emory HIV Research Project presented evidence that 3 out of 34 people among heterosexual Zambian couples were superinfected during the time of the study.

The United Nations General Assembly's Fourth Committee approved Tuesday (October 21st) a draft resolution that would have parties to the Western Sahara dispute "continue to show political will and work in an atmosphere propitious for dialogue in order to enter into a more intensive phase of negotiations". The Assembly would also support the process of negotiations "with a view to achieving a just, lasting and mutually acceptable political solution that would provide for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara".

Following pressure from Survival International, De Beers says it has stopped operations on the land of the Kalahari Bushmen in Botswana because those it consulted, including Bushmen living inside the reserve, did not agree with its plan to explore for diamonds near a Bushman community.

Five years after the introduction of free primary education (FPE) in Kenya, the enrolment of girls in schools continues to lag behind in Garissa, in Kenya's North Eastern region. Most communities living in the North Eastern region are nomadic and semi-nomadic, and depend on livestock for their livelihood.

Over the years, education has focused on access and parity — that is, closing the enrollment gap between girls and boys — while insufficient attention has been paid to retention and achievement or the quality and relevance of education. The primary focus on girls’ access to education may overlook boys’ educational needs. This approach also fails to confront the norms and behaviors that perpetuate inequality. This paper presents the Gender Equality Framework, which has been designed to address this inequality.

As October marks breast cancer awareness month, a research conducted by lgbthealthchannel website (focusing on gay health and wellness issues) found that lesbians, bisexual women and women who have sex with other women are more likely to develop breast cancer than heterosexual counterparts. The findings emphasise that breast cancer can at times be associated with nulliparity – the state of not giving birth.

At least two Africa migrants were reported dead after landing in a wooden fishing boat packed with 125 migrants in Spain's canary Islands. Another four migrants were taken to hospital after boat arrived early in the morning at a beach on island of La Gomera, a spokeswoman for emergency services said.

Five months after a specialised facility for multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) patients was established at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi, the lack of isolation wards is raising concerns. "This is not the best place; TB is a highly infectious disease,” Catherine Koskei, a matron working at the facility, told IRIN. “The patients need to be restricted.”

Kenya will have to find new sources of funding to keep more than 200,000 people on antiretroviral (ARV) treatment after the country's latest bid for support from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was rejected, a senior government official said. "We are too dependent on donor funding for programmes like these [related to HIV, malaria and tuberculosis], which are vital to the health of our people - we must start becoming more self-reliant," Danson Mungatana, Assistant Minister for Medical services, said on 27 October.

The Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) of International PEN protests the detention of the US-based blogger Jonathan Elendu, who has been held incommunicado without charge in Abuja, Nigeria, since 17 October 2008. There are fears for his health following reports of ill treatment. The WiPC believes that Elendu has been detained for his critical reporting on Nigeria. It calls on the Nigerian authorities to charge Elendu with a recognisable criminal offense or to release him immediately and unconditionally.

An intensive evening and weekend program of experiential learning and new perspectives on ways to bring about conflict transformation and peacebuilding. The goal is to develop the knowledge and skills needed to facilitate the transformation of interpersonal, organizational, community or complex societal conflicts, including ethnic, religious or cultural tensions, using techniques of multi-track and citizens’ diplomacy.

The University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa is launching a landmark programme to breathe new life into efforts to empower the poor and marginalised. The Masters in Social Justice is the first of its kind to be launched by a South African university and combines law, social justice and development. Run by the Institute of Development and Labour Law at the UCT Faculty of Law, it involves prominent South African legal and development experts, including Judge Dennis Davis, and is designed for both law and non-law graduates.

When I first visited Haiti a decade ago – about two years before Margaret Trost's initial visit – one incident shocked me beyond all others: A man offered me his child. Understanding French, but not Haitian Creole, I thought I had misunderstood; a translator assured me that I hadn't. There was a drought; the man's crops had failed. He had five other children. He could not feed them all.

Citing the example of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Joe Contreras explores the degree to which Latin Americans are increasingly keen to mobilise and assert their African roots on the back of a new black consciousness movement stirring in Central and South America. While momentum around black power would not be said to be entirely new in the region, lobbying for community land rights and increased spending to improve living conditions in urban slums and rural villages has gathered pace, driven in particular by its epicentre of Colombia and facilitated by the possibilities for communication and the sharing of experiences through the Internet.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/403/northern_kenya_l.jpgSurveying a history of marginalisation and distance from government support, Ahmed Issack Hassan explores the legal and administrative impediments to have plagued the development of the region of Northern Kenya. Citing a litany of human rights abuses and the discrimination faced by inhabitants of the region, the author argues for the need for appropriate and effective legislation and sustained political goodwill from executive and national parliamentary power in the struggle to tackle tyrannical practice.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/403/JEM_l.jpgIn his review of recent events in the Sudanese Darfur crisis, Savo Heleta assesses the role of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebel group. With its explicit goal of overthrowing the current Bashir regime, Heleta argues, the JEM represents a potentially revolutionary movement, one whose egalitarian, pro-justice manifesto will only come to fruition with the support of a broad range of regional players and influences.

Defining the black Atlantic as a political geography of race, Ali A. Mazrui considers the prospects for a future post-racial society. While outgrowing racism, the author argues, may prove a more immediately realisable goal, moving away from race consciousness represents a longer-term outcome. Through avoiding the excesses of nationalism and tribalism, national and tribal identities can prove a beneficial resource of mutual exchange and learning for diverse peoples within domestic, continental and trans-continental spheres. If periods of national history can be pre-tribal, tribal or post-tribal, asks Mazrui, should we not also consider whether periods of continental history can be pre-racial, racial or post-racial?

With the US presidential election fast approaching, Mukoma Wa Ngugi offers his reflections on Barack Obama’s candidacy, George W. Bush’s exalted status within particular African countries and the future prospects for US-Africa relations under a new US administration. While asserting that Obama’s rise would scarcely have been possible in Wa Ngugi’s own native Kenya, the author contends that Africans must ultimately rely on themselves if the continent’s promise is to be fulfilled.

The Regional Manager manages and oversees Internews Network media development programs and projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is a geographic sub component of the Africa, Middle East, Health and Humanitarian Media Program Management Unit (PMU). Responsibilities for this position include direct line management of the Country Directors, Resident Journalism Advisors and Africa Program Associate (Nairobi-based), direct donor correspondence, as well as donor identification and communication with the Program Vice President and other key staff on development opportunities.

CREAW is a non-governmental, non-partisan, membership organization whose goal is to transform society by empowering women and expanding frontiers for women’s rights and freedoms. CREAW aims at setting standards in upholding human rights and empowering society through civic education, legal advocacy and women’s rights awareness.CREAW is recruiting for the position of Legal Officer. Deadline for application: 31ST October 2008.

A new World Bank report Global Development Finance says developing countries as a whole have so far shown resilience in the face of US-based financial turmoil and soaring energy and food prices, partly because of improved policies, higher investments and technological progress in recent years, says the report. In 2008, growth in China, the rest of East Asia and the Pacific, and other developing regions together will fall from 7.8% to a still-strong 6.5% while their high-income trading partners like the United States slow to between 1 and 2% and import less.

Wellspring Advisors seeks a consultant to undertake a mapping and analysis of Ugandan nongovernmental organizations focused on children’s rights and development. The consultant shall undertake a scoping study that will provide (1) an overview of the field of children’s rights in Uganda, with a focus on the role of nongovernmental organizations; (2) profiles of key Ugandan children’s rights organizations; and (3) grantmaking recommendations, including identification of potential funding strategies as well as specific organizations.

Sokari Erkine reviews the following from the African blogoshphere:

Mama Ethiopia
Wondering the World
What An African Woman Wants
Ore’s Notes
Black Looks
Uganda Scarlett Lion
Helen Zille

In response to : In her new book, "The Shock Doctrine", Naomi Klein provides an excellent analysis of the free-market fundamentalist and corporatist strategies that hobbled newly-independent African governments from the outset, making it impossible for them to deliver "democracy" in any real sense of redistribution and economic justice.

Dear Comrades,

I am still disturbed over how President Kibaki’s and Prime Minister Raila's unpatriotic and selfish hunger for power-at-all-costs can be rewarded by honorary doctorate degrees conferred by the University of Nairobi!

In old England, honorary degrees were awarded to, amongst others, subjects who showed conspicuous merit or who had done extraordinary good service to the state or the university. However, in the politics of honorary degrees it has increasingly become an open secret that honorary degrees are now political goods for trade, as I suspect is the present case.

A degree honoris causa is literally conferred “for the sake of honour”. What honour can Kibaki and Raila possibly claim from the 1200 dead; the 350,000 IDPs and the billions of property pillaged as a result of their self-serving political machinations?

What claim to public honour can Kibaki stake when the Kriegler report confirmed plausible questions over the legitimacy of his presidency; following the scary indictment of the Waki report that post elections killings were planned at the State House and further in light of allegations that neither is Raila innocent for some of the crimes spawning in the post election period?

What honour does the University of Nairobi find in these two acting in characteristic selfishness, when “other forces” (read) Chinkororo, Mungiki, Baghdad boys etc threatened to share or snatch power from their hands, by quickly moving to put out the fire they started through signing the "negative peace accord"?

What honour can Kenyans find in the grand coalition government’s failure to resettle thousands of IDPs who are stuck in IDP camps? What honour can the President and Prime Minister claim from there pussy footing in resolving agenda no. 4 issues: historical injustices, unemployment, land problems, poverty, resource redistribution etc? What honour can the two claim when they have already started flip-flopping in the implementation of Kriegler and Waki reports?

Mr. President and Mr. Prime Minister, Kenyans will give you honorary degrees in any field you want if you can give us a democratic and just constitution; if you can resolve issues of agenda no. 4 in the peace accord; and if you can implement Kriegler and Waki reports to the letter.

I firmly believe Kenya is a civilized country where no institution worth its salt should award such covetous honours as doctorate degrees to anyone for the reckless and barbaric behaviour of engineering fights, killings, rapes, looting, displacements among other evils for selfish ambition; otherwise all of us will begin fantasising about methods of fast tracking ourselves to such honours.

The first honorary degree ever awarded, to Lionel Woodville by Oxford University, made him a doctor of canon law in a blatant bid to win the favour of a powerful man. Is it now sadly the case then that Prof. Magoha likewise awarded the honorary degrees to Kibaki and Raila as negotiation for the renewal of his term as the Vice Chancellor of University of Nairobi?

George Nyongesa
Bunge la Mwananchi

The law has been twice revised since May 2008 but it has become more repressive each time. It is before the rubber stamp parliament and it will for sure be adopted as the Meles Zenawi regime has ordered it should be. The Charities and Societies proclamation that will set up the all powerful and arbitrary Charities and Societies Agency is aimed at banning NGOs working on human rights issues in Ethiopia (women's, children's, disabled person's rights, etc...)

Far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North's problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism.

At minimum, the ongoing chaos offers new ideological space and material justifications for African finance ministries to re-impose exchange controls and re-regulate finance, and to find sources of hard currency not connected to the Bretton Woods Institutions or Western donors.

The 2008 world financial meltdown has its roots in the neoliberal export-model (dominant in Africa since the Berg Report and onset of structural adjustment during the early 1980s) and even more deeply, in thirty-five years of world capitalist stagnation/volatility. As South Centre director (and Ugandan political economist) Yash Tandon put it: ‘The first lesson, surely, is that contrary to mainstream thinking, the market does not have a self-corrective mechanism.‘ Such disequilibration means that Africa receives sometimes too much and often too little in the way of financial flows, and the inexorable result during periods of turbulence is intensely amplified uneven development. Africa has always suffered a disproportionate share of pressure from the world economy, especially in the sphere of debt and financial outflows. But for those African countries that made themselves excessively vulnerable to global financial flows during the neoliberal era, the meltdown had a severe, adverse impact.

In Africa’s largest national economy, for example, South African finance minister Trevor Manuel had presided over steady erosion of exchange controls (with 26 consecutive relaxations from 1995-2008, according to the Reserve Bank) and the emergence of a massive current account deficit: nine percent in 2008, the second worst in the world. The latter was in large part due to a steady outflow of profits and dividends to corporations formerly based at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange but which re-listed in Britain, the USA or Australia during the 1990s (Anglo American, DeBeers, Old Mutual, Didata, Mondi, Liberty Life, BHP Billiton). In the second week of October 2008, South Africa’s stock market crashed 10 percent (on the worst day, shares worth $35 billion went up in smoke) and the currency declined by nine percent, while the second week witnessed a further 10 percent crash. The speculative real estate market had already begun a decline that might yet reach those of other hard-hit property sectors like the US, Denmark and Ireland, because South Africa’s early 2000s housing price rise far outstripped even these casino markets (200 percent from 1997-2004, compared to 60 percent in the US).

On the other hand, the cost of market failure could at least be offset, somewhat, by ideological advance. The main gains so far were in delegitimating the economic liberalisation philosophy adopted during the 1994-2008 governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki (presided over by Manuel). Indeed Mbeki’s dramatic September 2008 departure occurred partly because of substantially worsened inequality and unemployment since 1994, which in turn was responsible for thousands of social protests each year. When a solidarity letter Manuel wrote, resigning from Mbeki’s government on its second-last day, was released to the press (by Mbeki)) on 23 September, the stock and currency markets imposed a $6 billion punishment within an hour. The crash required incoming caretaker president Kgalema Motlanthe to immediately reappoint Manuel with great fanfare.

In the same spirit, Mbeki’s replacement as ruling party president, Jacob Zuma, had visited Davos and paid tribute to Merrill Lynch and Citibank in 2007-08 (ironically the latter two institutions insisted on having their jitters calmed). Zuma assured international financiers that Manuel’s economic policy would not change. Hence the opening of ideological space to contest neoliberalism in practice became a crucial struggle for the trade unions and SA Communist Party, which in mid-October held an Alliance Economic Summit that suggested Manuel make only marginal shifts at the edges of neoliberalism.

However, as the financial meltdown unfolded in the US and Europe, the merits of South Africa’s residual capital controls became clearer. As SA deputy trade minister Rob Davies wrote approvingly in the main Communist journal: ‘Interestingly, The Business Times of 21 September attributed this [safety from contagion] partly to “exchange control”’ which meant ‘there is a healthy degree of trapped liquidity within the financial system.’ Another factor was that many exotic financial products had been banned. As a leading official of the central bank, Brian Kahn, explained:

‘The interbank market is functioning normally and the Reserve Bank has not had to make any special liquidity provision. We have a relatively sophisticated and well-developed banking sector, and the question then is, what has saved us? (This may be tempting fate, so perhaps I should say what has saved us so far?) This all raises the old question whether or not exchange controls work. The conventional wisdom is that they do not, particularly when you need them to work. We seem to have been exception to this rule. It turns out that we were protected to some extent by prudent regulation by the Bank regulators, but more importantly, and perhaps ironically, from controls on capital movements of banks. Despite strong pressure to liberalise exchange controls completely, the Treasury has adopted a policy of gradual relaxation over the years. Controls on non-residents were lifted completely in 1996, but controls on residents, including banks and other institutions, were lifted gradually, mainly through raising limits over time. With respect to banks, there are restrictions in terms of the exchange control act, on the types of assets or asset classes they may get involved in (cross-border). These include leveraged products and certain hedging and derivative instruments. For example banks cannot hedge transactions that are not SA linked. Effectively it meant that our banks could not get involved in the toxic assets floating that others were scrambling into. They would have needed exchange control approval which would not have been granted, as they did not satisfy certain criteria. The regulators were often criticised for being behind the times, while others have argued that they don’t understand the products, but it seems there may be advantages to that! Our banks are finding it more difficult to access foreign funds and we have seen some spikes in overnight foreign exchange rates at times. But generally everything seems ‘normal’ on the banking front… Our insurance companies and institutional investors were also protected to some extent, in that there is a prudential limit on how much they can invest abroad (15 per cent of assets), and the regulator in this instance (the Financial Services Board) places constraints on the types of finds or products they can invest in. (Generally it appears that exotics are excluded). One large South Africa institution, Old Mutual, moved its primary listing to the UK a few years back (when controls were relaxed), and the plc has had fairly significant exposure in the US.’

Demands for deeper exchange controls were made by the South African Communist Party (SACP). And as Riaz Tayob of Third World Network points out, Manuel has been terribly irresponsible in pushing further financial services deregulation through the World Trade Organization (WTO).

As for the rest of Africa, similar opportunities to contest financial system orthodoxy now arise. At this stage, it is practically impossible for staff from the most powerful external force in African economic policy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to advise elites with any credibility. The IMF’s October 2006 Global Financial Stability Report, after all, claimed that global bankers had shown ‘resilience through several market corrections, with exceptionally low market volatility.’ Moreover, global economic growth ‘continued to become more balanced, providing a broad underpinning for financial markets.’ Because financial markets always price risk correctly, according to IMF dogma, investors could relax: ‘[D]efault risk in the financial and insurance sectors remains relatively low, and credit derivatives markets do not indicate any particular financial stability concerns.’ The derivatives and in particular mortgage-backed securities ‘have been developed and successfully implemented in U.S. and U.K. markets. They allow global investors to obtain broader credit exposures, while targeting their desired risk-reward trade-off.’ As for the rise of credit default swaps (the $56 trillion house of cards bringing down one bank after the other), the IMF was not worried, because ‘the widening of the credit default swaps spreads [i.e. the pricing in of higher risk] across mature markets was gradual and mild, and spreads remain near historic lows.’

Fast forward to the April 2008 launch of the IMF’s ‘Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa’ study. IMF Africa staffer John Wakeman-Linn’s powerpoint slideshow, ‘Private Capital Flows to Sub-Saharan Africa: Financial Globalization’s Final Frontier?’, concluded that the vast rush of finance is generally good for Africa, but policies would have to be changed – making Africa more vulnerable to the international financial system – in order to take full advantage:

• More transparency and consistency: exchange controls in sub-Saharan Africa complex and difficult to implement.
• Gradual and well-sequenced liberalisation strategy can help limit risks associated with capital inflows.
• Accelerated liberalisation in the face of large inflows may help their monitoring (e.g. Tanzania); selective liberalisation of outflows may help relieve inflation and appreciation pressures, but further work needed on modalities.

The IMF proclaimed the merits of liberalisation and rising financial flows to Africa, especially portfolio funding (i.e., short-term hot money in the forms of stocks, shares and securities issued by companies and government in local currencies but readily convertible). Such ‘hot money’ - speculative positions by private-sector investors – flowed especially into South Africa’s stock exchange, and also to a lesser extent into share markets in Ghana, Kenya, Gabon, Togo, and Seychelles.

However, financial outflows continue apace. An updated report on capital flight by Leonce Ndikumana of the Economic Commission for Africa and James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts shows that thanks to corruption and the demise of most African countries’ exchange controls, the estimated capital flight from 40 sub-Saharan African countries from 1970-2004 was at least $420 billion (in 2004 dollars). The external debt owed by the same countries in 2004 was $227 billion. Using an imputed interest rate to calculate the real impact of flight capital, the accumulated stock rises to $607 billion. According to Ndikumana and Boyce:

‘Adding to the irony of SSA’s position as net creditor is the fact that a substantial fraction of the money that flowed out of the country as capital flight appears to have come to the subcontinent via external borrowing. Part of the proceeds of loans to African governments from official creditors and private banks has been diverted into private pockets – and foreign bank accounts – via bribes, kickbacks, contracts awarded to political cronies at inflated prices, and outright theft. Some African rulers, like Congo’s Mobutu and Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, became famous for such abuses. This phenomenon was not limited to a few rogue regimes. Statistical analysis suggests that across the subcontinent the sheer scale of debt-fueled capital flight has been staggering. For every dollar in external loans to Africa in the 1970-2004 period, roughly 60 cents left as capital flight in the same year. The close year-to-year correlation between flows of borrowing and capital flight suggests that large sums of money entered and exited the region through a financial “revolving door”.’

Where did this leave African debtors in 2008? According to the IMF, the ‘debt sustainability outlook’ of low-income African countries ‘has improved substantially, with 21 out of 34 countries classified on the basis of the Debt Sustainability Framework at a low or moderate risk of debt distress at end-2007.’ Yet the major lesson from the prior quarter-century of debt distress was not the abstract ratios, but instead, the ability to pay the debt in the context of pressing human needs. It was here, according to London-based Jubilee Research, that the Bretton Woods institutions had not accurately assessed the damage done by debt, or the injustice associated with repaying debt inherited from prior undemocratic governments:

‘Current [mid-2008] approaches to debt relief (HIPC and MDRI for poor countries, and Paris and London Club renegotiations for middle income countries) are not solving the problems of Third World indebtedness. HIPC and MDRI are reducing debt burdens but only for a small range of countries and after long delays, and at a high cost in terms of loss of policy space. While non-HIPC poor countries continue to have major debt problems and middle-income country indebtedness continues to grow. The present approach is marred by the involvement of creditors as judge, prosecution and jury in direct conflict with natural justice and by the failure to take into account either the human rights of the people of debtor nations or the moral obscenity of odious debt. It is all too little and too late… Even after the debt relief already granted under HIPC and MDRI, 47 countries need 100% debt cancellation on this basis and a further 34 to 58 need partial cancellation, amounting to $334 to $501 billion in net present value terms, if they are to get to a point where debt service does not seriously affect basic human rights.’

Hence the system of debt peonage remains, and the only prospect for its relief is the weakening of Washington’s power, along with the overhauling of the aid system that is so closely connected to debt (for the richest set of recommendations, see Yash Tandon's work). The Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) conference in September 2008 provided an opportunity to address the problems of donor/financier cross-conditionality, ‘phantom aid’ (including tied aid), corruption, waste, economic distortions and political manipulation, as well as to add the South’s demand for repayment of the North’s ecological debt to the South. But the opportunity was lost, and even mild-mannered NGOs realised they were wasting their time, as a staffer at Civicus, Nastasya Tay, revealed:

‘A colleague from a major international NGO gave an excellent summary of the whole High Level Forum process: “Why should I attend interminably long meetings, to passionately lobby for reform, when countries like the US and Japan are refusing to sign on because of some “language issues” with the AAA? In the end, we will have worked incredibly hard to, if we’re lucky, change a few words. And it’s just another document”.’

Hence, for some African countries, the solution lies in an alternative source of hard currency finance. It is not only China who provides condition-free loans to several of Africa’s most authoritarian regimes. More hopefully, Venezuela is considering a proposal to replace and displace the IMF, as happened in Argentina in 2006, in which case repaying the IMF early or even defaulting would be feasible. In other African countries, progressive social movements have argued for debt repudiation and are concerned about any further financial inflows beyond those required for trade financing of essential inputs. This would also entail inward-oriented light industrialisation oriented to basic needs (and not to luxury goods, a major problem that emerged in Africa’s settler colonial economies during the 1960s-70s).

The crucial ingredient for establishing an alternative African financing strategy from the Left is pressure from below. This means the strengthening, coordination and increased militancy of two kinds of civil society: those forces devoted to the debt relief cause, which have often come from what might be termed an excessively polite, civilised society based in internationally-linked NGOs which rarely if ever used ‘tree shaking’ in order to do ‘jam making’ and; those forces which react via short-term ‘IMF Riots’ against the system, in a manner best understood as uncivilised society. The IMF riots that shook African countries during the 1980s-90s often, unfortunately, rose up in fury and even shook loose some governments’ hold on power. When these, however, contributed to the fall of Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia (one of many examples), the man who replaced him as president in 1991, former trade unionist Frederick Chiluba, imposed even more decisive IMF policies. Most anti-IMF protest simply could not be sustained.

In contrast, the former organisations are increasingly networked, especially in the wake of 2005 activities associated with the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), which generated (failed) strategies to support the Millennium Developmental Goals partly through white-headband consciousness raising, through appealing to national African elites and through joining a naïve appeal to the G8 Gleneagles meeting. Since then, networks tightened and became more substantive through two Nairobi events: the January 2007 World Social Forum and August 2008 launch of Jubilee South’s Africa network. These networks could return to the cul-de-sac of GCAP’s ‘reformist reforms’ – i.e., to recall Andre Gorz’s phrase, making demands squarely within the logic of the existing neoliberal system and its geopolitical power relations, in a manner that disempowers activists if they gain slight marginal changes.

Or they could embark upon ‘non-reformist reform’ challenges, by identifying sites where the logic of finance can be turned upside down. The most striking case might have been the South African ‘bond boycott’ campaign of the early 1990s, wherein activists in dozens of townships offered each other solidarity when collective refusal to repay housing mortgage bonds was the only logical reaction. This forewarned the 1995-96 ‘El Barzón’ (‘the yoke’) strategy of more than a million Mexicans who were in debt when interest rates soared from 14 to 120 percent over a few days in early 1995: they simply said, ‘can’t pay, won’t pay’. That slogan was also heard in Argentina in early 2002, following the evictions of four presidents in a single week due to popular protest. The ongoing pressure from below compelled the government to default on $140 billion in foreign debt so as to maintain some of the social wage, the largest such default in history.

At the time of writing, a November 2008 summit was called by the G8 in New York, to refashion the world’s financial architecture, likely adding China, India, Brazil and South Africa for legitimacy (and access to substantial dollar reserves). Activists began contemplating whether to ‘Seattle’ the event (shut it down with protest); African social movements and a few patriotic African trade ministers were, after all, not only present but instrumental in preventing the World Trade Organization’s Seattle summit from proceeding nine years earlier. A serious danger for civil society would be to settle for a UN-sponsored event full of reformist reforms. Enormous damage to Southern finances was caused by the 2002 precedent set in Monterrey at the UN Financing for Development conference, which had as key UN advisors Michel Camdessus (former IMF managing director) and Trevor Manuel.

Instead, much more forthright national action can be taken, spurred by far-seeing civil society activists, such as those who demand reparations for apartheid, colonialism, slavery and ‘ecological debt’ owed by the North to the South. Africa needs to re-impose national exchange controls and import controls (especially on luxury goods for the elites), as installed successfully by Malaysia, Chile and Venezuela in recent years.

As commodity prices plunge from their 2002-07 speculation-driven bubble prices, as trade deals with the North are unveiled as clearly disadvantageous and as trade finance becomes difficult as a result of bank mistrust of counterparty debt, and as the hot money portfolio flows dry up and new sources open for hard currency, the argument for what Samir Amin calls ‘delinking’ and Walden Bello terms ‘deglobalisation’ becomes all the more compelling. The evidence above suggests it is already beginning to happen, in no small part thanks to civil society advocacy.

* Patrick Bond is professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies where he directs the .
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/