At the invitation of AFRICOM, the US Africa Command, Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of the former president of South Africa, addressed a meeting of 150 ‘staff’ on 20 January 2010. He spoke about AFRICOM’s role, highlighting some truths, tempered with a surprisingly self-effacing obsequiousness.

No doubt, as a self-critical entrepreneur in post-Apartheid South Africa, Mbeki was in a position to use the controversial platform to test his persuasive prowess, exhorting them to consider a more humanitarian and developmental AFRICOM, that would link not only to African governments, but also to ‘society’.

It is this link to society and Mbeki’s development thesis that piques curiosity about Mbeki’s opening remarks – that South Africa was the lead capital exporter into Africa, ahead of traditional rivals the UK and France, as well as the US. The common interest between the US and South Africa, said Mbeki, was to provide security for their mutual investments in the region.

The ‘truths’ Mbeki espoused may not be convincing to critically engaged Africans; they seem tailored to the sensitive palate of his audience. His prescriptions may provide a convenient pretext for the continuation of US policies on the continent. His speech also suggests the potential aspirations of South Africa, as an investor in the region, and intimates SA elite thinking on where it would like to position itself within the current flux of the geopolitical landscape.

Mbeki said he tried to show that the challenge facing sub-Saharan Africa, based on ‘the deep roots of Africa's security and development crises’, is ‘not state building as many analysts believe. The immediate challenge most of Africa faces is society building.’ In short, this is the role he recommended for AFRICOM.

SECURITY IN AFRICA

He noted ‘that the problems of security in Africa are not easily amenable to solution by military means especially by foreigners. Interventions by foreign powers have been tried many times since the 1960s to no lasting effect. There is no better illustration of this truth than the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has been unstable, and therefore getting poorer, since the assassination of (Patrice) Lumumba 48 years ago.

‘As in all human affairs, the use of force in the right social context does produce solutions. There is no better illustration of this fact than the history of the United States’, said Mbeki, referring to events in American history, ‘the war of independence, the civil war, and the civil rights revolution.’

Notwithstanding the undesirability of focusing on the military option to solve Africa's challenges, Mbeki added that the ‘use of force to solve Africa's problems must however not be ruled out.’ He was of the view that ‘the creation of the African Command by the US government was an important initiative.’

ENGAGING WITH NON STATE–ACTORS

Mbeki emphasised that AFRICOM must not just confine itself to working with African governments only, arguing that it ‘must also engage with non-state actors in its effort to assist in re-constructing societies’, as a pre-condition to achieving long-term security in Africa.

‘Building a viable, sustainable and stable society requires the establishment and development of legitimate, socially hegemonic group or groups that can then build a viable state,‘ he said, which the European colonial powers failed to do. They left behind a semblance of a state that had no social anchors, which ‘led to Africa's instability during the last half a century‘ and continues to this day in many countries.

The nub of Mbeki’s diagnostic exhortations to AFRICOM was about the creation of a middle class to moderate the powerful property owning forces within a country:

‘The most important factor in the creation of a stable capitalist society is the rise of a property owning class that controls extensive assets. On its own, this class of property owners is not sufficient to create a stable society because in order to develop the assets of these property owners and make them profitable, the owners require the technical and managerial skills of professional and artisan classes, generally referred to as the middle class. The bargaining power of this middle class also acts as a restraining influence on the political power of the large property owners. This power balance at the existential level culminates in the emergence of the state that is established by these social formations to codify their relationship into a stable order.’

The development model upon which Mbeki based this recommendation is the theory of comparative advantage, which he explained later.

THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY AND COLONIALISM

While addressing the legacy of slavery and colonialism, Mbeki seems to have also taken obsequious self-effacement to new heights, perhaps reflecting his perceptions of the audience’s susceptibilities and his desire to be persuasive or influential. He cited a number of reasons why Africans were to blame, and responsible for the current problems. These types of remarks were made when he described Africa’s handicaps and while addressing ‘Africa's colonial legacy’.

‘European colonial powers failed to develop their African colonies,’ Mbeki said, founding what he called ‘pseudo-states’, which were stable only as long as the colonial powers controlled them. ‘Once the colonial powers departed, these pseudo-states became a focus for conflict among the various rudimentary elites that had emerged amongst the indigenous peoples during colonialism. These new elites fought amongst themselves for control of tax revenues and other privileges associated with access to power in these pseudo-states.’

‘In the final analysis, it was this intra-elite competition that accounted for Africa's endemic political instability during the last 50 years’, Mbeki said.

However, this conclusion is clearly at odds with what he said when discussing ‘Colonialism, Liberation and Cold War’: ‘Africa was caught in this whirlwind where these two camps [of the Cold War"> vied with each other to control the newly independent countries or to stop them from aligning themselves with their adversaries. Some of the most well documented interventions in independent Africa were those by the United States government which connived in the assassination of Congolese nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba in 1961; the overthrow of the government of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966 and in the attempt to destroy the Angolan government of Agostinho Neto and his party in the 1970s and 80s.’

‘African states suffer from a number of important handicaps,’ he said continuing in the vein of African leaders’ culpability.

African states suffer from weak allegiance by their citizens to these states and vice versa, he said. This explains why African countries during the past 50 years have been centres of many conflicts and that it was not surprisingly, that Africa is host to the largest number of refugees and internally displaced persons in the world.

Mbeki said because these states have only recently been captured by African rulers, African elites therefore perceive sovereignty as a valuable economic asset because it enables them to enrich themselves, further exacerbating the weak allegiance of the populus towards these states.

In Europe, for the state to retain its legitimacy, it had to promote economic development which led to rising standards of living of the population. This is not the case in most of sub-Saharan Africa, he announced.

Mbeki also characterised Africa as having mostly intra-state conflict, which was different in societal effect from inter-state conflict. The latter had both the consequences of galvanising people against an external threat as well as enhancing the states’ organisational capabilities.

DEVELOPMENT AND THE MODERN AFRICAN STATE

Presenting his views on what is needed to strengthen Africa, Mbeki noted that it is sometimes argued that most African countries are small, poor, landlocked, under-developed and therefore lack domestic markets. To compensate for these shortcomings, the argument goes, it is necessary that African countries eliminate barriers to trade amongst themselves. Through this route, African countries will be able to develop enterprises with the requisite economies of scale to make them competitive in the world markets, it is said.

The experience of Europe however shows that this argument is flawed, Mbeki said, citing the example of some relatively small European countries that had developed world-class companies long before European integration became reality. He argued that this demonstrates that it is not the size of a country's population – rather it is a country's skills pool and its control over its economic, social and security policies – that, in the final analysis, determines whether a country industrialises or not.

On the results of instability, Mbeki said that an important factor that determines whether a country develops or not is, on the one hand, its ability to generate a meaningful economic surplus. On the other hand, it is its ability to direct a large part of that surplus to productive investment rather than merely to private consumption. As a result of Africa's endemic instability, a large part of sub-Saharan Africa's surplus leaves the continent.

One of the most disgraceful but under-reported scandals in Africa is the extent to which African elites export capital from the continent, he said. According to the United Nations, nearly 40 per cent of Africa's private wealth is kept outside Africa, compared to only 3 per cent of South Asia's private wealth and 6 per cent of East Asia's. The small economic surplus that remains goes to finance elite consumption and to pay for the running of the largely unaccountable state. Capital flight is both a result and a driver of Africa's lack of security.

THE US AND SOUTH AFRICA

In the preface to his speech, perhaps seeking identifying common ground with the US, Mbeki expressed gratitude for the support South Africa received from the American people against apartheid, which helped the transition of power. He mentioned American banks refusal to rollover the loans to the then apartheid South Africa and for the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act by majority through the US Congress.

Times have changed since apartheid. Economically, the US and South Africa are in very similar positions in the world. The US has about 5 per cent of the world's population, but produces about a quarter of the world's gross domestic product (GDP). South Africa has 5.5 per cent of the African population with about 23 per cent of Africa's GDP. The similarity was due to the size of the two countries’ economies relative to their neighbours, he said.

Mbeki added that, South Africa was the largest foreign investor in sub-Saharan Africa and has overtaken France and the United Kingdom, the traditional foreign investors, and even the US.

‘Actually, it's the oil companies that are bigger investors from South Africa in sub-Saharan Africa. The United States, of course, is a very big investor in the rest of the world. So we have similar challenges in respect of investment in Africa. ‘So the questions of peace in Africa are really of immediate interest to your country, but they are of very immediate interest to my own country.’

AFRICA AND THE WORLD

Mbeki was asked how he saw individual African nations competing on the world market without combining economically or socially, given the advent of globalisation and the rise of China and India. Mbeki said we cannot replicate in Africa what happened in Europe because the Europeans had 300 years head start relative to the rest of us in Africa and in Asia. ‘They could do many things, which we can't do now.’

While African governments have a programme of regional integration, Mbeki believes that the continent needs to go beyond creating common markets. ‘We need to actually reintegrate African countries in view of the fact tthat the large Asian countries have now entered the world market. Before India, China, Russia and so on were not major players in the world economy. They were closed economies.’

For Africa to be able to keep up, to be competitive, we have to also build our countries up, Mbeki said. Referring to the Southern African Customs Union, he said,‘What we should be doing is create a political union amongst those countries, so that they have a common parliament and they get closer and closer towards being a single country.’

‘But what is important for Africa, is the massive comparative advantage of huge metal deposits, and it should become the world's engineering workshop because of the endowment. To do that, we have to first integrate those countries, and second to build up the skill level of the population,’ he said.

SOCIAL ANCHORS FOR AFRICA

When asked by what means he saw ‘social anchors’ being accomplished in Africa, Mbeki mentioned education and capital flight. Incentives were needed for the few Africans who have the money to invest their money in Africa instead of taking their money to Swiss bank accounts and to Riggs Bank in Washington. Africa has to find a solution to stop these processes, by creating an environment of stability whereby the owners of capital feel that they can keep their capital in Africa. ‘However, the issue of security, again, remains very, very critical because where people feel that there is no security, then they will not put their savings in an insecure environment.’

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR AFRICOM

Asked what AFRICOM should prioritise, Mbeki said that the African countries are becoming more and more different. The challenge for AFRICOM is being able to acquire more information about the individual countries and to understand the nature of the differences between them. Having said that, most people in Africa see the army as having either directly a predatory role or potentially a predatory role. ‘So trying to get the militaries in Africa out of that mode is a very, very critical factor.’

He said that it is becoming especially important to try to understand the unique characteristics of the large African countries, like South Africa, Angola, DRC, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, as they are the ones with influence in their regions:

‘If I were the head of AFRICOM, I would identify the critical countries in Africa that have regional influence, which can influence their neighbours and then try and find a way to stabilise those countries, so that they can exercise hopefully a more positive influence on their neighbours, which will then mean that AFRICOM itself doesn't have to be involved in each and every country. We have 54 countries in Africa. You can't possibly be involved in all 54 countries. So you have to identify the countries, which make a difference to other countries,’ Mbeki said.

AN ASSESSMENT OF MBEKI’S VIEWS

Assessing Mbeki’s positions is complicated, as one cannot easily discount the accommodation he made to reach out to his audience. After all this is an audience charged with everything from humanitarian relief to covert anti-terror activities, some of whose operations are alleged to violate fundamental international laws.

First, it is unclear who owns the South African capital Mbeki patriotically speaks about being invested in Africa. It seems like Mbeki conflates investments for which South Africa is merely a conduit or host with investments originating from South Africans. Ownership of the South African economy by black people, governing elite or otherwise, is at a record low – and even at the best of times it hovered around 7 per cent. In particular, in the financial sector, which drives the outward investments, South African blacks have managed to a secure a meagre target of only 10 per cent ownership.

This conflation could be the reason why foreign-owned assets, profit repatriation and externalisation of resources are dealt with rather poorly in his speech.

Second, Mbeki posits a developmental model based on comparative advantage, but he does not explain its failure even though it has implemented in many parts of Africa for over 30 years. Yet Mbeki does not hesitate to put the blame ‘in the final analysis’ squarely on African leaders themselves, even though he glosses over the evidence produced by the developmental model he endorses, which north of the Limpopo was foisted on many African countries in the most dastardly circumstances.

South Africa endorsed the comparative advantage development model as part of its home-grown structural adjustment programme, GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy). As a consequence of this and other flanking policies, the quality of the composition of its exports has been primitivised and it is more commodity dependent than it was during Apartheid.

An EU parliamentary report on Europe’s free trade agreement with South
Africa found that liberalisation of tariffs has resulted in EU exports
displacing the more advanced productive sectors of the country. And in agriculture, subsidised imports have had their tariffs reduced or removed entirely challenging farmers, black and white. Even if credence were given to the two-country-two-commodity comparative advantage theory (which essentially is what Ricardo's mathematical proposition is about) the outcomes do not bear it out in South Africa.

And it is fantastical that this simplistic theory enjoys so much currency – if Japan followed this theory no one would drive Toyatas, simple. This theory can hold if the world were an international barter system, because it is not possible to have trade without money. So money would be the third commodity not taken into account in this two-country-two-commodity theory, which upsets the whole theory. A saving grace for SA is that the new administration has moved on from such notions to other more realistic traditions despite stiff internal resistance.

Third, it is unclear why Mbeki views the US AFRICOM as important. There is already a multilateral body legally charged with maintaining peace and security – the United Nations. The castration of the UN Security Council by the US invention of the concept of pre-emptive war and its invasion of Iraq serves only to weaken the thrust of Mbeki’s case. Not to argue for Africa‘s rights, at the very least, under settled international law is a glaring and pandering omission.

Mbeki singularly fails to make any convincing argument for the normalisation of the militarisation of humanitarian aid and development assistance in general, or with AFRICOM in particular. His argument hauntingly echoes the rich country push for more reasons to interfere in the affairs of mainly developing countries on the humanitarian grounds of the ‘responsibility to protect’; which has been extremely controversial at the UN for many developing countries, mildly put. One would have expected better from Mbeki, especially after the US role in monopolising the airspace and landing rights in Haiti (even disrupting relief from Medicines Sans Frontiers) given his own thesis: The need for society building and redistribution to create a middle class to moderate the interests of large owners of property using the US military.

Maybe it is trite to suggest that Mbeki, and the prestigious institute he heads, should come out of the laager and look north of the Limpopo in solidarity (by dispensing with the colonialism-of-a-special-type legacy and being more open in acknowledging of the pitfalls of post-colonial economic decision-making). There is a sharp contrast between the diagnosis offered by Mbeki and that of the respected former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, speaking in 1976 BEFORE the advent of Globalisation as we have come to know it:

‘…the reality of neo-colonialism becomes obvious to a new African government which tries to act on economic matters in the interests of national development, and for the betterment of its own masses. For such a government immediately discovers that it has inherited the power to make laws, to treat with foreign governments, and so on, but it did not inherit effective power over economic developments in its own country. Indeed, it often discovers that there is no such thing as a national economy at all! Instead there exist in its land various economic activities which are owned by people outside its jurisdiction, which are directed at external needs, and which are run in the interests of external economic powers’. (‘Process of Liberation’, Ibadan University, 17 November 1976)

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* Riaz Tayob is a researcher at the South African chapter of SEATINI, the Southern and East African Trade Institute and writes in his personal capacity.
* Moeletsi Mbeki is a political economist and the deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs, an independent think tank based at the University of the Witwatersrand.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.