13 - 19 September 2001
Issue No.551
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 13 - 19 September 2001 Issue No.551 |
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Mammon mad
Western behaviour in Durban made it all so horribly clear. All the rich world cares for is wealth and power, writes Gamal Nkrumah
These are bleak times for Africans. Pockets of peace and prosperity perch tenuously like houses on stilts above a turbulent ocean of bloody conflict, economic and social malaise, financial ruin, education and health-care collapse, and apocalyptic epidemics such as HIV/AIDS. Almost everywhere, governments (whether unelected authoritarian regimes, military juntas or democratic administrations) are deeply unpopular.
illustration: Ossama Qassim
The gulf between the final official resolutions and the resolutions of the parallel non- governmental organisations and civil society meetings at the World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances (WCAR), exposed the African governments' confounding dilemmas. With little to lose, most African governments have openly embraced economic deregulation, unbridled privatisation, and fiscal discipline. Greedy for more, the West has urged African governments to accelerate towards radical fiscal and monetary reforms. New concepts, so ill-defined as to allow their authors to adapt them to whatever purposes suit (think "good governance"), are introduced and demanded by the West. Many African governments have succumbed. Economic partnership, so much more cost-effective for Western taxpayers, is now the only carrot the West cares to hold out to poor nations. Development aid (especially American) is down to a trickle; "economic partnership" is the new buzz phrase. But the benefits to Africa are highly doubtful.
The pressure put on African governments to accept Western hegemony is vast. Western-funded think-tanks and research institutes across Africa have jumped on the bandwagon, stoutly advocating the worst excesses of neo-liberalism. Even as the Lomé Treaty creating the African Union formally came into force at the last Organisation of African Union (OAU) summit in Lusaka in May, 2001, most African governments were making it clear that continental union is meaningless without some form of partnership with the West. The continent's chief recovery programme, the New African Initiative (NAI) for African continental development, is based on this very concept of economic partnership with the EU and the US.
But the other option, hope of a fair amount of redistribution of rich countries' wealth, has little mileage either. The now- defunct OAU was beset by a bedraggled procession of miscalculations that hastened its demise. Chief among these errors was the inability of Africa's post-independence neo-colonial leaders to understand that the hardest gesture for rich countries to make was to put cash on the table. They wrongly assumed that their peoples' manifold socio- economic afflictions would somehow help win over the wealthy Western powers. Let's face it, neither WCAR, nor the fight against poverty, nor even HIV/AIDS, have managed to tilt the scales towards compassion.
Africans have to weight those scales themselves. It was refreshing to note that when the host government is on the side of justice at an international conference, there is no need to batter those protesting against global inequality, as occurred at previous international conferences convened in Seattle, Prague, Davos or Genoa. At WCAR, South Africa acted as a gentle mediator in order to ensure a meaningful outcome to the conference. It played a pivotal role in reaching a compromise between the West and the rest of the world at WCAR over the wording of the final communiqué. Indeed, WCAR had partially proven that Africans, that African- Americans, that the world's poor, economically marginalised and politically disfranchised can be historical actors.
Sadly, race issues and the legacy of apartheid still beleaguer us. Zimbabwe, South Africa's neighbour, is found just across the Limpopo river. In Zimbabwe, the land-grab by indigenous African peasants of white- owned farms is ripping apart the socio- economic fabric of the country and that once prosperous country is languishing in political chaos. Zimbabwe's turmoil threatens to spill into neighbouring countries like Namibia and South Africa, which share a similar history of European settler colonialism. Trouble may brew.
Zimbabwe's peasants increasingly blame Western economic self-interest for their plight. That self-interest is disgracefully flaunted all across the continent. The stipulations, rules and regulations of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), signed between the US and 35 African countries, and the similarly-structured EU's Cotonou Agreement with almost 80 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states with a total population of some 650 million, merely lock Africa into economic subservience to Western consumers. The essence of these agreements is unrestricted access to and control over the continent's farming and mineral resources. Such unequal relationships between the former colonies and their one-time masters hauntingly echo painful memories of past repression. They might as well start calling us wogs again.
Far from being a marriage of convenience, such partnerships between rich and poor inevitably drive the relationship in contradictory directions. We are not so much creating a new, more equitable world as returning to something familiar to Africans from the age of slavery, mercantile capitalism and colonialism. Yet the West still clings precariously to its image as benefactor to the world's poor. But the strain on its fingernails is showing. So much development assistance and humanitarian relief money has been washing through the corridors of power that accusations of the corrupting nature of Western aid can no longer be suppressed.
The latest in the shabby carousel of meeting held between African leaders and America exemplifies great power chicanery. Next week, hundreds of American and African business and political leaders will converge on Philadelphia for the US-Africa Business Summit. With over 30 African leaders in attendance, the summit is expected to be the largest gathering of African heads of state in the history of US-Africa summits. The unprecedented gathering is scheduled to include Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo, South Africa's Thabo Mbeki and the Democratic Republic of Congo's Joseph Kabila -- that's assuming they would brave the trip to the US following Tuesday's bombing disasters, or that US officials will have time for the visiting African dignitaries.
The Washington-based Corporate Council for Africa is sponsoring the summit. "The primary goal is to build business and economic relationships between small and large businesses in the US and Africa," explained Stephen Hayes, president of the CCA. "The second goal is to make more public opportunities in Africa for US businesses," he added.
The Bush Administration is publicly as committed to the successful implementation of AGOA as the Clinton Administration. US Secretary of State Colin Powell, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Walter Kansteiner, Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick are expected to participate.
The Bush Administration has signaled that it will sponsor a US-Sub-Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Co-Operation Forum. All very well.
Yet a spat over bananas has revealed the worth of such agreements when they conflict with US priorities. Certain Caribbean nations had a special arrangement with Britain to supply bananas to the British market. The US has pressured Britain to switch to bananas imported from plantations owned by US- based multi-national corporations in Central America. The independent farmers of the Caribbean were made the sacrificial lambs and their interests ditched in favour of reaching a compromise with Washington and complying to new World Trade Organisation (WTO) regulations, even though the Caribbean banana growers were signed up to the ACP. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was the unusual saviour, offering a 21 million dollar package of grants and loans, to free the banana growers from WTO and EU control. The islanders are the descendants of African slaves; they have only their roots to turn to for succour in their hour of need.
With WCAR it became painfully clear that the West, led by America, was a dead weight holding back the progress of peoples of colour world-wide. The lineaments of Western intent became plain. Power is about making money; not about giving money away. And power is what interests the West. The correlation between white supremacy and making big money on a global scale was superficially touched upon at WCAR. There, it became clear that power is what interests the US above all: power untrammelled - above compassion, above ethics, above a fairer world.
And we all know what absolute power does.
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