SOUTH AFRICA: Mbeki's neoliberal blueprint for Africa

BY PATRICK BOND

JOHANNESBURG — Everyone seems worried about Africa's health and welfare these days. If you have an open mind and regularly read the London Financial Times — or its South African subsidiary Business Day — you would have seen notice of a Millennium Africa Recovery Plan (from mid-2000 to mid-2001), a New African Initiative (from July-October 2001) and now a New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), launched in Abuja, Nigeria by several African heads of state on October 23.

They're actually the same thing, but for various reasons (including the Afrikaans translation of the acronym NAAI, which literally means "to be fucked over") the name has evolved.

Everyone supports the NEPAD, though frankly, very few of its supporters know what the warmed-over Washington consensus strategy means or how to defend it, especially against the charge of hypocrisy that its sponsors logically attract.

Those critical voices — especially the African Trade Network's Titteh Hormuh in Accra, Yash Tandon in Harare, Dot Keet in Cape Town and Mohau Pheko in Johannesburg — are ignored, or pooh-poohed by elites who finally realise the importance of public relations gambits. Consider some related Financial Times headlines that blared within the first month after the September 11 terrorist attacks:

• September 26: "Protesters ask right questions, yet they lack the right answers" (by Belgian prime minister and current European Union president Guy Verhofstadt);

• October 1: "Partnerships only way to break cycle of poverty" (by Anglo-American Corporation executive Jonathan Oppenheimer);

• October 7: "New swipe at fighting poverty" (Gondal Gondwe and Callisto Madavo, the leading African officials at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank);

• October 10: "Attacks on US hurt Africa" (Ian Goldin and Alan Gelb, South African economists and senior World Bank employees);

• October 10: "Clamour against capitalism stilled" (FT reporters claiming "the counter-capitalist movement is in retreat").

AIDS pandemic

South Africa's mercurial President Thabo Mbeki is the main subject of this interest. But now we are forced to ask yet again, is he fit to lead the continent?

To answer initially in the negative, alert readers know that Mbeki has become a pariah among health professionals desperately fighting the AIDS pandemic, because of his deadly neglect of the nearly five million of his 40 million constituents who are HIV+.

The president — now termed "undertaker-in-chief Mbeki" — was back in the international news in October for yet more stunning gaffes, first using five-year old mortality data to imply that health spending priorities should be revised away from AIDS prevention, and next by disputing subsequent AIDS statistics released by the respected local Medical Research Council (a government body).

Then, answering the right-wing opposition's questions in parliament, he again insisted that excessive toxicity of anti-retroviral drugs justifies ignoring treatments to combat mother-to-child-transmission of HIV. And in a major speech at Fort Hare University on October 12, he revealed a perverse paranoia about his critics:

"Thus does it happen that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards, to demand that because we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its [sic] passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease."

Amidst this unnecessary — some say genocidal — slaughter, let's play devil's advocate and take a more positive point of view: Mbeki is seen as Africa's most legitimate (thanks to the 66% ANC vote in 1999), self-confident and fundamentally pro-Western leader. If anyone can shake down Washington for debt relief or Geneva for trade concessions, it's the president of a recently liberated South Africa.

'African Renaissance'

From the late 1990s, Mbeki embarked upon an "African Renaissance" branding exercise with poignant poetics. The contentless form was somewhat remedied in the secretive Millennial Africa Recovery Program, whose power-point skeleton was unveiled to select elites in 2000, during Mbeki's meetings with Bill Clinton in May, the Okinawa G8 summit in July, the UN Millennium Summit in September, and a subsequent European Union gathering in Portugal.

The skeleton was fleshed out in November 2000 with the assistance of several economists, including mild-mannered leftists from Columbia University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. It was immediately endorsed during a special South African visit by World Bank president James Wolfensohn "at an undisclosed location", due presumably to fears of the disruptive protests which had soured a Johannesburg trip by new IMF tsar Horst Koehler a few months earlier.

Thanks to work by a coauthor of South Africa's own disastrous 1996 home-grown structural adjustment program (Steven Gelb), the content of the 60-page working document was becoming clearer:

• more privatisation, especially of infrastructure (regardless of its profound failure even in South Africa);

• more insertion of Africa into the world economy (in spite of fast-declining terms of trade);

• more multi-party elections (typically, though, between variants of neo-liberal parties, as in the US) as a veil for the lack of thorough-going participatory democracy;

• grand visions of information and communications technology (hopelessly unrealistic considering the lack of simple reliable electricity across the continent); and

• a self-mandate for peace-keeping (which South Africa has subsequently taken for its soldiers stationed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi).

By this stage, Mbeki had managed to sign on as partners two additional rulers from the crucial north-west region of the continent: Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. Unfortunately, both continued to face mass popular protests and widespread civil/military/religious bloodshed at home, diminishing their utility as model African leaders.

Later, to his credit, Obasanjo led a surprise revolt against Mbeki's capitulation to Western pressure at the World Conference Against Racism in September 2001, when he helped generate a split between European and African countries over reparations due the continent for slavery and colonialism. Tellingly, even loose talk of such reparations cannot be found in the NEPAD, and the South African host delegation was furious at Obasanjo's outburst because it nearly scuppered a final conference resolution.

But that incident aside, 2001 has been a successful year for selling NEPAD. Another pro-Western ruler, Tanzania's Benjamin Mkapa, joined the New Africa leadership group in January 2001 in Davos, Switzerland. There, Mbeki gave the world's leading capitalists and state elites a briefing, which was very poorly attended. A few days later, an effort was made in Mali to sell West Africans the plan, with on-the-spot cheerleading by Wolfensohn and Koehler.

The July 2001 meeting of the African Union in Lusaka provided the opportunity for a continent-wide leadership endorsement, once Mbeki's plan was "merged" with an infrastructure-heavy initiative — the Omega Plan — offered by the neo-liberal Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade, to become the New African Initiative.

The Genoa G8 summit offered soothing encouragement. With 300,000 protesters outside the conference accusing the world's main political leaders of running a destructive, elitist club, Mbeki was a useful adornment. Likewise, Mbeki's October visits to Japan and Brussels confirmed his elite popularity, perhaps because there was no apparent demand for formal monetary commitments.

Recolonisation

To sum up the ideological partnership that Mbeki proposes, consider the way that the neo-liberal recolonisation of African economic policy is explained in the web site version of NEPAD: "The structural adjustment programs provided only a partial solution. They promoted reforms that tended to remove serious price distortions, but gave inadequate attention to the provision of social services. As a consequence, only a few countries managed to achieve sustainable higher growth under these programs."

Slippery, this line of analysis, and worth unpacking briefly to conclude. For one test of robust analysis is to pose the opposite premise, and to see whether the subsequent hypotheses are worth exploring:

• What if structural adjustment represented not "a partial solution" but instead, reflecting local and global power shifts, a profound defeat for genuine African nationalists, workers, peasants, women, children and the environment?

• What if "promoting reforms" really amounted to the IMF and World Bank imposing their cookie-cutter neo-liberal policies on desperately disempowered African societies, without any reference to democratic processes, resistance or diverse local conditions?

• What if the removal of "serious price distortions" really meant the repeal of exchange controls (hence allowing massive capital flight), subsidy cuts (hence pushing masses of people below the poverty line), and lowered import tariffs (hence generating massive deindustrialisation)?

• What if "inadequate attention to the provision of social services" in reality meant the opposite: excessive attention to applying neo-liberalism not just to the macro-economy, but also to health, education, water and other crucial state services? And what if the form of IMF/World Bank attention included insistence upon greater cost recovery, higher user-fees, lower budgetary allocations, privatisation, and even the disconnection of supplies to those too poor to afford them, hence leading to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people?

• What if "inadequate attention to the provision of social services" is not anywhere correlated to the inability of countries to "achieve sustainable higher growth", but rather serves as a nice-sounding justification for "adjustment with a human face", as UNICEF coined the compromise that NEPAD apparently seeks?

If these hypotheses are reasonable, and if the implication is to not proceed further with structural adjustment — human face or not — then a central task of NEPAD must be to slip around such arguments without reference to their relevance. By doing so, NEPAD fits right into the globalisers' modified neo-liberal project, which now insists even more incongruously that integration solves poverty.

Like all top-down policy formulations, NEPAD reeks of technicism, a scent which could dissipate partially if exposed to the fires of popular debate, protest and participation. But that would risk the transformation of NEPAD into a partnership with Africans themselves.

Mbeki's AIDS initiatives provide enough evidence of his intentions to keep millions of Africans alive, much less in partnership. And that means, for the rest of us, that NEPAD will require some new placards, namely against South African sub-imperialism.

[Patrick Bond's new book is Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance, from University of Cape Town Press; ordering information available from <http://pbond@wn.apc.org>.]

BY PATRICK BOND

JOHANNESBURG — Everyone seems worried about Africa's health and welfare these days. If you have an open mind and regularly read the London Financial Times — or its South African subsidiary Business Day — you would have seen notice of a Millennium Africa Recovery Plan (from mid-2000 to mid-2001), a New African Initiative (from July October 2001) and now a New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), launched in Abuja, Nigeria by several African heads of state on October 23.

They're actually the same thing, but for various reasons (including the Afrikaans translation of the acronym NAAI, which literally means "to be fucked over") the name has evolved.

Everyone supports the NEPAD; though frankly, very few of its supporters know what the warmed-over Washington consensus strategy means or how to defend it, especially against the charge of hypocrisy that its sponsors logically attract.

Those critical voices — especially the African Trade Network's Titteh Hormuh in Accra, Yash Tandon in Harare, Dot Keet in Cape Town and Mohau Pheko in Johannesburg — are ignored, or pooh-poohed by elites who finally realise the importance of public relations gambits. Consider some related Financial Times headlines that blared within the first month after the September 11 terrorist attacks:

• September 26: "Protesters ask right questions, yet they lack the right answers" (by Belgian prime minister and current European Union president Guy Verhofstadt);

• October 1: "Partnerships only way to break cycle of poverty" (by Anglo-American Corporation executive Jonathan Oppenheimer);

• October 7: "New swipe at fighting poverty" (Gondal Gondwe and Callisto Madavo, the leading African officials at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank);

• October 10: "Attacks on US hurt Africa" (Ian Goldin and Alan Gelb, South African economists and senior World Bank employees);

• October 10: "Clamour against capitalism stilled" (FT reporters claiming "the counter-capitalist movement is in retreat").

AIDS pandemic

South Africa's mercurial President Thabo Mbeki is the main subject of this interest. But now we are forced to ask yet again, is he fit to lead the continent?

To answer initially in the negative, alert readers know that Mbeki has become a pariah among health professionals desperately fighting the AIDS pandemic, because of his deadly neglect of the nearly five million of his 40 million constituents who are HIV+.

The president — now termed "undertaker-in-chief Mbeki" — was back in the international news in October for yet more stunning gaffes, first using five-year old mortality data to imply that health spending priorities should be revised away from AIDS prevention, and next by disputing subsequent AIDS statistics released by the respected local Medical Research Council (a government body).

Then, answering the right-wing opposition's questions in parliament, he again insisted that excessive toxicity of anti-retroviral drugs justifies ignoring treatments to combat mother-to-child-transmission of HIV. And in a major speech at Fort Hare University on October 12, he revealed a perverse paranoia about his critics:

"Thus does it happen that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards, to demand that because we are germ carriers, and human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its [sic] passions to reason, we must perforce adopt strange opinions, to save a depraved and diseased people from perishing from self-inflicted disease."

Amidst this unnecessary — some say genocidal — slaughter, let's play devil's advocate and take a more positive point of view: Mbeki is seen as Africa's most legitimate (thanks to the 66% ANC vote in 1999), self-confident and fundamentally pro-Western leader. If anyone can shake down Washington for debt relief or Geneva for trade concessions, it's the president of a recently liberated South Africa.

'African Renaissane'

From the late 1990s, Mbeki embarked upon an "African Renaissance" branding exercise with poignant poetics. The contentless form was somewhat remedied in the secretive Millennial Africa Recovery Program, whose power-point skeleton was unveiled to select elites in 2000, during Mbeki's meetings with Bill Clinton in May, the Okinawa G8 summit in July, the UN Millennium Summit in September, and a subsequent European Union gathering in Portugal.

The skeleton was fleshed out in November 2000 with the assistance of several economists, including mild-mannered leftists from Columbia University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. It was immediately endorsed during a special South African visit by World Bank president James Wolfensohn "at an undisclosed location", due presumably to fears of the disruptive protests which had soured a Johannesburg trip by new IMF tsar Horst Koehler a few months earlier.

Thanks to work by a coauthor of South Africa's own disastrous 1996 home-grown structural adjustment program (Steven Gelb), the content of the 60-page working document was becoming clearer:

* more privatisation, especially of infrastructure (no matter its profound failure even in South Africa);

• more insertion of Africa into the world economy (in spite of fast-declining terms of trade);

• more multi-party elections (typically, though, between variants of neo-liberal parties, as in the US) as a veil for the lack of thorough-going participatory democracy;

• grand visions of information and communications technology (hopelessly unrealistic considering the lack of simple reliable electricity across the continent); and,

• a self-mandate for peace-keeping (which South Africa has subsequently taken for its soldiers stationed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi).

By this stage, Mbeki had managed to sign on as partners two additional rulers from the crucial north-west region of the continent: Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. Unfortunately, both continued to face mass popular protests and widespread civil/military/religious bloodshed at home, diminishing their utility as model African leaders.

Later, to his credit, Obasanjo led a surprise revolt against Mbeki's capitulation to Western pressure at the World Conference Against Racism in September 2001, when he helped generate a split between European and African countries over reparations due the continent for slavery and colonialism. Tellingly, even loose talk of such reparations cannot be found in the NEPAD, and the South African host delegation was furious at Obasanjo's outburst because it nearly scuppered a final conference resolution.

But that incident aside, 2001 has been a successful year for selling NEPAD. Another pro-Western ruler, Tanzania's Benjamin Mkapa, joined the New Africa leadership group in January 2001 in Davos, Switzerland. There, Mbeki gave the world's leading capitalists and state elites a briefing, which was very poorly attended. A few days later, an effort was made in Mali to sell West Africans to the plan, with on-the-spot cheerleading by Wolfensohn and Koehler.

The July 2001 meeting of the African Union in Lusaka provided the opportunity for a continent-wide leadership endorsement, once Mbeki's plan was "merged" with an infrastructure-heavy initiative — the Omega Plan — offered by the neo-liberal Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade, to become the New African Initiative.

The Genoa G8 summit offered soothing encouragement. With 300,000 protesters outside the conference accusing the world's main political leaders of running a destructive, elitist club, Mbeki was a useful adornment. Likewise, Mbeki's October visits to Japan and Brussels confirmed his elite popularity, perhaps because there was no apparent demand for formal monetary commitments.

Recolonisation

To sum up the ideological partnership that Mbeki proposes, consider the way that the neo-liberal recolonisation of African economic policy is explained on the Web site version of NEPAD: "The structural adjustment programmes provided only a partial solution. They promoted reforms that tended to remove serious price distortions, but gave inadequate attention to the provision of social services. As a consequence, only a few countries managed to achieve sustainable higher growth under these programs."

Slippery, this line of analysis, and worth unpacking briefly to conclude. For one test of robust analysis is to pose the opposite premise, and to see whether the subsequent hypotheses are worth exploring:

• What if structural adjustment represented not "a partial solution" but instead, reflecting local and global power shifts, a profound defeat for genuine African nationalists, workers, peasants, women, children and the environment?

• What if "promoting reforms" really amounted to the IMF and World Bank imposing their cookie-cutter neo-liberal policies on desperately disempowered African societies, without any reference to democratic processes, resistance or diverse local conditions?

• What if the removal of "serious price distortions" really meant the repeal of exchange controls (hence allowing massive capital flight), subsidy cuts (hence pushing masses of people below the poverty line), and lowered import tariffs (hence generating massive deindustrialisation)?

• What if "inadequate attention to the provision of social services" in reality meant the opposite: excessive attention to applying neo-liberalism not just to the macro-economy, but also to health, education, water and other crucial state services? And what if the form of IMF/World Bank attention included insistence upon greater cost recovery, higher user-fees, lower budgetary allocations, privatisation, and even the disconnection of supplies to those too poor to afford them, hence leading to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people?

• What if "inadequate attention to the provision of social services" is not anywhere correlated to the inability of countries to "achieve sustainable higher growth", but rather serves as a nice-sounding justification for "adjustment with a human face", as UNICEF coined the compromise that NEPAD apparently seeks?

If these hypotheses are reasonable, and if the implication is to not proceed further with structural adjustment — human face or not — then a central task of NEPAD must be to slip around such arguments without reference to their relevance. By doing so, NEPAD fits right into the globalisers' modified neo-liberal project, which now insists even more incongruously that integration solves poverty.

Like all top-down policy formulations, NEPAD reeks of technicism, a scent which could dissipate partially if exposed to the fires of popular debate, protest and participation. But that would risk the transformation of NEPAD into a partnership with Africans themselves.

Mbeki's AIDS initiatives provide enough evidence of his intentions to keep millions of Africans alive, much less in partnership. And that means, for the rest of us, that NEPAD will require some new placards, namely against South African sub-imperialism.

[Patrick Bond's new book is Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance, from University of Cape Town Press; ordering information available from <http://pbond@wn.apc.org>.]

From Green Left Weekly, November 21, 2001.
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