Ndungu Report.pdf

Review of African Political Economy No. 103:135-204©ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2005

Briefings

Land & Politics in Namibia

Henning Melber

Southern African societies still bear thelasting effects of their colonial history;in particular, the inherited structurallegacies of an apartheid system. Whilethis special brand of white minorityrule was later called ‘separate develop-ment’, the euphemistic term actuallydescribes in a rather appropriate waycolonisation – the violent removal ofpeople from their land. Today, grossinequalities in access to, and posses-sion of land are a reflection of thisearlier colonial expansion. 2004 markeda century since the genocide started inthen ‘German South West Africa’ and isa reminder of the origins of Namibia’sskewed land distribution (cf. Melber,2000). Whatever rationale for seekingsolutions to this impasse are utilised,this memory cannot be tilted among thegenerations of victims.

In 2002, twelve years after Independ-ence, the Party Congress of SWAPO ofNamibia passed a resolution whichurged government to expropriate 192farms owned by absentee landlords.While this was within the legal andconstitutional discretion governing thecountry, and reiterated the recommenda-tions adopted soon after Independenceby the National Land Conference of1991, it was not implemented by thoseSWAPO cadres in government. It wasn’tuntil a newly-emerging political space in2004 did the land issue also re-emerge asan ingredient to the open contestationover the succession to Namibia’s Presi-dent Sam Nujoma. SWAPO’s President

since its foundation and in office sinceIndependence, he ultimately had to aban-don the campaign for a fourth termbeyond March 2005. His declared crownprince Hifikepunje Pohamba, like him-self a first generation activist, is thecurrent Minister of Land, Resettlementand Rehabilitation. When he was de-clared Nujoma’s choice, Pohamba devel-oped a hitherto unseen commitment toaddress the land issue. The followingchronology of events between Februaryand June 2004 is based on the localnewspaper coverage.

In a special announcement televised atthe end of February 2004, Namibia’sPrime Minister Theo Ben Gurirab con-firmed the new policy approach as indi-cated shortly before by Minister Pohambain Parliament: from now on Governmentwould expropriate land. Zimbabwe’sMinister of Information, Jonathan Moyo,on an official visit in the country at thetime, expressed his satisfaction about thehistorical moment he could witness.During early April, a team of six expertsseconded from Zimbabwe visited Na-mibia to assist in the evaluation of seizedland. In his May Day speech PresidentNujoma confirmed that expropriation offarms would not only target under-utilised land but also serve as a punitivemeasure. He warned ‘minority racistfarmers’,

that steps will be taken and we can drivethem out of this land … as an answer tothe insult to my Government.

A letter of 10 May by Minister Pohamba –at a time when the internal competitionfor the nomination as the party candi-date for the next term as President was in

ISSN 0305-6244 Print/1740-1720 Online/05/010135-70DOI: 10.1080/03056240500121065

136 Review of African Political Economy

full swing – was sent to some 15 farmersexpressing ‘interest in acquiring theirproperty’. The recipients were ‘cordiallyinvited to make an offer to sell theproperty to the State and to enter intofurther negotiations in that regard’.Among the farms were those which wereon record for recent labour related con-flicts; but there was also a game ranchowned by a foreign national who hadinvested considerably in a luxuriousfarmhouse. Among his guests was Na-mibia’s Head of State who enjoys theoccasional hunting safari; one wonderswhy this farm has been selected as apriority.

Since the expropriation letters were dis-tributed, a minority group of racisthardliners among the white farmers em-barked on a course of public confronta-tion. At a meeting in June they articulatedopenly arrogant and self-righteous defi-ance to government policy and blamedthe commercial farmers’ union for itssell-out strategy. This added fuel to theflames and made the land issue the mostcontroversial topic in public debate bymid-2004. The Parliamentary and Presi-dential elections held in November 2004confirmed Nujoma’s confidante as hissuccessor and next Head of State. Hewas nominated by SWAPO as candidatefrom three contesters by an extraordi-nary party congress held at the end ofMay 2004 after an intense period ofinternal struggles turning ugly and show-ing the full force of autocracy by thepresident. A new cabinet is appointed byPohamba to take office on Namibia’sIndependence Day, 21 March 2005. Itremains to be seen what turn the landpolicy then might take. The first 15 yearsof Namibian Independence were charac-terised more by an absence of any coher-ent and consistent strategy; instead, therewas a dominance of politics with andabout the land issue.

This briefing looks behind and beyondthe current rhetoric providing food forspeculation about the government’s

emerging land policy and revisits landas ‘contested territory’ (see Melber, 2002).The issue is viewed within the context ofthe post-colonial ideology under a formerliberation movement, which now em-braces a strategy of populist rhetoric tocover own policy failures. This affectsthe socio-economic policy within anincreasingly narrow-minded nation-building discourse (see Melber, 2003aand 2003b). The land issue hence emergesas a tempting political tool for manipula-tion and social engineering, instead ofaddressing in the first place a longoverdue material redistribution as anintegral part of a coherent process toreduce the gross inequalities within afundamentally non-egalitarian society.

Land appeals to a majority of Namibiansfor the simple reason that many of themare directly or indirectly affected.

Agriculture … provides a livelihood tomore than two-thirds of all Namibians,either as communal farmers, or as labour-ers on commercial farms. Three-quartersof the poor in Namibia depend on agricul-ture for at least some of their householdconsumption needs. In spite of this, thesector’s contribution to GDP remainsvery limited, less than 8% (UNDP,1998:44).

Some 44% of Namibia’s territory (exclu-sively within the area of the former‘Police Zone’) is classified as freeholdland composed of fenced ranches. It isprivate property of less than 5,000 (pre-dominantly but no longer exclusivelywhite) farmers; 43% (mainly in the North-ern and Eastern parts) is communal land(the former ‘native reserves’). A consider-able portion of the latter has in themeantime been fenced off, a practicelargely tolerated by the authorities (some-times with office bearers being an activepart thereof) despite demands to thecontrary articulated by the NationalLand Conference (cf. Werner, 2001:272).A reform process would also have to bearin mind, and carefully address, the per-

manent challenges posed by Namibia’sextreme ecological constraints to anysustainable effort to enhance land pro-ductivity. Namibia’s history of land use,exacerbated by the additional pressureon land since colonisation by Europeansettlers, is ample illustration of the pain-ful consequences of deliberate over-exploitation of natural resources.

Only about 8% of the territory is suitablefor dry land cropping, with an averageannual rainfall of 500mm or more. Two-thirds of the country is classified as semi-arid and around a quarter as arid. Sixtyper cent of the commercial farmland(freehold agricultural land) receives onaverage less than 300mm rain annually.

In such an arid environment land owner-ship becomes much less of a crucial factorthan in most countries (UNDP, 1998:46).

Giving back land to a previous tiller (oractually herder) does therefore not neces-sarily pay off when measured in terms ofeconomic performance, and in some casesnot even in terms of self-employment.

The main issue therefore is not land, butpoverty – a view, shared from a differentperspective for South Africa (Hendricks,2000), where the degree of proletarisationis most advanced. Interesting enough,neither Namibia’s official Poverty Re-duction Strategy, approved by Cabinet in1998, nor the National Poverty Reduc-tion Action Programme for 2001-2005links land reform to poverty reduction:

In other words, the Namibian Govern-ment does not view land redistribution asone of the major instruments in reducingpoverty. In fact, there is an inexplicablypessimistic view expressed in the PovertyReduction Strategy, namely that the agri-cultural base was too weak to offer asustainable basis for prosperity (Sachi-konye, 2004:74)

When liberation movements took overpolitical power towards the end of the

twentieth century, a framework was cre-ated to address the inherited inequali-ties. The process of de-colonisation andtransfer of political power, however, hadbeen one of controlled change as a resultof internally and externally negotiatedsettlements. The legitimate governmentswere required to honour a rule of the lawbased on the recognition of existingproperty relations. Landowners at Inde-pendence, therefore, were legally entitledto their farms and protected by commonlaw – as painful as such endorsement ofprevious injustice in some cases mightbe. Namibia’s President Sam Nujoma(2001:419) paints a misleading picturewhen he suggests that as a result of animperialist conspiracy Namibians weredenied the opportunity to address theland issue differently. As a matter of fact,Namibians – as represented by the lib-eration movement SWAPO – were part ofa deal: ‘land and property rights werenever the subject of public debate’ andthe ‘aspect of the Bill of FundamentalHuman Rights that gave guarantees toexisting property owners received sur-prisingly little attention’ during the de-liberations of the Constituent Assemblyprior to Independence (Cliffe et al.1994:205, 214).

Such a limiting point of departure, al-though a constraint for social transfor-mation, does nevertheless not preventoptions to adopt reformist land policiesaimed at creating more equality. Despitethe obvious relevance of, and need toaddress the land issue as a priority onthe agenda for change, those assumingpolitical power paid little visible atten-tion to exploring possible solutions. In-stead, high ranking political officebearers and bureaucrats used their en-ergy during the initial period of consoli-dating post-colonial power structures tosecure their own farms, often throughaccess to land provided by the state.Members of the new political elite wereamong the beneficiaries of drought reliefthrough state financed drilling ofboreholes on their private farms, thereby

Land & Politics in Namibia 137


adding revenue and aid funded value totheir property (cf. Kössler/Melber, 2001).

In contrast to this eagerness of accessingand utilising land for own benefits, themajority of the population saw little to noprogress in terms of creating access toland. Interestingly enough, Namibianlawmakers have been reluctant to intro-duce a land tax despite the fact that it isan obvious tool for at least reformistsocial transformation based on gener-ated revenue. While the Agricultural(Commercial) Land Reform Act of 1995provided the legal framework, it tookalmost another decade until taxes arelikely to be finally introduced during thefiscal year 2004/2005 with the adoptionof a Land Tax Bill.

Also painfully slow was the action withregard to the purchase of farmland forresettlement purposes. By the mid-1990s,the Namibian authorities had acquiredonly some 100,000 hectares of freeholdland for redistribution – less than ahandful of so-called commercial farms(Werner, 2001: 272). After a decade ofIndependence, the farmland bought bythe Ministry of Lands, Resettlement andRehabilitation amounted to 54 farmstotalling 341,000 hectares (Werner,2000:45-48). For many years, the Minis-try did not even spend the annual budgetallocated for the purchase of farms. Theproblem was not mainly the reluctanceof commercial farmers to abandon theirproperty within the ‘willing seller –willing buyer’ policy advocated. In con-trast:

By 2001 the government has been offered759 commercial farms. A total of 505 ofthese farms were turned down, leavingthem for sale in the private sector. Thegovernment has shown interest in 254farms since 1991, or about one farm inthree put on sale, but only actuallypurchased 97 for land reform purposes,only about 13% of the farms sold inNamibia over this ten year period(Harring/Odendaal, 2002:52).

This study therefore concludes that thestrategy formulated in the ‘White Paperof Resettlement Policy’ of 2001 has so farfailed not really because of a lack offarms on the market. If the quality of theland on offer would not promote ameaningful re-distributive effect by reset-tling people, it would actually supportthe argument that Namibia’s climaticand environmental constraints do sim-ply not allow to generate circumstancesunder which people would be enabledon a meaningful scale to make a decentliving from the land.

To complicate matters further, reversingthe historical injustices requires the deci-sion when and under which circum-stances change of land ownership becameunacceptable. Conflicting claims by dif-ferent regional-ethnic groups, which atsome period of time had occupied thesame territorial entity, creates a collisionof interests too difficult to be amicablysolved. On the other hand, land restitu-tion is strictly speaking for the majorityof the population a non-issue. Land wasphysically occupied and expropriatedby the European settlers and the colonialstate in the southern and central areas ofNamibia declared as ‘Police Zone’. Themajority of the population settled northof this Police Zone and was never moved.Colonial-capitalist patterns of exploita-tion were established there in differentways: the colonial administration reliedon forms of an indirect rule. It rathersought to exploit the people by means ofintroducing a strictly regulated and sys-tematic system of organised contractlabour in collaboration with local head-men (cf. Melber, 2000). The Land ReformConference sought to avoid the issue bystating:

given the complexities in redressing an-cestral land claims, restitution of suchclaims in full is impossible (quoted fromWerner 2001:266; my emphasis).

This vagueness allows widely differinginterpretations and arbitrariness, thereby

creating manoeuvring space for thosewho are in control over and execution ofthe power of definition. Not surpris-ingly, since Namibian Independence acertain ambiguity by the post-colonialauthorities especially towards the mostmarginalised indigenous minoritygroups prevailed (Daniels, 2003:57-63;Suzman, 2002, 2004). Werner (2002:56)suggests:

that the difficulties involved in disentan-gling competing claims of lost landsprovided an ideal political opportunity tobroaden the category of beneficiaries ofland reform to include those who werenever dispossessed in the historical sense.

Before joining the Namibian EconomicPolicy Research Unit (NEPRU) in themid-1990s, Werner had been a Directorin the Ministry of Lands, Resettlementand Rehabilitation and hence benefitingfrom first hand insights. As he pointsout, the formula chosen by the LandConference allowed to bring in the mainbase of SWAPO in the Northern areas offormer Ovamboland as primary benefici-aries of re-distributive measures. Hencethe Land Conference ‘provided the po-litical legitimacy to rule out any ethni-cally specific claims to land, no matterhow justified they might have been’(Ibid.) This explains why the govern-ment can currently refer to some 240,000people waitlisted for resettlement, mainlyfrom the densely populated Northernareas, in which direct evasion from landnever took place under German andSouth African rule.

Unfortunately, the possession of land isassociated with wealth – even if thismight be the wrong conclusion (at leastin its general form): aggregated data forNamibia suggest that the land utilisedby the (hardly existing) ‘average com-mercial farmer’ (and his labourers) is notyielding the high monetary income onemight expect:

If total value added by commercial agricul-ture (N$565 million in 1997) were evenlydivided between the 6,337 farms, theaverage value added per farm wouldamount to about N$90,000, includingwage bill to an average of six farm workers,return to capital employed, land rents andown labour (UNDP, 1998:45).

This does of course neither imply thatthere are no wealthy ranchers, nor ques-tion that commercial farmers are muchbetter off than most of those in thecommunal areas, whose average annualincome is estimated according to thesame source at about N$3,000. The pointis, however, that among commercial(white) farmers land ownership – evenunder ‘ordinary’ circumstances – is nottaking for granted a guaranteed andsecure existence. There is even specula-tion that with the introduction of theland tax commercial farming units willhave to close down due to lack ofeconomic sustainability. Farming in Na-mibia, as Sherbourne (2003) has shown,is increasingly ‘a rich man’s hobby’. Ashe suggests, it turns into a lifestyle choicefor the urban rich prepared to subsidisetheir farms from other principal sourcesof income. A government policy trying toencourage black Namibians into com-mercial farming therefore has to rely onheavy subsidisation – just as it had beenthe case under the deliberate policy ofsettling farmers from South Africa’s poorwhite Afrikaans speaking underclass inthe then ‘fifth province’ from the 1920sonward. In a striking analogy to thisearlier period, land policy is therefore inthe first place about pigmentation of theskin. Sherbourne (2004:1) hence answershis hypothetical question ‘Any Room forEconomics?’ as follows:

While some have tried to argue that landreform is important to boost the country’seconomy and reduce poverty, in theirhearts most people know that the landquestion is about race: black Namibiansshould own more of Namibia’s commercialfarmland. In reality everything else –



agricultural output, the treatment of farmworkers, poverty reduction, environmen-tal sustainability – is very much second-ary.

Since an estimated 800,000 of some 1.8million Namibians live on the commu-nal lands, a meaningful land reformwould have to address the issue as muchthere to achieve effective ways and meansof reducing poverty among the ruralpopulation.

Given that some of the land north of theRed Line (i.e. outside of the previous‘Police Zone’) is among the potentiallymost productive in Namibia, one couldargue that the challenges to bring securityof tenure, security of investment, equita-ble infrastructure and market participa-tion to Namibia’s communal areas is justas important to the land issue in Namibiaas acquiring and redistributing commer-cial farmland that was expropriated dur-ing the colonial period (Fuller, 2004:86).

The complexity of existing forms of landuse and ownership goes far beyond thesimple dichotomy of commercial and/orcommunal forms of land, and touchesupon different aspects of fencing offcommunal lands as a land acquisitionstrategy in a process of further classdiversification (see Twyman et al., 2001).

A pragmatic approach, confining theland issue to macro-economic and fiscalpolicies, would however ignore the socio-cultural aspects. Conquered people re-claim their history by regainingownership over their ancestors’ lands.Such a desire has little in common withthe economic rationality presented above.It is a legitimate matter of dignity, self-respect and spirituality, not measurablein bare economic terms. This was articu-lated in the Namibian context by theprevious Deputy Speaker of the NationalAssembly, since September 2001 electedBishop to the Evangelical LutheranRhenish Church in Namibia, as a power-

ful spiritual leader and representative ofpublic morale in the following way:

Our grand parents died without seeingjustice done to the land issue, our parentsare dying in poverty with sufferingengraved on their faces. They told us howthey were living happily on their land,cultivating their crops and looking aftertheir cattle. Together with their parents,they experienced the horror of their landbeing fenced around. (…) To remove thepeople from the land on which they havebeen living for generations, is to destroyand kill them, not only outside but alsoinside … The violation of the land rightsare the violation of the soul of the people,but its restoration is the resurrection ofthe soul of the people and life in abundance(Kameeta, 2002:29, 30).

This theological mystification might pro-voke doubts among those sceptical aboutthe glorification of a ‘noble savage’ typeof Namibian historiography. Such anemotional dimension, rooted in issues ofidentity, however, simply illustrates thepoint that ‘people’s relationship to theirenvironment is not only material, butalso social and cultural’ (Salih, 1999:163).

This emotional dimension suits the aspi-rations and agendas of ideologicallyminded social engineers of the post-colonial elite. One of those is UazuvaKaumbi. He heads the state-subsidisedPan African Centre of Namibia (PACON)and is the chairperson of the board of thestate broadcasting enterprise (and hencea powerful player in shaping publicdiscourse). He recently drew the cat-egorical conclusion:

Speaking as an indigenous Namibian, Iinvite my white compatriots and theirsympathisers to understand that the in-surance policy for peace and stability isexpensive. There are various options tochoose from. Sacrifices must be made. Thechoice is theirs. The land is ours! (Kaumbi,2004:94).

The most worrying part of this constella-tion – not really as complex as it mightlook when applying a class analysisapproach – is that such calculatedpopulism seems to work. It is evidentthat the land issue might be – as long as itremains unresolved for a large part of thepopulation – a social factor to be easilyactivated by those competing for politi-cal power, material gains and seekingpopular support. The task remains toseek an acceptable compromise underthe given circumstances. There is noquick fix solution on how a reduction(not to mention elimination) of unaccept-ably skewed income inequalities couldbe achieved while maintaining socialstability at the same time. On the otherhand, relative social stability is onlysecured when there is a visible reductionof the extreme socio-economic dispari-ties.

Popular pseudo-recipes might ease thepressure on government for a short time,but could just as well create more frustra-tions when new realities again do notmeet expectations. At the same time, anysuccessful efforts to ease poverty andcreate more social equality within post-colonial societies would reduce both thesymbolic relevance of and the socialfrustration that is linked to the landissue. The challenge lies in dealing withan agrarian economy based on highlyskewed distribution of land as well asweak and insecure property rights of themajority of rural people. It remains

a festering wound on the body politic ofpost-liberation Southern Africa that willbe healed neither through neglect nor thepalliative of de-racialising commercial ag-riculture. Radical surgery is required,but, as Zimbabwe demonstrates so clearly,this must not itself threaten the life of thepatient (Cousins, 2003:308)

Henning Melber, The Nordic Africa Insti-tute, Uppsala, Sweden; e-mail: [email protected]

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The Ndungu Report: Land& Graft in KenyaRoger Southall

The following summary of the Reportof the Ndungu Commission on Illegaland Irregular allocation of public landprovides an insight into a critical, recentepisode in the struggles over ‘land’ and‘graft’ in Kenya. To put it in the latestcontext, it is first worth noting that onthe ‘graft’ front, the Commission canchalk up one partial victory in that itsexposures have lead to the return oftracts of land to public action by politi-cians, including former President Moi.However, the limits of the larger fightagainst corruption was underlined whenJohn Githong’o resigned his govern-ment position as Commissioner againstCorruption. But the story the NdunguCommission unfolded is also a chapterin another very broad issue in Kenya’spolitical economy – land.

One of the few African countries toenact individual tenure of indigenousland, along with redistribution ofchunks of the former ‘white highlands’,Kenya is faced with landlessness on alarge scale and with recurrent landdisputes among individuals and be-tween communities. Government hasjust set in train a National Land PolicyFormulation Process to try and sort outthese underlying problems, includingthose thrown up by the Commission.

According to Transparency International(TI), things in contemporary Kenya haverecently got better: corruption has im-

proved from ‘highly acute’ to merely‘rampant’! Yet in commenting upon this,The Economist (18 December 2004) notesthat Kenya remains one of the mostcorrupt countries in the world, andopines that following the example offormer President Moi’s cronies,

too many of the new ruling elite are out toget rich, rather than govern. Members ofParliament, in a country where the aver-age annual income per head is a modestUS $400 a year, have awarded themselvesan annual salary and allowances of$169,625 and ‘new patronage networksare replacing the old ones, as the well-connected appoint their chums and rela-tives to plum public posts.

To be sure, The Economist continues,Kenya is probably somewhat better offthan it was under Moi, but PresidentKibaki’s economic and political reformshave stuttered, with progress towards anew constitution which would reducethe powers of the presidency and en-hance democratic accountability pres-ently on hold. Meanwhile, although thenew government has promised an end tothe culture of impunity for the powerfulthat developed under Moi, several minis-ters involved in corruption scandalsboth new and old are going unpunished.Whilst Moi’s Kenya African NationalUnion (KANU) was roundly trounced inthe general election of December 2002,the new government of the NationalRainbow Coalition (NARC) includespowerful figures who – like Kibaki him-self – formerly served under Moi andwho jumped ship when it was clear thatthe latter’s craft was sinking, and landedsquarely on their feet in the new cabinet.For all that the government has estab-lished various investigations into abusescommitted by former KANU politicianswho are still in office (having estab-lished, notably, hearings into theGoldenberg scandal of the early 1990s inwhich former Vice-President and currentMinister of Education, George Saitoti, isheavily implicated), it is the decision to

give Moi himself immunity from corrup-tion charges, on the grounds that ulti-mately he opted to leave office peacefully,which seems more likely to set the keyprecedent (Brown, 2004:335).

Even if, as many observers suggest, theNARC government’s commitment to acleansing of the Augean stables is likelyto be more rhetorical than real, its eager-ness to convince both the internationalinvestment and creditor community, aswell as its own (increasingly skeptical)supporters, that it is doing something islikely to prove more than a little interest-ing. This is demonstrated by the recentrelease (December, 2004) of the Report ofthe Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal/Irregular Allocation of Public Land (Gov-ernment Printer, Nairobi), chaired byPaul Ndungu, presented to Kibaki sixmonths previously, in which, inter alia,details are given concerning illegal landawards made to both the Kenyatta andMoi families, as well as to a raft of formerministers, MPs, judges, civil servantsand military officers, with recommenda-tions that the large majority of suchawards should be revoked. However,whilst it is such juicy findings whichhave gained the headlines, it is thechapter and verse which the Reportgives concerning the systematic way inwhich established procedures, designedto protect the public interest, were per-verted to serve private and political endswhich may well prove to be its most longlasting value.

The present brief piece seeks merely tohighlight some of the Ndungu Report’sfindings. Such a review can only bepreliminary, for at 244 pages with twoannexures running to 976 (Appendix I)and 797 (Appendix II) pages, the pros-pect of analysing the mass of detailedevidence is as daunting as it could beilluminating. Nonetheless, even a cur-sory analysis serves to confirm earlieranalyses that corruption and patronagehave become thoroughly embedded inKenya’s politics.

The Ndungu Report: Land & Graft in Kenya 143


Land & Demography in Kenya

The Ndungu Commission, which wascomposed of 20 prominent citizens, law-yers and civil servants (drawn fromministries particularly concerned withthe land issue) was appointed by Presi-dent Kibaki in June 2003, and wascharged with inquiring into the unlaw-ful allocation of public lands, ascertain-ing the beneficiaries, identifying publicofficials involved in illegal allocations,and making recommendations for ap-propriate measures for the restoration ofillegally allocated lands to their properpurpose, for prevention of future illegalallocations, and for appropriate criminalprosecutions. It was but one of a series ofmeasures designed to tackle the issue ofcorruption and to realise the fruits of anewly democratic era. Yet it was perhapsone of the most emotive of the reforminitiatives taken by the NARC govern-ment, for as noted by the Commission(p.xvii):

land retains a focal point in Kenya’shistory. It was the basis upon which thestruggle for independence was waged. Ithas traditionally dictated the pulse of ournationhood. It continues to command apivotal position in the country’s social,economic, political and legal relations.

Fundamental to the present importanceof the land issue is the rapid growth inpopulation. At the turn of the previouscentury, the colonial administrationcould justify its allocation of lands toEuropean settlers by arguing that, withan African population of just some 4million, there was plenty of space for all.By independence, the total populationhad grown to 8.2 million, and with one ofthe highest population growth rates inthe world (around 2.9% per annum),reached some 30.7 million by 2001, ofwhom only around 1% were non-Afri-can (‘Europeans’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Ar-abs’). Given the concentrations ofpopulation in the high rainfall areas ofthe Central Highlands and western

Kenya (20% of Kenya’s population livesin the drier 80% of the land in the northand east), the pressure upon land (not tomention the remaining wildlife) is in-creasingly evident, not least because ofthe scarcity of formal employment andthe dependence of the overwhelmingmajority of the population upon peasantagriculture (which contributes some 50%of total agricultural production). In thiscontext, access to land becomes critical topopular well-being, and the illegal ap-propriation of public land a peculiarlyvisible crime that has come to excite hugepassion, not least because, as the Com-mission Report asserts, the practice ofillegal allocations of land increased dra-matically during the late 1980s andthroughout the 1990s:

Land was no longer allocated for develop-ment purposes but as political reward andfor speculation purposes … ’land grab-bing’ became part and parcel of officialgrand corruption through which landmeant for public purposes … has beenacquired by individuals and corporations(p.8).

The Law Relating to theAllocation of Land

The Commission’s review of the landsystem as it developed under colonial-ism (based upon the Crown Lands Ordi-nance of 1915), stresses how the authorityto allocate Crown lands (as distinct fromlands reserved for African CustomaryTenure) was vested in the Governor, andunder him, the Commissioner of Lands.Under their prerogative, grants of agri-cultural leases (initially for 99, later for999 years) were made to settlers, whilstcommercial plots in townships and ur-ban centres were initially allocatedthrough a system of public auction whileresidential plots within municipalitieswere allocated through public tender.However, by the 1940s, the system ofpublic auction – which had becomedominated by wealthy cartels – hadfallen out of favour, resulting in a change

whereby commercial plots would beallocated by means of direct grant by theCommissioner with the assistance of alocal committee, a system which hadalready informally replaced the publictender system with regard to residentialland.

The principles which decided such allo-cations included notions of the publicinterest, as well as the ability of selectedallottees to pay for land (sold at 20% of itsestimated value to encourage develop-ment) within 30 days and to carry outintended developments within a pre-scribed time limit. As the Committeenotes, for all that such procedures mayhave worked to restrict African opportu-nities to purchase land in ‘white’ areas,they served to control the ‘mischief ofland speculation’. However, in what isone of the

greatest ironies in the history of landallocation in Kenya, what appears to havesucceeded in the colonial period (i.e.allocation by direct grant) is what laterfacilitated the massive illegal and irregularabandonment of public land by the Gov-ernment after independence,

for it was to be the very officials andinstitutions charged with being the cus-todians of public land who were tobecome the facilitators of illegal alloca-tions (pp.6-7). The colonial Doctrine ofPublic Trust, whereby Kenya’s rulersadminister land in trust for the people ofKenya, dissolved under independence,and land was to become granted forpolitical reasons, or simply subject to‘outright plunder’ by ‘a few people at thegreat expense … of the public’ (pp.9-10).

What land has been involved? Accord-ing to the Commission, all types. InKenya, it explains, land is divided intothe three categories of government land,trust land and private land. Govern-ment land comprises two sub-catego-ries, unalienated (land which has notbeen leased or allocated) and alienated

(land which has been leased to a privateindividual or body corporate, or whichhas been reserved for the use of a govern-ment department or corporation or insti-tution, or which has been set aside foranother public purpose). Trust land isheld by County Councils on behalf oflocal communities, groups, families andindividuals in accordance with applica-ble African Customary Law until it isregistered under any land registrationstatutes, following which it is trans-formed into private land and becomesthe sole property of the individual orgroup in favour of whom it is registered.Finally, private land is land which isregistered in accordance with laws thatprovide for registration of title, and isregistered in the name of an individualor a company, and may be created fromeither government land or trust landthrough registration after all legal proce-dures have been strictly followed (pp.44-45). According to these definitions, it isonly government land which is publicland, for trust land belongs to localcommunities. However, because trustland has long become victim to landgrabbing, the Commission opted to re-gard all trust lands which had beenillegally allocated as public land for itsown investigative purposes (p. 46).

Under the law, it is only the Presidentwho has the right to allocate unalienatedgovernment lands, although he can del-egate limited powers to the Commis-sioner of Lands. Yet even the Presidentcannot exercise his powers without pay-ing regard to the public interest. Inpractice, however, key responsibility fallsupon the Commissioner of Lands andhis officials, who under the GovernmentLands Act may cause township plots onunalienated land to be sold by auction(unless the President prescribes other-wise) for business or residential pur-poses (but only if it is not required forpublic purposes), whilst not even thePresident has the authority to allocatealienated government lands which havebeen set aside for a public purpose such



as nature conservation, forests, playareas or by-passes.

In any process of allocation, a formaloffer of sale is made to an approvedpurchaser by the Commissioner forLands. Such a letter of allotment is onlymade to the person to whom it is ad-dressed, lapses after 30 days, and hasvarious conditions attached, and as suchcannot be legally transferred to anotherperson. Meanwhile, trust land can onlybe removed from the communal owner-ship of local people through legallyprescribed adjudication processes,whereby local communities are givenample notice and opportunity to claimtheir ownership in accordance with theircustomary law. However, despite allthese legally strict safeguards, ‘it is in theallocation process that most of the cor-ruption and fraudulent practices relat-ing to land have occurred’ (p.54).

The Commission’s Findings

Upon the basis of detailed review of alllaws relating to land, official reportsconcerning the land issue by govern-ment and non-government bodies, docu-ments and records submitted byministries and public bodies, and re-ports and memoranda by professionalassociations and members of the public,the Commission categorised its findingsaccording to three broad types of publicland: Urban, State Corporations’ andMinistries’ Lands; Settlement Schemesand Trust Land; and Forestlands, Na-tional Parks, Game Reserves, Wetlands,Riparian Reserves, Protected Areas, Mu-seums and Historical Monuments.

I. Urban, State & Ministries’ Land: TheCommission indicated that numerousmethods were used to grab land fallingunder this category.

There was found to have been wide-spread abuse of presidential discretionwith regard to unalienated urban land,with ‘in many instances’ (both) Presi-

dents Kenyatta and Moi making grantsto land to individuals without any con-sideration to the public interest, for po-litical reasons, and without properpursuit of legal procedures, whilst therewas also extensive illegal allocation bythe presidents of alienated land (viz,land which they did not have legalpower to allocate). Various Commission-ers of Lands had made direct grants ofgovernment land without any authorityfrom the President. Forged letters anddocuments were used to allocate land innumerous instances, with many recordsat the Ministry of Lands and Settlementshaving been deliberately destroyed. Of-ten, land was sold by grantees withoutany adherence to the conditions laiddown by letters of allotment, and manyillegal titles to public land were trans-ferred to third parties, often State Corpo-rations, for massive sums of money.Land compulsorily acquired, like that forthe proposed Nairobi by-pass, was ille-gally allocated to individuals and com-panies, and then often sold on to thirdparties, whilst land reserved for publicpurposes such as schools, playgrounds,and hospitals etc had been sold off inblatant disregard of the law by both theCommissioner of Lands and numerouslocal authorities. In broad summary, theCommission found that the powersvested in the President had been grosslyabused by both the President and succes-sive Commissioners of Lands and theirdeputies over the years, under bothprevious regimes; there had been ‘unbri-dled plunder’ (Commission: p.81) ofpublic land by local councillors andofficials; illegal transactions were hugelyfacilitated by the extensive complicity ofprofessionals (lawyers, surveyors, valu-ers, physical planners, engineers, archi-tects, land registrars, estate agents andbankers) in the land and property mar-ket; and most high profile allocations ofpublic land were made to companiesincorporated specifically for that pur-pose, largely to shield the directors andshareholders of such entities from easypublic view. Finally, and interestingly,

the Commission found that ‘most illegalallocations of public land took placebefore or soon after the multiparty gen-eral elections of 1992, 1997 and 2002’,reinforcing its view that public land wasallocated ‘as political reward or patron-age’ (p.83).

With regard to the over 140 state corpora-tions (inclusive of such institutions asuniversities and the Central Bank) andthe 113 odd companies in which thegovernment holds shares, the Commis-sion noted that although the purchaseand disposition of land is incidental totheir business, many such entities haveacted as if they were set up to deal in landand have participated in land grabbingschemes through which the public haslost ‘colossal amounts of money’ (p.87).Land allocated to state corporations is‘alienated land’, but has been illegallyallocated to individuals or companies intotal disregard of the law. Such land wascustomarily sold at less than marketvalue to allottees, who often proceeded tosell it other state corporations at amountsfar in excess of market value (p. 89). Ausual procedure would be for the seniormanagement of the corporations to ad-dress a letter of surrender of land to theCommissioner of Lands, who would inshort order receive an application forpurchase of the same land from anindividual or company. At other times,corporation land might be allocated bythe Commissioner of Land to individu-als without any reference to corporatemanagement whatsoever. Through suchmethods, ‘a civil servant, a politician, apolitical operative etc would transformfrom an ordinary Kenyan … into a multi-millionaire’ (p. 90).

Corporations which have lost large ar-eas of land under such dubious circum-stances include Kenya Railways, KenyaAgricultural Research Institute, thePower & Lighting Company, Kenya Air-ports Authority, and Kenya IndustrialEstates, whilst other bodies such as theKenya Food and Chemical Corporation

which ended up in liquidation followingmismanagement nonetheless proceededto sell off their remaining assets, includ-ing land, at throw away prices (p.90).One such transaction can be cited byway of example. In January 1994, theNumerical Machining Complex Limited(owned wholly by Kenya Railways andthe University of Nairobi (sic)) was allo-cated 840 hectares of land belonging tothe Kenya Meat Commission for ‘indus-trial purposes’. Within a few weeks, thethen Head of the Public Service, Profes-sor Philip Mbithi, who was a Director ofthe Company, wrote to the head of theNational Social Security Fund (NSSF)informing him that the president hadsuggested that the NSSF purchase theland at market value. In February 1995,the NSSF proceeded to purchase 136hectares of land at a cost of 268 millionshillings, which was fully 8.5 timesmore than the professionally assessedvalue! Today, the land purchased by theNSSF remains largely undeveloped, asdoes that remaining with NumericalMachining Complex (pp. 91-92).

This is illustrative of the further scamwhereby state corporations were pressu-rised into making illegal purchases ofpublic land, becoming ‘captive buyers ofland from politically connected allottees’(p. 92), the most abused corporation inthis regard being the NSSF, which be-tween 1990 and 1995 spent some 30billion (n.b., not million!) shillings inbuying both developed and undevel-oped plots throughout the country. TheCommission gives a full list of the trans-actions involved, many of the vendorsbeing companies whose individual own-ers are not immediately evident.

The Commission made similar findingswith regard to various government min-istries which own large tracts of land,despite the fact that most of them claimednot to have lost land through illegalallocations. Again, loss of land might betriggered by a letter from an official of aministry addressed to the Commissioner



of Lands indicating that the ministry nolonger required a certain tract of land,and the latter would in turn allot it to anapplicant purchaser in excess of hisauthority. Prime offenders included theMinistry of Livestock and Fisheries De-velopment which claimed only to havelost small fisheries land, while informa-tion provided by the public indicatedthat it has lost large tracts of its livestockholding grounds. Similarly, the NationalYouth Service is said to have lost thou-sands of acres of land in allocations toprominent politicians. Then, of course,there is the Kenyatta International Con-ference Centre (KICC). This was fundedby the Ministry of Roads and PublicWorks between 1967 and 1974 for 79.7million Kenya Shillings and subse-quently managed by the Ministry ofTourism. In 1985, this was sold to KANUvia a 99 year lease for just 1,680 shillingsand a pepper corn rent, with the titlebeing made out in favour of PresidentMoi and Peter Oloo Aringo. SubsequentlyKANU took over the Centre, and as-sumed the role of landlord by collectingrent from tenants until February, 2003,when the new NARC administrationtook over the KICC on behalf of govern-ment. KICC now constitutes the subjectof a court case concerning ownershipbetween KANU and the government(pp.112-3).

Meanwhile, at a less exalted although farmore pervasive level, the Commissionfound that many thousands of govern-ment houses and properties were ille-gally allocated to individuals andcompanies.

II. Settlement Schemes & Trust Lands:Trust land, including settlement schemeland purchased by government withinternational loans from European set-tlers for settlement by African smallhold-ers or carved out of Trust land, has beensimilarly abused. The Commission foundthat, overall, whilst the establishment ofsettlement schemes and their subsequentallocation in the early years of independ-

ence generally conformed to the originalobjectives, in latter years there was exten-sive deviation, with much land havingbeen allocated for purposes other thansettlement and agricultural production.

Allocation of plots, formally conductedunder Settlement Fund Trustees, devolvesin practice upon District Plot AllocationCommittees composed of the DistrictCommissioner, District Settlement Of-ficer, District Agricultural Officer, thearea MP, the Chairman of the relevantCounty Council and the Clerk to Coun-cil. Settlement Fund Trustees appear tolack any supervisory powers over thesecommittees, with the result that the localcommittees have been almost whollyunaccountable. The result has been pre-dictable, with the interests of the land-less having been ignored in favour ofthose of ‘District officials, their relatives,members of parliament, councillors andprominent politicians from the area, Min-istry of Lands and Settlement officials,other civil servants and … so called‘politically correct’ individuals’ (p.127).And whilst the majority of deservingallottees received smaller plots, the un-deserving often received large ones. Mean-while farms belonging to the AgriculturalDevelopment Corporation, designed toprovide an the needs of the agriculturalindustry by developing high qualityseeds or livestock or undertaking re-search etc, have been illegally estab-lished as settlement schemes andsubsequently illegally allocated to indi-viduals and companies, often as politi-cal reward or patronage (Commission:pp. 134-5).

In addition to the above, extensive tractsof Trust Land have been illegally allo-cated, with county councillors havingbeen the main beneficiaries. Whilst theCommission was able to provide someglaring examples of such abuse, it washampered in its work by the failure orrefusal of councils to submit relevantinformation (p.140). It concludes:

Instead of playing their role as custodiansof public resources including land, countyand municipal councils have posed thegreatest danger to these resources … themost pronounced land grabbers in theseareas were the councillors them-selves…The corruption within centralgovernment has been replicated at thelocal level through the activities andomissions of county and municipal coun-cillors (Commission: p.147).

III. Forestlands, National Parks, GameReserves, Wetlands, Riparian Reserves &Protected Areas: After examination ofthe official reports and the ‘scantyrecords’ of responsible government de-partments and agencies (p.148), the Com-mission found that only 1.7% of the 3% ofthe country which was covered bygazetted forests at independence re-mains, most of the reduction havingcome about as a result of illegal andirregular excisions, usually made with-out any reference to scientific considera-tions or under the guise of settlementschemes. The beneficiaries of such exci-sions include (often private) schools,government institutions, and religiousbodies as well as private individualsand companies. Similarly, many illegalallocations of land around riparian siteshave been illegally allocated by the KenyaWildlife Service, with many such alloca-tions – such as those made since 1995 tosome 14 beneficiaries around LakeNaivasha – being known to have se-verely affected the ecosystem. Fortunately,the Commission finds that the NationalParks and Reserves have been moreeffectively protected, yet nonetheless itprovides some ten cases of illegal alloca-tions within KWS protected areas, and15 cases in KWS alienated plots besidethem. Furthermore, the Commission alsorecords 26 instances of illegal alloca-tions of land from Nature Reserves fall-ing under the domain of local authorities,whilst there are some 8 known cases ofland set aside for national museums andmonuments having been illegally allo-cated to private individuals. The latter

include the allocation of Kongo Mosquesite at Kwale to former President Moi in1986 (p. 169). It comes as no surprise thatland belonging to the military, and evenland portions belonging to State Housesand lodges, have also been sold off.

Against this catalogue of corruption, it isnot surprising that the Commission con-cludes that their has been systematic andwidespread abuse of public trust bypublic officials, to the extent that manyofficials now fail to see anything morallywrong with their allocating land ille-gally. There were many centres of powerwhich were responsible for the illegalallocation of land, yet the Commissionmakes it clear that the lead in publicplunder has consistently been givenfrom the top. Kenya, it concludes, hasfallen into a state of ‘moral decadence’,this epitomised no more clearly than bythe extensive participation in land grab-bing by churches, mosques, temples andother faith institutions, these includingsuch venerable institutions as the Catho-lic Archdiocese of Nairobi, the ChurchCommission of Kenya, and the AnglicanChurch (pp.182-3).

The Commission’sRecommendations

Whilst making a series of sensible recom-mendations concerning, inter alia, theneed for an inventory of public land andthe computerisation of land records, aswell as for a comprehensive land policy,the Commission also urges the establish-ment of a Land Titles Tribunal chargedwith reviewing each and every case ofsuspected illegal or irregular allocationof land, and hence embarking upon theprocess of revocation and rectification ofsuch titles.

Reference to the weighty Annexes indi-cate that revocation would be a formida-ble task. Its specific recommendations,by way of example, include the follow-ing: revocation of 105 plots allocatedfrom land reserved for the Nairobi by-



pass (Annex 3); of 551 allocations madeby the Nairobi City Council (Annex 5); 86allocations by Meru, 449 by Nakuru, 270by Eldoret, 100 by Nyeri, 186 by Kisumu,407 by Mombasa, 56 by Nyahururu, 67by Kiambu, 30 by Kisii, 17 by Kapsabet,187 by Kerugoya/Kutus and 118 byKitale Councils, with further dubiousallocations by all these councils also tobe investigated (Annexes 7-23). Numer-ous improperly documented allocationsof land by Kenya Railways should alsobe examined, whilst 229 allocations madeby the Kenya Agricultural Research In-stitute, 31 by Kenya Pipelines, 572 madeby Kenya Industrial Estates, and 178 bythe prison authorities should be revoked,as well as smaller numbers of plotsillegally allocated by other state corpora-tions. There should also be revocation oftitles of some 7 illegal allocations madeby the judiciary (!), 57 by the Ministry ofCooperative Development and Market-ing, 47 by the Ministry of Agriculture,289 by the Ministry of Education, 73 bythe Ministry of Labour and 22 by theMinistry of Energy (Annexes 41-49). TheCommission also provides lists ofthousads of houses which have beenillegally allocated throughout the coun-try, implying that title to these, too,should be revoked, as should those tohundreds of allocations of land made toindividuals and companies from forests,game parks and reserves etc which arelisted in Volume II of the Annexes.

Commentary

Some time ago, following Ajulu (1997)and Himbara (1994), I characterisedKenya as a kleptocracy characterised bya drive for primitive accumulation bythose who controlled the post-colonialstate, alongside the failure of an Africanbusiness class to promote industrialisa-tion and development. However, myprimary emphasis was upon financialand commercial corruption, and whilst Irecognised land-grabbing (especially bylocal councillors) as a phenomenon, Ifailed to appreciate how enormously

extensive the illegal appropriation ofpublic land was to the formation andconsolidation of Kenya’s political elite.In this regard, although less blinkeredobservers such as Jacqueline Klopp (2000)have written upon the issue, enormouscredit is due to the Ndungu Commissionfor the compilation of a truly formidablebody of documentation concerning land-grabbing. Yet what is lacking from itsanalysis, even if – strictly speaking – itmay have gone beyond its terms ofreference, is some assessment of whatland grabbing may have had upon theeconomy, and whether, in particular,land which was illegally appropriatedhas been put to productive use. In thisregard, no overall summary or analysishas been provided, even though, withregard to the majority of allocations, theCommission offers two columns whichlist, first, the officially intended use of theland, and in the second, its current use.Even so, even an unsystematic thumbingthrough the pages of the annexuressuggests that the overwhelming majorityof allocations have been utilised forresidential, commercial, industrial orbuilding purposes, even if the majority ofthe sites grabbed from the Kenya Agri-cultural Research Institute, whose presentuse is listed as ‘private’, may well havebeen transformed into private farms.

In this regard, the report has little to tellus about ‘the land issue’ in the sense ofour acquiring greater knowledge aboutthe overall distribution of land betweengovernment, ethnic groups, classes, andcorporations, let alone the extent to whichit has contributed to the eating away ofKenya’s already diminishing supply ofarable farming land. Furthermore, onlymore detailed analysis will be able to tellus how much land-grabbing has contrib-uted to the unregulated and under-serviced peri-urban sprawl which istoday such a visible feature of Kenya’sunfortunate development path.

I have two further concerns. One is that,perhaps through lack of time (the report

was compiled in just eighteen months),the Commission has left the slog ofidentifying the vast bulk of individualpolitical beneficiaries to other analysts.Yes, it makes mention at times of particu-lar allocations to key figures such as Moiand the Kenyattas, and it provides thenames of individual and corporate ben-eficiaries in its detailed charts of alloca-tions, whether by councils, corporationsor other bodies. Of course, this offers ahost of raw material for researchers topursue, enabling them to identify,through detailed cross-referencing toknown occupancies of political office,how particular MPs, councillors andcivil servants have benefited. Yet anuneasy suspicion remains that the Com-mission may well have pulled itspunches in this regard, and that it couldhave caused considerably greater embar-rassment to present political incumbentsthan it has done.

The second worry, of course, is that littlewill come of the Commission’s hardwork. Even though the Commission hasmade recommendations that many hun-dreds of land allocations should berevoked and investigated, there are notso many that a Land Commission withthe right political backing could not sit injudgement over process and appeals.However, given that NARC has ab-sorbed so many members of the formerKANU regime, it seems unlikely in theextreme that Kenya’s avaricious politi-cians, however much formally commit-ted to democracy, will be prepared tounscramble the egg. More probably –save perhaps for a few show caserevocations - they will want to draw aline under the past, and simply ordainthat no further transgressions should bepermitted, although even that aspirationseems unlikely to be realised given thecontinuing nature of Kenyan politics asethnically manipulated and patronagebased, especially if the Commission iscorrect in identifying illegal land alloca-tions as regularly increasing around thetime of competitive elections.

Professor Wangari Maathai was recentlyawarded the Nobel Peace Prize for hercontribution to sustainable developmentand democracy, notably out of respect forher work in mobilising local communi-ties to defend Kenya’s rapidly diminish-ing forests and to planting trees. TheNdungu Commission’s demonstrationof the extent to which illegal land alloca-tion is entangled with political officeindicates that, without a doubt, the primeresponsibility for defending remainingpublic land will continue to fall, willynilly, upon the shoulders of civil society.

Roger Southall, Democracy and Govern-ance, Human Sciences Research Coun-cil, South Africa; e-mail: [email protected]

Bibliographic Note

Ajulu R. (1998), ‘Kenya’s Democratic Ex-perience: the 1997 Elections’, Review of AfricanPolitical Economy, no. 76.

Brown, S. (2004), ‘Theorising Kenya’s ProtractedTransition to Democracy’, Journal of ContemporaryAfrican Studies, 22, 3.

Himbara, D. (1994), Kenyan Capitalists, the Stateand Development, Nairobi: East African Edu-cational Publishers.

Klopp, J. (2000), ‘Pilfering the Pubic: TheProblem of Land Grabbing in ContemporaryKenya’, Africa Today, 47, 1.

Southall, R. (1999), ‘Re-forming the State?Kleptocracy & the Political Transition in Kenya’,Review of African Political Economy, 79.


Ngugi Appeal,page 196


The Political Economy ofDanish Aid to Kenya,1998-2003

John Kirkby & Phil O’Keefe

In the summer 2003, an evaluation ofDanida’s rural development pro-gramme in Eastern and Coastal Prov-inces of Kenya took place.1 This externalevaluation, commissioned by Danida’sindependent evaluation service, wasunusual not least because each of thefive evaluation teams included Kenyaprofessionals as evaluators, a rare oc-currence despite the current level ofevaluation requirements.2 The evalua-tion covered the period from 1998 to2003.

In 2002 Danida spent DKK92 million onKenyan rural development. This is set torise to DKK150 million in 2005. Whatwas unusual was the political economyof the aid programme itself.

Transparency International rankedKenya towards the top of its globalcorruption index in 2002. Later that year,the Kenyan population overwhelminglyrejected the regime associated with Moithat was seen to be the seat of thecorruption. As of January 2005, therewere still strong claims, not least fromthe British High Commissioner, thatcorruption was still rife in Kenya. And,in early February, 2005, the man leadingthe anti-corruption effort in Kenya, JohnGithongo resigned while visiting Lon-don, claiming, among other things, thathis life was under threat.3

How do development agencies operateunder such a regime? At various timesthe World Bank and the IMF suspendedaid operations in Kenya. The Nether-lands Foreign Ministry closed downtheir Kenyan aid operation. The Britishand the Americans soldiered on, albeiton a smaller scale and with much breast

beating about good governance. TheDanes did it differently.

Danida, the Danish aid administration,responded to the growing corruption notby leaving Kenya but by bypassing cen-tral government structures to work inproject mode at district level. As such,Danida did not really follow its ownprogramme goals of poverty alleviationthrough support to central governmentprogrammes, but operated in effect asseries of model Non-Governmental Or-ganisations. It is difficult to judge theoverall impact on the total population ofEastern and Coastal Provinces where theprojects were undertaken. Projects wereundertaken in six sectors namely agri-culture, nutrition, health micro-enter-prise development, micro-finance androad building.

In agriculture the focus was on sustain-able management of soils, water, vegeta-tion and animal resources. BecauseEastern and Coastal Provinces fall largelyinto the semi-arid areas, the participa-tory planning processes used by Danidaled to a local demand for water projectsrather than the more traditional agricul-tural extension projects. There was areduction in poverty, helped by thestrengthened extension services particu-larly where they incorporated local ex-pertise, but, like most extension services,this was achieved by not addressing thepoorest of the poor. The major successeswere closer to the larger towns where theextension professionals lived.

The nutrition based programme aimed atreducing poverty and improving thenutritional status of children. It achievedmuch through its community based ac-tivities, because it directly targeted thevery poorest. In various forms, the nutri-tion programme, a direct outcome of thedroughts of the 1970s, was a successstory in terms of local pre-disaster plan-ning and community response but theproject was at the end of its life. Concernwas expressed that this loss of local

capacity, partly because of the centrali-sation (command and control) of disas-ter response following the bombings ofthe US Embassy and local hotels, wouldinevitably produce a weaker local re-sponse in future disasters. The 2004Kenya Flash Appeal, released by theUnited Nations Office for the Coordina-tion of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA),sought some US$96 million while notingthat there was little local capacity forimplementation.

The health sector projects were focused onfundamental reforms in health care deliv-ery. Planning and management have im-proved at all levels, and professionalswithin the hospital system think as aunified service. Beyond the hospital sys-tem, environmental health professionalswere largely excluded from the reformsalthough they are in the frontline incontrolling endemic and epidemic dis-ease. But beyond the professionals, therewas little evidence that user groups, wheresuch issues as prescription charges wereraised, had much contact with the profes-sionals. More broadly, attention will haveto be paid to the HIV/Aids issues and todeal with communicable disease andmalnutrition in a more holistic manner.Hospital and dispensary care is not suffi-cient to deliver rural health.

Micro-enterprise development andmicro-finance were seen as essentialefforts to bolster the informal sector that,along with rural road maintenance, isviewed as the only sector capable ofgenerating large-scale employment op-portunities in Kenya. As financialprojects, they were very much ‘Top-Down’ and principles of mutuality in-volving money proved difficult to ground.Most importantly, training and lendingwere not directly linked to the agricul-tural sector, a missed opportunity forinformal employment generation in alargely rural area. Many of the smallloans were in fact used for social repro-duction rather than supporting the de-velopment of micro-enterprises.

The roads project, set up to maintainexisting dirt roads in Coast Province,was a considerable success. Over 100road gangs, using labour based meth-ods, were trained, with over a third of theroad gangs led by women. Considerableprogress has been made towards a kindof privatisation that sees these gangs asbusinesses contracted to the state. Allinvolved commented on the positivesocial and economic impacts and high-lighted the importance of using labour-intensive methods and local labour togenerate sustainable road building solu-tions. The activities clearly showed thatnecessary skills exist in rural communi-ties for the communities themselves toorganise and maintain roads that areviewed as necessary arteries for localdevelopment. Why Danida decided torun down such a project is open toquestion although the approach hassince been championed by the WorldBank.

Danida chose to remain as a develop-ment actor in Kenya when other bilateraland multilateral agencies withdrew. Thiscommitment to continuity should bewidely applauded, especially the diffi-cult political negotiation to link to pro-vincial and district level structures. Theemphasis on participatory planning, anemphasis that included both rights andresponsibilities, give the better projectsreal beneficiary ownership not least be-cause they demanded ownership in re-turn for cost sharing. Poverty was notdirectly addressed except in the nutri-tion project and the poorest were notreally given access to professionally de-livered services. Gender was stronglyaddressed and women were found to bethe best organisers and managers oflocal funds and their manual labour wasvaluable. There was a highly visibleKenyan management to all projects clearlyshowing capacity to address rural devel-opment.

Working in project mode, Danida cre-ated strong project boundaries, which

The Political Economy of Danish Aid to Kenya 153


put limits on interventions and madecross-sectoral approaches difficult. Butstrong boundaries made targeting easierand thus generated much success withinprojects. On the bottom line, however,this created Danida, not Kenyan, institu-tional capacity. In responding to theevaluation, Danida noted that:

The conclusion stating that it was acorrect assessment to keep Kenya as aDanida programme country despite coop-eration difficulties with the former gov-ernment is a welcome recognition of adifficult political decision taken undercomplicated circumstances.4

It notes Danida’s future commitments toarid and semi-arid land programmeswith an emphasis on health and agricul-ture, a new push on water provision andcross-sectoral attention to HIV/Aids.

The Danish reaction to bad governanceand corruption in Kenya in the 1990scontrasts markedly with that of Norwaywhich was openly critical about thedeteriorating human rights situation.Kenya severed diplomatic ties with Nor-way in 1991. While praise is due for theDanish response it stands in stark con-trast to the reaction from Denmark tosimilar situations in Malawi, Eritrea andZimbabwe.5

John Kirkby & Phil O’Keefe, Division ofEnvironmental Management, School ofApplied Sciences, Northumbria Univer-sity, NE1 8ST, UK; e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected].

Endnotes

1. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Danida; ‘Projectsin Makueni and Taita Taveta Districts, Kenya.Evaluation 2004/4’, Copenhagen. Hard copieswhich are free, can be obtained by contacting theDanish State Information Centre at http://danida/netboghandel.dk/. The evaluationcontains a synthesis report, five sectoral reportsand a GIS analysis. The evaluation can be directlydownloaded from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’homepage www.um.dk or the Evaluation

Department’s homepage at www. Evaluation.dk.

2. A copy of a film ‘Postcards from Kenya’,containing interviews with Kenyan professionalsand beneficiaries, parallels the formal evaluation;copies are obtainable from ETC UK, 117, NorfolkStreet. North Shields, NE30 1NQ, UK.

3. ‘Corruption in Kenya: Feet of Clay’, Economist,.London, 12 February 2005.

4. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Danida; ‘Summaryof Evaluation: Danida’s Comments’, Copen-hagen., October 2004.

5. ‘Danida Experiment: Denmark Applaudedfor Remaining in Kenya in Times of Trouble’,Development Today, 17 November 2004.

Occupied Western Sahara:Campaign to End Kerr-McGee’s Involvement

Richard Knight

Western Sahara Resource Watch, repre-senting organisations in 20 countries,announced today (28 February 2005) inOslo a campaign against the US energycompany Kerr-McGee (KMG). This Okla-homa City-based corporation is involvedin the illegal, unethical and politicallycontroversial plundering of hydrocar-bons in the Moroccan occupied areas ofWestern Sahara. Morocco has illegallyoccupied Western Sahara since 1975 andthe people of the territory, led by Polisario,are struggling for self-determination andindependence. Kerr-McGee has beenexploring for oil and gas in the territorialwaters of Western Sahara since 2001under licence from the Moroccan stateoil company, ONAREP. Today, the inter-national solidarity movement for West-ern Sahara started contacting thecompany’s 600 biggest shareholders, de-manding that action be taken to preventthe company from renewing the contractthat is set to expire 1 May.

Western Sahara is Africa’s last colony.Formerly a colony of Spain, in May 1975a UN mission determined that the peopleof Western Sahara overwhelmingly sup-ported the liberation movement Polisarioand were categorically for independenceand against integration of the territoryinto Morocco. In mid-October of that yearthe International Court of Justice ruledthat the people of Western Sahara havethe right to self-determination includingindependence. Morocco rejected theCourt’s ruling and invaded the territoryin the first days November, forcing amajority of the population into refugeecamps in Algeria. Morocco has refusedto implement a 1991 UN peace plan inwhich a referendum would allow thepeople of Western Sahara to choosebetween independence and integrationinto Morocco. The UN Legal Councilsays that Western Sahara is a non-self-governing territory and that exploitationof the territory’s hydrocarbons would beillegal. According to Richard Knight, amember of the Association of ConcernedAfrica Scholars and spokesperson ofWestern Sahara Resource Watch:

It is remarkable that Kerr-McGee doesstill not understand the political, legal andhumanitarian dimensions of the catastro-phe they are inflicting to the Sahrawipeople. For three years, the company hasrefused to listen to our arguments. Nowwe hope to get some assistance from theirshareholders.

The campaign requests the shareholdersto play a role as active investors, influ-encing KMG not to renew its contract on1 May 2005. If the constructive share-holder pressure does not succeed inchanging the KMG policy, the campaigndemands the investors to divest. So far, aNorwegian and a Dutch seismic surveycompany have decided to not continuethe activities in Western Sahara due tothe political implications of the con-tracts. This happened as a consequenceof active shareholder ownership anddozens of sell-outs over the last years.

Also a Danish and a French companyhave left the area, making Kerr-McGeethe only foreign company remaining inthe Western Sahara.

One major investor has already divestedfrom Kerr-McGee – the Norwegian fundadministrator Skagenfondene has soldits 100.000 shares, taking a US$2 millionloss. Due to the massive negative atten-tion on Kerr-McGee’s activities in theoccupied territories, they regarded theshares as too risky. Now the govern-ment-owned Norwegian Petroleum Fundis considering if it should sell its shares,estimated to be worth over $7 million.

The campaign against Kerr-McGee haslead to an impressive mobilisation world-wide. Today, 19 organisations on fourcontinents have all started contactingtheir respective Kerr-McGee sharehold-ers simultaneously. Last month, we con-tacted all screening agencies in the world,explaining them the nature of the con-tract, urging them to recommend theirclients to sell. Now contacting the share-holders is a natural second step in ourstrategy (Liesbeth den Haan of theNetherlands Foundation for the Rightto Self-Determination for the SahrawiPeople).

No country recognises Morocco’s sover-eignty over Western Sahara. ThePolisario-formed government in exile, afounding member of the African Unionwhich is recognised by 70 countriesincluding South Africa, has heavily con-demned the Kerr-McGee contract. Ac-cording Jacob Mundy founder of Friendsof Western Sahara:

Morocco’s planned theft of Western Saha-ra’s hydrocarbons is immoral and illegal.Since Kerr-McGee signed the reconnais-sance contract with ONAREP in 2001,Morocco has stalled the UN-supportedpeace process. Morocco has even rejected agenerous plan put forward by former USSecretary of State James Baker. Kerr-McGee’s activities have already blocked

Occupied Western Sahara: Campaign to End Kerr-McGee’s Involvement 155


the peace efforts and contributed to risingtension in the region. If Kerr-McGeecontinues, there are definitely possibilitiesof taking legal actions against the com-pany, and we strongly urge Kerr-McGeeto not renew their contract. We are verysure that our measures will make Kerr-McGee withdraw, as the last company inthe industry still operating in WesternSahara. The question is how and when.

For further information, or to receive a full versionof the shareholder letter, please contact RichardKnight (New York, USA) tel (+1) [email protected]; Jacob Mundy (Seattle, USA)tel (+1) 206-329-1341 [email protected]; Tom March-banks, Western SaharaCampaign (UK) tel (+44) [email protected] or Liesbeth den Haan(Holland), tel (+31) 610858899, e-mailst.zelfbeschikkingwest-sahara@planet. nl. Thecampaign is coordinated by the newly foundedWestern Sahara Resource Watch. WSRW is anetwork of organisations that work to preservethe natural resources in Western Sahara for theusage of its people, inasmuch as their sovereigntyover those resources is a right with erga omnescharacter enshrined in several UN resolutionsand human rights documents. (www. friendsofwesternsahara.org).

ZANU-PF & the Ghosts ofForeign FundingDavid Moore

The Zimbabwe African National Un-ion-Patriotic Front’s NGO Act, promis-ing to severely curtail the activities ofcivil society groups with a whiff ofhuman rights or governance activitiesand ban foreign support for them, raiseshistorical questions about ZANU-PF’sown path to power. A long history of‘international nationalism’ is obliter-ated by the latest manifestation of ‘weare our own liberators.’ The archivesreveal a complex layer of links betweenZimbabwe’s nationalists and imperial-ists of both innocent and interestedhues.

At the end of 2004 the Zimbabwe AfricanNational Union-Patriotic Front passedthe ‘Non-Governmental Organisation’sBill’ through Zimbabwe’s parliament. Itbans the foreign funding, and thus se-verely curtails the activities of, civilsociety groups involved in anythingremotely approaching human rights orgovernance activities (funds from thedirect arms of states, such as USAID andDFID – not to mention the IMF and theWorld Bank, which ZANU-PF hopeswill come back, coins in hand – will notbe stopped). 1 The bill imposes a state-appointed board of trustees over NGOsranging from soccer clubs to HIV-AIDSadvisory bodies. Zimbabweans abroad –estimated in some documents to reach25% of the population – will be includedamong those foreigners and imperial-ists.2 The bill was passed in spite of thefact that the parliamentary legal reviewcommittee reported that it violated theconstitution on twelve counts. The reportcondemned it as

a cynical and comprehensive attack on therights of the people to organise themselvesin the promotion, protection, defence andadvancement of their freedoms and liber-ties. It is a calculated attempt to all butextinguish just about all the rights andliberties contained in the constitution.3

Such legislation raises historical andhypothetical questions. Those familiarwith the history of the Zimbabweanliberation war remember the extensiveinternational support given to the na-tionalist movement in its various partypolitical manifestations. They know thatboth ‘imperialists’ and ‘critical cosmo-politans’4 assisted and influenced mostof these actors to some degree or another.Yet precise relationships and condition-ing patterns have not been documentedor delineated.5

At the conjectural level, one is driven towonder: why is Zimbabwe’s contempo-rary ruling party so concerned – para-noid might be the appropriate label,

considering how ‘patriotism’ has trans-mogrified so quickly from nationalisminto fear and loathing6 – with ‘imperial-ist machinations’ now? The easy answeris because ZANU-PF believes the oppo-sition – in which it collapses the Move-ment for Democratic Change and a‘hit-list’ of politically involved civil soci-ety groups including the Zimbabwe CivilEducation Trust, Zimbabwe ElectionSupport Network, Combined HarareResidents Association, Crisis in Zimba-bwe, Humanistic Institute of Develop-ment Co-operation with DevelopingCountries, National Constitutional As-sembly, Media Institute of Southern Af-rica, Zimbabwe Liberators Platform (agroup of ex-combatants who believe theso-called ‘war vets’ who invaded landare neither genuine nor true to the legacyof the liberation war), Zimbabwe Law-yers for Human Rights, Amani Trust,Zimbabwe NGO Human Rights Forum,Bulawayo Agenda and Women of Zim-babwe Arise,7 which it will target first –will be strangled without external sup-port. Suffocation is necessary before theMarch 2005 parliamentary elections. Re-sorting to an Africa-centrism born on theshores of receding sovereignty ZANU-PF ideologues claim all these organisa-tions are totting up their accounts ofmurder and torture and educating peo-ple on the arcane mysteries of multipartydemocracy in the interests of the Blair-Bush imperialist conspiracy. It all worksto the benefit of the party of tea-drinkers8

and lackeys, which must be destroyed ifZimbabwe is to retake its destiny into itsown hands. ZANU-PF liberated Zimba-bwe on its own, it says: so should itschallengers.

A more complex answer entails burrow-ing deeper into history, however, andmelding the conjectural and the histori-cal. ZANU-PF itself may be haunted bythe ghosts of foreign funding. The partythat championed the call ‘we are ourown liberators’ when it ostensibly pulleditself away from the globe-trotting JoshuaNkomo with his multi-racialism and

begging-bowl tactics may be havingnightmares about its own historical rela-tionships with liberals and imperialists.This briefing demonstrates evidence thatcould be the cause of sleepless nights forthose in power under auspices otherthan their own. Such data helps explainthe vitriol accompanying a history ofhypocrisy.

International Nationalism,Imperialist States

The roots of anti-imperialism’s humour-less hypocrisy lay in its untruth. Themyth of self-liberation ignores scores ofchurches’ support (they are in this legis-lation’s sites too, if straying too close toCaeser’s domain). It downplays statesranging from their neighbours such asZambia, Tanzania and Mozambique(where freedom fighters were domiciled,trained and, if they got too precocious,imprisoned) to the Swedes, Chinese,Soviets and even some of the manyguises of Britain and the United States. Itsidelines big NGOs such as AmnestyInternational. It ignores the impromptuZimbabwe Detainees’ Defence Commit-tee, which lobbied in the mid-1970s forthe ZANU leaders jailed in Lusaka forallegedly assassinating their chairman,Herbert Chitepo.9

The illusion of autonomous liberationfor Zimbabweans is both less than amyth and more than a lie: such autarkywas (and still is, of course) impossible.Timothy Scarnecchia’s work10 showsnone other than Robert Mugabe as themaster dialectician of the myth-lie. Hewas keenly aware of the dexterousmanoeuvrings necessitated by the poli-tics of ‘international nationalism’11 at itsadvent in the early sixties. Scarnecchia’sarchival digging reveals the Salisburybased American consul-general’s reporton an interview with Mugabe about thevexed relationship between the tradeunions and the nationalists and foreignfunding. Mugabe acknowledges in theinterview that:

ZANU-PF & the Ghosts of Foreign Funding 157


African political or labor movements inthis country cannot stand on their ownwithout financial backing from some ex-ternal source … however … [one mustbe] capable of ‘riding the tiger’ without‘ending inside.’

Aside from the psycho-historicalresonances of the parallel with GodfreyHuggins’ image of the partnership be-tween horse and rider, for which liberalRhodesians are remembered, such anadmission is an adroit recognition of thedependence of all ‘third world’ societieson the crumbs from western tables. To-day’s discourse does not replicate suchfrankness. It would be better for it, be-cause its importance lies not in theconfession of the emptiness of a sloganabout ‘self-reliance’ but in the questionof the balance between state-to-state ‘in-tervention’ and sovereignty (or sover-eignty in the making) and the relationsbetween members of global civil societyand their subalterns on the periphery ofglobal capitalism. There was no dis-course of ‘global civil society’ in thesixties and seventies, but this nascentsocial formation helped ZANU – par-ticularly some of its leaders – reach thepinnacle of power. Many state agencieswere even more important. Into the equa-tion must go the fact that there are nosuch things as ‘puppets’: al Qaeda’sblowback is lesson enough about howimperialist hubris quickly sours. As onelong-time participant in Zimbabwe’s vari-ous struggles said about Mugabe ‘it isironic that the man the USA created isnow considered to be a ‘rogue’.’12 It is notforeign funding per se at issue, but itseffects, including the psychological onesof relying on assistance for ‘liberation’from such paternalistic relations. Label-ling its recipients as on the strings oftheir masters is not enough, because ifone goes back far enough, the strings willalways be there. Perhaps only theirelasticity is at issue.

The length of these cords (rememberLenin’s optimistic line that the bourgeoi-

sie – and it could be a global entity! –might hang itself with its own rope) isrevealed in the Foreign and Common-wealth Office files in London’s NationalArchives.13 There is a telegram in thesefiles from the FCO to Accra, sent on 9November 1967. It reads, (in upper case):‘Mrs. Sarah F. Mugabe, Ghanaian bornwife of Robert Mugabe, Secretary Gen-eral of Z.A.N.U., has been invited to visitBritain by the Ariel Foundation. She is todo a year’s secretarial course, and Arielundertake to be responsible for her finan-cially.’ It continues to say that Mrs.Mugabe could not get an entry permituntil she got a letter from Ariel confirm-ing its support. ‘In view of short noticeAriel who are well known to us hasasked for our help. Please take thistelegram as the confirmation required.’Scribbles above the body of the telegramread ‘Eric, were you consulted abt. this?’Underneath there is a flurry: ‘Would youwish to have this on one of your files? Ifnot, it can be destroyed,’ and, in anotherhand, ‘can we now destroy?’ A largescrawl taking up about a fifth of thewhole page notes: ‘Mr. Reiss of IRDdespatched this tel. It was not clearedwith us. Ariel decided on their owninitiative to help Mrs. Mugabe.’14

What was the Ariel Foundation? StephenDorril’s account of British intelligenceactivities informs us that it was a CIA-front, rooted in the halcyon days ofLabour Party student activity on theinternational battle-ground between so-cial democracy and its challenges fromthe Soviet Union. Dennis Grennan is onename that sticks out in respect to theMugabe family: Grennan was an earlyconduit of American benevolence to theolder but poorer imperialists across theAtlantic.15 In his adult years he was anadvisor to the British Foreign Secretary.He hosted Robert Mugabe in the UKwhile the latter was climbing up the poleto ZANU-PF’s leadership in 1976. Theirrelationship has been described as ‘long-standing.’16 Who were liberating our-selves?

A few files further on in the archives,there is a letter from the British Embassyin Washington reporting on an earliervisit of the party chairman, HerbertChitepo.17 It reads, in understated lowercase type, that although the Africanbureau at the State Department was‘somewhat reticent’ about the not-yet-Maoist chairman’s trip, ‘we have it ongood authority that he came on a UnitedState’s Government grant.’ Apparentlyhe ‘pressed strongly for more activeAmerican support of ZANU [emphasismine].’ The Americans told the Britishthat if the west did not support the newparty on the block ‘the Russians willestablish control over them.’ Thus ‘wesuspect … the State Department (nodoubt in conjunction with CIA) are con-sidering’ Mr. Chitepo’s request. The let-ter went on to say:

the State Department regard Chitepo asone of the more competent and articulateRhodesian Africans in exile [but] admit-ted to … having been slightly disap-pointed with him – he made a goodsuperficial impression, but there did notseem to be much substance underneath.… [He] presented his case in relativelyrestrained terms [to liberal Congressmen]… in contrast to his performance at therather strange meeting in a Chineserestaurant.

The lesson for those dancing for foreignassistance might be to avoid Chineserestaurants. For those paying prospec-tive puppets, it might be that such experi-ences turn potential clients to Maoism.

Nearly a decade after Mr. Chitepo wentto Washington, the spouse of one of themen accused of assassinating him re-ceived a letter from the CommonwealthSecretariat in Marlborough House. Itwas in response to information handedon by a Mrs. Beryl McGovern of theUnited Nations Development Programmethat Mutukudzi Mudzi, after havingspent more than a year in prison (he wasreleased after the case was closed18),

wanted to re-enter the University ofZambia. The letter advised her that theSecretariat ‘would be very pleased tocontinue his award under the Common-wealth Rhodesian Scholarship TrustFund’ and asked her to make sure thatthe University sent a statement of his feesdirectly to London. It was copied to anIgnatius Chigwendere of the Commis-sion for Racial Justice in London.19

The British state’s thirty year rule hasslowed down the process of tracingrecent history, and thus more cats havenot come out of the hat on the relation-ship between states, their multilateralinternational representations, and theaspirants to the club.20 How would theycompare with the links alleged by ZANU-PF between the MDC and its ‘masters?’

Innocent NGOs

Of course, foreign funding is not juststate-to-state-class-in-the-making, andZANU-PF is well aware of that fact. Thusits well-trod discourse of the complicitybetween human rights oriented NGOsand imperialism’s pernicious desires. Itstheory on this collusion could rest on anempirical history of how this cog in theimperialist machine assisted today’s rul-ing party in the past. A 1971 letter to theFCO from Amnesty International, anNGO ZANU-PF pretends to hate, illus-trated the multi-layered dynamic thatZimbabwe’s leaders know so well andwould like to stop now. This note, writ-ten during the Pearce Commission’s1971 efforts to sound out African opin-ions about a new constitutional twist(and led to the ‘blowback’ of BishopMuzorewa and the United African Na-tional Council), ‘repeats’ a previous prom-ise of ‘airfare and all other possibleassistance to Messrs. Malowa, Manyongaand Zvobgo’ [the recently deceasedEddison, long time and iconoclastic Min-ister of Justice and Parliamentary Affairs]who, along with Lazaurus Nkala,21 JoshuaNkomo, and Daniel Madzim-bamuto,promised to leave the country so ‘could



hardly pose a threat to the security of theRhodesian state.’ Indeed, wrote AI corre-spondent John Humphries, the Rhode-sians seemed to be accepting the goodsense of such a policy, as they hadallowed a Herbert Musikavanhu to takeup the good graces of a British TechnicalAssistance Grant to study at Gray’s Inn.22

A few years later, a man kept underrestriction by the Mozambicans for jump-ing ZANU’s leadership queue was alsobusy typing letters. They rest in the Catho-lic Institute of International Relations’archives. The CIIR may be poised on theedge of NGO status, given that its patronhas embassies around the world, butthese theoretical niceties simply indicatedthe fuzziness of the notion of ‘global civilsociety,’ especially when the church en-ters the picture. In any case, the CIIR has along history of committed support toZimbabweans’ causes.23 In the mid-1970s,it played host to the impromptu committeestruck to defend those previously referredto in Lusaka’s busy jails. It appears also tohave offered succour to the Commissionfor Racial Justice, headed by the sameIgnatius Chigwendere (albeit with differ-ent spellings of his last name) who wascopied letters from the CommonwealthSecretariat.24

Chigwendere was the recipient of a letteraddressed from Quelimane on 11 June1976. While the author was underMozambican house arrest and decidinghow to convince the radical young guer-rillas that he was better than the othermembers of the old guard he was usurp-ing,25 Robert Mugabe wrote to the direc-tor of the Commission on Racial Justice.Mugabe apologised for having ‘con-cluded that you were the Chigwederereferred to in the mention of the Co-ordinating Committee composition,’ andthen asked him to ‘get persons of goodwill interested in extending assistance toour cause … assistance of a non-militarytype such as clothing, medical suppliesand office equipment (type-writers, du-plicators, etc.) … [and] blankets’ for the

huge influx of recruits arriving in Mo-zambique. ‘This is just as important asbeing in the front-line firing a gun. Wehave to sustain the man who is doing thefighting in front of us!’

Across the Atlantic

Meanwhile in San Francisco, a freeEddison Jonas Mudadirwa Zvobgo wasreviving ZANU’s post-Chitepo reputa-tion by publishing a new ZimbabweNews series.26 Archived by the HooverInstitute’s revolution-watchers, it con-tains ‘Comrades Robert & Sally Mugabe,Edgar & Anne Ruvimbo Tekere’s’ re-quest for foreign currency so Mozam-bique’s – the ‘host government’s’ – textilefactories could make uniforms for Zim-babwe’s freedom fighters, and assist-ance in compiling a list of drugs from a‘doctor with tropical medicine experi-ence.’ Donations for ‘educational pur-poses’ were solicited, too, best left in‘money form’ until the ‘Camps Educa-tional Advisory Committee’ was estab-lished.27

The Pacific Coast propaganda also cel-ebrated the arrival of a new militaryforce, uniting ZANU’s and ZAPU’s ar-mies. Zvobgo was not sure if ‘ZILA’ wasthe Zimbabwean African LiberationArmy or the Zimbabwean United Libera-tion Army (it was actually ZIPA, theZimbabwean People’s Army), but hecelebrated it for removing NdabaningiSithole from ZANU’s presidency andreviving the struggle to its ‘full swing.’28

He printed its long list of needs for the180 schools it hoped to build in Zimba-bwe’s liberated areas. It included, amongmuch else, 180 microscopes and type-writers, 5,000 boxes of cycolstyling sten-cils (‘we expect to produce most of ourown textbooks’), 2,400 blackboards, and‘the Heinemann’s African Writers Seriesin multiple copies.’ Secretary for FinanceZimbabwe United Liberation Army SaulSadza’s list was much more inclusivethan Mugabe-Tekere’s. Perhaps that isone reason why the young militants

were removed from the scene by thereinvented old guard – with the assist-ance of their Mozambican hosts – just ayear after the ostensible publication ofCalifornia’s Zimbabwe News.

It seems that the men who wrote andpublished such letters know the role ofwell-meaning foreigners (to quote Leninonce again, ‘useful idiots?’) in the battleto unseat authoritarian power-mongers:thus the current legislation to eliminatethis source of support for those continu-ing that struggle. There are differences,though. This time, the opposition isinside Zimbabwe, not poised on itsborders, and it consists of a much widerband of working people and intellectu-als. To date, these bearers of liberation’sreignited torch have not had to rely toomuch on the men – and children – ‘doingthe fighting in front of us.’

To be sure, they and their allies all overthe world will be able to break thesanctions imposed by a new NGO Bill.But their struggles will be much moreconstrained, and the legislation willenable the ruling party to single out itsmost persistent enemies. Hopefully thiswill not mean that the new oppositionwill have to move to the strategies ofthose trying to contain the democraticspace they are expanding so assidu-ously. Assuredly, no one will believe thejustification for such repressive legisla-tion. They should, however, worry aboutthe dependence syndrome of which theaid and the authoritarianism are compo-nent parts.29 Perhaps, too, they shouldnote that the Council meant to govern theNGO Act is eligible for foreign funding.30

David Moore, [email protected]

*This briefing was read at the African StudiesAssociation of Australasia and the PacificAnnual Meeting, University of Western Australiain Perth, November 26-28, 2004. A short versionis ‘Unmasking Zanu PF hypocrisy about NGOs,’Zimbabwe Independent, October 29, 2004.Thanks to Steve Kibble at the CIIR for archival

access, to David Blake, Librarian at theCommonwealth Secretariat and to the Britishtaxpayers for the National Archives and itshelpful workers at Kew Gardens. I am gratefulalso to Stanford’s Hoover Institute librariansand archivists, who belie their employer’sconservative reputation. The hospitality of thePolitics Discipline at the University of Adelaidein Australia assisted the completion of this paper.

Endnotes

1. Jan Raath, ‘Mugabe Bans Human RightsGroups’, The Times, 18 November 2004.

2. Solidarity Peace Trust, ‘No War in Zimbabwe:An Account of the Exodus of a Nation’s People’,November 2004.

3. Report of the Parliamentary Legal Committeeon the Non-Governmental Organisations Bill,2004, [H.B. 13, 2004], Parliament, Harare,Zimbabwe, p. 1.

4. A. Bartholomew & J. Breakspear, ‘HumanRights as Swords of Empire’, C. Leys & L.Panitch, (eds), Socialist Register 2004: The NewImperialism,, London: Merlin Press, p. 132.

5. Patricia Appavoo, “The small state as donor:Canadian and Swedish development assistancepolicies, 1960-1976,” PhD Thesis, University ofToronto, 1989 charts Canadian and Scan-dinavian state aid to southern African liberationmovements rather than between members ofglobal civil society and the transitory categoriesof activists (i.e. from non-state to state).

6. Terrence Ranger, ‘Nationalist Historio-graphy,Patriotic History and the History of the Nation:the Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe’, Journalof Southern African Studies, 30, 2 (June 2004), pp.215-234.

7. Godfrey Marawanyika, ‘NGOs get 6-monthreprieve’, Zimbabwe Independent, 26 November2004.

8. The notion of ‘tea-drinkers’ in Zimbabweanhistory is ironic, given that the many of theAfrican members of the Capricorn Society – amulti-racial group organized by Europeanliberals to ensure the black élite would not takethe communist path – who subsequently joinedthe nationalist movement and ZANU werecondemned as ‘tea-drinkers’ by their moremilitant precursors.

9. The Catholic Institute for InternationalRelations archives, in London, contain thiscommittee’s correspondence. Members includedKees Maxey, Judith Acton (Todd) and LionelCliffe among others: ‘Anonymous Chelmsford’donated £600 to its appeal. See Luise White(2003), The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Text



and Politics in Zimbabwe, Bloomington, CapeTown/Harare: Indiana University Press, DoubleStorey/Weaver), for a discursive analysis of theversions on Chitepo’s untimely demise.

10. Timothy Scarnecchia, ‘“Imperialist Stooge”versus “Communist Puppet”: Defining a Selloutin Zimbabwean Nationalist Politics, 1961-1963’,African Studies Association Annual Meeting,Boston, 31 October 2003.

11. John Day (1967), International Nationalism:The Extraterritorial Relations of Southern RhodesianAfrican Nationalists, London: Routledge and KeganPaul,

12. Interview, Harare, September 2004.

13. National Archives, Public Records Office.Rhodesia: Political Affairs, Internal: Zanu Party.FCO 36/14 RPI/13. Secret.

14. Cypher/Cat A: Immediate CommonwealthOffice to Accra. Telno 1351. 9 November 1967 (IR5/7/-), Confidential.

15. Stephen Dorril (2000), MI6: Inside the CovertWorld of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service,New York: The Free Press, pp. 475, 722.

16. David Smith & Colin Simpson (1981), Mugabe,Salisbury: Pioneer Head, p. 94; Africa Confidential,27 August 1976.

17. Confidential and Guard (1030/11) BritishEmbassy, Washington, DC, 29 March, 1967.

18. Luise White, The Assassination … .

19. Commonwealth Secretariat Library, Marl-borough House. RA (8) 287. 7 December 1976.

20. The Freedom of Information Act, implementedin 2005, should improve matters for contemporaryhistorians and political researchers.

21. His daughter Irene was assisted in her nursingstudies by Amnesty International, as attested bya letter of 27 August 1971, asking the FCO tofacilitate the processing of a British passport soshe could get to the UK through Pretoria. An FCOtelegram to Pretoria a few days later confirmedthat ‘entry facilities [were] issued 16 August andposted to applicant next day.’ National Archives,Public Records Office, FCO 36/766, Policy andActivities of Amnesty International in Relation toRhodesia: demand for release of political pensionsand detainees, 1968-1971, files 26 and 28.

22. National Archives, Public Records Office, FCO36/766, Policy and Activities of AmnestyInternational in Relation to Rhodesia: demand forrelease of political pensions and detainees, 1968-1971, file 23.

23. The CIIR is well-known for its series FromRhodesia to Zimbabwe, on which it worked with thePatriotic Front manpower initiative, published in

1978-80. It included Roger Riddell’s ‘Alternativeto Poverty and The Land Question’, DuncanClarke’s ‘The Unemployment Crisis’, ColinStoneman’s ‘Skilled Labour and Future Needs’,Rob Davies’ ‘The Informal Sector’, and MichaelBratton’s ‘Beyond Community Develop-ment in1978’, John Gilmurray, Roger Riddell, and DavidSanders’ ‘The Struggle for Health’ and VincentTickner’s ‘The Food Problem in 1979’, and RogerRiddell’s ‘Education for Employment in 1980’.There have been discussions on developing a seriesalong the same lines for the current moment. Foran excellent example of the CIIR’s current workand continued commitment, see Lloyd Sachi-konye (2003), The Situation of Commercial FarmWorkers after Land Reform in Zimbabwe, Harare/London: Farm Community Trust of Zimbabweand Catholic Institute for International Relations.

24. It is spelled Chingwendere and Chigwedere invarious letters.

25. David Moore, ‘Democracy, Violence andIdentity in the Zimbabwean War of NationalLiberation: Reflections from the Realms ofDissent’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 29,3(December 1995), 375-402.

26. The post-Chitepo assassination turmoil inZANU is reflected in the revised bibliographicdetails of Zimbabwe News, The San Franciscoedition, dated January/ May 1976, is labelled thefirst but in fact was preceded by many issues.

27. ‘Comrades Robert & Sally Mugabe, Edgar &Anne Ruvimbo Tekere Send Their Greetings ToAll ZANU Members and Supporters Around theWorld,’ Zimbabwe News, 1, 1, (January/May 1976),San Francisco, pp. 39, 41.

28. Eddison Jonas Mudadirwa Zvobgo, ‘SPECIALFEATURE: The Armed Struggle ZILA In FullBloom And In Full Swing,’ Zimbabwe News, 1, 1,(January/May 1976), San Francisco, pp. 28-30.

29. Alex de Waal (1997), Famine Crimes: Politicsand the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa, Oxford:James Currey, for thought-provoking questionson the relationship of aid, sovereignty anddemocracy, to which my ‘Humanitarian Agendas,State Reconstruction, and Demo-cratisationProcesses in Wartorn Societies,’ UNHCR Policyand Evaluation Unit, Working Paper 24, June2000, is a feeble response.

30. Report of the Parliamentary Legal Committeeon the Non-Governmental Organisations Bill,2004, [H.B. 13, 2004], Parliament, Harare,Zimbabwe, p. 16.

�

Who? The World TradeOrganizationGlobal Exchange

The WTO Is FundamentallyUndemocratic

The policies of the WTO impact allaspects of society and the planet, but itis not a democratic, transparent institu-tion. The WTO rules are written by andfor corporations with inside access tothe negotiations. For example, the USTrade Representative gets heavy inputfor negotiations from 17 ‘Industry Sec-tor Advisory Committees.’ Citizen inputby consumer, environmental, humanrights and labor organizations is con-sistently ignored. Even simple requestsfor information are denied, and theproceedings are held in secret. Whoelected this secret global government?

The WTO Will Not Make UsSafer

The WTO would like you to believe thatcreating a world of ‘free trade’ will pro-mote global understanding and peace. Onthe contrary, the domination of interna-tional trade by rich countries for thebenefit of their individual interests fuelsanger and resentment that make us lesssafe. To build real global security, we needinternational agreements that respect peo-ple’s rights to democracy and trade sys-tems that promote global justice.

The WTO Tramples Labor &Human Rights

WTO rules put the ‘rights’ of corpora-tions to profit over human and laborrights. The WTO encourages a ‘race tothe bottom’ in wages by pitting workersagainst each other rather than promot-ing internationally recognized laborstandards. The WTO has ruled that it isillegal for a government to ban a productbased on the way it is produced, such as

with child labor. It has also ruled thatgovernments cannot take into account‘non commercial values’ such as humanrights, or the behavior of companies thatdo business with vicious dictatorshipssuch as Burma when making purchas-ing decisions.

The WTO Would PrivatizeEssential Services

The WTO is seeking to privatize essen-tial public services such as education,health care, energy and water. Privatiza-tion means the selling off of public assets– such as radio airwaves or schools – toprivate (usually foreign) corporations, torun for profit rather than the public good.The WTO’s General Agreement on Tradein Services, or GATS, includes a list ofabout 160 threatened services includingelder and child care, sewage, garbage,park maintenance, telecommunications,construction, banking, insurance, trans-portation, shipping, postal services, andtourism. In some countries, privatizationis already occurring. Those least able topay for vital services - working classcommunities and communities of color –are the ones who suffer the most.

The WTO Is Destroying theEnvironment

The WTO is being used by corporationsto dismantle hard-won local and na-tional environmental protections, whichare attacked as ‘barriers to trade’. Thevery first WTO panel ruled that a provi-sion of the US Clean Air Act, requiringboth domestic and foreign producersalike to produce cleaner gasoline, wasillegal. The WTO declared illegal a provi-sion of the Endangered Species Act thatrequires shrimp sold in the US to becaught with an inexpensive device al-lowing endangered sea turtles to escape.The WTO is attempting to deregulateindustries including logging, fishing,water utilities, and energy distribution,which will lead to further exploitation ofthese natural resources.

Who? The World Trade Organization 163


The WTO Is Killing People

The WTO’s fierce defense of ‘Trade Re-lated Intellectual Property’ rights (TRIPs)– patents, copyrights and trademarks –comes at the expense of health andhuman lives. The WTO has protected forpharmaceutical companies’ ‘right toprofit’ against governments seeking toprotect their people’s health by provid-ing lifesaving medicines in countries inareas like sub-saharan Africa, wherethousands die every day from HIV/AIDS. Developing countries won an im-portant victory in 2001 when they af-firmed the right to produce generic drugs(or import them if they lacked productioncapacity), so that they could provideessential lifesaving medicines to theirpopulations less expensively. Unfortu-nately, in September 2003, many newconditions were agreed to that will makeit more difficult for countries to producethose drugs. Once again, the WTO dem-onstrates that it favors corporate profitover saving human lives.

The WTO Is IncreasingInequality

Free trade is not working for the majorityof the world. During the most recentperiod of rapid growth in global tradeand investment (1960 to 1998) inequalityworsened both internationally andwithin countries. The UN DevelopmentProgram reports that the richest 20% ofthe world’s population consume 86% ofthe world’s resources while the poorest80% consume just 14%. WTO rules havehastened these trends by opening upcountries to foreign investment andthereby making it easier for productionto go where the labor is cheapest andmost easily exploited and environmentalcosts are low.

The WTO Is Increasing Hunger

Farmers produce enough food in theworld to feed everyone – yet because ofcorporate control of food distribution, as

many as 800 million people worldwidesuffer from chronic malnutrition. Ac-cording to the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights, food is a human right. Indeveloping countries, as many as fourout of every five people make their livingfrom the land. But the leading principlein the WTO’s Agreement on Agricultureis that market forces should controlagricultural policies rather than a na-tional commitment to guarantee foodsecurity and maintain decent familyfarmer incomes. WTO policies have al-lowed dumping of heavily subsidizedindustrially produced food into poorcountries, undermining local produc-tion and increasing hunger.

The WTO Hurts Poor, SmallCountries in Favor of RichPowerful NationsThe WTO supposedly operates on aconsensus basis, with equal decision-making power for all. In reality, manyimportant decisions get made in a proc-ess whereby poor countries’ negotiatorsare not even invited to closed doormeetings – and then ‘agreements’ areannounced that poor countries didn’teven know were being discussed. Manycountries do not even have enough tradepersonnel to participate in all the nego-tiations or to even have a permanentrepresentative at the WTO. This severelydisadvantages poor countries from rep-resenting their interests. Likewise, manycountries are too poor to defend them-selves from WTO challenges from therich countries, and change their lawsrather than pay for their own defense.

The WTO Undermines LocalLevel Decision-Making andNational SovereigntyThe WTO’s ‘most favored nation’ provi-sion requires all WTO member countriesto treat each other equally and to treat allcorporations from these countries equallyregardless of their track record. Localpolicies aimed at rewarding companies

who hire local residents, use domesticmaterials, or adopt environmentallysound practices are essentially illegalunder the WTO. Developing countriesare prohibited from creating local lawsthat developed countries once pursued,such as protecting new, domestic indus-tries until they can be internationallycompetitive. California Governor GrayDavis vetoed a ‘Buy California’ bill thatwould have granted a small preferenceto local businesses because it was WTO-illegal. Conforming with the WTO re-quired entire sections of US laws to berewritten. Many countries are evenchanging their laws and constitutions inanticipation of potential future WTOrulings and negotiations.

There Are Alternatives to theWTO

Citizen organizations have developedalternatives to the corporate-dominatedsystem of international economic gov-ernance. Together we can build the po-litical space that nurtures a democraticglobal economy that promotes jobs, en-sures that every person is guaranteedtheir human rights to food, water, educa-tion, and health care, promotes freedomand security, and preserves our sharedenvironment for future generations.

The Tide is Turning Against FreeTrade and the WTO!

International opposition to the WTO isgrowing. Massive protests in Seattle of1999 brought over 50,000 people to-gether to oppose the WTO – and suc-ceeded in shutting the meeting down.When the WTO met in 2001, the Tradenegotiators were unable meet their goalsof expanding the WTO’s reach. TheWTO met in Cancún, Mexico from 10-14September 2004, and met thousands ofactivists in protest and scoring a majorvictory for democracy. Developing coun-tries refused to give in to the rich coun-tries’ agenda of WTO expansion – andcaused the talks to collapse!

Preventing Opportunities forDevelopment

Proponents of establishing investor pro-tections under the WTO are pushing forbinding rules that would allow foreigninvestors to enter countries without con-ditions or regulations, and to be granted‘national treatment’. If granted nationaltreatment, foreign investors must betreated no differently than domestic in-vestors. If such agreements become areality, developing countries will be pre-vented from taking the very same actionsthat developed countries took in theirearly stages of industrialization. Specifi-cally, they will be prohibited from pro-viding tax incentives, targeted subsidies,and purchasing contracts to developingindustries so that they can competeagainst foreign firms. Because of thenatural advantages the MNCs have aslarge experienced firms, the predictableresult of such disastrous policies will beunfair preferences for foreign investors.

Outlawing PerformanceRequirements

Performance requirements, crucial formeeting development goals, will also beprohibited if such agreements are estab-lished. Developing countries will losethe ability to demand use of local materi-als, local labor, and demand technologytransfer, which stimulate growth in thelocal economy. Additionally, the im-provement of environmental and laborstandards will be nearly impossible ascountries will be pressured to compete ina ‘race to the bottom’. This will particu-larly prove true if, as under NAFTA,governments are prohibited from screen-ing investors on the basis of such criteriaas worker compensation or environmen-tal standards.

Investor Rights Over CitizenRights

Perhaps most alarming are the provi-sions that would model those in

Who? The World Trade Organization 165


NAFTA’s Chapter 11. Under NAFTA’sChapter 11, governments are prohibitedfrom passing laws which adversely af-fect the business of foreign investors,regardless of the role that such legisla-tion would have in meeting nationalsocial and development goals. In theevent that such legislation negativelyaffects the profits of a multinationalcorporation, individual companies havethe right to sue the foreign government ina secret NAFTA tribunal – bypassing thenational courts. If the corporation wins,the accused government must then com-pensate the corporation in the amount ofprofits they claim to have lost – includ-ing hypothetical profits that they claimthey would have made twenty years intothe future! This confers new rights onMNCs that neither domestic companiesnor citizens – who have to obey nationallaws – enjoy. It creates a class of ‘super-citizenship’ for foreign corporations atthe expense of citizen sovereignty.

Wheels in Motion: MovingTowards Multilateral InvestmentAgreementsIn spite of promises made by developedcountries to focus the agenda at the WTOCancun ministerial on development is-sues, rich countries instead lobbied heav-ily to expand the WTO by adding a newagreement on investment. The effects ofdeveloping such an investment agree-ment would be disastrous for the welfareof people and the environment in bothdeveloped and developing countries, aslegislators will lose the sovereign right topursue policies that puts the publicinterest above corporate interests.

Resisting Corporate Domination

Many developing countries expressedtheir opposition to bringing new invest-ment issues to the Cancun ministerial ofthe WTO in September 2003. It was clearduring the negotiations that rich coun-tries employed strong-arm tactics to at-tempt to force the introduction of the

investment issue despite clear opposi-tion. However, on the last day of theministerial, large groups of developingcountries came together and voiced theirtotal opposition to the launching of newnegotiations on investment and otherNew Issues. This strong coalition ofdiverse developing countries maintainedsolidarity to oppose the rich countries’agenda, and scored a clear victory fordemocracy and the poor in Cancun. It isimperative that developing countries con-tinue to oppose the launching of invest-ment negotiations in the WTO, and thatcitizens continue to hold their repre-sentatives accountable.

Alternative Proposals

Developing countries must retain theautonomy to pursue strategies that en-sure that foreign investment contributesin a positive manner to the realization ofnational goals. Additionally, developedcountries should pursue trade positionsthat will benefit the public welfare ratherthan the bottom line of a few largemultinational corporations. To this end,binding obligations on investors shouldbe instituted to ensure that they behavein a manner that is consistent withinternational human rights and devel-opment objectives. A fair and equitabletrade agreement would include meas-ures to counter corporate predatory busi-ness practices, anti-labor policies, andenvironmental degradation. Finally, inorder to make corporations more ac-countable, enforceable internationalstandards should be established for thereporting and disclosure of information.

Eight years of experience with the WTOhas shown that it is still dominated bythe interests of rich countries and elitebusinesses around the world. It’s timefor a fundamental review of the WTO’simpact, and to scale down or abolish andreplace the WTO with a completelydifferent institution. Furthermore, an al-ternative to the FTAA draft currentlybeing negotiated must be developed so

that issues of social justice are not subor-dinated to corporate interests. Strength-ening the rights of investors will do littleto benefit working people in either devel-oping or rich countries. On the contrary,an agreement of this nature will benefitcorporate interests at the expense ofordinary citizens.

© Global Exchange 2004, 2017 MissionStreet, #303, San Francisco, CA 94110;tel: (415) 255-7296 fax: (415)255-7498.

Editor's Note: Within the global justicemovement, see Focus on the Global South(www.focusweb.org) and the Third WorldNetwork in Penang (www. twnside.org); GreenAlternatives to Globalisation: A Manifesto by MichaelWoodin & Caroline Lucas. Published by PlutoPress, 2005.

The European Union: NewStart or Old Spin?Paul Goodison

Since stepping into the post of EU TradeCommissioner Peter Mandelson hasbeen very active on issues of impor-tance to the African Caribbean andPacific (ACP) group of countries, whichenjoy special non-reciprocal preferen-tial access to the EU market under theCotonou Agreement. One of Commis-sioner Mandelson’s first policy speecheswas to ACP ministers on 1 December2004. One of his first overseas trips wasto the Caribbean to consult Caribbeanministers and see for himself the chal-lenges posed to the region’s sugar andbanana producers by changes in EUpolicies. January 20, 2005 saw the launchof the Commissioner’s ideas on how toput development concerns at the centreof the EU’s economic partnership agree-ment (EPA) trade negotiations, while 24January saw him attending the ACP-EUagriculture ministers consultation onEU sugar-sector reform. Howeverthroughout this time, while nominallyfocusing on the side dish of bilateralACP-EU trade relations, CommissionerMandelson has been quietly warmingup ACP governments for the maincourse: securing ministerial-level agree-ment to a WTO text in Hong Kong.

Undoubtedly the Commissioner has beenvery busy in his first few months in officedealing with issues affecting Europe’strade with Africa, but what does it allmean? Is this a fresh broom sweeping inwith new ideas on what the main plankof EU trade policy towards Africa shouldbe, abandoning neo-liberal ideas thatfree trade will solve everything, or is itthe ‘King of Spin’ striking again? Thisbriefing seeks to review the ideas thatCommissioner Mandelson is putting for-ward and how the European Commis-sion (EC) is seeking to interpret themoperationally in the light of their under-

The European Union: New Start or Old Spin? 167


lying policy agenda. This agenda in-volves getting WTO acceptance of itsCAP-reform strategy and a shift in itsagricultural exports to higher-value-added products.

Putting Development at theHeart of EPAs

The over-riding ‘new’ idea which Com-missioner Mandelson has put forward isthat development concerns should be atthe heart of the process of EPA negotia-tions. This was emphasised in the Com-missioner’s statement to the Civil SocietyDialogue Group on 20 January 2005.1 Inthe face of a growing body of criticismfrom African social actors and Europeandevelopment NGOs, CommissionerMandelson rejected the idea that EPAsshould be scrapped, but acknowledgedthat the approach needed to change so asto strengthen its development focus. Heclaimed EPAs ‘are not classical hard-nosed, free-trade agreements of the sortthat developing blocks negotiate betweenthem’. If this is the case what is it thatmakes the EPA process different from‘classical’ free-trade area agreements, forexample, the kind that the EU signedwith South Africa in 1999?

EPAs Involve More than TariffRemoval

First there appears to be the EC’s aspira-tions to ensure that EPAs cover morethan simply trade in goods. While thisopens up possibilities for the establish-ment of targeted programmes of assist-ance to address supply-side constraintsand enhance African production andtrading capacity, from the EC perspec-tive it is seen to apply primarily to theneed to get the right economic policyenvironment in place. For the EC thisrequires the negotiation of a range ofagreements in trade-related areas, oftenon issues where African governmentshave declined to make any commitmentsin the WTO. This ‘WTO +’ approach isseen as central to securing the claimed

economic benefits of EPAs, since it isseen as consolidating the ability of Afri-can countries to compete and take ad-vantage of market opening. This ‘WTO+’approach also characterises the EC’sapproach to trade in services

Creating the Right Conditions

Second, Commissioner Mandelson andEC documents have placed considerableemphasis on measures to address con-straints on competitive production. Ad-dressing ACP ministers on 1 December20042 he argued that for trade opennessto generate growth and contribute topoverty eradication ‘the right condi-tions’ have to be in place. If they are notthe benefits of trade openness cannot bereaped. For Commissioner Mandelsonthese ‘right conditions’ appeared to re-late primarily to improving the businessclimate, establishing appropriate domes-tic economic policies and following prin-ciples of good governance, although inhis speech to ACP ministers referencewas also made to the need to tacklesupply-side constraints on competitiveproduction. In this latter regard, how-ever, Commissioner Mandelson did notgo as far as his former ministerial col-league Gordon Brown, who while ontour in Mozambique spoke of the needfor an ‘infrastructure fund’ for Africa tofinance ‘roads, railways, water, electric-ity, so that major infrastructural con-cerns can be alleviated in order to developthe supply-side of the economy’.

The sentiments expressed by ChancellorGordon Brown are much closer to theaspirations of ACP governments in cre-ating the ‘right conditions’ for tradeopening to generate growth than theprescriptive policy preoccupations ofCommissioner Mandelson.

The weight given to these different fac-tors is of some significance for the realityis that there is currently little evidencethat addressing supply-side constraintsis being accorded priority within the EU

aid-deployment process. This was cer-tainly the case in regard to the use of theinitial 9th European Development FundNational Indicative Programme alloca-tions (the NIP is the main EU financialinstrument for extending developmentassistance to African countries). It is alsoa feature of the current mid-term reviewof the 9th EDF NIPs. This is a seriousmatter, for given the delays in approvingnew financial allocations and then sub-sequently committing EDF funds, if pro-grammes to address supply-sideconstraints are not being designed nowthey are unlikely to be effectively rolledout until 2012-14 at the earliest.3

The Centrality of RegionalIntegration

The third factor which is seen as makingEPAs different from traditional free-tradearea agreements and placing develop-ment at the heart of the EU’s trade policytowards Africa, is the centrality accordedsupport to regional integration withinthe EPA process. In his 20 Januaryspeech Commissioner Mandelson main-tained that ‘trade opening … is not at theforefront’ within the EPA process, rather‘it comes towards the end, after regionalintegration has kick-started growth, afterlong transition periods, after Europe hasinvested aid and support in these leastdeveloped countries’ capacity to trade’.However the question arises: what doesCommissioner Mandelson mean whenhe talks about the priority accorded tosupporting regional integration?

An indication can be found in his 1 Decem-ber 2004 speech to ACP ministers, when hespoke of the need to ‘develop regionalmarkets, with a common set of bordermeasures, tariff and non-tariff, as an incen-tive for that pivotal requirement for success-ful development: investment’. He continued‘setting rules for regional development are atthe heart of the EPA process, at the heart ofthe Cotonou mandate and are central to theroadmaps that we have jointly agreed for thenegotiations’.

The emphasis here is clearly on tradepolicy rule-making at the regional level.This sits quite easily with the EC’s long-standing approach to the regional di-mension of EPAs which has focussed onthe formal conclusion of regional-inte-gration agreements – that is essentiallypromoting free-trade areas as steppingstones to customs unions, with whichthe EU can then conclude regional EPAs.It does not appear to refer to the broaderprocess of regional integration, wherebytrade integration is a tool for the transfor-mation of regional production struc-tures.

The Sectoral Deployment of 9th EDFNIP Funds

Sector % of total funds allocated

Structural adjustment 30.7%Transport 7.9%Governance 7.0%Rural development 6.7%Water 6.3%Education 5.0%Health 4.3%Civil society 2.9%Social provision 1.3%Agriculture 1.1%Food Aid 1.0%Business 0.6%Environment 0.5%Trade 0.1%Undifferentiated 3.1%

Differing Concepts of WhatRegional Integration is About

A broader conceptualisation of what adevelopment-oriented regional integra-tion process should look like was re-cently given expression in the UNEconomic Commission for Africa’s re-port on the economic and welfare im-pacts of EPAs in Africa.4 This reportplaced considerable importance on firstbuilding intra-African markets and de-veloping African supply capacities topromote intra-African trade to serve Afri-can markets from African production. It



noted that a key constraint on the exploi-tation of traditional preferences has beenthe absence of supply capacities. It ar-gued that regional supply capacities hadto be built before liberalisation. Thereport therefore advocated an approachto EPAs whereby ‘SSA countries liberal-ise trade among themselves without im-mediate reciprocation on the preferencesgranted by the EU on the understandingthat the EU is in a position to agree toEPAs that provide enough time to theAfrican countries to build their capaci-ties so that they can eventually be able tocompete with the EU producers andexporters’. This it is held will ‘enable theproducers and exporters in the region tobuild capacities as they compete amongthemselves before facing the EU produc-ers and exporters when the reciprocityprinciple kicks in.’ At first glance theredoes not appear to be that much differ-ence between what CommissionerMandelson put forward to the CivilSociety Dialogue Group on 20 Januaryand what the UN ECA is advocating.However as the ECA report noted giventhe challenges faced in integrating Afri-can markets and building competitivesupply capacities to serve these newlyenlarged markets, ‘EPAs should lookbeyond the 12 years as the possible datesfor introducing reciprocity’.

Herein lies the key shortcoming in Com-missioner Mandelson’s approach, forwhile paying lip-service to the need toaddress the wider development agenda,Commissioner Mandelson remains wed-ded to existing EC time-frames for theconclusion of EPAs. These time framessimply do not allow sufficient time forbuilding real regional markets and de-veloping competitive supply capacitiesto serve these enlarged regional markets,prior to the introduction of reciprocity intrade relations with the EU.

The Problem of Time Frames

The EC remains committed to conclud-ing EPAs by the end of 2007; indeed in

the eastern and southern Africa regionthe ‘road map’ for negotiations has set atarget for concluding ‘substantive nego-tiations’ by the end of 2005. This wouldinvolve firm and binding commitmentsto tariff-reduction schedules and theeventual elimination of tariffs on a speci-fied volume of current trade in specifiedyears.

But how can African regional groupingsdetermine such timetables for tariff re-ductions and elimination, in ways con-sistent with the development ofcompetitive regional production struc-tures designed to serve enlarged regionalmarkets, when the process of creatingthose regional markets is still in itsinfancy within the regional configura-tion with whom the EU is currentlynegotiating? Rational choices on whichproducts to ‘front load’ for tariff elimina-tion, which products to ‘back load’,which products to exclude from tariff-elimination commitments, which prod-ucts to subject to special tradearrangements, and which products tosubject to special safeguard provisions,simply cannot be made at the regionallevel until regional markets have beencreated and regional production struc-tures have evolved.

To do so would be to abandon prema-turely the very policy tools that mustform an important part of regional effortsto nurture the development of competi-tive forms of regional production to serveenlarged regional markets. This is adimension of the sequencing of thebroader regional-integration processesand the negotiation and implementationof EPAs which the EC largely ignores.This is in large part based on the ideo-logical belief in what is termed ‘openregionalism’, that is the promotion ofregional integration at the same time asan opening of regional markets to in-creased competition, from in this case theEU. This sequencing is in distinct contra-diction to the sequencing advocated inthe UN ECA report and strongly fa-

voured by a number of prominent Afri-can trade negotiators. When confrontedwith this problem of the current timeta-ble EC officials invariably fall back onthe mantra of ‘WTO compatibility’ andthe question of ‘the waiver’. It is pointedout that the current WTO waiver willlapse on 1 January 2008 and that there-fore new WTO-compatible free-trade areaagreements need to be in place by thisdate. At times the issue of ‘the waiver’and ‘WTO compatibility’ almost seemsto take on a religious significance, withthere being only one true path to theattainment of compliance.

However this sanctified approach toWTO compatibility is now being ques-tioned by prominent African trade nego-tiators who have advanced the conceptof ‘light EPAs’.

‘Light EPAs’: Overcoming theTime Constraint

The concept of a ‘light EPA’ wouldrequire ACP countries to grant reciproc-ity in the tariff treatment accorded EUgoods only to the level necessary to secure aWTO waiver . Thus if it was deemed that afree-trade area between, on the one hand,a developed trading bloc like the EU andon the other hand, groupings of leastdeveloped and developing countries,need only cover 80% of all currentlytraded goods and can be asymmetrical inits product coverage and time-frames forimplementation, then if the EU were togrant complete duty-free access for allimports, the African regional groupingsconcerned would only need to phase-inzero duties on 60% of imports from theEU. Work undertaken by Dr Chris Stevensof the Institute for Development Studiesin Sussex on the bound tariff schedulesprevailing in Southern Africa, suggeststhat such a ‘light EPA’ would not in-volve the removal of substantive tariffprotection, since high tariff items couldall be excluded from such a ‘light EPA’.This attainment of WTO compatibilitywould represent the first stage of the EPA

process and would deal exclusively withtrade in goods. This would be accompa-nied by a second crucial component ofthe EPA process, namely the establish-ment of targeted programmes of supportfor the building of regional markets anddevelopment of competitive regional sup-ply capacities. This could, as appropri-ate, embrace support for the developmentof regional policies in a range of trade-related areas and in the provision of arange of services. Once these programmeshave been successfully implemented andhave begun to deliver results, both interms of deepened regional trade and abroader regional production base, thenconsideration could be given to a moreextensive process of tariff elimination onimports from the EU, geared towardsfurther stimulating the development ofregional competitiveness.

The concept of a ‘light EPA’ constitutes aradical departure from the approachwhich the EC has adopted to date, yetwould be wholly consistent with thebroad pro-development sentimentswhich Commissioner Mandelson hasbeen advocating since his inaugurationas Trade Commissioner. It remains to beseen whether the Trade Commissionerwill be open to this alternative conceptand whether he can then carry themember states and Commission serviceswith him in operationalising it.

The Contribution of EPAs toBuilding Regional Integration

The implicit response of the EC to theargument that more time is needed tobuild regional markets and deepen re-gional integration is to argue that theEPA process itself is directly stimulatingregional integration in Africa to an un-precedented degree. According to the ECthe EPA negotiating process has height-ened the political profile given to re-gional policies and created a situationwhere ‘many ACP leaders perceive EPAnegotiations as an opportunity and achallenge’.5



This is undoubtedly the case but notnecessarily in the positive way the ECdepicts it. In some regions the EPAprocess has heightened the political in-tensity of regional discussions because ithas led to the fragmentation of existingregional integration schemes.

The membership of the Southern AfricanDevelopment Community (SADC),whose roots go back as far as 1980, havebeen split by the process of EPA negotia-tions. Six members of the SADC havechosen to negotiate as part of the Easternand Southern African (ESA) EPA negoti-ating configuration (which embraces intotal 16 countries). Seven members of theSADC are seeking to negotiate as theSADC configuration. This split largelyarose because of the fears which a numberof SADC member states had over thedangers of simply being drawn into theEU-South Africa Trade Development andCo-operation Agreement TDCA), a free-trade area agreement which pre-dated(and pre-empted) the opening of the EPAnegotiations.

The Fragmentation of the SADCConfiguration

SADC Configuration ESA Configuration

Botswana DemocraticRepublic of Congo

Lesotho MalawiNamibia MauritiusSwaziland SeychellesMozambique ZambiaAngola ZimbabweTanzania

The TDCA itself has also created ten-sions and frictions within an existingregional integration initiative, as a resultof the EU choosing to negotiate a free-trade area agreement with only one of themembers of the Southern African Cus-toms Union (SACU), the largest, SouthAfrica. The smaller members of the SACU– Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, andSwaziland were excluded from the nego-

tiations with South Africa and now findthemselves de facto part of a free-tradearea with the EU, over which they havehad no influence. Despite the decision ofthe governments of these countries tonegotiate as part of the SADC configura-tion, this is likely to prove very difficultsince the EC has made it quite clear that acountry can only be a member of one free-trade area agreement with the EU. Thereal issue for the BLNS is thus how toretro-fit the EU-South Africa TDCA tomeet their needs in the context of theexistence of SACU.

The SADC configuration also faces afurther problem, namely the absence ofthe largest regional economy South Af-rica from the negotiations, since SouthAfrica already has a free-trade areaagreement with the EU, the TDCA. In thiscontext how can it be argued that theEPA process is promoting deeper re-gional integration in Southern Africa?

Looking beyond the SADC to the EastAfrican Community (EAC), here againthe EPA process is generating problems.For some years now Kenya, Uganda andTanzania have been moving towards re-launching the East African Communityas a Customs Union. Steady progresswas being made. Then along came theEPA negotiations and the EAC is splitwith Tanzania choosing to negotiate aspart of the SADC configuration since it isnot a member of the Common Market ofEastern and Southern Africa (COMESA)and Kenya and Uganda choosing tonegotiate as part of the Eastern andSouthern African region, which has at itsheart the COMESA. Even COMESA itselfhas been split with the organisation’slargest economy, Egypt, not being a partyto the ESA configuration negotiationswith the EU.

The EC claims that this is the fault ofAfrican countries and the problems gen-erated by their overlapping membershipof a multiplicity of regional initiatives.However, rather than ignoring this real-

ity would it not have been better for theEU to support a rationalisation/harmo-nisation and consolidation of regionalinitiatives prior to the launching of EPAnegotiations?

Undoubtedly the EPA process has height-ened the ‘political profile’ of regionalintegration processes and made manyACP leaders perceive EPA negotiationsas a ‘challenge’, however this is not forthe positive reasons which the EC sug-gests, but rather as a result of the EPAthrowing into disarray long-standingregional integration plans and initia-tives. Commissioner Mandelson in his‘new’ approach has simply ignored theseinconvenient consequences of the launch-ing of the EPA negotiations. It remains tobe seen what solutions he will offer tothese problems in the future.

Responding to EU Sugar-sectorReform

Turning to the crucial question of the EUsugar-sector reform (which will see east-ern and southern African sugar export-ers losing an annual income of around€€ 156 million) and the issue of EU assist-ance to the required restructuring,6 Com-missioner Mandelson’s role is a trickyone. He is responsible for the tradeconsequences of the reform, but not thebasic process of EU sugar-sector reform,which falls under the portfolio of Agri-culture Commissioner Mariann FischerBoel. Equally Commissioner Mandelsonis not responsible for the developmentassistance dimension of the EU’s pro-posed policy response, management ofwhich will fall under the portfolio ofCommissioner Louis Michel. Commis-sioner Mandelson thus finds himselfcentrally located in the debates, but withlittle direct responsibility over the scopeof EU sugar-sector reform or the speedand effectiveness of the EU’s develop-ment assistance response.7

Nevertheless he has taken positionswhich mark something of a departure

from the past, most notably on 1 Decem-ber 2004 when he made it clear to ACPministers that the EU’s proposed 33%reduction in the EU institutional pricefor sugar was a ‘first step’ in the reformprocess, not the final objective. Whilethis had been implicit in earlier Commis-sion statements about bringing the sugarregime into line with the general trajec-tory for CAP reform, it had never been soexplicitly stated.

This acknowledgement has importantimplications for sugar-sector adjustmentsin Africa, for it means that over themedium- to long-term it is likely that EUsugar prices will continue to fall towardsworld market price levels. It is these evenlower prices on which long-term sugar-sector restructuring plans in ACP coun-tries will need to be drawn up.

Commissioner Mandelson’s franknesswas however matched by his implacabil-ity on the question of the timing andscope of reform. Speaking in the Carib-bean at the beginning of January 2005 hemade it clear that the EU.

will not back down on plans to overhaul itspreferential sugar regime.8

He cited internal pressures for reformarising from the high internal EU sugarprice as the main factor driving reformpointing out that for the EU the statusquo was not an option. He did, however,indicate that ACP sugar producers wouldget a ‘breather’ to allow them more timeto prepare for the end of high EU sugarprices since ‘in all probability’ reformwould be deferred a year and be phased‘in two stages over a two year period at aminimum’. He maintained that ACPsuppliers would not simply be aban-doned. They would in fact continue toenjoy preferential access to the EU mar-ket. He even went so far as to suggest thatincreased volumes and additional mar-ket access could form part of the ECpolicy response, so that EU sugar-sectorreform would have a neutral impact on



ACP sugar industries. This is an impor-tant issue for competitive non-least de-veloped southern African sugar exporters(notably Swaziland and Zimbabwe9). Ifthese countries were to be granted unlim-ited access to the EU market for theirsugar exports then they could indeed bebetter off under a reformed EU sugarregime, given their growing exposure toworld market prices for their sugar ex-ports. However, in order to ensure arevenue-neutral impact their existing quo-tas under both the sugar protocol and thespecial preferential sugar arrangementwould need to be doubled. It came assomething of a surprise therefore whenno reference was made to the possibilityof increased duty-free access to ACPsuppliers to the EU sugar market in theEC’s working document on the EU sup-port strategy for affected ACP sugar-protocol beneficiaries released on 24January 2005. The trade dimension ofthis action plan was largely restricted tohighlighting the claimed benefits thatACP countries would gain from theconclusion of the Doha DevelopmentRound and the signing of EPAs with theEU.

This raises the questions: was Commis-sioner Mandelson simply flying kites inthe Caribbean to demonstrate his open-ness to dialogue or is he genuinelycommitted to increased market access forcompetitive ACP sugar producers aspart of the EU’s response strategy butfacing difficulties in selling this to fellowCommissioner Fischer Boel and EU agri-culture ministers? This will be a criticalissue in the coming months, as will bethe EC’s proposals for developing re-gional markets for ACP sugar.

The Commission working documentidentified the development of regionaltrade in sugar as an important aspect ofthe market diversification which ACPproducers will need to pursue in the faceof EU sugar-sector reform. Yet it ignoresmany of the fundamental problems facedin developing this trade, not least of

which is the annual export by the EU of600,000 tonnes of refined sugar to Africa,at world market prices (or less than halfthe average EU production cost of sugar).It will be very difficult for African sugarsuppliers to compete under these condi-tions. The EC working document hasacknowledged that the development ofthe regional sugar trade may require theextension of regional trade preferences.However, will the EC follow through onthis recognition and support the classifi-cation of sugar and sugar-based prod-ucts as a ‘special product’ in the WTO towhich special trade treatment can thenbe accorded? Will the EC accept similarspecial treatment for sugar and sugar-based products under EPAs, with suchproducts being excluded from tariff re-ductions or subjected to special safe-guards or special arrangements?

Finally there is the problem of invest-ment. African countries export raw sugarto the EU while importing refined sugar.For the intra-African sugar trade to de-velop investments will be required inrefining capacity. Equally investmentswill be required in freight forwarding,storage and transhipment facilities totransport sugar cost effectively betweensugar-surplus countries of Africa andsugar-deficit countries. Yet with EU pricereductions pending, commercial financ-ing for sugar-sector related investmentsare drying up or becoming much moreexpensive.

This is an issue which could easily beaddressed by making available low costsEIB-administered risk-capital loans toall ACP sugar-exporting countries re-quiring restructuring. This would, how-ever, require a change in EIB lendingpolicy. While this is an area outside thescope of Commissioner Mandelson’s for-mal portfolio, it is an issue which couldbe taken up with his colleague LouisMichel, since it is central to the develop-ment of intra-regional trade in sugar inAfrica.

If all these issue scan be addressed thenthe development of the intra-Africansugar trade as an alternative basis for thefuture development of low-cost sugarproduction in southern and eastern Afri-can countries would appear a reason-able prospect. It remains to be seen,however, whether under CommissionerMandelson’s leadership there is anyeffective follow through on the detailedrequirements to deliver on nominal policycommitments.

EPAs & Sugar

Finally with regard to the question ofEPAs and the sugar sector, the EC is nowproposing that future market access forACP sugar-protocol beneficiaries be in-corporated into future EPAs. This ap-pears a simple solution to ensuring WTOcompatibility for any future ACP sugararrangement. However this is far frombeing a straightforward issue. As theCTA’s Agritrade news update for Febru-ary 2005 has questioned:

• Would the sugar quotas to be incor-porated into the EPA agreementsbe allocated to the regional group-ing as a whole, or would they becountry-specific within the re-gional allocation?

• Would non-LDC sugar-producingcountries which had not tradition-ally benefited from a sugar quota(e.g. in the Caribbean EPA contextthe Dominican Republic) be al-lowed access to the regional sugarquota if traditional suppliers couldno longer competitively supply theEU market at the lower price?

• If the quota is to be allocated to theregional grouping as a whole, howwould quota-restricted access for aregional grouping be reconciledwith continued unrestricted duty-free access for the LDC sugar-exporting countries which formpart of that regional grouping?

• Equally, would quota reallocations,where countries can no longer com-petitively supply the EU sugar mar-ket at the lower price, only occurwithin the regional groupings? Orwould there be provision for thetransfers of quotas across regionalgroupings?

This is important for southern Africawhere the lowest-cost production in theACP is located.

• Would the sugar arrangements in-corporated into EPAs allow for anexpansion of sugar exports to de-fray the costs of price reductions ashas been implicit in statements byCommissioner Mandelson?

• How would SPS access be dealtwith? Would these quotas form partof any regional quota (an importantissue in both eastern and southernAfrica), or would the sugar arrange-ments incorporated into EPAs sim-ply reflect existing national quotasunder the sugar protocol?

This illustrates some of the difficultiesfaced in trying to incorporate sugar-market preferences into EPAs.

The Main Dish

A common theme running through Com-missioner Mandelson’s pronouncementsto ACP ministers, be it on EPAs or sugaris the importance of concluding theDoha Development Round at the HongKong Ministerial in December 2005.Speaking to Caribbean ministers in Guy-ana at the beginning of January 2005Commissioner Mandelson emphasisedhow together the ACP group and the EU

must craft, in the DDA, a global strategyfor the smaller and more vulnerable WTOmembers, but their interests will be betterserved by embracing the Round ratherthen seeking to slow it down and remain-ing over-dependent on preferences.



During this visit he then called foragreement to be reached on sugar-sectorsupport measures before the Hong KongWTO Ministerial in December 2005.While short on specifics, the Commis-sion memorandum on the action plan forACP sugar-protocol beneficiaries as-serted that the conclusion of the DohaDevelopment Round was a key compo-nent of the trade dimension of EU’sproposed response strategy. The EU’snew ‘charm offensive’ in the run up tothe Hong Kong WTO Ministerial is nowwell underway.

This is a central consideration whichneeds to be borne in mind in looking atCommissioner Mandelson’s statementand commitments, be they on the central-ity of the development dimension toEPAs, or the importance of an early startto EU assistance with sugar-sector re-structuring. The questions arise:

• Are these commitments sincere orjust part of the ‘charm offensive’designed to secure ACP endorse-ment of a Doha Round whichsuccessfully promotes and de-fends EU commercial interests?

• Will ACP ministers be able to usethe run up to Hong Kong to extractsubstantive concessions from theEU on turning EPAs into genuinedevelopment tools or ensuringearly assistance to ACP sugar-sector restructuring, in exchangefor their support in Hong Kong?

• Will Commissioner Mandelsonprove an ally to the ACP in helpingthem secure the necessary sub-stantive changes in the EC’s cur-rent approach?

• Or will the King of Spin StrikeAgain? It remains to be seen.

Paul Goodison, e-mail: [email protected].

Endnotes

1. See speech by Trade Commissioner Mandelson(SPEECH/05/23-20/01/2005) http://e u r o p a . e u . i n t / r a p i d /pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/05/23&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

2. See speech by Trade Commissioner Mandelson(SPEECH/04/505-1/12/2004) http://e u r o p a . e u . i n t / r a p i d /pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/0 4 / 5 0 5 & f o r m a t = H T M L & a g e d =0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

3. This assumes a two-and-a-half year delay inlegally making new funds available – 2010 - anda further two-and-a-half to four-year delay inactually moving from primary commitments tosecondary commitments and actual payments.

4. See ECA assessment of the economic andwelfare impacts of the EU-Africa EPAs. http://www.uneca.org/eca_programmes/trade_and_regional_integration/documents/KAringi.pdf

5. See EC memorandum (MEMO/05/18-20/01/2005) http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/05/18&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

6. While the EU market accounts for 40% of thevolume of sugar exports of ACP sugar-protocolbeneficiaries it accounts for 71% of the revenueearned on exports.

7. This being said since the Commission takes allpolicy decisions as a corporate body ofCommissioners, he does have an input into policydecisions in all departments of the EC.

8. See the Daily Nation, Barbados, 10 January2005, http://www.nationnews.com/StoryView.cfm?Record=56821&Section=LO

9. Least developed country suppliers such asMozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, Sudanand Ethiopia will already enjoy unrestrictedaccess to the EU sugar market after reform as aresult of the EU’s ‘Everything but Arms’ (EBA)initiative.

Editor's Note: see The Guardian letters page, 24March 2005 from: Dr. Daleep Mukarji, Director,Christian Aid, Peter Mandelson, EU TradeCommissioner and Caroline Lucas, MEP Green,UK.

�

Activists Press for FullDebt CancellationSingy Hanyona (Porto Alegre,Brazil)

A Global Call to Action Against Povertyhas been launched to press rich coun-tries to completely cancel debt that has inmost cases compromised economic andsocial development of poor countries.

According to Action Aid International, amember of the Global Call to Action

Against Poverty (G-CAP) Coalition, Zam-bia and Malawi for instance face increas-ing demands in debt repayments eachyear. A report by Action Aid Interna-tional, presented at the 5th World SocialForum, reveals that in Zambia, debtrepayments to the International Mon-etary Fund (IMF) alone cost US$25 mil-lion per annum. This is significantlyhigher than the budget for education in acountry where 40% of rural women andchildren are unable to read and write.Zambia owes the international commu-nity about US $6.7 billion, although theIMF has pledged reduction of the amountafter the country meets targets for theHighly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC)Initiative later this year.In Malawi, more money is spent on

servicing the country’s debt than onhealth, despite nearly one in fiveMalawians being HIV positive, accord-ing to the Action Aid report. Launchingthe G-CAP, Brazilian President LuisInacio Lula da Silva called for the richand powerful countries to take responsi-bility for their promises and increase aiddirected towards the achievement of thepriorities of developing countries. G-CAP is a coalition of national and inter-national civil society groups uniting totake action in 2005 against what theycall ‘the scandal of global poverty’. Thiscoalition is braced to bring tangibleresults this year. The G-CAP has identi-fied:

The G8 meeting of world leaders fromrich countries in Britain in July 2005;

The United Nations review of theMillennium Development Goals(MDGs) Summit in September 2005;

The World Trade Organization (WTO)Ministerial meeting at the end of 2005;

and the Blair Commission for Africaas unique opportunities for real actionto tackle poverty and injustice.

Recent United Nations reports show thatthe internationally agreed targets for

Poverty reduction, such as the MDGswill not be achieved without full debtcancellation for the poorest countries,especially those in southern Africa. Ac-cording to Henry Malumo, Coordinatorof the Zambian Civil Society Committeeon the MDGs:

The year 2005 must be rememberedas the year that changed the world.

The Porto Alegre meeting noted that forover 20 years, the IMF, World Bank, andthe WTO have forced poor countries toimplement a wide range of economic andsocial reforms in return for low interestloans which do not serve the interests ofdeveloping countries. The New Partner-ship for Africa’s Development (NEPAD)is seen as a pre-cursor to solving massivedebt owed by developing countries. Simi-larly, inter-governmental linkages be-tween civil society organisations andgovernments are vital, said Asha-RoseMigiro, Minister of Community Develop-ment in Tanzania. Speaking during thelaunch of another global initiative, theCitizens Global Platform, Magiro saidthere is need for regional partnershipinitiatives, such as NEPAD, to bring inthe silent and marginalised groups thatare sidelined in political decision-mak-ing. Social activists at this year’s forum

Activists Press for Full Debt Cancellation 177


also discussed the issue of debt in theface of the tsunami disaster that hitseveral Asian and African countries on26 December 2004. Delegates expressedtheir deepest sympathy to the tsunamivictims. They expressed concern that inthe face of this massive destruction,northern and international creditorsshould not continue to hold the South inbondage for the debts that have contrib-uted to their impoverishment. Some so-cial activists noted that it is now onemonth after the tsunami, but there hasnot been adequate response from theworld richest nations and the interna-tional financial institutions that theycontrol.

Africa’s debt is estimated at US$540billion with debt expenditure account-ing for 70% of its Gross Domestic Prod-uct (GDP). The Forum called on thedebtors to convert at least US$15 billionthat Africa owes to fight against the HIVand AIDS pandemic. Instead of priorit-ising debt servicing, African countriesneed to be given an opportunity toconcentrate on rehabilitation, provisionof clean water and other human develop-ment programmes.

According to Jubilee South Debt Cam-paign, to date, an estimated total of onlyUS$6 billion in financial aid has beenpromised by the G8 countries. This is adrop in the ocean compared to the US$400 billion set aside as the annualUS military budget and the nearlyUS$200 billion that the US and the UKhave spent so far on the Iraq war.Jubilee campaigners also allege that therelief package is insignificant comparedto the profits that the IMF, the WorldBank, the Asian Development Bankand Northern governments have madefrom loans to the South.

SARDC/Southern African News Features ,SANF is produced by the Southern AfricanResearch and Documentation Centre (SARDC),which has monitored regional developmentssince 1985. Email [email protected] // www.sardc.net

Running on Empty

New Scientist

Growing crops takes water, and there’sfar less of it than we thought. It is asobering thought. The water in an Ol-ympic swimming pool would irrigateenough crops to feed only one personfor a year. No wonder the world isrunning dry. Worse, we are confrontedby a startling new revelation: hydrolo-gists have completely miscalculated howmuch water will be available in futureto irrigate crops. It is a mistake thatthreatens to wreck hundreds of irriga-tion systems across the globe, causenew famines and waste billions ofdollars of precious investment capital.Natural water systems are already incrisis. Some of the world’s largest riv-ers, such as the Nile in Egypt and theIndus in Pakistan, often run almost dry.Underground water reserves are beingoverpumped by a massive 200 cubickilometres a year. That’s a lot of swim-ming pools.

But such numbers only tell part of thestory. Hydrologists have till now com-forted themselves with the belief that weare so inefficient in the way we usewater, particularly for irrigation, thatmodest investment could transform thesituation. ‘More crop for every drop’ hasbeen the buzz phrase. On the face of it,this seems like common sense. More thantwo-thirds of the water we grab fromnature is intended for irrigating thecrops that feed the world, but nearly two-thirds of that never reaches the plants.Instead water leaks from distributioncanals and percolates underground or itevaporates from flooded fields. Capturethat wasted water and everything will beOK.

But that word ‘wasted’ is a tricky one.The leaked water is wasted for onefarmer, maybe, but often it is not lost tofarming. Research presented to the Stock-

holm Water Symposium in August 2004by the Comprehensive Assessment ofWater Management in Agriculture(CAWMA), an international collabora-tion by scientists from some 90 institutes,reveals that most is reused by agricultureat some point, either being taken fromrecharged groundwater or from riversdownstream. This is a hugely importantrevelation. It does not mean, of course,that saving water at the farm level isentirely useless. Anything that cutsevaporation really does save water. Andnot all water that seeps down fromflooded fields and canals gets recycled.But it does mean there is far less scope forsaving irrigation water than we thought.In many places, the introduction of more‘efficient’ irrigation technologies up-stream in river basins will leave parchedfields downstream. In Sri Lanka, forexample, the lining of canals with ce-ment has already reduced the amount ofrecharged groundwater. As a conse-quence, the CAWMA reports tells us,several shallow drinking holes, whichprovide better quality drinking waterthan fluoride-laden deep wells in thearea, have dried out.

We Need Other Solutions to theWater Shortage Crisis

Right now in India, where virtuallyevery drop of river water is consumedduring the long dry season, farmers arebeing encouraged to switch from grow-ing rice to less thirsty crops like maize,with the promise they can double theiryields without increasing irrigation. Thatis plain wrong. According to the CAWMAreport, paddies consume no more waterthan maize, once the seepage has beendiscounted.In northern Mexico, the gov-ernment is lining irrigation canals in thebelief that the resulting water savingswill allow it to pay back a water debtowed to the US under an old agreementto share the waters of the Rio Grandecatchment. Texas farmers will get theirpromised water, alright, but the pricewill be paid by Mexican farmers who use

underground water fed by those leakingcanals. They will see their pumps rundry.

Why Has Nobody Thought ofThis Before?

Well some have, of course, but not manyof the hydrologists, irrigation engineersand officials who decide how money isspent on water infrastructure. Europe-ans in particular rarely think seriouslyabout water. Taps stay running, and byand large rainfall waters much of Eu-rope’s crops. But in large parts of theworld, water shortages are the numberone cause of poverty. Permanent hydro-logical drought is close to becoming aglobal fact of life. The new revelationsunderline just how close we have cometo running out of water, and how muchharder it will be than we thought toengineer solutions.

©New Scientist vol. 183, issue 2461.

Getting to Boiling Point:Turning up the Heat onWater & Sanitation

Water Aid

When the water starts boiling it isfoolish to turn off the heat (NelsonMandela)

The world’s poorest people are stillwaiting for the water itself, let alone forit to boil. Since the 1980s. Water Decadefailed to secure water and sanitation forall the world’s population, a processionof international reports and conferenceshas called for universal access to theseservices. But constant repetition of thefact that ‘water is life’ has proved not tobe enough. The performance of the

Getting to Boiling Point: Turning up the Heat on Water & Sanitation 179


water sector remains brutally inad-equate: more than a billion people arestill without safe water and 2.6 billionlack any way to dispose of their excre-ment in safety and with dignity.

These failures are undermining develop-ment: keeping children out of school,stopping adults pursuing their liveli-hoods, and denying many people goodhealth and in some cases even life. Thisis the silent emergency affecting theworld today. Unless the delivery of waterand sanitation improves significantlythe Millennium Development Goal(MDG) to halve world poverty by 2015will be undermined.

To assist in moving from the ‘what’ ofpolicy to the ‘how’ of action, WaterAidhas sought the views of practitioners inthe 14 countries where it works. Theirperspectives on the day-to-day block-ages actually preventing them from de-livering new water and sanitationservices have confirmed that much betteruse could and should be made of themoney in the sector. At the same timecalculations of the numbers of people tobe reached, the costs of the most basicapproaches for doing so and currentavailable resources have confirmed thatmost countries – 12 out of the 14 exam-ined – need to invest more money if theyare to have any chance of reaching theirMDG targets for water and sanitation (tohalve by 2015 the proportions of peoplewithout access to water and sanitation).Better spending of all the money andbringing in new money are politicalcommon sense: for communities withoutsafe water, getting access to such water is– almost without exception – their firstpriority. It is also development commonsense: children and women in particularneed to be free of the burdens of haulingwater and of water-related diseases ifthey are to pursue their education andlivelihoods. Where political and devel-opment agendas have come together, thepower of politics to deliver new waterand sanitation services has been clearly

seen. How to improve the performanceand resourcing of the water sector there-fore comes down in the end to thequestion of whether there is the politicalwill to do so.

Prioritisation: Putting Water &Sanitation at the Heart of PovertyReductionWater Ministry officials are the poorrelations of Government, lacking anyattention to what they are achieving andlast in the queue for resources. But thereare two compelling arguments why wa-ter supply and sanitation should be apriority of government. Where poor peo-ple have a voice, they themselves assertthe human right to safe water whichgovernments have a duty to deliver. Thiswas seen at its most effective in Uganda.Communities highlighted water as a toppriority when they were consulted abouttheir needs during the national povertyreduction planning process. Energeticcivil society advocacy ensured that wa-ter was prioritized in the final plan. Anadditional 2.2 million people gainedaccess to safe water in just three years.

The second key reason to prioritise watersupply and sanitation is that withoutthem people simply cannot escape pov-erty. Not having safe water and basicsanitation results in disease and in-creased infant mortality, while also hold-ing back economic growth. The timespent collecting water keeps womenfrom paid work and children from school.In Tanzania, 12% more children werefound to attend school when safe waterwas available within 15 minutes ratherthan one hour from their home. In Ni-geria, the government started to eradi-cate guinea worm when it realised thatspending $2m could recoup 30 millionworking days every year. Water andsanitation underpin development andwithout them the MDGs will not be met.Becoming a priority of government iscurrently a challenge. However, the big-ger challenge to financing basic water

supply and sanitation provision is how tomake the money perform better. Our researchidentifies a number of key concerns.

Transparency: Be Open AboutWhat’s Going On

Many citizens, even those working in thewater sector, cannot gauge the full extentand effectiveness of their government’sefforts to finance and provide water andsanitation services. Information onspending and its impact is often hard toget hold of, long out of date or inconsist-ent. In Madagascar even the ministryresponsible for water supply finds itdifficult to get hold of budget data fromthe Ministry of Finance. In Ethiopia thelatest official expenditure data is for1996/7. And coverage data in countriesis disparate; for example in India andTanzania coverage rates vary consider-ably between government reports. Theweaknesses in data consistency andaccuracy can lead to under-estimation ofthe scale of need and level of investmentsrequired. A lack of transparency can alsolead to unequal distribution of services,because it is not clear which areas havethe greatest need. Some areas see repeatedinvestment while others are ignored. At-tention to monitoring performance andlevels of investment in the sector andmaking this information more readilyavailable enables civil society and parlia-ments to analyse such inequities and exertpressure to correct them.

Equity: Some for All Not All forSome

Not enough money is going to the placesthat need it most. This is happening ateach level of decision making. Interna-tionally, less than 40% of aid for watergoes to those countries which are hometo nearly 90% of the 1.1 billion peoplewho don’t have access to clean water. Atnational level, in Bangladesh for exam-ple, Dhaka’s water utility has proposedspending $1.5bn on its sewage system.That could be enough to meet water

supply and sanitation targets for thewhole country. Such inequitable distri-bution is evident in other countries too,and not just because data is lacking:political agendas also come into play. InMalawi, areas which are already well-served receive more resources while ar-eas which are still unserved remain thatway. Even the choice of technology canmake a difference. In Tanzania invest-ments in low cost technologies such asshallow-wells and springs are more eq-uitable than investments in piped watersupplies which disproportionately ben-efit the better off. Yet, donor assistancefavours spending on pipes.

Coordination: Don’t Duplicate

District water officers and other localgovernment officials get trapped in amaze of overlapping water and sanita-tion projects. Multiple funding and re-porting streams – some channelledthrough central government, others go-ing through provincial administrationsor directly to communities – leave peopletied to their desks writing applicationsand reports. This uncoordinated andunwieldy network of funding results ininequities and drains the capacity ofpublic servants. Without unified report-ing systems, breakdowns can go unno-ticed for years in official data and so failto have resources allocated for repairs.

Capacity: Give LocalGovernment the Money as wellas the ResponsibilityLocal administrative bodies are increas-ingly expected to shoulder newly decen-tralised responsibilities for water andsanitation without having the staff theyneed. The problem is made worse whenthe responsibilities are decentralisedwithout simultaneous decentralisationof finances. In Tanzania, for example,less than 10% of the total approved waterexpenditure in 2004/5 was spent throughlocal authorities who have the responsi-bility for water supplies.



Sustainability: the DifferenceBetween Success & Failure

Installing the infrastructure is only thefirst step. Once built the water andsanitation systems have to keep work-ing. Money has to be raised from users tofinance repairs and routine maintenance.The bigger the system the greater themanagement challenge.

Many big urban systems have sufferedyears of neglect, starved of investments.Bringing them back from the brink ofcollapse is now a huge challenge. Manypast rural investments have completelycollapsed. Spending on infrastructuremust go hand in hand with buildingcapacity for managing systems and sus-taining them financially. It must involvewomen as they have strong interests inkeeping systems working. Maintainingsystems is a balancing act between keep-ing water affordable and meeting therunning costs. Installing overly-sophis-ticated infrastructure which costs usersa disproportionate amount of their cashincome is a non-starter. It is equally arecipe for disaster to suppress chargesbelow the costs of production. Gettingthis balance right is greatly influencedby the choice of technology.

Privatisation: a PointlessCondition

Water sector officials at both nationaland local levels are wrestling with de-mands to draw in private sector partici-pation. This has been put forward in thepast decade by World Bank-led donorsas a solution for developing countries’water needs. Results, however, havebeen mixed and international privatecompanies themselves are now seekingalternative approaches. But some donorsperversely still champion privatisation,making it a condition of aid. A moresensitive, context-determined approachis required. For example in Uganda theshort-term contracting-out of the man-agement of Kampala’s ailing water util-

ity dramatically improved coverage, col-lection and productivity. Public sectormanagers were then able to take theselessons to other urban areas as well as tomake further improvements to Kam-pala’s water supply.

Spending, Aid & Debt: Willingthe Means as Well as the Ends

Even where there is the political will todo so, governments can find their abilityto act is constrained. Critical to Ugan-da’s success was the fact that it had debtrelief funds available to invest. But gen-erally the water sector’s share of avail-able funds from national governmentsand donors is in decline: dropping from2.6% to 1.9% of direct UK aid between1998/9 and 2002/3, for example andoverall accounting for only 1% or so ofdeveloping country spending. In manycountries debt relief has been slow tokick in and trivial in relation to overalldebt with repayments still far outstrip-ping the additional finance required forwater and sanitation.

The money for water and sanitation isnot going to come from the internationalcapital markets either.

Financial markets are now uninterestedin water for the poorest countries manyof which do not even have credit ratings.It is public finance that has to leadinvestment in these basic building blocksof development. The recent global falls inpublic finance going to water and sanita-tion have to be reversed.

The world’s richest countries thereforeneed to do much more to deliver on theircommitment to Millennium DevelopmentGoal 8 for a global partnership fordevelopment, addressing the specialtrade, debt and aid needs of the leastdeveloped countries.

Conclusion: Turning up the Heat

The water sector needs to deliver muchmore and more quickly if the povertyreduction benefits of access to safe waterand sanitation are to be secured by thetarget deadline of 2015. The sector needsto feel the heat of public scrutiny. Thatheat, allied with a better appreciation ofwater’s role in reducing poverty, mustgenerate the political will both to de-mand that the sector deliver and also toresource it to do so.

All countries’ water sectors need tospend their money more effectively. Gov-ernments need to open up planning andmonitoring processes to civil society anddevelopment partners to ensure thatexpenditure is proportional to need; bothin terms of geography and relative pov-erty. Responsibilities for water and sani-tation should only be devolved to localgovernment where associated budgetsare also devolved. Water supply systemsmust be self sustaining, balancing run-ning and maintenance costs withaffordability. Where the private sectoroffers real advantages in maintainingthis balance they may have a role. How-ever, it is public finance that has to leadinvestment in the sector. For most coun-tries studied, this means doubling spend-ing on water supply and sanitation.

Specifically in 2005 national govern-ments and donors need to produce theplans for managing national water re-sources and to finance increases in ac-cess to safe water and sanitation. Theymust also agree coordination arrange-ments which avoid duplication of re-porting systems and ensure efficienttargeting of funds. From 2006/7 on-wards water sector budgets must be fullydisbursed and spent with the resultsthen publicly reported. These are notdemands for new promises, they aresimply what is required for water sectorinvestments to conform with existingcommitments – to the Millennium Devel-opment Goals or to donors’ Rome Decla-

ration on Harmonisation. This reportsets a baseline against which progresson these issues can be measured. Unlessthe sector’s performance reaches higherstandards in this way, the world’s poor-est people will remain trapped in pov-erty for want of their rights to safe waterand sanitation.

WaterAid – Calls to Action

Poverty-reducing improvements in health,education and livelihoods rely on increases inaccess to safe water and sanitation. To achievethe water and sanitation MDGs:

Governments of developing countriesneed to:

• By the end of 2005, produce an investmentand delivery plan for managing their waterresources and achieving their water andsanitation targets, with a separate budget forsanitation.

This must be produced in partnership with thedonor community and other water supply andsanitation stake-holders and reviewed annually.It should provide the means for greater co-ordination within the water and sanitation sectoras well as delineate a separate sanitation budget.

• From 2006/7, devolve budgets to localgovernments with responsibility for water andsanitation where appropriate.

This can, for example, be achieved by setting upspecial purpose water and sanitation grants tolocal governments. Spending should be allocatedproportionately to need to redress disparities inboth geographic coverage and relative wealth.

• From 2006/7 publish an annual report on theperformance of the water and sanitation sector.

• From 2005, enable and strengthen theparticipation of the principal stakeholders of thesector – the users and providers – in the planning,monitoring and review of the water and sanitationservices.

This must include the establishment ofconsultative multi-stakeholder mechanisms andgreater attention to the collection and use ofinformation on sector performance. It will alsorequire improvements in the transparency andaccessibility of this information to the public.



Governments giving aid need to:

• By the end of 2005, agree a mechanism foreradicating wasteful duplication in planning,funding and reporting systems between donorsand recipient governments.

As a result there will be one monitoring systemfor water supply and sanitation outputs.

• From 2006/7, align their water supply andsanitation support with the government-ledsector investment and delivery plans.

This will include harmonising their procurementand other operating practices with governmentpolicies in the sector.

• Ensure that they are meeting their millenniumgoal commitment of a partnership for develop-ment including providing 0.7% of GDP in aid by2010 and closing finance gaps for water andsanitation especially in the least developedcountries.

This will mean spending 70% of their watersupply and sanitation aid on the countries withthe greatest water and sanitation needs. Theseare most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, plussome in South and South-East Asia.

• From 2005, provide strategic assistance to thestrengthening of civil society, media andparliamentary scrutiny of water and sanitationsector performance and financing.

Summary of Key Statistics

• All World Governments signed up to theMillennium Development Goals of halving worldpoverty by 2015.

Included in these are targets to halve theproportions of people without safe water andadequate sanitation by 2015.

• In many regions these targets are off track,especially in Africa and for sanitation. Over 2.6billion people – two-fifths of the world’spopulation – do not have access to sanitation

• 384,000 people need to gain access tosanitation every single day to reach theMillennium Development targets – a 90% increaseon performance since 1990.

• 1.1 billion people – one person out of every sixin the world – do not have access to safe water.280,000 people need to gain access to safe waterevery single day to reach the MillenniumDevelopment target. This requires a 25% increaseon performance since 1990.

• 2.1 million children die every year fromdiarrhoea. This is one in five of all child deaths

under the age of five and means a child diesevery 15 seconds from water-related diseases.

• 5.6 billion productive days are lost annuallyaround the world due to diarrhoeal diseases.

• 443 million school days are lost annuallyworldwide due to diarrhoeal diseases.

• Water and sanitation are prioritised in thepoverty reduction plans and budgets of justtwo of the 30 countries where nearly 90% of the1.1 billion people without safe water live.

• Aid for water more than halved from 1995 to2002 by when it was at its lowest in real termssince 1985.

• Information on national water sector spendingand performance may be non-existent orinconsistent, take years to emerge, be publishedonly in foreign languages or in a very limitednumber of copies.

• Spending is also not well-targeted withincountries: projects may aid just 0.3% of thepopulation, use technologies nearly 10 timesmore expensive than necessary, or improveservices for a few rather thanextending them toall.

• Only one half or even fewer of water systemscontinue to work where the wrong technologiesare used or where participation in projects isinsufficient to ensure long term communitymanagement capacity.

• Lack of coordination in a country’s watersector means there may be as many as ninedifferent routes for funds to reach communities.

• Funds made available by central governmentto the local authorities with the responsibility toprovide water and sanitation services are usuallyworth less than $1 per person per year.

• Sub-Saharan Africa got just 0.001% ofinternational private sector water investmentsbetween 1990 and 19974. By contrast the localprivate sector may have constructed nearly 90%of waterpoints.

• Water budgets are hardly ever fully spent.Utilisation rates range from 9-65% often becauseof delays in disbursements. Local authorities inthe last month of the financial year can still bewaiting for half of their budget to be released.

• Annual spending on water and sanitationneeds to double, from around $14 billion to $30billion.

• This means there is a financing gap of $16billion a year. This amount is the equivalent to15% of Europe’s annual alcohol bill or only0.002% of the world’s $1 trillion yearly militaryexpenditures.

• Less than 40% of aid for water goes to the 30countries where nearly 90% of the 1.1 billionpeople without access to safe water live.

• The total debt of 52 indebted poor countries is$375 billion. Poor countries spend less than 0.25%of their income on water supply and sanitation.

WaterAid, Prince Consort House, 27-29 AlbertEmbankment, London SE1 7UB. Telephone:+44(0)20 7793 4500. www.wateraid.org

Oil Boom or Bust Ahead forSão Tomé & Príncipe?Glenn Brigaldino

Size of a country matters little when itcomes to extending the influence sphereof armed globalisation. A mere handfulof islands of 1,000 km2 just off the WestAfrican coast, São Tomé and Principeand its 160,000 citizens are now bathingin the spotlight of international atten-tion. Independent from Portugal since1975, the country existed in relativeisolation from world affairs, makingonly meagre developmental progress,but generally under peaceful condi-tions. In the past five years much haschanged, as the island nation has beendrawn into the orbit of an increasinglyunmasked for of predatory globalisa-tion. Today, São Tomé is being drawninto geo-strategic and transnational eco-nomic relationships over which thecountry has no genuine control.1

Until now, São Tomé’s economy hasbeen heavily dependent on foreign aid.Cocoa has been the only significant cashcrop, but recently prices have crumbled.The current account deficit balance hassteadily risen, from US$16m in 1999 toUS$23m in 2003, however inflationseems contained at about 10% a year.GNI per capita (formerly GNP per capita)has risen to US$320 in 2003 yet still anestimated 54% (2004) of the islanderslive below the poverty line. In terms of a

partnership environment conducive todevelopmental progress, relatively fa-vourable engagement conditions exist inSão Tomé. But with regard to localcapacities, both at the institutional andcivil society level, critical shortcomingsseem to exist. It is not at all certain thatthere exists sufficient and suitable ca-pacity, in particular at the Governmentlevel ‘to develop policy (including legalframeworks) … (or) the capacity to en-force it’. There is a serious risk of localcapacities being stretched too far and toothin, in addition to being corrupted andthus diverted from the important tasks ofparticipatory national development. Part-nership in cooperation with the manypartners knocking on São Tomé’s doorscan easily be reduced to little more than alabel to mask non-transparent rubber-stamping mechanisms.2

With the confirmation of substantialoffshore oil reserves, the big economicturn-around and developmental up-swing seems within close grasp. Al-though actual production is not expectedto start until sometime after 2008, SãoTomé is now being heavily courted by oilcompanies from near and far. Near,meaning Nigeria, with whom São Toméhas agreed to share the offshore reserves.Far of course refers to US firms, notably aconsortium of ChevronTexaco andExxonMobil who have secured the firstoil licence along with a little knownNorwegian-based firm (EER), not allsurprisingly linked to Nigeria. The sign-ing bonus of $60m, is equivalent to SãoTomé’s 2003 GDP.

At the same time, the Government ofPresident de Menezes is being showeredwith attention of a different, yet relatedkind: high-level political and militarydelegations from the USA have recentlybeen visiting São Tomé. In early 2004 US-soldiers conducted ‘training exercises’for the country’s military with largermanoeuvres continuing, notably in thewaters above the offshore oil fields.Discussions for establishing a US naval

Oil Boom or Bust Ahead for São Tomé & Príncipe? 185


base in São Tomé are progressing. Mean-while, a military aid agreement wassigned with Portugal’s State Secretaryfor Foreign Affairs and Cooperation,Manuela Franco. Under this 300,000euro two-year agreement, the São Toméarmed forces are to be supplied withtraining and hardware, which the SãoTomé government expects will turn thetide of dissatisfaction and unrest amongarmy officers – which had been one of thecauses for the July 2003 coup. An inter-nal motivation for the programme mayhave been to turn the forces’ focus to-wards international military coopera-tion exercises. Thus, a peculiar mix ofsecurity, oil and political stabilisationissues are emerging as being of centralimportance to the countries’ insertioninto the political economy of the globaloil markets. It is an unexpected situationfor a country ranked by UNDP at 123 inhuman development to find itself in.3

In the past three decades, São Tomé hasrecorded notable success in healthachievements and average life expect-ancy now reaches 69 years. Progress inthe education sector has been harder tocome by and the overall enrolment ratiostands at 62%, comparable to Hondurasor Oman. However social indicators andlivelihoods factors of relevance to thegeneral population are of little concern tothe emerging elites of the new politicaleconomy. A duality of foreign securityand energy-supply interests in São Toméis quickly taking shape and gainingpolitical influence. National sovereigntyas well as social and cultural identity ofSão Tomé and its people are at risk ofmoving towards oblivion, in the face oflures and promises of a wealth churningoil boom.

The US, increasingly concerned aboutdiversifying its oil supply base stands tobenefit most from such a boom. But alsothe national oil companies of other oil-hungry countries have shown flag in SãoTomé. Earlier this year Brazil’s Petrobras,which already operates in Nigeria, Equa-

torial Guinea as in Angola, sent a delega-tion to negotiate business terms with SãoTomé authorities. Details of the negotia-tions remain undisclosed but Petrobrasmay be preparing to enter the SãoToméan market in cooperation with Chi-nese partner oil companies that alreadyoperate offshore the archipelago.4 Ma-laysia has emerged as a global player inexploration of oil and gas reserves.Petronas, Malaysia’s national oil com-pany, is no stranger to Africa. In January2004, São Tomé’s president Menezeswas on an official visit to Malaysia.Reportedly, on 10 January he visited theMalaysia Palm Oil Board (MPOB) andmet ‘senior Petronas officers in Putra-jaya’. Elsewhere on the continent, inEthiopia’s Gambela region Petronas isestablishing a presence in preparationfor exploration activities. It is alreadyactive in Equatorial Guinea and, regard-less of the completely dismal humanrights reputation of the country, Petronashas major operations in Sudan.5

For the time being, São Tomé’s oil re-serves are to be jointly developed andexploited with Nigeria, the regional pow-erhouse and close ally of the USA.Indeed, São Tomé is tumbling into a newera of development. The combination ofpromising oil reserves, a possible strate-gic role as host to a US naval basealongside rising control over the state bya corruption-prone alliance of membersof the political and military elite isshaping up to catapult the micro-stateinto the grey-zone of capitalist globalisa-tion. Whether the country will succeed inchannelling the forecasted capital in-flows into a broad-based, sustainabledevelopment project depends as muchon bridging new social divisions as onwarding off foreign political pressures.

The lure of quick and easy money mayprove to tempting to resist for manynational decisions-makers. To be sure,succumbing to it will raise the spectre ofa remote Atlantic island devoid of a self-conscious national identity and with its

development approaches defined by ex-ternal policies and economic interests.São Tomé needs to assert itself now, as aself-determined nation with a commit-ment to an inclusive sustainable devel-opment project. Before too long it mayfind itself relegated to some back-yardspace at the globalisation drive-in mov-ies, idling on while on stand-by to playpleasure islands to the hulky crews fromthe imperial galleons.

Glenn Brigaldino, Ottawa; e-mail:[email protected].

Endnotes

1. The term ‘armed globalization’ is used byNegri and Hardt for describing today’s’ primaryobstacle to democracy, namely the global stateof war. In their important exploration of thedialectics of the ‘multitude, the living alternativethat grows within (armed globalizations’)Empire’, the authors set out to provide aconceptual basis for a new project of democracy.M.Hardt & A.Negri (2004), Multitude, New York:The Penguin Press; Richard Falk has elaboratedthe dynamic of predatory globalization for ahuman rights and civil society perspective.Richard Falk (1999), Predatory Globalization,Cambridge: Polity Press.

2. For a state-of-the-art discourse on thechallenges, dynamics and opportunities entailedin partnership modes of cooperation refer to: J.Brinkerhoff (2002), Partnership for InternationalDevelopment: Rhetoric or Results?, Boulder: LynneRienner Publishers, Boulder.

3. Afrol news, 5 February 2004, Portugal, SãoTomé sign military accord, quoted from http://www.afrol.com/articles/11219

4. Afrol news, 20 October 2004, Brazil’s Petrobrasinterested in São Tomé oilfields, see: http://www.afrol.com/articles/14591

5. Afrol news, 21 January 2004, Malaysianinterest in São Toméan oil, see: http://www.afrol.com/articles/10918

For a discussion on how Malaysia’s owneconomic development has been pushed at thecost of environmental degradation, see GlennBrigaldino, Hard choices ahead for Malaysia, ISBN/ eBook ID: 0-9733847-2-7, visit http://www.ebookad.com/eb.php3?ebookid=15578

Bibliographic Note

Economist Intelligence Unit, ‘Country ReportSão Tomé and Principe’, July 2004.

IRINNEWS.ORG, 23 August 2004.

New Internationalist, issue 318 (Nov. 1999)Country Profile São Tomé and Principe.

STRATFOR, São Tomé’s Energy Industry andthe future of regional security, 28 October 2003.

UNDP Human Development Report 2004, Onlineat: http://hdr.undp.org/2004.

US Military Involvement inAfrica

Daniel Volman

US Military Commands for Sub-Saharan Africa

Most African countries fall within thearea of responsibility of the US Euro-pean Command (which also covers Eu-rope and the former republics of theSoviet Union). However, a number ofcountries in northeast Africa (Egypt,Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Su-dan, and Kenya) and the Seychelles arewithin the area of responsibility of theUS Central Command; the US PacificCommand covers the Comoros, Mada-gascar, and the Indian Ocean. Thesecommands (along with the variousbranches of the armed forces, i.e. the USAir Force, the US Navy, and US SpecialForces Command) are responsible forconducting active military operations inAfrica, including training exercises, hu-manitarian relief, peacekeeping, evacu-ating civilians from unstable countries,and other operations.

However, in an recent interview (March2005), Marine General James L. Jones*,Supreme Allied Command Europe (Bel-gium) clarified this structure:

US Military Involvement in Africa 187


Africa is an important part of ourtheater, and has been neglected fortoo long … Africa is everybody'sproblem and everybody's responsibil-ity.

European Command must help strug-gling democracies in Africa developtheir armed forces to protect theirborders. This is important becausefundamentalists want to recruit inAfrica. These fanatics go to areaswhere there is not much hope andeconomic prospects are dismal.

NATO needs to focus more attentionon Africa … NATO will have to quitbeing such an eastward-focused alli-ance and will have to react to some ofthe compelling realities of the south-ern flank (www. defenselink.mil.news).

Most arms sales are conducted throughthe US Defense Security CooperationAgency, which comes under the author-ity of the Office of African Affairs at theoffice of the Assistant Secretary ofDefense for International Security Af-fairs. Certain military hardware (includ-ing rifles, shotguns, electronics, policeequipment and crowd control chemicals,and explosives) is sold under a licensingprogram administered by the Office ofDefense Trade Controls at the US StateDepartment’s Bureau of Political-Mili-tary Affairs.

AngolaCommercial Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)BeninAfrica Contingency Operations Training

Assistance (ACOTA)International Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)BotswanaCommercial Sales ProgramForeign Military Financing ProgramForeign Military Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Burkina FasoInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)

BurundiInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)CameroonCommercial Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Cape VerdeInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Central African RepublicInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)ChadInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)ComorosInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Congo, Republic of theInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Cote d’IvoireAfrica Contingency Operations Training


Program (IMET)Democratic Republic of the CongoInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)DjiboutiCommercial Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)U.S. Use of African Military BasesEquatorial GuineaInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)EritreaForeign Military Financing ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)EthiopiaCommercial Sales ProgramForeign Military Financing ProgramForeign Military Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)GabonCommercial Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)GambiaInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)GhanaAfrica Contingency Operations Training

Assistance (ACOTA)Africa Regional Peacekeeping Program

(ARP)Foreign Military Financing ProgramForeign Military Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Military ExercisesGuinea

Foreign Military Financing ProgramForeign Military Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Guinea-BissauInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)KenyaAfrica Contingency Operations Training

Assistance (ACOTA)Commercial Sales ProgramForeign Military Financing ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Military ExercisesUS Use of African Military BasesLesothoInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)MadagascarInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)MalawiAfrica Contingency Operations Training


Program (IMET)MaliAfrica Contingency Operations Training

Assistance (ACOTA)Foreign Military Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)MauritaniaInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)MauritiusInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)MozambiqueInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)NamibiaInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)NigerInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)NigeriaAfrica Regional Peacekeeping Program

(ARP)Commercial Sales ProgramForeign Military Financing ProgramForeign Military Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)RwandaInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)SenegalAfrica Contingency Operations Training

Assistance (ACOTA)Africa Regional Peacekeeping Program

(ARP)Foreign Military Financing Program

Foreign Military Sales ProgramSao Tome e PrincipeInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)SeychellesInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Sierra LeoneInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)South AfricaCommercial Sales ProgramForeign Military Financing ProgramForeign Military Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Military ExercisesSwazilandInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)TanzaniaInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)Military ExercisesTogoInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)UgandaAfrica Contingency Operations Training


Program (IMET)Military ExercisesZambiaCommercial Sales ProgramInternational Military Education and Training

Program (IMET)ZimbabweForeign Military Sales Program

Daniel Volman, Director of the African SecurityResearch Project in Washington, DC for ACAS(Association of Concerned Africa Scholars).Information from the US State Department,Congressional Budget Justification for ForeignOperations, Fiscal Year 2003, and from variousUS Defense Department web sites and news-paper articles. www.prairienet.org/acas/military/militarysummary.html. Additionaldata from Jan Burgess.

* General Jones is the Supreme Allied Commander,Europe (SACEUR) and the Commander of the UnitedStates European Command (COMUSEUCOM). From theSupreme Headquarters Allied Power Europe, Mons,Belgium, General Jones leads Allied Command Europe(ACE), comprising NATO's military forces in Europe. Themission of ACE is to preserve the peace, security, andterritorial integrity of the NATO member nations inEurope. As COMUSEUCOM, General Jones commandsfive US components: US Army, Europe; US Navy,Europe; US Air Forces in Europe; US Marine Forces,Europe; and Special Operations Command, Europe.

US Military Involvement in Africa 189


New Undeclared ArmsRace: America’s Agendafor Global MilitaryDominationMichel Chossudovsky

The Pentagon has released the sum-mary of a top secret Pentagon documentwhich sketches America’s agenda forglobal military domination. This redi-rection of America’s military strategyseems to have passed virtually unno-ticed. With the exception of The WallStreet Journal, not a word has beenmentioned in the US media. There hasbeen no press coverage concerning thismysterious military blueprint. The lat-ter outlines, according to the Wall StreetJournal, America’s global military de-sign which consists in ‘enhancing USinfluence around the world’, throughincreased troop deployments and amassive buildup of America’s advancedweapons systems.

While the document follows in the foot-steps of the administration’s ‘pre-emptive’ war doctrine as detailed by theNeo-cons’ Project of the New AmericanCentury (PNAC), it goes much further insetting the contours of Washington’sglobal military agenda. It calls for a more‘proactive’ approach to warfare, beyondthe weaker notion of ‘pre-emptive’ anddefensive actions, where military opera-tions are launched against a ‘declaredenemy’ with a view to ‘preserving thepeace’ and ‘defending America’. Thedocument explicitly acknowledgesAmerica’s global military mandate, be-yond regional war theaters. This man-date also includes:

military operations directed againstcountries, which are not hostile toAmerica, but which are considered stra-tegic from the point of view of USinterests.

From a broad military and foreign policyperspective, the March 2005 Pentagondocument constitutes an imperial de-sign, which supports US corporate inter-ests worldwide.

At its heart, the document is driven by thebelief that the US is engaged in acontinuous global struggle that extendsfar beyond specific battlegrounds, such asIraq and Afghanistan. The vision is for amilitary that is far more proactive, focusedon changing the world instead of justresponding to conflicts such as a NorthKorean attack on South Korea, and assum-ing greater prominence in countries inwhich the US isn’t at war (WSJ, 11March 2005)

The document suggests that its objectivealso consists in ‘offensive’ rather thanrun of the mill ‘pre-emptive’ operations.There is, in this regard, a subtle nuancein relation to earlier post-9/11 nationalsecurity statements:

[The document presents] four core prob-lems, none of them involving traditionalmilitary confrontations. The services aretold to develop forces that can: buildpartnerships with failing states to defeatinternal terrorist threats; defend the home-land, including offensive strikes againstterrorist groups planning attacks; influ-ence the choices of countries at a strategiccrossroads, such as China and Russia; andprevent the acquisition of weapons of massdestruction by hostile states and terroristgroups (Ibid).

The emphasis is no longer solely onwaging major theater wars as outlined inthe PNAC’s Rebuilding America’sDefenses, Strategy, Forces and Resourcesfor a New Century’; the March 2005military blueprint points to shifts inweapons systems as well as the need fora global deployment of US forces in actsof worldwide military policing and in-tervention. The PNAC in its September2000 Report had described these non-

theater military operations as ‘constabu-lary functions’:

The Pentagon must retain forces topreserve the current peace in ways thatfall short of conduction major theatercampaigns … These duties are today’smost frequent missions, requiring forcesconfigured for combat but capable of long-term, independent constabulary opera-tions (PNAC, http://www. newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf , p. 18)

Recruitment of Troops to Policethe Empire

The underlying emphasis is on thedevelopment and recruitment of special-ized military manpower required to con-trol and pacify indigenous forces andfactions in different regions of the World:

the classified guidance urges the militaryto come up with less doctrinaire solutionsthat include sending in smaller teams ofculturally savvy soldiers to train andmentor indigenous forces (Ibid.).

The classified document points to theneed for a massive recruitment andtraining of troops. These troops, includ-ing new contingents of special forces,green berets and other specialized mili-tary personnel, would be involved,around the world, in acts of militarypolicing:

Mr. Rumsfeld’s approach likely will trig-ger major shifts in the weapons systemsthat the Pentagon buys, and even morefundamental changes in the training anddeployment of US troops throughout theworld, said defense officials who haveplayed a role in crafting the document orare involved in the review.

The US would seek to deploy thesetroops far earlier in a looming conflictthan they traditionally have been to helpa tottering government’s armed forcesconfront guerrillas before an insurgency

is able to take root and build popularsupport. Officials said the plan envi-sions many such teams operating aroundthe world.

US Military Involvement is notLimited to the Middle East

The sending in of special forces inmilitary policing operations, under thedisguise of peace-keeping and training,is contemplated in all major regions ofthe world.

A large part of these activities, however,will most probably be carried out byprivate mercenary companies on con-tract to the Pentagon, NATO or theUnited Nations. The military manpowerrequirements as well as the equipmentare specialized. The policing will not beconducted by regular army units as in atheater war:

the new plan envisions more active USinvolvement, resembling recent militaryaid missions to places like Niger andChad, where the US is dispatching teamsof ground troops to train local militaries inbasic counterinsurgency tactics. Futuretraining missions, however, would likelybe conducted on a much broader scale.

Of the military’s services, the MarineCorps right now is moving fastest to fillthis gap and is looking at shifting someresources away from traditional am-phibious-assault missions to new unitsdesigned specifically to work with for-eign forces.

To support these troops, military officialsare looking at everything from acquiringcheap aerial surveillance systems to fly-ing gunships that can be used in messyurban fights to come to the aid of groundtroops. One ‘dream capability might bean unmanned AC-130 gunship that couldcircle an area at relatively low altitudeuntil it is needed, then swoop in to laydown a withering line of fire, said adefense official’ (Ibid.).

New Undeclared Arms Race: America’s Agenda for Global Military Domination 191


New Post Cold War Enemies

While the ‘war on terrorism’ and thecontainment of ‘rogue states’ still consti-tute the official justification and drivingforce, China and Russia are explicitlyidentified in the classified March docu-ment as potential enemies.

… the US military … is seeking todissuade rising powers, such as China,from challenging US military dominance.Although weapons systems designed tofight guerrillas tend to be fairly cheap andlow-tech, the review makes clear that todissuade those countries from trying tocompete, the US military must retain itsdominance in key high-tech areas, such asstealth technology, precision weaponryand manned and unmanned surveillancesystems (Ibid.).

While the European Union is not men-tioned, the stated objective is to shunt thedevelopment of all potential militaryrivals.

‘Trying to Run with the Big Dog’

How does Washington intend to reachits goal of global military hegemony?Essentially through the continued devel-opment of the US weapons industry,requiring a massive shift out of theproduction of civilian goods and serv-ices. In other words, the ongoing in-crease in defense spending feeds thisnew undeclared arms race, with vastamounts of public money channeled toAmerica’s major weapons producers.The stated objective is to make the proc-ess of developing advanced weaponssystems ‘so expensive’, that no otherpower on earth will able to compete orchallenge ‘the Big Dog’, without jeopard-izing its civilian economy:

[A]t the core of this strategy is the beliefthat the US must maintain such a largelead in crucial technologies that growingpowers will conclude that it is tooexpensive for these countries to even

think about trying to run with the bigdog. They will realize that it is not worthsacrificing their economic growth, saidone defense consultant who was hired todraft sections of the document (Ibid.,emphasis added).

Undeclared Arms Race betweenEurope & America

This new undeclared arms race is withthe so-called ‘growing powers’. WhileChina and Russia are mentioned as apotential threat, America’s (unofficial)rivals also include France, Germany andJapan. The recognized partners of the US– in the context of the Anglo-Americanaxis – are Britain, Australia and Canada,not to mention Israel (unofficially). Inthis context, there are at present twodominant Western military axes: theAnglo-American axis and the competingFranco-German alliance. The Europeanmilitary project, largely dominated byFrance and Germany, will inevitablyundermine NATO. Britain (through Brit-ish Aerospace Systems Corporation) isfirmly integrated into the US system ofdefense procurement in partnership withAmerica’s big five weapons producers.

Needless to say, this new arms race isfirmly embedded in the European project,which envisages under EU auspices, amassive redirection of state financialresources towards military expenditure.Moreover, the EU monetary system es-tablishing a global currency which chal-lenges the hegemony of the US dollar isintimately related to the development ofan integrated EU defense force outside ofNATO.

Under the European constitution, therewill be a unified European foreign policyposition which will include a commondefense component. It is understood,although never seriously debated in pub-lic, that the proposed European DefenseForce is intended to challenge America’ssupremacy in military affairs:

under such a regime, trans-Atlantic rela-tions will be dealt a fatal blow (accordingto Martin Callanan, British Conserva-tive member of the European Parlia-ment, Washington Times, 5 March 2005).

Ironically, this European military project,while encouraging an undeclared US-EU arms race, is not incompatible withcontinued US-EU cooperation in mili-tary affairs. The underlying objective forEurope is that EU corporate interests areprotected and that European contractorsare able to effectively cash in and ‘sharethe spoils’ of the US-led wars in theMiddle East and elsewhere. In otherwords, by challenging the Big Dog from aposition of strength, the EU seeks toretain its role as ‘a partner’ of America inits various military ventures. There is apresumption, particularly in France, thatthe only way to build good relations withWashington, is to emulate the AmericanMilitary Project, i.e. by adopting a similarstrategy of beefing up Europe’s advancedweapons systems.

In other words, what we are dealing withis a fragile love-hate relationship be-tween Old Europe and America, indefense systems, the oil industry as wellas in the upper spheres of banking,finance and currency markets. The im-portant issue is how this fragile geopo-litical relationship will evolve in terms ofcoalitions and alliances in the years tocome. France and Germany have mili-tary cooperation agreements with bothRussia and China. European Defensecompanies are supplying China withsophisticated weaponry. Ultimately, Eu-rope is viewed as an encroachment bythe US, and military conflict betweencompeting Western superpowers cannotbe ruled out. (For further details, seeMichel Chossudovsky, The Anglo-Ameri-can Axis, http://globalresearch.ca/arti-cles/CHO303B.html )

From skepticism concerning Iraq’s al-leged weapons of mass destruction(WMD) to outright condemnation, in the

months leading up to the March 2003invasion, Old Europe (in the wake of theinvasion) has broadly accepted the le-gitimacy of the US military occupation ofIraq, despite the killings of civilians, notto mention the Bush administration’spolicy guidelines on torture and politicalassassinations.

In a cruel irony, the new US-EU armsrace has become the chosen avenue of theEuropean Union, to foster ‘friendly rela-tions’ with the American superpower.Rather than opposing the US, Europehas embraced ‘the war on terrorism’. It isactively collaborating with the US in thearrest of presumed terrorists. Several EUcountries have established Big Brotheranti-terrorist laws, which constitute aEuropean ‘copy and paste’ version of theUS Homeland Security legislation.

European public opinion is now galva-nized into supporting the ‘war on terror-ism’, which broadly benefits theEuropean military industrial complexand the oil companies. In turn, the ‘waron terrorism’ also provides a shakylegitimacy to the EU security agendaunder the European Constitution. Thelatter is increasingly viewed with disbe-lief, as a pretext to implement police-statemeasures, while also dismantling laborlegislation and the European welfarestate.

In turn, the European media has alsobecome a partner in the disinformationcampaign. The ‘outside enemy’ pre-sented ad nauseam on network TV, onboth sides of the Atlantic, is Osama binLaden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.

In other words, the propaganda cam-paign serves to usefully camouflage theongoing militarisation of civilian insti-tutions, which is occurring simultane-ously in Europe and America.

New Undeclared Arms Race: America’s Agenda for Global Military Domination 193


Guns & Butter: The Demise ofthe Civilian Economy

The proposed EU constitution requires amassive expansion of military spendingin all member countries to the obviousdetriment of the civilian economy. TheEuropean Union’s 3% limit on annualbudget deficits implies that the expan-sion in military expenditure will beaccompanied by a massive curtailmentof all categories of civilian expenditure,including social services, public infra-structure, not to mention governmentsupport to agriculture and industry. Inthis regard, ‘the war on terrorism’ serves– in the context of the neoliberal reforms– as a pretext. It builds public acceptancefor the imposition of austerity measuresaffecting civilian programs, on thegrounds that money is needed to en-hance national security and homelanddefense.

The growth of military spending inEurope is directly related to the USmilitary buildup. The more Americaspends on defense, the more Europe willwant to spend on developing its ownEuropean Defense Force. ‘Keeping upwith the Jones’, all of which is for a goodand worthy, cause, namely fighting ‘Is-lamic terrorists’ and defending the home-land.

EU enlargement is directly linked to thedevelopment and financing of the Euro-pean weapons industry. The dominantEuropean powers desperately need thecontributions of the ten new EU membersto finance the EU’s military buildup. Inthis regard, the European Constitutionrequires ‘the adoption of a security strat-egy for Europe, accompanied by finan-cial commitments on military spending.’(European Report, 3 July 2003). In otherwords, under the European Constitu-tion, EU enlargement tends to weakenthe Atlantic military alliance (NATO).The backlash on employment and socialprograms is the inevitable by-product ofboth the American and European mili-

tary projects, which channel vastamounts of State financial resourcestowards the war economy, at the expenseof the civilian sectors. The result areplant closures and bankruptcies in thecivilian economy and a rising tide ofpoverty and unemployment throughoutthe Western World. Moreover, contraryto the 1930s, the dynamic developmentof the weapons industry creates very fewjobs.

Meanwhile, as the Western war economyflourishes, the relocation of the produc-tion of civilian manufactured goods toThird World countries has increased inrecent years at a dramatic pace. China,which constitutes by far the largest pro-ducer of civilian manufactured goods,increased its textile exports to the US by80.2% in 2004, leading to a wave of plantclosures and job losses (WSJ, 11 March2005).

The global economy is characterized by abipolar relationship. The rich Westerncountries produce weapons of mass de-struction, whereas poor countries pro-duce manufactured consumer goods. Ina twisted logic, the rich countries usetheir advanced weapons systems tothreaten or wage war on the poor devel-oping countries, which supply Westernmarkets with large amounts of consumergoods produced in cheap labor assemblyplants.

America, in particular, has relied on thischeap supply of consumer goods to closedown a large share of its manufacturingsector, while at the same time redirectingresources away from the civilianeconomy into the production of weaponsof mass destruction. And the latter, in abitter irony, are slated to be used againstthe country which supplies Americawith a large share of its consumer goods,namely China.

©Michel Chossudodvsky, Global Re-search 2005.

US Thwarts Justice forDarfurHuman Rights Watch, Brussels

The United States is blocking UN Secu-rity Council action on the human rightscrisis in Darfur on account of the Bushadministration’s hostility to the Interna-tional Criminal Court, Human RightsWatch said today. On Tuesday, theUnited States proposed splitting a UNSecurity Council draft resolution onSudan into three separate resolutions,none of which would authorise a tribu-nal to prosecute crimes against human-ity in Darfur.

The United States is hanging the peopleof Darfur out to dry by stalling onjustice,’ said Richard Dicker, director ofHuman Rights Watch’s InternationalJustice Program.

After labeling Darfur a genocide, theUnited States is now blocking the crediblethreat of prosecution by the InternationalCriminal Court, which could immediatelydeter further violence in Darfur.

The US move follows ongoing negotia-tions among all Security Council mem-bers on a single Sudan resolution onjustice, targeted sanctions, and a peace-support mission. The UN peace-supportmission for Sudan is to implement theNaivasha peace agreement, the accordending the 21-year civil war between theSudanese government and southern-based rebels. The mission of 10,000troops will cover areas in the north andsouth of Sudan, but not Darfur, wherecontinuing fighting and violence againstcivilians has created a human rightsdisaster. According to Dicker:

In the guise of taking action on a peace-keeping force in the North-South conflict,the United States is pushing aside meas-ures needed to deal with atrocities inDarfur … Vague commitments to ac-

countability are not enough. The heinouscrimes committed in Darfur need immedi-ate investigation and prosecution by theInternational Criminal Court.

Twelve out of the Security Council’s 15members support authorising the Inter-national Criminal Court (ICC) to investi-gate and prosecute crimes in Darfur. USopposition to referring Darfur to the ICCis unrelated to crimes committed inDarfur, Human Rights Watch said. In-stead, it is rooted in the Bush administra-tion’s ideological opposition to the court,which focuses largely on fears aboutpolitically motivated prosecutionsagainst Americans.

On 25 January, the UN Commission ofInquiry for Darfur strongly recommendedthat the Security Council refer the situa-tion to the International Criminal Court.Washington sponsored the resolutionthat created the UN Commission, but hasignored the commission’s findings thatthe ICC is the ‘single best mechanism’and ‘only credible way’ to ensure thatjustice is done in Darfur. ‘As the SecurityCouncil delays, the situation in Darfur isonly getting worse,’ said Peter Taki-rambudde, director of Human RightsWatch’s Africa Division.

The people of Darfur need a vastlyenhanced protective force. But in themeantime, targeted sanctions and justicecould have an immediate impact. Theyshould be a top priority for passage byevery Security Council member.’

The violence in Darfur has continued,despite fewer allegations of air attackson civilians in the past two months.Almost 2 million people have been force-fully displaced from their homes in thepast two years of the conflict. Most ofthese displaced civilians have becomevirtual prisoners in camps and townsdue to ongoing attacks, rape, looting,and assault by government-backed mili-tias known as the Janjaweed. The Suda-nese government has been unable or

US Thwarts Justice for Darfur 195


unwilling to stop ongoing atrocities.Rebel movements have also been respon-sible for an increasing number of attackson commercial convoys over the pastmonths.

Editor's Note: See Lawless World: America& the Making & Breaking of Global Rules byPhilippe Sands, Allen Lane, 2005.

Ngugi & Njeeri Wa Thiong’o

We are writing to appeal to the Kenyangovernment to react appropriately and withall deliberate speed to the brutal attack onNgugi Wa Thiong’o and Njeeri Wa Ngugi andthe rape of Njeeri. We write to stress theurgency of an appropriate response that willhold accountable not only the direct attackers,but all those responsible for what we see as apolitically motivated attack by enemies ofwhat Professor Ngugi Wa Thiong’o stands forin Kenya, Africa and the world.

The world community continues to watch thiscase closely, first and foremost because we areshocked by the brutality of this attack and rape,but also because of the grave implicationsimpunity for the perpetrators would have.International organisations, including women’sgroups, civil liberties organisations, andorganisations of writers and intellectuals are buta few of the members of the internationalcommunity deeply invested in how the presentadministration will respond to this attack.

It is critical for the Kenyan government to rebuffthis grave attack against an internationallycelebrated public intellectual whose commitmentto his country and the empowerment of ordinarypeople has been unwavering. If this attack onthe occasion of his first return to his homecountry, after 22 years in forced exile, is notcondemned, and all those responsible pursuedfor their crimes, a chilling blow to intellectualliberty will have been dealt. Such blows haveimpact the world over. This one, in particular,would send a sad message regarding Kenya’scapacity to overcome its political past. Thisgovernment must respond firmly to demonstratea commitment to the political future of thecountry. It is equally critical to demonstrate awillingness on the government’s part to respondto the full gravity of the rape of Njeeri WaNgugi.

The culture of silence around violence againstwomen in Kenya fosters repeated and wide-spread abuses against the human rights ofwomen. A full length Amnesty Internationalreport on violence against women in Kenya(March 8, 2002) cites several national andinternational instruments that hold governmentsresponsible for failures to prosecute with ‘duediligence’ any violence against women. We wantto express our unconditional solidarity with NjeeriWa Ngugi in her ongoing struggle to standpublicly against the epidemic of violence againstwomen. We believe that the government of Kenyahas both the opportunity and the responsibilityto meet the challenge of supporting her. Thischallenge consists in bringing all those responsiblefor this attack on Njeeri Wa Ngugi and NgugiWa Thiong’o to justice. But steps must also betaken to end the conditions that foster this cultureof silence. Systems must be put in place, as inother countries, for women to anonymouslyidentify their attackers. Every form of sexualviolence against women must be treated as acrime of the gravest consequence. The victimscannot be left to fight alone. To that end, wehope that this administration will not set theprecedent of allowing Njeeri Wa Ngugi to standalone. At a time like this, when we are seeingpolitical violence erode so many countries inEurope, North America, Africa, and indeed onevery continent, it is doubly important for peoplein positions of power to stand against theimpunity of perpetrators. We hope that withyour actions, you will set an example for Kenyaand the world.

Please write to one or more of the followingcontacts in Nairobi:

Kiraitu Murungi,Ministry of Justice andConstitutional Affairs; [email protected]@skyweb.co.ke

Dorothy Angote, Justice & ConstitutionalAffairs, [email protected]

Attorney General, State Law Office; Tel: 25420 227411; please use fax: 254 20 315105

First Lady, Lucy Kibaki, State House; [email protected]

John Githongo, Office of President, State House;[email protected]; [email protected]

Hon. Ayang Nyong’o, Minister of Planning &National Development; [email protected]

Phillip Murgor, Director of Public Prosecution,State Law Office; [email protected]

Please copy of all letters to: [email protected] and Kenya Human RightsCommission; [email protected]

�

A Tribute to ClaudeMeillassoux

In the spring of 2004 ROAPE took overan old country house hotel on theoutskirts of Sheffield. With views acrossthe moors and the rhododendron inbloom it was here we held our gettogether of extended family of editorsand friends. Of notable absence wasClaude, a valued friend and mainstayof the journal from its very beginningsin 1974. When speaking with Claude onthe phone he and his companion,Corinne Belliard, were so very pleasedto be invited but unable to come, thisyear; perhaps next? He is missed morethan we can say. (JB)

Bonnie Campbell, Montreal

There are those who have been so forma-tive in our own intellectual parcours thatthey become as a permanent fixture, amountain in the paysage of our ideas.Claude Meillassoux was one of these.Such an inspiration, such a model ofintellectual and political commitmentand of great personal generosity andcharm. So intellectually creative andclear.

At one of his seminars in Montreal(October 1989) on ‘Le Spectre de Malthus.Un problème de reproduction démo-graphique du Sahel’ Claude eloquentlyand convincingly documented that theissue to be addressed was that of re-duced access to resources and the reduc-tion of jobs and not, as generallyproposed, the excessive reproduction ofpeople. He spoke of the misguided poli-cies of the Bretton Woods Institutionswhose strategies aimed very consciouslyat reducing public expenditure and no-

tably food subsidies in the cities when allknew that there were no alternativesources of employment or livelihood.Une suppression planifiée … C’est très trèsgrave concluded Claude.

Claude Meillassoux: humanist, brilliantintellectual, warm and charming person… What a gap you leave.

Bernard Schlemmer, France*

Claude Meillassoux passed away on 2January 2005. In anthropology and inthe social sciences more broadly, heleaves behind many colleagues who willfeel themselves orphans – paradoxicallyenough, because Claude never consid-ered himself anyone’s spiritual father.

A Thunder Clap in a Serene Sky

His name will remain forever associated,in our intellectual history, with the para-digm break (in T. S. Kuhn’s sense) repre-sented by the appearance of his seminalarticle ‘Essai d’interprétation du phéno-méne économique dans les sociétéstraditionnelles d’autosubsistance’(Cahiers d’études africaines , 1960, 4:38-67).Roland Waast still remembers when, asa young student, and sitting on theterrace of the Café La Sorbonne, themeeting spot of the Sociology students,he saw Raymond Jamous arrive, fever-ishly brandishing an issue of the Cahiers,and shouting ‘I have just discovered thearticle that will change the face of An-thropology!’ It was suddenly clear thatthe indigenous societies studied by An-thropology - those that we could notidentify other than by differerence fromor in opposition to our Western society -were like any human society, forced toproduce economic goods and to becomepart of relations of production beforethey could function on any other level.

A Tribute to Claude Meillassoux 197


It is this article, quickly followed byMeillassoux’s masterly thesis on theGouro (L’anthropologie économique desGouro de Côte d’Ivoire ; Mouton, 1964)which opened the way in France to thesudden rise of research in economicanthropology, and well beyond. To citeonly a few of the pioneers in this fieldwho began their work during the 1960s,young scholars of his generation orbarely his juniors, one must mention thenames of Pierre Bonnafe, Jean Copans,Jacques Dupre, Pierre-Philippe Rey, andEmmanuel Terray. And we should addtheir contemporaries in other disciplines,economists such as Samir Amin, orBenjamin Coriat, the philosopher EtienneBalibar, the historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovich, the demographers FrancisGendreau or Jacques Veron - just to namea few – simply to speak of those whoshare Meillassoux’s perspective or whoacknowledge him as an influence andmodel for their own work.

Rapidly, most French anthropologistsbecame influenced by the work of ClaudeMeillassoux to a greater or lesser degree,to the point at which economic anthro-pology came to contest the domination ofFrench Academia with structural an-thropology, during at least that decade. Itis obviously impossible to mention hereall those who followed that trend, oreven those who recognise or still recog-nise Meillassoux’s influence. This influ-ence later expanded beyond the smallcircle of the Francophones. One of hiskey works (Femmes, greniers et capitaux;Maspero, 1975) was translated into noless than six languages because thisyoung man’s perspective fashioned newperspectives both within Anthropologyitself, and among the various disciplinesof the social sciences, and particularly inthe Marxist intellectual community. Thedebate suddenly ceased to tie itself inknots over the extension of the ‘Asianmode of production’ or the relevance ofthe concepts of infra- and superstructureapplied to pre-capitalist societies. Ratherit opened the way to a general reflection

on historically constructed economic andsocial formations, in any place or at anyhistorical period of human society - thusaccomplishing the real goal of historicalmaterialism.

What were the intellectual origins of sodaring and splendid a feat? No doubt itowes much to the fact that he did notpursue a ‘classical’ education. Instead,coming from a rich bourgeois industrialfamily of Northern France, and havinghad an education as a wholly liberaleconomist in the United States, he beganhis professional life at the heart of thecapitalist system. He thus knew it fromthe inside and its practices and usesswiftly convinced him that he couldnever make a career there; to the contrary,he would devote his abilities to fightingit! That is how he trained himself inanthropology, remote from the dominantcurrents of his time: French structural-ism or Anglo-Saxon functionalism. For-tunately enough, he then found in GeorgeBalandier a ready listener with whom heshared common concerns and under-standing.

The ‘Meillassoux Seminar’ of LaRue Tournon

With his reputation now established, hecontinued in the 1970s to act as aninnovator, a catalyst, by directing aseminar, whose exact title most partici-pants could hardly remember, becausefor everyone, it was ‘The Meillassouxseminar’. This brought together, wellbeyond anthropologists strictly speak-ing, all those who wanted to take part,intellectually, in the movements of eman-cipation and national liberation, andwho were interested in the basic chal-lenges that this issue posed: how toanalyze the articulation between tradi-tional economies and the capitalisteconomy, the lineage-based societies andthe construction of nation-states,neocolonialism and imperialism, devel-opment and underdevelopment, etc?Naturally, the debates were heated and

impassioned. One remembers the ‘semi-nar’ as a place where intellectual re-search and militant passion fed eachother, where controversies were built butsometimes also denunciations were pro-nounced, where engagement in the theo-retical debate was judged againstpolitical engagement, where a true dia-lectic of logos and praxis worked.

Claude Meillassoux was then fully rec-ognized for his human qualities in addi-tion to his intellectual qualities. Hiswillingness to listen, his care for others,his personal warmth, his lack of sympa-thy for hierarchy, status, titles and posi-tions, as well as his radicalimpermeability to dominant trends inthought, to accepted ideas and sloppyreasoning, made him an organizer recog-nized, appreciated, respected and evenliked, in spite of the lively criticismswhich he did not fail to offer when heexpressed disagreement. This seminarwill not be a place for mere speech, asuseful as it could be. Bringing togetherscholars from various positions anddisciplines, the seminar was the placewhere several important collective workswere produced, such as L’évolution ducommerce africain depuis le XIXee siécle enAfrique de l’Ouest, OUP 1971, or L’esclavageen Afrique précoloniale (Maspero, 1975)and, especially, Qui se nourrit de la famineen Afrique? (Maspero, 1974).

Committed Thought

That last title illustrates particularly wellthe Claude’s approach, which consistsin accepting simultaneously the respon-sibilities of the scientist and those of themilitant, combining academic researchand political engagement. The result,written in a state of great urgency by theAfricanist scholars mobilized by Claude,refused to interpret the impact on thedrought-stricken Sahel simply as theoutcome of natural forces. Rather it showsthat one can there perceive the inevitableoutcomes of a policy of economic domi-nation directing the key productive ac-

tivities of these countries solely in thecombined interest of the rich countries,the greedy multinationals and the cor-rupt national elites. The work was anearly example of an ecological analysiswhich today remains influential but isno longer startling. At the time it wassufficiently disturbing, and had enoughimpact and echo, not only on Africanistscholars or anthropologists but broadlyon researchers in Social Sciences, eveninfluencing part of public opinion, thatthe scientific institutions kept an obvi-ous watch on contributors to the bookand those who made frequent referenceto it, going as far as making impossible ordifficult for them to conduct field work.

This way of combining academic pro-duction and involvement in contempo-rary events, intellectual responsibilityand militancy, illustrated by the collec-tive effort around that book, is usuallyonly manifest in exceptional circum-stances, when collaborative thought andeffort appear to be the logical choice.There, the militant voice of the scholar iscalled for in the public debate, becauseshe or he shares a certain responsibilitythrough being the holder of particularknowledge. With Claude Meillassoux,this involvement was permanent. Hisbibliography** shows well enough thebreadth of his range of interests, where itis hard to discern whether theoreticalquestioning arises from political engage-ment or the other way round. One recallshere how much his analyses in economicanthropology came to feed his incisivecritique of the world’s economic evolu-tion and the exacerbation of the hierar-chy of domination (There is neitherother-worldliness today or Manicheismin his vision of the ‘traditional’ societies:it was he who, to the contrary, was thefirst to theorize the hierarchy of domina-tion existing within those rural socie-ties!). And from then on, while many ofhis articles dealt directly with socialquestions apparently remote from theAfrican terrain, they derived in fact fromhis broad scientific approach and which

A Tribute to Claude Meillassoux 199


he used to fight any injustice in any partof the world. Paradoxically, it was hispolitical engagement that would awakenhis scholarly interest in Southern Africa,a source of so much fundamental work.Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch wrote tome on this subject: ‘I remember seeinghim on his return from South Africa, andhe said to me: “I could only agree to go tothat country (then under apartheid) oncondition that I should return with apolitical testimony from there.” He wasstill one of the very first scholars to bringthe concerns of South Africa to Frenchpublic opinion!’ From that field trip hewrote ‘Les derniers Blancs : le modéle sud-africain (Maspero, 1979). Earlier he hadmade a more modest contribution to anopenly militant collective work, L’Afriqueaustrale, par rapport la colonisation et auxtravailleurs africains (in UGTSF, (ed.)Notre Afrique, Maspero 1978, pp. 18-32),which was well in his style.

Across the Disciplines

In the last two decades, ClaudeMeillassoux gave further proof of hismilitant open-mindedness, in challeng-ing the entire scientific community toengage in a collective and interestedeffort, by organizing several conferenceswith a group of colleagues in variousdisciplines. He made it clear that theconference themes should be at the inter-face of the various disciplines, so as toallow each researcher who faced prob-lems in the field to express their concernsin an open forum. Very carefully pre-pared by a small group constituted firstas an Organizing Committee, then as aPublishing Committee, each of thesethree conferences has been an importantmoment in their intellectual progressionfor many scholars, who repeatedly re-mind us of that fact.

The first conference, Terrains et perspec-tives (Orstom, 1987), dealt with theresponsibility borne by scholars in thesocial sciences confronted by the trans-formations of rural societies in the Third

World and with the policies and theideologies of development. He wrote theconclusion, showing how ‘the peasants,who use the land to their exclusivebenefit, are considered from the point ofview of a capitalist economy, parasites’(p. 443). The second conference, Le Spec-tre de Malthus (Orstom - EDI - Ceped,1991), decompartmentalized a debatewhich though concerning every fieldresearcher, had been confined to confer-ences for demographers: questions ofunderdevelopment and food depend-ency of Third World countries in acontext too quickly analyzed as ‘over-population’. In an introductory theoreti-cal chapter, Claude warned us that ‘thispopulation is today in the situation of arelative overpopulation. The problem,for the capitalist economy which createdit, is to make it disappear in order not tohave it as an overload’ (p. 31). The thirdand last conference, on child labour(L’enfant exploité; Karthala, 1996) wasaround a strikingly overlooked problemin which nobody (with the notable ex-ception of Alain Morice) seemed inter-ested. Yet our awareness of the issuewould inevitably challenge our variousdisciplinary approaches, and force us toreconsider our perspective, so long as welook at reality from the point of view ofchildren forced into hard labor. Thereagain, it was Claude who wrote theconclusion, underlining the paradox of‘the incongruity of child labor. Howsuch physically weak human beings,without any training, described as tur-bulent and inattentive, with a so-callednarrow understanding, are likely to bepreferred as workers over qualified andresponsible adults? This extraordinaryparadox arises from another: the wellbeing of the individual is not the firstconcern of a capitalist economic system.Quite to the contrary, it is human beingswho have to adapt to the realities of acompeting economy and that are af-fected, if not trapped, between the costsof goods and the prices of a fluctuatingeconomic market’.

What characterizes to me, and mostsignificantly, Claude Meillassoux’s ap-proach, is the permanent movement backand forth between intellectual and mili-tant engagement. Even his methodologyrefuses to consider any society, anysocial phenomenon, as analyzable in anautonomous and isolated way, and outof context. His major contention was thatthe same systems of domination andexchange are at work in any humanactivity and in all human societies. Hiscontention still challenges us and keepsus alert: It is hard for us to imagine today,how we will preserve this spirit ofvigilance, now that he is not here tovigorously maintain alive that spirit ofcontroversy which is its major prerequi-site.

* Text originally composed in French by BernardSchlemmer and circulated worldwide by ToyinFalola. English translation by Edgard Sankaraof La Grange College, US.

** If you would like a copy of Meillassoux'sbibliography (8 pages) please get in touch [email protected].

Hommage à ClaudeMeillassoux

de Bernard Schlemmer

Claude MEILLASSOUX nous a quitté. Illaisse, dans le champ de l’anthropologieet, au-delà, dans l’ensemble des sciencessociales, bien des collègues qui se sententaujourd’hui un peu orphelins - fortparadoxalement, car il ne se reconnaissaitcomme le père spirituel de personne.

Un coup de tonnerre dans un cielserein

Son nom restera à jamais lié, dans notrehistoire, à la rupture de paradigme, ausens où l’analysait T. KHUN, qu’areprésenté la publication de son articlefondateur « Essai d’interprétation du

Hommage à Claude Meillassoux 201

phénomène économique dans les sociétéstraditionnelles d’autosubsistance »(Cahiers d’études africaines, 1960, 4 :38-67). Aujourd’hui encore, Roland WAASTraconte comment, en ce temps-là jeuneétudiant, il vit, alors qu’il était à laterrasse du café La Sorbonne, le QG duGroupe des étudiants de sociologie,débouler Raymond JAMOUS qui, agitantce numéro des Cahiers à bout de bras,s’écria « Je viens de découvrir l’articlequi va changer l’anthropologie ! ».Soudain se révélait comme une évidenceque les sociétés étudiées par l’anthro-pologie - qu’on ne savait évidemmentpas nommer autrement que par défaut,par opposition aux nôtres - étaient,comme toute sociétés humaines,contraintes de produire des bienséconomiques, et de les produire avantmême que de les échanger, de rentrerdans des rapports de production avantque de fonctionner sur tout autre plan.

C’est cet article, rapidement suivi de sathèse magistrale sur l’anthropologieéconomique des Gouro de Côte d’Ivoire(Mouton, 1964) qui a permis, en France,le soudain essor de la recherche enanthropologie économique, et bien au-delà. Pour ne citer que les pionniers,jeunes chercheurs de sa génération ou àpeine cadets, et qui ont débuté leurstravaux au cours de ces années 1960, lesnoms de Pierre BONNAFE, de JeanCOPANS, de Jacques DUPRE, de Pierre-Philippe REY, d’Emmanuel TERRAYs’imposent, auxquels il faut ajouter, dansla même génération mais pour d’autresdisciplines, ceux d’économistes commeSamir AMIN, ou Benjamin CORIAT, dephilosophes comme Etienne BALIBAR,des historiens comme CatherineCOQUERY-VIDROVICH, des démo-graphes comme Francis GENDREAU ouJacques VERON - et j’en oublie, qu’ils mepardonnent - pour ne parler ici que deceux qui affirment leur communautéd’approche avec MEILLASSOUX, voirequi reconnaissent son rôle déclencheurpour leurs propres travaux.


Rapidement, c’est la grande majorité desanthropologues français qui se trouventpeu ou prou influencés par les travauxde Claude MEILLASSOUX ; au point quel’anthropologie économique va disputertout le devant de la scène disciplinaire àla seule concurrence de l’anthropologiestructurale, pendant toute la décennie aumoins. Il est évidemment impossible icide citer tous ceux qui se sont inscrit danscette histoire, pas même ceux qui se sontréclamé ou se réclament encore de soninfluence. Son influence s’étendra enoutre largement hors du petit cercle desfrancophones : rappelons que l’un de sesouvrages clés, Femmes, greniers et capitaux(1975, Maspero) sera traduit en pasmoins de six langues.

Car le regard porté par ce jeune hommeouvrait singulièrement les fenêtres, àl’intérieur de l’anthropologie elle-même,et entre les diverses disciplines de sci-ences sociales, en particulier pour lacommunauté intellectuelle qui seréclamait du marxisme. Le débat cessaittout soudain de s’empêtrer dansl’extension du « mode de productionasiatique » ou la pertinence des notiond’infra et de superstructure appliquéesaux sociétés précapitalistes, pour ouvrirla voie à une réflexion générale sur lesformations économiques et socialeshistoriquement constituées, en quelquelieu ou en quelque temps historiquesqu’on s’y intéresse, en répondant, autantdire, à l’ambition réelle du matérialismehistorique.

D’où venait l’audace de ce chercheur quidébarquait ainsi dans le champ uni-versitaire avec un tel coup d’éclat ? Sansdoute du fait qu’il n’avait pas suivi laformation classique mais que, fils debonne et riche famille industrielle duNord, avec une formation économistetout à fait libérale reçue aux États-Unisd’Amérique, il avait commencé sa vieprofessionnelle au coeur du systèmecapitaliste, qu’il connut ainsi del’intérieur et dont les pratiques et lesusages le convainquirent rapidement

que jamais il ne pourrait y faire carrière,et bien au contraire qu’il consacreraitson intelligence à le combattre ! C’estainsi qu’il se forma à l’anthropologie,bien loin des courants dominants del’époque, le structuralisme ou lefonctionnalisme anglo-saxon, trouvantheureusement avec Georges BALAN-DIER une parole et une écoute plus enaccord avec ses préoccupations.

Le « séminaire Meillassoux » dela rue de Tournon

Cette influence reconnue, il va pour-suivre, de la fin des années fin 1960 à lafin des années 1970, son rôle de novateur,d’impulseur, en animant un séminairedont on peut douter que bien des partici-pants aient retenu l’intitulé exact, carpour tout le monde, c’était « le séminaireMeillassoux ». Là se rencontraient, bienau-delà des anthropologues stricto sensu,tous ceux qui comptaient participer,intellectuellement, au mouvementd’émancipation et de libération nationale,qui s’intéressaient aux questions de fondque posait cet ensemble de problème :comment analyser l’articulation entre leséconomies traditionnelles et l’économiecapitaliste, les sociétés lignagères et laconstruction des États-Nations, le néo-colonialisme et l’impérialisme, ledéveloppement et le sous-dévelop-pement, etc.?

Autant dire que les débats étaient vifs etpassionnés. On se souvient du «séminaire » comme du lieu où la recher-che intellectuelle et la passion militantes’alimentaient mutuellement, où seconstruisaient les controverses maisparfois aussi se prononçaient lesanathèmes, où l’engagement dans ledébat théorique se jugeait à l’aune del’engagement politique, où fonctionnaitréellement une dialectique du logos et dela praxis.

Claude MEILLASSOUX fut alors pleine-ment reconnu pour ses qualités humaines,et plus seulement intellectuelles. Son

Hommage à Claude Meillassoux 203

sens de l’écoute, son attention aux autres,sa fraternité chaleureuse, son absencetotale du sens de la hiérarchie, despositions mandarinales, des titres et despostes, comme son imperméabilitéradicale aux pensées dominantes, auxidées pré-pensées, aux facilités duraisonnement, firent de lui un animateurreconnu, apprécié, respecté et même aimé,malgré la vivacité des critiques qu’il nemanquait pas de faire quand il exprimaitson désaccord.

Ce séminaire ne sera pas seulement unlieu de paroles, si utile que cela put être.Réunissant des chercheurs d’horizons etde disciplines variés, il donnera pourtantlieu à plusieurs ouvrages collectifsd’importance, comme L’évolution ducommerce africain depuis le XIXee siècleen Afrique de l’Ouest, 1971, OxfordUniversity Press, ou comme L’esclavageen Afrique précoloniale (Maspero, 1975)et, surtout, Qui se nourrit de la famine enAfrique? (Maspero, 1974). En effet, cettepublication illustre particulièrement biencette démarche si caractéristique deClaude MEILLASSOUX, qui consiste àassumer dans un même mouvementresponsabilité scientifique et responsa-bilité citoyenne, recherche académique etengagement politique : réalisée dansl’urgence par les chercheurs africanistesmobilisés par MEILLASSOUX qui serefusaient à voir, dans les conséquencesde la sécheresse qui frappait alors leSahel, les seuls effets d’une fataliténaturelle, elle démontre tout au contraireque se lisent là les résultats attendusd’une politique de domination écono-mique orientant l’essentiel des activitésproductives de ces pays vers les seulsintérêts combinés des pays riches, desmultinationales intéressées et des élitesnationales corrompues. L’ouvrage,précurseur d’une analyse écologique qui,aujourd’hui, peut garder sa force maisn’étonne plus, était à l’époquesuffisamment dérangeant, a eu suffisam-ment d’impact et d’écho, non seulementdans le milieu des africanistes ou desanthropologues, mais au-delà même des

chercheurs de sciences sociales,atteignant une partie de l’opinionpublique, au point que les institutionsscientifiques vont tenir à l’oeil - et le fairesavoir - les co-auteurs de l’ouvrage etceux qui s’y référent avec trop de com-plaisance, voire les sanctionner en leurrendant impossible ou difficile l’accès auterrain.

Au marge des disciplines

Cette façon de lier activité professionnelleet actualité historique, responsabilitéintellectuelle et responsabilité citoyenne,illustrée collectivement au moment de cetouvrage, ne se trouve généralement qu’aucours de circonstances particulières,quand la convergence, comme ici, sembles’imposer logiquement, la prise de pa-role du professionnel étant renduenécessaire dans le débat civique, du faitmême de ses connaissances particulières.La bibliographie ci-dessous montre assezl’étendue de ses champs d’intérêt.

Cette ouverture, il va la mettre à nouveauà l’oeuvre pour que l’ensemble de lacommunauté scientifique intéressée soitcollectivement interpellée, ces vingtdernières années, en organisant, avec ungroupe de collègues de diverses disci-plines, des colloques dont il voulait, trèsconsciemment, qu’ils portent à l’interfacedes disciplines, afin de permettre àchaque chercheur de terrain,nécessairement confronté avec cetteproblématique mais ne pouvants’exprimer dessus parce que la questionne se pose pas au coeur de sa recherche,de s’exprimer sur ces thèmes importants.Très soigneusement préparé par ce petitgroupe qui se constituait en comitéd’organisation, puis d’édition, chacunde ces trois colloques aura été pourcertains, nous en avons l’écho, un mo-ment important de leurs réflexion.

Le premier, Terrains et perspectives(Orstom, 1987), portait sur la responsa-bilité des chercheurs en sciences socialesconfrontés aux transformations des


sociétés rurales du Sud, aux politiques etaux idéologies du développement. Il enrédigera la conclusion, montrant com-ment « les paysans qui utilisent la terre àleur bénéfice exclusif sont, dans la per-spective d’une économie capitaliste, desparasites » (p. 443).

Le second, Les spectres de Malthus,(Orstom - EDI - Ceped, 1991), décloison-nait un débat qui concerne chaquechercheur de terrain, mais restaitcantonné dans les seules tribunes desdémographes : les questions du sous-développement et de la dépendancealimentaire des pays du Sud dans uncontexte trop rapidement analysé commeétant celui de la « surpopulation ». Dansun chapitre théorique introductif, ClaudeMEILLASSOUX rappelle que « cette popu-lation est aujourd’hui dans la situationd’une surpopulation relative. Leproblème, pour l’économie capitalistequi l’a créée, est de la faire disparaîtrepour ne pas l’avoir à charge » (p. 31).

Le troisième, enfin, L’enfant exploité(Karthala, 1996) portait sur un problèmedont on s’aperçut brutalement quepersonne ou presque (Alain MORICEconstituant une notable mais quasiunique exception) ne s’intéressait, alorsque sa prise en compte ne pouvaitmanquer d’interpeller fondamentalementnos approches, nous contraindre àrenouveler notre regard, pour peu qu’onaccepte de regarder la réalité de leurpoint de vue : les enfants travailleurs. Làencore, c’est Claude qui rédigea la con-clusion, soulignant le paradoxe de «l’incongruité de l’emploi des enfants.Comment des êtres physiquement faibles,sans expérience, réputés turbulents etinattentifs, d’entendements encore limité,sont-ils susceptibles d’être préféréscomme travailleurs à des adultescompétents et responsables ? » Cetextraordinaire paradoxe découle d’unautre : le bien-être des individus n’estpas la finalité première de l’économie. Cesont à l’inverse les êtres humains qui ontà s’adapter à la conjoncture de l’économie

concurrentielle et sont façonnés, sinonbroyés, entre les coûts et les prix dumarché.

Ce qui caractérise - à mes yeux, le plussignificativement - l’itinéraire de ClaudeMEILLASSOUX, c’est ce va-et-vient entreengagement intellectuel et engagementmilitant qui, chez lui, restera permanent.Sa démarche même refuse de considéreraucune société, aucun phénomène so-cial, comme pouvant être analysé defaçon autonome, isolée, hors contexte, saconviction profonde que les mêmesmécanisme de domination et d’échangesont à l’oeuvre dans toute activitéhumaine et dans toutes les sociétéshistoriquement constituées. Elle n’a pascessé de nous interpeller, de nousempêcher de dormir, parfois : nous avonsdu mal à concevoir, aujourd’hui, com-ment nous pourrons conserver cet espritde vigilance, maintenant qu’il ne seraplus là pour maintenir vigoureusementvivant l’esprit de controverse qui en estla condition majeure.

Bondy, le 7 janvier 2005

Documents

Ndungu Report.pdf