The neoliberal project, led by the IMF and World Bank, promised to correct many of the distortions in the African postcolonial environment and pledged to engineer liberalization and expand democratic space through competitive multiparty elections. Decades later, few people, if any, can testify to the success of the envisaged reforms. Instead, neoliberalism failed to guarantee a sustainable basis for freedom, rights and prosperity. This compilation shows that the reform period opened the continent to greater privation by a more emboldened local political class who, under pressure from or by acquiescing to foreign imperialist forces, undermined the struggles for democratic transformation and economic empowerment. Examining the rewards of multiparty politics, the dividends from a new constitutional dispensation, the processes of land reform, women's rights to property, or the Pan-Africanist project for emancipation shows that all have suffered severely. Through these essays, Issa Shivji calls for a new, Africa-centered line of thinking that is unapologetic of the continent's right to self-determination and sets out examples of how such thinking should proceed.
The neoliberal project, led by the IMF and World Bank, promised to correct many of the distortions in the African postcolonial environment and pledged to engineer liberalization and expand democratic space through competitive multiparty elections. Decades later, few people, if any, can testify to the success of the envisaged reforms. Instead, neoliberalism failed to guarantee a sustainable basis for freedom, rights and prosperity. This compilation shows that the reform period opened the continent to greater privation by a more emboldened local political class who, under pressure from or by acquiescing to foreign imperialist forces, undermined the struggles for democratic transformation and economic empowerment. Examining the rewards of multiparty politics, the dividends from a new constitutional dispensation, the processes of land reform, women's rights to property, or the Pan-Africanist project for emancipation shows that all have suffered severely. Through these essays, Issa Shivji calls for a new, Africa-centered line of thinking that is unapologetic of the continent's right to self-determination and sets out examples of how such thinking should proceed.
Where is Uhuru?: Reflections on the Struggle for Democracy in Africa
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Overview
The neoliberal project, led by the IMF and World Bank, promised to correct many of the distortions in the African postcolonial environment and pledged to engineer liberalization and expand democratic space through competitive multiparty elections. Decades later, few people, if any, can testify to the success of the envisaged reforms. Instead, neoliberalism failed to guarantee a sustainable basis for freedom, rights and prosperity. This compilation shows that the reform period opened the continent to greater privation by a more emboldened local political class who, under pressure from or by acquiescing to foreign imperialist forces, undermined the struggles for democratic transformation and economic empowerment. Examining the rewards of multiparty politics, the dividends from a new constitutional dispensation, the processes of land reform, women's rights to property, or the Pan-Africanist project for emancipation shows that all have suffered severely. Through these essays, Issa Shivji calls for a new, Africa-centered line of thinking that is unapologetic of the continent's right to self-determination and sets out examples of how such thinking should proceed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781906387464 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pambazuka Press |
| Publication date: | 11/28/2010 |
| Pages: | 258 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Issa G. Shivji is a former professor of law and is currently the Mwalimu Nyerere Research Chair in Pan-African studies at the University of Dar es Salaam. He is the author of Concept of Human Rights in Africa and Let the People Speak: Tanzanie Down the Road to Neoliberalism. Godwin R. Murunga is a professor in the department of history, archaeology, and political studies at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya. He is the author of Kenya: Democracy on Trial.
Read an Excerpt
Where Is Uhuru?
Reflections on the Struggle for Democracy in Africa
By Issa G. Shivji, Godwin R. Murunga
Fahamu
Copyright © 2009 Issa G. ShivjiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-906387-47-1
CHAPTER 1
Critical elements of a new democratic consensus in Africa
Introductory remarks
In this chapter, I wish to reflect on what would possibly be the critical elements in constructing a new democratic consensus in Africa. Although this is presented in a logical fashion, I should make clear at the outset that it is not the result of an intellectual exercise in logic. The immediate experience upon which I have drawn heavily, but for lack of time cannot present here, is the work I did as the chairperson of the Tanzanian Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Land Matters in 1991-92. The policy, legal and structural recommendations of that commission are primarily based on the need to democratise the land tenure system in the country. This was to address the main grievance of the pastoral and peasant communities — lack of security of tenure — and to answer their main demand, which was for full participation or involvement (kushirikishwa) in the decision-making processes (URT 1994, Shivji 1998a). It is that concrete experience and our recommendations concerning the structure of land tenure that I am seeking to generalise in the basic elements of a new democratic consensus.
This chapter begins with a brief overview of the state of the global political economy, which continues to be the most decisive context for the economics and politics of our countries and societies. It then interrogates the dominant discourse on democracy and argues that it is both contradictory and contested terrain. The dominant discourse continues to accept uncritically the premises of liberal democracy, which, I submit, provide neither feasible nor acceptable modes of politics and organisation of state power in our countries. It is in opposition to the dominant discourse that I situate the main elements of an alternative construct, which, for lack of a better term, I will call popular democracy.
The reconstruction of the global political economy
In 1885, at the Berlin Conference, the imperial powers divided up the African geographical space. One hundred years later, at the Uruguay negotiations, the imperial consortium called the G7 divided up Africa's ecological, environmental and financial space. Among the various agreements reached and eventually institutionalised in the World Trade Organisation (WTO), two of the most important were TRIPs (trade-related intellectual property rights) and TRIMs (trade-related investment measures). On top of the traditional forms of intellectual property — engineering designs, copyrights, trademarks etc. — TRIPs create and protect new forms of property in life-forms. Nature's ways and diversity have themselves become the subject of property, to be owned and exploited by the corporate world and protected, through force if necessary, by the consortia of powerful states led by the United States of America. Thus our biodiversity and relatively clean environment are themselves on the verge of attracting a new form of colonisation, just as our land, labour and minerals were the target of classical colonialism.
TRIMs imply an open space for financial corporations to control, manipulate and siphon off financial resources. Probably, the most important effect of this for small economies like Africa's is the control over such institutional savers as national banks, insurance and pension funds. In effect, what the opening up of the financial markets and privatisation of pension and insurance funds really means is that the big finance capital cuts into the social wage of the working class while at the same time destroying any incipient basis for national accumulation. The Uruguay negotiations, ostensibly an extension of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), have much more to do with new forms of property and exploitation than simple liberalisation of commodity trade.
Trade and aid, the central concepts of the pre-Uruguay GATT, are displaced by financial, investment and intellectual property rights (IPRs); the most-favoured nation clause (MFN) has been sidelined by the national treatment clause and the complicated form of bilateral and multilateral negotiations is being replaced by legislative and judicial powers accorded to panels of experts of the WTO, backed by the sanction of retaliatory measures which, needless to say, only the strong can take against the weak. Preferential treatment for the commodities of developing countries would not only be phased out but developing countries would also be obliged to grant exclusive marketing rights (EMRs) to the products of the North. In short, the WTO embeds new forms of property and exploitative relations between the North and the South whose full implications are yet to be fully appreciated.
The TRIPs, TRIMs and the General Agreement on Trade-Related Services in essence force open all national doors so as to provide free entry to the giant corporations of the North. The institutions of the WTO under which member nations are obliged to streamline their national legislation to accord with the WTO agreements are a fatal nail in the sovereignty of weak states of the South (particularly African states, which are in no position to put up even symbolic resistance) and undermine the basic rights of all peoples, the right to self- determination. Korten (1995, p. 181) points out that the formation of the WTO completes the Bretton Woods trio which now stands at the top of global dominance in the interest of transnational corporations:
A review of the accomplishments of the three Bretton Woods institutions brings their actual functions into sharp focus. The World Bank has served as an export-financing facility for large Northern-based financial institutions. GATT has served to create and enforce a corporate bill of rights protecting the rights of the world's largest corporations against the intrusion of people, communities, and democratically elected governments.
The corporate-state complex of the North has become the new global aristocracy, with the bureaucracies of the Bretton Woods institutions acting as their mandarins. The victims are the peoples of the South and Africa in particular, which throughout the Uruguay negotiations did not even play second or third fiddle. (African delegates were observed to spend their time in the corridors drinking while the large corporate delegations of the G7 negotiated among themselves.) The WTO's potency as a supreme legislative body of unelected bureaucrats is illustrated by the following example.
In 1994 the Indian government attempted to amend its Patent Act of 1970 to accord with the obligations under the TRIPs agreement, but this failed to get parliamentary approval. In 1996 the USA filed a dispute under the WTO against India demanding that India give legal security to US corporations by changing its laws to admit applications for product patents in agrichemicals and pharmaceuticals. It even demanded that the legislation be on the lines that have been introduced by Pakistan under US pressure under which the date of filing the application is not the date on which the application is filed in Pakistan but the date on which it is first filed in another member country (Third World Resurgence 1997, p. 3).
In effect, this is a typical example of the obligations under TRIPs and TRIMs, which require member countries to standardise their laws so as to provide protection to and in the interest of the corporations of the North. It is the corporations standing to benefit from monopoly patenting of products which is the true purport of the so-called IPRs. What is even more outrageous is that many of the products (particularly pharmaceuticals, seeds and other life-forms) which these corporations seek to patent are the very ones coming from third world countries, based on their biodiversity and traditional knowledge systems. In other words, the fruits of biopiracy are turned into the exclusive property of the transnationals, just as under colonialism, resources looted from the third world were transformed into capital to return as foreign investment.
This is one glaring example of the basic feature of the global political economy: monopolisation and concentration of capital, power and knowledge in the hands of a few hundred large corporations. The transnationals, in cahoots with the states of the North, pressurise the states of the South in various ways to pass laws and create institutions regardless of whether such are democratically acceptable to their own people. It is obvious that this type of globalisation is neither global neighbourhood nor global interdependence, (the heavily ideologised terms used in the Brundtland report, 1995, for a critical review of which see Baxi 1996) nor, for that matter, a global village. It is nothing but total negation of the sovereignty of the states and the right of peoples to self-determination and a licence for new forms of global pillage.
The full implications of the new economic order thus created have yet to seep into policy and popular consciousness in Africa. The danger in much of our public discussions and policymaking is that it is not even a subject of critical discourse. Instead, our political leaders, publicists and intellectuals are mesmerised by glib talk of democracy, human rights and the 'free' market and are busy establishing puny stock exchanges while losing control of elementary processes of policy — and law-making.
The global ideologies
The post-cold war reconstruction of the global political economy and dominant hegemonies is being propagandised in terms of neoliberal images and ideologies of democracy, constitutionalism, pluralism and the 'free' market (see generally Furedi 1994 and essays in Gills et al. 1993). These are the images and ideologies that we in Africa parrot like apes. None of these ideologies answers to the realities on the ground. As a matter of fact, they are non- existent or under severe strain in the countries of their origin. With the intense concentration and monopolisation of wealth, power and knowledge in the hands of a few hundred transnational corporations, even a schoolboy can tell that there cannot be a free market or democracy. A free market assumes and requires more-or-less equal actors, not a few giants and many Lilliputians. The market doesn't count heads; it counts dollars. It favours the few rich and powerful and not the miserable many because of their numbers.
The power of corporations and the dictates of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and WTO to the peoples and states of the world make nonsense of any notions of democratic states, particularly in Africa. The first condition of democratic states, in the sense of being responsive and accountable to their peoples, is that they are independent and sovereign. As we have seen, under globalisation this condition is severely undermined. Their economic policies, their legislative processes and their political stances are all determined by the international financial institutions (IFIs) who are under the hegemony of big states and giant corporations. The basic incompatibility between democracy and the market was pointed out by none other than the world's notorious financial speculator, George Soros. It deserves a quote.
Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammelled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat (quoted in Khor 1997, p. 16).
Indeed, as Mafeje has argued, even in its homelands, liberal democracy is a phenomenon of the past. Chastising his fellow African intellectuals for uncritically parroting liberal notions of democracy, Mafeje says:
Historically and substantively, liberal democracy has been superseded by other modes of bourgeois democracy. Liberalism was for all intents and purposes dead but for its letter. The term itself had become a swear-word both on the right and left of the contending forces. What has obscured the social and political significance of this is that the form it had inaugurated has remained. The rules of the game prevailed — call them parliamentary democracy and individual rights or 'human rights', to use the current jargon of the right in America and Europe. So, in insisting on liberal democracy, some African intellectuals can be accused of mistaking the form for its substance. If elsewhere the major battles are being fought between social democrats and representatives of monopoly capitalism personified by Western leaders like Reagan, Thatcher, Bush and Kohl, how can they sound their clarion call for battle in such reactionary and antiquated terms (Mafeje 1995, pp. 18 — 9)?
On the political level, too, we are witnessing a re-organisation of the global order. While I do not subscribe to the propaganda that the state is about to wither away or that we may be moving towards a world government, there are potent signs that the so-called international organisations such as the United Nations are being privatised. In this regard, the Gulf war and the continuing saga of sanctions against Iraq (see generally Bennis & Moushabeck 1991), the recent appointment of the US favourite to UN chieftainship and the clearly hypocritical 'human rights crusade' to form an International Criminal Court (where human rights violators from the South can be put on show trials while the major perpetrators, the leaders of the imperial North, wallow in self-righteousness) show the trend of events to come. So while at one end we are witnessing a consortium of powerful states privatising international organisations and institutions (particularly when it comes to the use of unilateral force legitimised as 'international intervention'), at the other end, weaker states in the fourth world are being reduced to 'management authorities' of the powerful consortia as they are stripped of their attributes of sovereignty and independence. In Africa, the concept of the state itself, as we have understood it traditionally, may need re-examination.
This is then the (new) global order, or more correctly, the 'new' imperialism, in the context of which we have to discuss the elements of constructing a new democratic consensus in Africa.
Critical elements of a new democratic consensus
The post-Bandung (to use Samir Amin's familiar characterisation, Amin 1990) consensus in Africa was based on anti-colonialism and non-alignment in a bipolar world dominated by the two superpowers. Self-determination took the narrow sense of constituting state sovereignty at the international level. In the processes which were the subject of debates in the 1960s and 1970s, the post-colonial African formations became socially more differentiated while the political order sought legitimacy in the various nation-building and developmentalist ideologies, albeit under the hegemony of one or the other imperial power (Wamba-dia-Wamba 1991a, Shivji 1986a, pp. 1 — 10). Nation-building ideologies — graphically summed up by Wamba-dia-Wamba in the formula: one people, one nation, one political party and one supreme leader — as it turned out were state-building ideologies in which the state itself was modelled on the colonial despotic state. Concentration of power in the executive arm of the state — whether this came about through military interventions or one-party populism of the right or the left — was the defining characteristic of the post-independence African state. The upshot was that many African states, with the economic crisis of the late 1970s, lost political legitimacy, that is to say, there was a breakdown of a broad consensus. Democracy, as a form of struggle and as a way of organising and constituting a new consensus, has been and is very much on the agenda. But democracy is a contested terrain and while there is no Chinese wall between the perspectives of domination and hegemony and those of resistance and liberation, the liberal and popular agenda of democracy are opposed in their fundamentals (Mafeje 1995, Amin 1993, Shivji 1989a, Mamdani 1987).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Where Is Uhuru? by Issa G. Shivji, Godwin R. Murunga. Copyright © 2009 Issa G. Shivji. Excerpted by permission of Fahamu.
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Table of Contents
Abbreviations vi
Introduction Godwin R. Murunga1 1
Part I Contested Terrain of Democratic Politics 7
1 Critical elements of a new democratic consensus in Africa 8
2 Good governance, bad governance and the quest for democracy in Africa: an alternative perspective 20
3 Towards a new democratic politics 30
4 Democratic village governance: a contested terrain 40
Part 2 The State of the Debate on Constitutionalism 49
5 Three generations 0f constitutions and constitution-making in Africa 50
6 Towards a new constitutional order: the state of the debate in Tanzania 64
7 Federalism, constitutionalism and the crisis: democracy and the Tanzania union 79
8 Constitutional limits on parliamentary powers 93
Part 3 Land: A Terrain of Democratic Struggles 105
9 Land tenure problems and reforms in Tanzania 106
10 Grounding the debate on land: the National Land Policy and its implications 124
11 Reflections on the issue of women and land 139
Part 4 Intellectuals, Biographies and Reminiscences 149
12 From neoliberalism to Pan-Africanism: towards reconstructin an Eastern African discourse 150
13 Walter Rodney - a revolutionary intellectual 159
14 National autonomous development in the thought of Edward Moringe Sokoine 167
15 The life and times of Babu: the age of liberation and revolution 183
Part 5 Pan-Africanism or Imperialism? 195
16 Pan-Africanism or imperialism? Unity and struggle towards a new democratic Africa 196
17 Globalisation and popular resistance 208
Part 6 Empire's Lawlessness 221
18 Law's empire and empire's lawlessness: beyond the Anglo-American law 222
Bibliography 229
Index 241