Africa

by Guy Arnold

  Once the Cold War was over the only effective alternative economic policy to the Western model, the Soviet one, had been discredited and had collapsed. Moreover, no African country was sufficiently independent to embark upon a development path of its own that did not require, or could dispense with, Western aid. The position is explained succinctly as follows: ‘Alternative economic policies have become marginalized or come to be regarded as unfeasible, and an influential body of opinion now holds that although the imposition of structural adjustment programmes has caused widespread suffering and might jeopardize the survival chances of democracy, African countries have in reality no other option.’15 This indeed places Africa in a strait-jacket and only two or three countries – South Africa, Nigeria, perhaps Egypt – have any chance of breaking free of such an externally imposed system. The same author, quoted above, continues: ‘Some countries – for example, Uganda and Mozambique – are finding that the conditions applied by the IMF to control money supply and reduce government deficits prevent them using additional assistance to fund recurrent costs, including social development expenditures. The effect is that if extra funds are forthcoming from donors, the rules require these to be channelled into uses other than enhancing and expanding services for the poor.’ A decade of structural adjustment programmes had not produced a single convincing success in terms of development and since that is the case it is time that recipients of these programmes, usually unwilling recipients, understood that the purpose of such programmes is to ensure that the donors get their money back rather than to achieve any development per se. And so we come to the new orthodoxy of the 1990s: good governance.

  Western support for the concept of good governance only appeared as the Cold War came to an end and it appeared with quite remarkable speed. The Communist alternative effectively collapsed in 1989 and by mid-1990 the principal concepts being advanced by the Western donors were good governance linked to aid conditionality. Unsurprisingly, the West’s sudden belief in good governance was not matched by the African leaders, who were expected to accept new principles of government that would reduce their power or sideline them altogether; nor were the masses, who were becoming increasingly restless under the old one-party autocratic systems and revolting against them, likely to embrace good governance as it was so suddenly thrust upon them by their former exploiters. Democracy would be greatly assisted if first the donors withdrew their support from the dictators, then it might be possible to consider good governance and what was meant by it as opposed to the kind of democracy that the people themselves would like to institute. In any case, it was soon obvious that good governance was a tool to be used for the exercise of continuing control over recipient countries. In effect, they were told, only if they accepted good governance as the West defined it could they expect continuing development assistance. Thus, Africa was still to be reformed and developed by the advanced economies of the West in ways that suited its purposes. In this way the donors, having ‘won’ the Cold War, could now move onto a new platform of moral high ground from which to dispense development and democracy to Africa. The assumptions behind the Western proposed good governance are entirely arrogant: Africa’s performance has to be constantly vetted though there is no one to vet the behaviour of the West. Not only was this sudden switch to good governance as the guiding principle of its relations with Africa reminiscent of the high hypocrisy of nineteenth-century missionary endeavour, but the West legitimized its hypocrisy by organizing a high-powered Commission on Global Governance composed of the great and the good, from both sides of the divide, to prepare a report Our Global Neighbourhood that would apply to the South but clearly not to the North whose powerful members would continue to go their own ways. The report is worth reading if only for the range of proposals that will automatically be ignored, as were earlier proposals in other publications such as the Brandt Report of 1980.

  Following a meeting in Stockholm in 1991, a document was produced entitled Common Responsibility in the 1990s: The Stockholm Initiative on Global Security and Governance which, in its turn, led to the establishment of the Commission on Global Governance chaired jointly by Ingmar Carlsson of Sweden and Shridath Ramphal, the former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, from Guyana. Their report, Our Global Neighbourhood, was published in 1995. By the time the report appeared – it was to be a guide for the post-Cold War conduct of international relations – there had already occurred the first Gulf War of 1991, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the breakdown of the international rescue operation in Somalia and the massive genocide in Rwanda. Optimistically, the report claimed, ‘There is no alternative to working together and using collective power to create a better world’ although immediate post-Cold War behaviour patterns would suggest otherwise. As with other such reports, the information and statistics provided make fascinating reading. Thus, for example, between 1945 and 1989 there were 138 wars causing 23 million deaths, all fought in the Third World; and between 1970 and the end of the Cold War in 1989 weapons worth US$168 billion were transferred to the Middle East, US$65 billion worth to Africa, US$61 billion worth to the Far East, US$50 billion worth to South Asia and US$44 billion worth to Latin America. The main suppliers of these arms were the US and the USSR, accounting between them for 69 per cent, followed by Britain, France and West Germany. In this way these five leading powers had armed and thereby facilitated wars in those regions. The implied question was simply, would they now desist from this lucrative trade? Our Global Neighbourhood is in the tradition of many UN documents, including its original Charter, the Pearson Report and the Brandt Report, and by implication it asks whether the world of the ‘new order’ would behave any better or any differently to that of the Cold War, which had just passed. As it pointed out, realistically and somewhat hopelessly:

  When the Cold War ended in 1989, it appeared reasonable to contemplate a serious, new look at prospects for demilitarizing international relations. Cold War rivalry – which had fuelled military budgets, powered the search for new weapons’ technologies, and fastened a reliance on military solutions to conflicts – was over, and it seemed that a new era of global harmony might be possible. That amount of euphoria was short lived, however. Although the tide of democracy was rising, it could not stem the subsequent outbreak of a host of cruel and devastating civil conflicts. In 1991 and 1992, 11 major wars broke out and the human death toll in all 29 of the ongoing wars reached six million.16

  At that point in time, however, there seemed to be no alternative to a Western-dominated, liberal economic democratic system for all since the collapse of the Communist system and the general destruction of its credibility lent great weight to Western arguments that ‘democracy’, preferably as advanced by the West, was the only political answer to the world’s many problems.

  Yet it soon became plain that the now all-powerful West, led by the United States, was less interested in either development or democracy when these values were conceived entirely on behalf of the people they affected, despite all its preaching about them over the years, than it was in exercising control over their economies so that these should be firmly drawn into the Western system by means of globalization. Control and not freedom was what the West sought and it soon came to see that ‘the maintenance of order requires a lowering of newly acquired expectations and levels of political activity’.17

  In the wake of the Cold War new orthodoxies and attitudes surfaced in the West: racism directed at immigrants, the acceptance that the poor are ‘always with us’ that downgraded the idea of eliminating poverty with development assistance, and demands for good governance, ostensibly as a prelude for aid, in fact as an argument for interference and intervention. Part of the helplessness of Africa as well as the contempt for its plight that surfaces so easily in the West was illustrated early in 1992 by the extraordinary revelation that the World Bank’s chief economist had proposed increased pollution for Africa. In an internal Bank memorandum Lawrence Summers suggested: ‘I’ve always thought under
-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted. Shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries [to such countries]? I think the economic logic behind dumping toxic waste in the lowest-wage countries is impeccable.’18 Subsequent apologies by the Bank and the claim by Summers himself that he was merely indulging in an intellectual exercise to sharpen debate could not erase the effect of this appalling indiscretion. As The Economist pointed out, Summers was equating the value of human life with income per head, on which basis he could conclude that ‘one Englishman is worth the lives of 100 Indians’. When such attitudes surface in the World Bank it is hardly surprising that such institutions had become so distrusted in the Third World, and continued to be distrusted by the new South. The West may have triumphed in the Cold War and, as a consequence, adopted a lofty language about spreading democracy and good governance. Under the surface, and sometimes blatantly on the surface, its attitudes were arrogant and neo-imperialist.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - TWO

  South Africa: The Last Hero

  The prologue to the 1994 elections lasted for four years and was a period of tortuous political infighting, violence and double-dealing before the final surrender of power by the whites. After the initial excitement that greeted President de Klerk’s speech of 2 February 1990 and the subsequent release of Nelson Mandela, the year became more troubled as both sides manoeuvred for political advantage, although the government repealed the Separate Amenities Act and said it did not regard independence for the six non-independent homelands as a continuing option. Towards the end of the year, Oliver Tambo, the ANC’s President-in-exile for 30 years, finally returned to South Africa. On 17 March 1990, in a move to counter white opposition to his policy, de Klerk called a nationwide white referendum on his reform policy and negotiations with the ANC, and said he would resign if he lost. As Mandela commented: ‘In the end 69 per cent of the white voters supported negotiations, giving de Klerk a great victory. He felt vindicated; I think the margin even swelled his head a bit. His hand was strengthened, and as a result, the Nationalists toughened their negotiating position. This was a dangerous strategy.’1 Despite the hopes for change that had been raised it was a year of violence. Already, by March 1990 more than 3,000 people had been killed in the preceding three years in Inkatha–UDF clashes. Mandela saw it as his priority to stop the killing. That March the death toll was 230 with hundreds more wounded, hundreds of houses destroyed and 12,500 people forced to flee to refugee centres. Talks between Mandela and Buthelezi to stop the violence were cancelled as a result of ANC pressure, for its distrust of Buthelezi was profound. Subsequent anti-government demonstrations were met by severe police violence, resulting in many deaths, while continuing black-black violence in Natal, between Inkatha and ANC supporters, led to over 1,000 deaths in the first half of the year. During July, August and September Inkatha launched an offensive against the ANC in the Transvaal townships (leading to another 800 deaths) and obliging the government to launch Operation Iron Fist. There were also right wing demonstrations against the government by the Conservative Party and the Afrikaanse Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) (Afrikaner Resistance Movement). Buthelezi argued that he was a national leader who transcended the tribal divides of South Africa, although the evidence did not support his claim. Since he did not command support like Mandela, his control of Inkatha was vital because it enabled him to cause sufficient trouble to ensure a place for himself at the negotiating table. By 1990 there was clear evidence that Inkatha had earlier received support from the government as an inducement to attack the UDF and ANC so as to hold them in check. The government was then working to create a Third Force to disrupt negotiations by fermenting Inkatha–ANC violence. The possibility of a right-wing white backlash was always present. There was the incursion by Eugene Terre’Blanche and his AWB into Bophutatswana, which had the contrary effect of ending homeland rule, while in 1994 Gen. Viljoen warned Mandela of a plot by white extremists to organize an uprising. In May the ANC agreed to assist the government in curbing violence and in August it agreed to end the armed struggle (launched in 1961) ‘in the interests of moving as speedily as possible towards a negotiated peaceful political settlement’. In return, the government released political prisoners, agreed to the return of exiles and amended the security legislation. Despite these moves, deaths at the hands of the police were higher in 1990 than in earlier years: between 2 February and 31 July 129 people were killed by the police and in one incident in March at Sebokeng township 17 people were killed and 400 injured.

  The activities of the hard right wing whites added to the unrest and violence. The Conservative Party (CP) threatened strikes and demonstrations and on 26 May at a rally of 50,000 whites at the Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria their leadership urged them to fight. The homelands, originally referred to as Bantustans, had been established under a number of acts from 1951 to the 1971 Bantu Homelands Constitution Act. Four homelands had been declared independent by South Africa: Transkei (26 October 1976), Bophutatswana (6 December 1977), Venda (13 September 1979) and Ciskei (4 December 1981). None of the four had been recognized as independent by the international community. The other six homelands were Lebowa, Gazankulu, KwaZulu, Qwaqwa, KwaNdebele and KaNgwane. De Klerk had already said that independence for the remaining six was no longer on the political agenda and in fact their brief histories as symbols of division under apartheid were about to be terminated.

  The rest of the apartheid laws were repealed during 1991, fighting between Inkatha and the ANC continued and the government was forced to admit that it had previously financed Inkatha, which was a devastating blow to Buthelezi’s standing. The ANC held a conference with 2,500 delegates attending in July at which Mandela was elected President. Another 1,200 deaths resulted from ANC–Inkatha fighting during the first half of the year and though several attempts to achieve an accord between the two were tried all failed and the violence continued. Over 20–21 December the all-party conference, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), met in Johannesburg with representatives of 19 political organizations including the government present, although it was boycotted by right-wing white groups, the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). The world community began to ease sanctions against South Africa while the groundwork was being laid for substantive talks between government and the various opposition political parties, though manoeuvring by government led to charges of bad faith from the ANC. Township violence continued through the year and between July 1990 and August 1991 there were 2,000 violent deaths from Inkatha–ANC clashes, 1,200 of these dating from January 1991. In August, 2,000 members of the AWB demonstrated against a National Party meeting being addressed by de Klerk; the police opened fire on the demonstrators and killed one. In an earlier period Verwoerd had taken pains to conciliate English-speaking South Africans, correctly judging that most had as little enthusiasm for majority rule as any Afrikaner. ‘Indeed, as late as 1991, when the ANC was clearly going to be a major force in any government, only 7 per cent of English-speakers (as against 5 per cent of Afrikaners; hardly a major difference) wanted a normal parliamentary system in which blacks had full rights.’2

  In May 1992, after a four-month interruption, the multiparty conference held its second plenary session at the World Trade Center. Known as CODESA 2, the talks had been preceded by secret meetings between ANC and government negotiators and a final session between Mandela and de Klerk; yet no agreement was reached. According to Mandela, the government seemed to think that the longer the ANC had to wait, the more support it would lose. CODESA 2 broke down over four issues: the government’s insistence upon an unacceptably high percentage of votes in the assembly to approve the constitution (a back-door veto); entrenched regional powers that would bind a future constitution; an undemocratic and unelected senate that had veto power over legislation from the main chamber; and a determination to make an interim constitution negotiated by the Convention into a permanent constit
ution.3 There now occurred a tragedy that could have led to catastrophe. ‘In May 1992 the much-admired young leader of the communists Chris Hani was murdered by two far-right gunmen, one of whom, Clive Derby-Lewis, had been a Conservative Party MP. Hani had, as Mandela had hoped, abandoned his earlier Stalinist hard line in favour of a democratic socialist attitude, and commanded the allegiance and affection of the young to a degree second only to Mandela himself. His death, and the manner of it, caused an outburst of grief and anger.’4