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Editorial:
Critiques of African and Global ‘Development’ in the Context of the Live
8/G8 Process
Jesse Benjamin
The idea for an issue of the ACAS Bulletin devoted
to critical analysis of Live 8 and the G8 Summit on Africa occurred this summer
in the midst of the multi-media hype surrounding the conference and the
concerts. They claimed to be
representative of a qualitatively new period in Western relations with Africa
and the ongoing efforts to address Africa’s protracted problems of debt,
poverty, health crises and more. It
was supposed to be a concert that would “make poverty history”.
But was there any substance beneath the slogans that took over much of
the media for several days in early July this year? While it was unusual to see any aspects of Africa on a
Western television screen at all, and some of the coverage, especially on MTV
seemed to go beyond headlines and stereotypes to include African people,
activists and occasionally-critical Western rock stars, it was also hard to miss
the corporate aspect of the whole enterprise.
Many of us began wondering if nothing had been learned from the clear
shortcomings of Live Aid/Band Aid some twenty years earlier – shortcomings
that made the term “band-aid” synonymous with superficial for a generation
of activists and critical scholars trying to make a difference ever since.
Scholars of Africa and practitioners of change
alike were quickly affirmed in their skepticism by elements of this whole
enterprise that were soon revealed to be far from new.
Many saw the Live 8 concert as window dressing for repackaged imperial
ambitions on the part of the Western powers, their corporations and donor
agencies. While some pointed out
that the new doubling of aid1 promised to Africa by G8 countries was
only a pittance compared to the $300 billion in debt still owed on the
continent,2 others pointed out that far more was being spent on the
supposed “war on terrorism” in Africa than immediate crises such as famine
prevention and alleviation in Niger and other Sahel nations.3
Debt “forgiveness” seemed positive, and may actually be in some
respects, until we see that it remains tied to crippling conditionalities much
as it has for more than twenty years. That
said, it remained difficult to cut through the hype in order to discern if any
of this was positive, and if so what, or if any openings had been created that
could be used by organizers and activists, aid workers and policy-minded
scholars the world over. Further,
how is this latest wrinkle or trend tied to the history of development
initiatives and the underlying global inequalities that preceded it?
The intention of this issue of the ACAS Bulletin
is to contribute to a debate on these questions and to the wider critique of
Live 8 and its G8 allies, and to start opening new dialogue about ways forward
despite the global obstacles to development and well-being in the African
continent posed by the Western powers, institutions and corporations.
We begin by reprinting a short article by Michel Chossudovsky, published
by GlobalResearch.ca the day before the huge concert, which outlines the
corporate underbelly of the Live 8 concert.
He reveals it to be perhaps “the largest media advertising operation in
history,” which uses “poverty as a marketing tool” that results only in
obscuring the real causes of global poverty.
Instead of really restructuring unequal global economic relationships, or
even truly “forgiving” debt, the author argues that the plan serves in
reality as a “social safety net for the IMF and World Bank.”
Sheila Carapico, writing a few days later in the
Middle East Report Online, just after the London bombings, places the Live 8/G8
spectacle in global context, showing how any attention and momentum gained by
the media blitz were abruptly sidelined by the violence which so conveniently
afforded the G8 powers the opportunity to get back on-message about the global
“War on Terror.” A war whose
oil hungry overlords may soon be coming to much of Africa as Bill Martin and
Meredeth Turshen pointed out in the previous issue of the ACAS Bulletin, as the
US plans to be getting more than 25% of its oil from the continent in the next
few decades. Carapico’s piece
helps situate Live 8 and the broader question of “aid” in the context of the
geopolitical vice Africa finds itself in, between the clashing
“civilizations” the world is currently being structured around.
Ronald Labonte, Ted Schrecker and David Sanders
use the issue of African health care to highlight the contradictions and
shortcomings of the current G8 plans on debt relief and trade adjustment.
The “gap between African reality and G8 rhetoric” is highlighted by
dismantling the numbers behind the debt restructuring proposals which are in
fact predicated upon additional free-market style conditions.
Ignored by the G8 are the historical processes by which this debt was
accumulated, and the same goes for current discussions of trade policy –
liberal slogans aside, the G8 policies continue to abdicate “responsibility
for the damaging legacy of colonialism,” and to promote similar global
inequalities in the present. In the
realm of health care, their ‘disease-specific interventions’ ignore the
context of the production of declining African health care systems and thus
conveniently limit themselves to the band-aid solutions of the past. While encouraging engagement with the G8 and efforts to
collect on its promises, the authors conclude that the pattern of Fatal Indifference, the title of their book on the subject,
will not be interrupted from above.
Next we turn to the analysis of Moses Ochonu,
whose work is more critical of the G8 than Live 8, although asking pertinent
questions of both. Ochonu critiques
the critics of both Live 8 and the G8. Calling
for debt cancellation rather than “forgiveness,” he implicates the
“mainstream revisionist histories which exonerate and assuage the West’s
conscience,” and in so doing make the current liberal discourse of
condescension possible. The shift
to cancellation rather than forgiveness is more than semantic and entails a
major political and paradigm shift. Here
however, he takes a turn from some of our other authors and offers food for
thought when he distances himself from those who would describe Live 8 as a new
scramble for Africa. Arguing that
do-gooder celebrities deserve a “lower critical standard than… Western
politicians,” he is clearly aware of the project’s many shortcomings, but
maintains that the good intentions should be appreciated if not duplicated,
deepened and nurtured.
Leif Brottem, writing for Foreign Policy in Focus
just after Live 8 and the Gleneagles Summit, uses the case of cotton, supposedly
Africa’s “white gold,” to illustrate the narrowness of neo-liberal
development thinking. Under Bretton
Woods conditionality regimes for decades, African economies have continued to
promote one-crop “solutions” to poverty that continue to fail despite the
planning and money thrown at them. By
isolating African national economies from the world system of which they are a
part, international financial institutions have been able to ignore the
deleterious impact of Western subsidies to its own cotton industries, while
African cotton farmers pay the price. Large
aid agencies have, to their credit, begun to make trade policy a central part of
their campaigns, and some are promoting organic cotton, with its obvious benefit
to farmers in both value added and toxicity reduction, but are less concerned
with alternatives to mono-cropping such resource depleters as ‘white gold.’
Below the economics of this single crop lie the problems of land
ownership, the unevenness of the world economy and the local political regimes
supported by it.
The problems of development theory are engaged in
Noah Zerbe’s review of the December 2004 issue of Historical
Materialism, devoted to “Marxism in African Realities.”
Decrying the unwillingness of most African studies concerned with
development in the 1980s and 1990s to critique the neo-liberal hegemony
underpinning Western institutional approaches to the continent, Zerbe finds a
refreshing alternative in this recent collection.
In contrast to the G8 model critiqued above, the historical materialist
methodology emphasizes the significance of Africa’s colonial past, “tracing
the historical evolution of the continent’s uneven integration into the global
political economy.” Here the African state, the agrarian question, and the issue
of Africa’s marginality from capital while at the same time undergoing extreme
external regulation by capital, all receive attention within a critical
framework, without losing sight of the local level, which is covered by several
contributors. At a time when
neo-liberal hegemony over even progressive discourse seems to be inescapable,
Zerbe found this collection to be a useful substitute.
As we review these critiques of the current round
of “aid” to Africa, debt restructuring, and international trade agreements,
alternative conceptual models are sorely needed, and it is likely to Africa
itself that we must look for answers. Several
of the pieces collected here highlight indigenous initiatives to combat the
lethal impact of the powerful entities that control the world economy. It is increasingly necessary to cut through the discursive
propaganda dominating the airwaves, especially as those very airwaves are more
than ever consolidated in the hands of megalithic multinational corporations
whose own profitability precedes their other functions as entertainer and
newsmaker. Small moments of
critical information sharing do infiltrate mainstream media discourse on
occasion and, so doing, reach broader audiences than we on the left usually do.
One recent example was when the Canadian band Sum
41 appeared on an MTV program entitled “Think MTV: Rocked: Sum 41 in Congo.”
During the show, which briefly engaged aspects of the war and its social
consequences in a predictably brief manner, the issue of the coltan trade made
one of its first mainstream appearances on US television.
Audiences were shown that this metal makes tiny cell phones and other
components possible and that it is extracted in often violent and human rights
violating contexts, drawing the links across the global economy between Western
consumers and African producers in a largely unprecedented manner.
The footage of Congo was itself largely exceptional in a US culture where
most have only seen Congo and its massive crisis through the oblique and
Eurocentric lens of the fictional television drama ER several seasons ago. As such, we must remain critical of mainstream cultural
representations of Africa while simultaneously embracing the few opportunities
to reach broader audiences these limiting media afford us
As this issue goes to press, the legacy of Live 8
is further complicated by the September 24 announcements of the IMF that “supports
the proposal to provide 100 percent cancellation of debts owed by Heavily
Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) to the IMF, the International Development
Association and the African Development Fund.”4
Although the plan is to implement this “debt relief” by the end of
2005, thus freeing billions of dollars from loan servicing to hopefully flow
instead into social services sectors, they also emphasize “that countries
benefiting from irrevocable debt relief should have demonstrated sound policies
and high standards of governance.” This
leaves the door open for continued deployment of stringent free-market
conditionalities that negate the benefits a lightened debt load portends.
Some have observed throughout the Live 8/G8 process that “privatization
hangs over debt relief,”5 and this continues to be a concern in
this recent announcement. So, while
on some levels we may welcome this latest development, and perhaps credit the
Live 8 project with playing a part in making it happen at this particular moment
in history, we must remain vigilant of the workings behind the headlines,
keeping foremost in our minds the deeper question of how to achieve African
“development” in the context of a radically unequal global system.
We hope that the essays collected here provide food for thought as
we confront the days, weeks and years ahead in our work on these issues.
Following the essays on problems of development,
Live 8 and the Debt in Africa, we reprint two recent ACAS alerts.
The first concerns the expulsion of USAID from Eritrea in August, and the
second is a teaching resource from Amnesty International on the film “Lords of
War.” Please also take note of
the new ACAS Bud Day Award and the two ACAS-sponsored panels at this year’s
African Studies Association Conference in Washington DC.
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[1] Jim VendeHei and Paul Blustein, “African Aid is Doubled by G8: Anti-Terror Solidarity Helps Blair Win Deal,” Washington Post, Saturday, July 9, 2005, A1.
2 Ann-Louis Colgan, “Op-Ed: The G8 and Africa,” The Examiner, July 7, 2005.
3 Norm Dixon, “Africa: Millions for Military Aid, A Pittance for the Starving,” Greenleft Weekly, August 24, 2005
4
“Communiqué of the International Monetary and Financial Committee of the
Board of Governors of the International Monetary Fund,” Press Release No.
05/210, September 24, 2005, see especially item number 12; web address: http://www.imf.org/external/np/omd/2005/eng/091505.pdf.
5
“Privatisation Hangs Over Debt Relief,” Inter Press Service, 12 June, 2005.
On related structural concerns, see: “What Debt Relief Means for
Africa,” Abraham McLaughlin, Christian Science Monitor, 13 June, 2005.