Thanks to SAPES and to Ibbo Mandaza for the invitation to come and address the SAPES Dialogue Forum. Of course for me coming to SAPES is like coming back home, since this is an institution I have been associated with since 1986. SAPES played an incredibly important role as the premier progressive social science and humanities forum in the 1980s and the 1990s, not only for Zimbabwe but for scholars from the whole of Southern Africa, as well as the continent and many of those in the global African Diaspora.
It’s been over 18 years since South Africa threw off the chains of apartheid. Apartheid or ‘colonialism of a special type’ as we characterised it was the last form taken by the system of colonialism on the African continent. In South Africa and Zimbabwe the last phase of colonial domination took the form of rule by those whose presence in our countries had its origins in settler colonialism. The fact that they often considered themselves as belonging here – and in South Africa’s case had lived here for many generations – in no way altered the colonial character of their regimes.
Colonialism in Africa and especially in the settler colonies like Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa – was a very far-reaching and deeply devastating process. It was characterised by the comprehensive destruction of existing African economies and social structures, the alienation of our land and theft of much of our wealth, the corruption of our traditional governance structures and their adaptation to the needs of colonialism, and the de-legitimisation of our languages, our religions, our knowledge systems and the very way that we saw the world.
Once it had completed its mission of dispossession of African societies, colonialism worked systematically to control our lives to ensure that we served the interests of the colonisers – mainly as sources of cheap labour power whose interests governments did not need to serve.
Indeed the colonisation of our region (and indeed the continent) was not an uncontested reality, but was characterised by heroic forms of resistance by the many settled agricultural and pastoral African communities of Southern Africa. It was the defeat of these wars of resistance by the indigenous people’s that marked the building and consolidation of settler colonial societies.
A post-apartheid Southern Africa
My lecture topic refers to the post-liberation phase, so it would be justifiable to ask why I begin in this way with the impact of colonialism. The reason is that I don’t think that it is quite correct to refer to the period that we are in as a ‘post-liberation’ phase. We are clearly in a post-colonial phase of our history, having won our right to rule our own countries.
However, the process of taking over government has been only a partial victory over the forces which previously oppressed us for most African people. So I have tried to approach this lecture with the notion that we are still fighting the legacy of colonialism in many ways; a legacy that is not only just a past, but is reproduced in many ways today.
I don’t want to be understood simplistically. The values and ideas introduced by colonialism have been internalised and we ourselves continue to be influenced to a greater or lesser extent by ideas, especially neo-liberal ideas, emanating from imperialist countries. These ideas are disseminated by the international or local mass media, by school or university textbooks, by much of the literature and art that we consume, by movies produced in Hollywood or by the economists in the World Bank, the IMF or privately owned and commercially driven corporations who influence our economic and social policies through conditions they impose for giving us loans or investing in our countries.
These ideas continue to dominate the way we manage our economies, our educational systems, our health care and social security systems and the ways we relate to our former colonisers, to other countries and to each other within our continent. All this is as much a part of neo-colonialism as the continued direct domination and exploitation of our economies.
Indeed SAPES embarked on some pioneering studies in the 1980s in analysing the impact of structural adjustment programmes in the region. Unfortunately, because of the fact that the means of the distribution of information and ideas still remained with the established capitalist classes, often backed by imperialist companies, these ideas and information were never as widely shared with the region, or even the world, as they should have been.
Because of apartheid South Africa this literature also never found its way into the South African market. It is my considered view that a lot of the work done by SAPES needs to be re-printed, restudied as those analyses carry important insights on some of the key challenges facing our region.
By emphasising the way colonialism ruthlessly destroyed our pre-colonial societies, I am not proposing a return to some romantic version of the pre-colonial past. And nor am I advocating a narrow African nationalism which rejects anything that is not African in origin. I am a Marxist and thus an internationalist, and I am a believer in the improvement of human life through economic development and the social, cultural and political development of human society. I certainly don’t reject all foreign ideas, whether they come from Europe, Asia, North or South America. Much of the knowledge – in both the natural and the social sciences – that comes to us from abroad is admirable and can help us.
We should embrace it and develop it. But we must consciously and systematically reject ideas that are rooted in the racist ideologies of colonialism, including those notions embedded in Afro-pessimism, which is after all another form of racism. For example, we should reject the idea that we should follow the same developmental growth path as this or that country (whether it be Britain, Brazil or South Korea) as if we are unable to develop policies based on our own needs and the conditions of our own countries. While we must learn from all people and nations, we must have the confidence to analyse our needs and chart our own path.
The legacy of colonialism is deeply systemic and requires comprehensive transformation
Therefore my starting point and main proposition is that the values and goals of the liberation struggle still remain as relevant in Southern Africa today – the struggle for building new nations, economic and social emancipation, and the struggle for sovereignty and democracy. It is however a relevance that must continue to be earned in the here and now, and not only be claimed and justified as part of a heroic past!
Settler colonialism or colonialism of a special type was a part type of capitalist rule – based on the forcible removal of Africans from the land to become cheap labour in the mines, white agricultural farms and the small manufacturing sector. It was a colonialism aimed at reproducing cheap labour for the colonial settler regimes. Whilst we should not lose sight of the importance of the national question in the national liberation struggle, at the same time the national question cannot be properly grasped outside of the class foundations and relations in colonial societies. Hence the continued relevance of economic emancipation in the current struggles towards the completion of our national liberation struggles.
So, the primary item on the agenda in the post-colonial phase of our struggle must be to complete our struggle for liberation by going beyond our political achievements. Above all we must develop strong, independent economies; eradicate mass unemployment; ensure significantly greater social equality; secure our democracy through strengthening our democratic institutions; build national unity; and overcome inequities based on race, gender, disability and other factors.
We must ensure free, quality education and health-care, and provide for the housing, sanitation and other basic needs of our people and ensure their safety and security. All these things are necessary so that we can provide a decent standard of living to all our people.
I believe that the most fundamental of our challenges is the economic one because so many of our other imperatives depend on having a thriving, productive and equitable economy. But our economic growth and economic modernisation should be on our own terms and its main aim to should be to benefit our citizens.
Colonialism shaped African economies to be sources of raw material for the industries of the colonising countries and markets for their goods and services. Major transport corridors were largely built for the purpose of taking raw materials to the ports and bringing in imported goods for sale to local markets. These markets were never developed to their full potential because this would have meant improving the lives of Africans – both materially and educationally – and thus empowering them to throw off the chains of colonialism. The export of raw materials and import of manufactured goods – not the rise in people’s living standards – was the main imperative behind the design of our economies.
In the post-independence period this has continued to a very large extent – partly though inertia, partly through a lack of capital to develop infrastructure or industry, partly through the lack of an educated and skilled workforce and partly through a lack of clear policies based on a determined political will. In many cases, it seems that political will has been lacking to challenge imperial interests – either through an absence of courage or because a local comprador class with political influence has interests which coincide with imperial, transnational capital rather than with those of the local population.
Whatever economic development was attained in the colonial period, it was built on the foundations the national oppression of the majority. Whatever the advances and gains made after independence – and indeed there are many –they have not fundamentally touched the economic growth path and trajectories of settler colonialism or colonialism of a special type. In many instances, even programmes of affirmative action, indigenisation or black economic empowerment, have tended to reproduce a highly dependent, if not compradorial, economic elite that is unable to play an independent role in the development of our economies.
The structural adjustment programmes, many characterised by a collusion between a domestic comprador element with the post-colonial state and imperialist capital contributed significantly in frustrating many promising national liberation struggles from especially fulfilling their mandate of social emancipation of the majority of the people.
The crisis of capitalism and the continued relevance of the values of the national liberation struggle
If we approach the issue in this way, I think that the first thing to become apparent is that it is not possible to leave our national or regional development to the market alone – or even mainly to the market. Markets generally favour the status quo even if they can sometimes make it more efficient. Markets benefit those who have resources those who have resources to invest or to purchase in the market. Unlike political democracy whose dictum is “one person, one vote” the democracy operates by the dictum, “one rand, one vote”, one dollar, one vote’ and so on.
Of course this characterisation is a bit simplistically and free-market capitalism can usually boast of examples of poor people who ‘made it’ and became wealthy. But the fact remains that if we want to fundamentally change our systems, to remove the structural flaws in them, it is necessary for the state to intervene. The idea of a lean state that remains on the side-lines of the economy – the kind of state that is promoted by the neo-liberal ideology that is still dominant in key international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF – cannot benefit the poor or even the middle classes in developing countries like our own.
Our states must be bold enough to intervene in the economy wherever necessary to ensure that structural reforms are carried out, new industries established, existing industries supported, natural resources locally beneficiated and appropriate infrastructure built. A developmental state is one that is focussed on the achievement of economic and social development that is both economically and environmentally sustainable.
Although there is room for a private sector and a market – both China and Cuba, for example, have found that it is necessary to allow a role for markets – the state must play the central role in determining the direction of the economy, regulating markets, intervening wherever necessary to ensure that the economy serves the majority of the people by creating enough jobs, providing a social wage and producing the goods and services that are necessary. Only if the state takes this leading role can the economy be directing to tackling particular goals that have been decided.
Liberalism, including its neo-liberal variety, is highly suspicious of the state, especially a developmental state or any state that is an active participant in the economy. To liberals, the state is antithetical to democracy. This is because it is seen to limit the rights of individuals – especially those individuals with capital – because, as I have argued, free markets favour those who are already rich and who benefit from the status quo.
But those of us who want to fundamentally restructure our societies for the benefit of the majority, especially of the working class and the poor, markets cannot be allowed to run rampant and determine the direction of our development. Markets must be an instrument that is subjugated to the will of the people as expressed by a democratic state. This is not anti-democratic, but is precisely to ensure that powerful minorities do not use democracy to pursue their own selfish interests at the expense of the people as a whole.
But all this is not new. Many of these arguments were made by SAPES scholars and researchers way back in the 1980s about the impact of structural adjustment programmes on the SADC economies. But what is different today is that this neo-liberal fundamentalism, with the current global capitalist crisis, is in deep trouble. The current global capitalist crisis does not only represent an economic crisis, but it is also an ideological crisis – the crisis of the idea of the market as the solution to the problems facing humanity.
This is unlike after the capitalist crisis of the early 1970s, which capitalism could survive and grow out of, principally through the emergence of neo-liberal policies characterised by three distinct and yet closely interrelated strategies. The first was the systematic dismantling of the welfare state in Europe and other advanced capitalist countries as a way of countering the declining profitability of the global capitalist system. The state and many of its functions became privatised and became sites of new capital accumulation and profitability.
The second key strategy was that of dealing with the crisis through the intensive exploitation of the developing world, through amongst others, the imposition of severe structural adjustment programmes, thus able to sustain capitalism and high levels of consumption in advanced capitalist countries.
The third strategy, closely linked to the above two, was the increasing financialisation of capitalism in advanced capitalist countries, with the increasing shifting of manufacturing and other productive capacity to the cheaper parts of the (developing) world - with cheap labour and often repressive regimes - as part of intensified accumulation and profit making for many of the Western capitalist corporations.
I would argue that neo-liberalism managed to take capitalism to higher levels of profitability, but this was increasingly accumulation of a special type where there was increasing financial speculation as a source of profitability with declining productive capacity in the advanced capitalist countries.
Perhaps one explanation for the stubbornness of the current global capitalist crisis that was set off by the sub-prime crisis in the US in 2008 is that there is not enough scope or opportunities now for capitalism to offload this crisis onto the developing world as was the case in the post-1973 period – that is, not much of a welfare state is left for private stripping nor are new rounds of structural adjustment programmes possible.
Of course there is now also a new phenomenon that it is precisely in some of the countries into which the manufacturing capacity of capitalism was relocated from the 1980s, that there is now more robust development that has managed to withstand the current colds of the current global capitalist crisis; places like China, India and Brazil. Ironically it is these countries that are now emerging as potential new economic powers, thus for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, providing a potential for countervailing economic forces in the world economy. These new powers are also too strong to be manipulated like the weaker ones of the earlier period in the developing world.
I would like to argue that this new situation presents new opportunities and avenues for alternative forms of development that could provide new hope and impetus for developing countries to realise some significant development. In this context and environment there is space for at least the emergence of new thinking, refashioning of the ideas and ideals of the national liberation movement and exploration of alternative and more beneficial forms of development for our region and the continent. The ideological authority of neo-liberalism has definitely been severely dented with the current global capitalist crisis. Exploration of new progressive ideas would in themselves deepen the ideological crisis of neo-liberalism and market economics!
The crisis of neo-liberalism today re-affirms the relevance of the values of the national liberation movement that it is only a combined action of the state and the people that can change our conditions for the better. What I am arguing emphatically is that developing economies like our own must have a clear direction given by the organised instrument of the population – its elected government – in order to break the chains of economic dependency, stagnation and deeply entrenched social inequalities.
The liberation movement and the motive forces for progressive development If our states are to lead the development process in our countries, they must have the necessary capacity to formulate and to carry out their aims. This though, is not an insuperable obstacle but a challenge. Afro-pessimism – propagated mainly by imperialist countries, but unfortunately and adopted almost subconsciously and internalised by many Africans – has it that African governments are inevitably doomed to become victims of corruption, that liberation movements will inevitably deteriorate once they get into government.
Such attitudes are of course reinforced by the neo-liberal view that the state is inherently inefficient and that the private sector is always more efficient than the public sector, even in operating the functions of the state.
Actually the experience of those countries over the last twenty to thirty years has not borne out these anti-state views. Privatised utilities have not been more efficient and private contractors have not delivered better services. The recent case of G4S in Britain, which was contracted to provide security services for the Olympic Games but failed and had to be bailed out by the British Army, has been highly publicised but is not an isolated example. Even worse than this, the deregulation of the financial sector on both sides of the Atlantic has led to the current severe economic crisis, a crisis which seemingly is still far from over. These are not examples that we want to follow and we must not be scared to use the state to further our developmental objectives.
If the capacity of our states is not what we would like it to be, it must be strengthened. We must take active steps to build up our states’ capacity to develop policy, to manage its implementation, to innovate, to encourage our citizens to become active agents of development and, in general to take forward a progressive developmental agenda. This will require, among other things, the on-going development of the skills of our officials and our populations, and restructuring of the institutions and processes of governance and production, and investment in the material and organisational instruments necessary to pursue our agendas effectively. We will learn on the job as we do our work. Although we cannot be foolhardy and set ourselves up for failure, we cannot allow ourselves to hold back by a fear of failure born of self-doubt.
A word of caution. There are those in the ranks of our movements who would some see the state’s resources as a way to personal enrichment. If they are allowed to dominate the state – or even if they gain substantive influence over its resources – this will be a major set-back for any progressive project. We must constantly guard against the state becoming an instrument for the enrichment of the few (and corrupt) at the expense of the many. Hence the necessity to mobilise the state and the people in the fight against corruption something that poses a very serious threat to development in our region.
I have tried to sketch the outline of an agenda for the states in our region. But we should consider – if only briefly - not only individual states but the region as a whole, particularly in the form of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). We must pay some attention to the relationship of southern African states to one another and to SADC as a whole. Organisations such as SADC – and indeed the African Union – have the potential to strengthen us all immeasurably beyond our capacities as individual states.
We must use them wisely and not squander their potential. Our cooperation is not new and stretches back to the days of our liberations struggles. Liberation struggles in countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia owe a great deal to the courageous solidarity from the rest of our neighbours and indeed South Africa and Namibia also benefitted from the support of Zimbabwe. Over the last two decades, we have built on the ties among SADC countries, but we still have a long way to go to realise the possibilities inherent in a deeper regional cooperation.
However, what is needed are new platforms for economic development, including a regional industrial strategy and investment into infrastructure to revitalise our economies. The question of a regional, combined with articulated national, industrial strategy is paramount. This should include a strategy for the local/regional beneficiation of our mineral resources, as a foundation for building manufacturing and other productive capacities in our economies.
Again, SAPES did a lot of work in the past on the issue of regional integration. This work needs to be revisited also as part of placing the issue of regional integration firmly in the discourse of progressive politics, scholarship and analyses. The fact that the concept of development is embedded in SADC’s name indicates the main agenda that holds us together is to promote and ensure the development of our region.
Of course the fundamental question and challenge facing us in the current period is whether we do have the social and political motive forces to exploit our opportunities, to drive the building of a developmental state, and lead the process of intensifying development in our countries and region? Indeed the national liberation movement prior to independence managed to unite the principal motive forces for change to defeat the colonial regimes – the working class, the peasantry, the progressive intelligentsia, professionals and the urban and rural poor.
Of course a related but key question that also has to be posed is whether the national liberation movement in our region and various countries still has any capacity to unite the widest possible range of forces to exploit new openings and drive a developmental agenda? The situation is indeed very uneven and unequal, and liberation movements now face new challenges and threats. Some of the liberation movements have been co-opted instead of challenging the post-colonial state, thus alienating most of the motive forces they had managed to unite in the struggle against imperialism and colonialism.
Or could it be that we need to new alliances to lead the process of development in our countries. My view is that such alliances, where needed, are best led from within the framework of the completion of the struggle for national liberation. Are the new formations inspired by the otherwise liberal notion of ‘civil society’ having the capacity to lead a developmental effort in our country? My own answer is a very firm no!
Another challenge that has faced former liberation movements and the post-colonial governments relates to the nature and character of an emerging national bourgeoisie and its relationship to the state. By ‘national bourgeoisie’ has normally been meant the new bourgeoisie that emerges from the ranks of the previously oppressed, and its rise often spurred not so much by significant changes in the post-independence economy, but through a combination of new government policies and sponsorship by either domestic or imperial bourgeoisie or both. Often the manner in which this bourgeoisie is born determines its own political and economic outlook.
In a number of instances the ‘national bourgeoisie’ is hardly ever a united force, often fragmented and sometimes occupying different positions and relations to the state. Often there is a fraction that is sponsored by established or imperialist monopoly capital. Then, often because of the narrow space for capital accumulation in the broader capitalist market (because this is often monopolised by both established colonial bourgeoisie), another fraction emerges that is dependent on accumulation through the state (what we often refer to as tenderpreneurs in South Africa).
The latter tends to be more aggressive, parts of it located within the liberation movement in power, and sometimes using state power as a ‘competitive advantage’, but also liable to co-option or collaboration with imperialist capital. Often there is a strong overlap between a leading cadre in the state and sections of the national bourgeoisie.
It is often the class politics within these new classes that have also had an enormous impact on the direction of liberation movements in power, especially where the working class and other progressive social strata is weak. If then alliance still remains vital, and the necessity to mobilise and unite the various motive forces for change, what kind of role does this class play? More so because what we normally refer to as a ‘national bourgeoisie’ is not so much a class than a fraction of a larger bourgeoisie (including the colonial and imperial), and often a dependent fraction of the latter.
Indeed, the principal challenge in our countries today still remains that of the mobilisation of the principal motive forces for change, the popular classes – so that they drive transformation for the benefit of the overwhelming majority of the people. The relationship between the popular classes and the post-colonial state is a critical issue in the tasks and challenges of reconstruction and development in our region. Often new fractures emerge between the liberation movement and the popular classes, thus significantly undermining the power of the motive forces to drive transformation.
Let us use this platform to debate these issues today and beyond in our region and the continent.
Strengthening regional co-operation in higher education, research and intellectual work Lastly, I want to say something about the role of intellectuals and of universities and other post-school institutions in shaping the nature of our region in the post-colonial period. First of all, their role in developing the skills for economic, social, political and cultural development is fairly obvious. We need to invest in post-school institutions to increase access and improve the quality of education and training. This is necessary not only to provide skills to the productive and services sectors – industries, mines, farms, infrastructure development institutions, banks, etc – but also very crucially in strengthening the state.
I am coming to the realisation that we do not make enough use of higher education in developing relations between our countries in SADC. There are a lot of SADC students studying in South African higher education institutions – there were approximately 50 000 SADC students in SA public and private higher education institutions in 2010, and there are no doubt even more now. This is useful to the students not only because they get a formal education, but because they get to know another country in the region and will able to make profitable use of this knowledge in their future with government, businesses and educational institutions in their later lives.
But most young people in South Africa hardly know their neighbouring countries and harbour only vague, often prejudiced, views of them. I would like to see us moving towards more South African students studying at both undergraduate and postgraduate in other SADC countries and am in fact preparing to provide bursaries to promote this as it could help to build strong ties in region. I don’t know to what extent students in the rest of the SADC region use educational institutions in their neighbouring countries. Surely we should promote this.
Just as important is the promotion of research cooperation among our countries. I don’t have the data, but would be prepared to bet that most of our countries have closer research cooperation with universities in the USA or the UK or other European countries than with the whole of the SADC region. This is certainly the case in South Africa.
Research cooperation in the region has been increasing in recent years and I believe strongly that this should be extended substantially. This means that all governments in the region should give a higher priority to providing resources for this purpose. The award of the major of the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope to our region – with a number of SADC countries participating in it – will give impetus to joint research in space science. We must grasp the opportunity with both hands and also work to extend cooperation to other areas of natural and applied science.
I am concerned at the marginalisation of the social sciences and the humanities in recent years and have recently announced my intention to establish a National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences. I am particularly keen that this institute should revive progressive intellectual thought and debate in our universities and that it will research alternatives to neo-liberalism. It is essential that our universities become intellectual cauldrons in which ideas about society are debated vigorously, examined carefully and begin to impact on the ways in which our society thinks and the way in which the states acts and intervenes in society.
All our social sciences and humanities should contribute to our social understanding and our social and cultural development, assist us to identify and tackle social challenges and contribute to our confidence in our own abilities to engage with the world. Economics, I believe, should once again come to be seen primarily as a social science rather that just as a tool for business.
While we must continue to have intellectual relations with the developed world, we must increasingly do so on our own terms and as equals – not just as consumers of knowledge that has been produced elsewhere. I am determined that our Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences will promote intra-SADC and intra-African cooperation as well as cooperation with other developing countries in Asia and Latin America.
To this end I have included on the steering committee that is preparing for the establishment of the Institute, Dr Sam Moyo of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies here in Zimbabwe, a representative of CODESRIA and Professor Emir Sadr, Director of the Latin American Social Science Research Council (CLACSO). We have also started building cooperative relations with Indian academics.
Intellectuals in our universities and other research institutes must become central to our development agenda. They must contribute to setting this agenda and advise governments and other national and regional institutions on how to achieve it. They must apply their skills of critique – I hope usefully and constructively. We cannot be satisfied with the notion that intellectuals are permanent professional cynics with a lot of negativity, but very little to contribute towards concrete developmental ideas. The work of intellectuals is an essential ingredient in keeping society vibrant and alert and in assisting society to define and to reach its goals.
It is indeed now the time to boldly challenge the neo-liberal discourse much more robustly than has been done since the 1980s. And this must be accompanied by the development of alternative ideas, not narrowly based on an enrichment strategy, but on a programme to change the lives of millions of our people in the region for the better. This must be the basis for seeking the widest possible consensus amongst the motive forces for change in our region.
I look forward to an interesting discussion and am keen to hear your ideas. I am, of course, also very happy to engage with you and answer any questions you may have.
Thank you.
Lecture at the SAPES Dialogue Forum in Zimbabwe, The Post-Liberation Phase in Southern Africa: Problems and Prospects, Dr B.E. Nzimande, MP Minister of Higher Education and Training, South Africa
