ISR Issue 60, JulyAugust 2008
The new scramble for Africa
By LENA WEINTSTEIN
LENA WEINSTEIN is a member of the International
Socialist Organization in New York City.Thanks to Petrino DiLeo and
Amy Muldoon for their assistance and input.
FOR CENTURIES, beginning
with the slave trade, the West has ruthlessly exploited the African
continent. As Karl Marx described it, “the turning of Africa into a
commercial warren for the hunting of black skins” was one of the
chief sources of “primitive accumulation” that “signaled
the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”1 But the abduction
and enslavement of millions of Africans was only the start. In the late
nineteenth century, in what became known as the “scramble for
Africa,” the continent was arbitrarily carved up into colonies by the
leading European powers, which violently subjected its people and plundered
the continent of its rich natural resources. In the post-independence eras,
African states became weak pawns in the world economy, subject to Cold War
rivalries, their path to development largely blocked by their debilitating
colonial past. More recently, the West has choked Africa with an onerous
debt regime, forcing many nations to pay more in interest on debts to the
World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) than on health care,
education, infrastructure, and other vital services combined.
The legacy of Western domination has left Africa
devastated with crippling rates of poverty, hunger, and disease. The
continent today has a gross national per-capita yearly income of
$829—below that of the 1950s and 1960s in most African
countries—and an average life expectancy of only fifty years.2 Sixty-two percent
of Africans have no access to standard sanitation facilities, and
two-thirds of the total world population suffering from HIV/AIDS (25.8
million people) live in Africa.3 It remains a continent abundant in human and natural
resources, but these manage to enrich only a handful of African rulers and
foreign capitalists.
This is the historical legacy, in the words of Patrick
Bond, “of a continent looted”:
[T]rade by force dating back centuries; slavery that
uprooted and dispossessed around 12 million Africans; precious metals
spirited away; the 19th century emergence of racist ideologies to justify
colonialism; the…carve-up of Africa into dysfunctional territories in
a Berlin negotiating room; the construction of settler-colonial and
extractive-colonial systems—of which apartheid, the German occupation
of Namibia, the Portuguese colonies and King Leopold’s Belgian Congo
were perhaps only the most blatant…; Cold War
battlegrounds—proxies for U.S./U.S.S.R. conflicts—filled with
millions of corpses; other wars catalyzed by mineral searches and offshoot
violence such as witnessed in blood diamonds and coltan; poacher-stripped
swathes of East, Central and Southern Africa…; societies used as
guinea pigs in the latest corporate pharmaceutical test; and the list could
continue.4
You might think a track record of this kind would lead
to some self-reflection on the part of Western powers regarding their
violent history in Africa. But you would be wrong. Robert Calderisi,
a former World Bank Africa chief and author of The
Trouble With Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working (2006) offers diagnoses and prescriptions for Africa that are no
less paternalistic than those given by the colonialists of old:
[Some Africans] believe all of Africa’s problems
are basically rooted in Western nastiness: colonialism, slavery, debt, and
the like. But my own sense is that opinion has shifted tremendously in
Africa over the last ten years, that there’s greater openness to
accepting that African problems have roots in Africa…. [O]ne of the
good legacies of colonialism [is that] there are Western nations that could
have turned their backs on Africa a long time ago if they didn’t have
some historical, economic, and sentimental connection…. For me to
suggest that we reduce rather than increase aid to Africa will sound to
many people like spitting in the face of a dying man, but I see it as
analogous to dragging a dope addict to his feet and bringing him to a
rehabilitation clinic.5
Others, like British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are
no less direct in their unapologetic defense of imperialism. “The
days of Britain having to apologize for its colonial history are
over,” he said during a tour of Africa, “We should celebrate
much of our past rather than apologize for it.”6
A new scramble for Africa marks the beginning of the
latest chapter in the plunder of the continent. The United States and
Europe, but also rising powers like China, seek to consolidate their grip
on Africa’s oil, its minerals, and other resources, all worth more
every day because of a massive boom in the price of oil and raw materials.
Like the earlier scramble for Africa, the new scramble for Africa is not
only about profits, but also control of strategic resources, chiefly oil.
The United States in particular is concerned about threats to its hegemony
in the region. And, as in the Middle East, the defense and expansion of
that hegemony also involves military intervention, justified under the
rubric of fighting terrorism. As author Michael Watts writes,
The strategic interests of the United States include
not only access to cheap and reliable…oil imports, but also keeping
the Chinese (for example in Sudan) and South Koreans (for example in
Nigeria)…and Islamic terror at bay. Africa is, according to the
intelligence community, the “new frontier” in the fight against
revolutionary Islam. Energy security, it turns out, is a terrifying hybrid
of the old and the new: primitive accumulation [i.e., looting] and American
militarism coupled to the war on terror.”7
Resource wars
The new scramble for Africa centers chiefly on oil,
the world’s most important strategic resource. The United States, the
largest global economic and military power, consumes a quarter of the
world’s oil but possesses only 3 percent of the world’s proven
oil reserves.8 West Africa alone sits atop 15 percent of the world’s oil,
and by 2015 is projected to supply up to a quarter of U.S. domestic
consumption.9 U.S. oil imports from Africa—which come mostly from Nigeria
and Angola, but also from Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Equatorial Guinea, and
Gabon—surpassed those from the Middle East for the first time last year.10
China, meanwhile, is also heavily involved in the new
scramble for Africa, driven to seek reliable sources for oil by its own
growing domestic needs. China’s oil consumption has doubled in a
single decade, and oil imports now comprise more than 40 percent of its
total oil consumption.11 Other countries are also getting in on the action.
Brazil and Malaysia, for example, have oil exploration projects underway in
West Africa and Sudan.
There is intensifying global competition for control
of oil and gas production and supply. Worldwide, a new generation of mainly
state-owned companies, such as China’s CNPC, Saudi Arabia’s
Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, Venezuela’s PDVSA, and Iran’s
NIOC now control one-third of the world’s oil and gas reserves and
production, while the major Western companies—ExxonMobil, Chevron,
BP, and Royal Dutch Shell—control just one-tenth of production, and
only 3 percent of reserves.12 (However, because they are fully integrated
operations, from extraction to production and distribution, the Western
“majors” make far larger profits.)
The dependence of the United States and other
developed nations on oil from developing nations is only going to increase,
as the Financial Times notes: “90 per cent of new supplies will come from
developing countries in the next 40 years. That marks a big shift from the
past 30 years, when 40 per cent of new production came from industrialized
nations.”13 Thus the new scramble for Africa is a fight between major
competing powers for control of new energy sources and profits at a time
when they control fewer resources themselves. The race is all the more
important given that conflicts and tensions in other energy-rich
areas—such as Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela—have loosened the
West’s grip.
The interest in African oil on one level is nothing
new. As Exxon boasts proudly, the company has been in Africa for a century.
Nigeria has been an exploration hotspot for decades. A preview “of
American plans for African people and resources in the new century can be
seen in Eastern Nigeria. U.S. and multinational oil companies like Shell,
BP, and Chevron, which once named a tanker after its board member
Condoleezza Rice, have ruthlessly plundered the Niger Delta for a
generation.”14
The crisis-wracked Horn of Africa has also been the
site of Western corporate investment for a number of years. “Big
Western companies including Conoco-Phillips, Chevron, and Total held Somali
exploration concessions before the country slid into civil war in
1991.”15
But interest in East African oil heated up
dramatically over the past fifteen years.16
Somalia may seem an unlikely prospect for investors
seeking untapped oil and gas fields, but that could be about to change as
the [oil] majors turn their gaze off the beaten track. Driven by record
profits, a race with hungry Asian rivals and fears of growing energy
nationalism in South America and Russia, interest in eastern Africa has
never been higher. “Africa across the board has seen a substantial
uptake in acreage in recent years by all sizes of companies from the majors
to mega-majors, independents and minnows,” said Duncan Clarke,
chairman and CEO of international energy consultants Global Pacific &
Partners. “Quite a few significant players have moved into
position.”17
Increasing oil and raw material prices have produced a
boom in some African countries, as well as a marked jump in foreign
investment, especially by Western and Chinese capital. By 2005, foreign
direct investment had almost tripled over the previous five years.18 U.S. investors
were expected to pump more than $50 billion into African oil between 2007
and 2010.19
According to a report published in April 2007 by the
IMF, sub-Saharan Africa recorded growth in its GDP in the 5–6 percent
range for the third consecutive year, fueled by the tripling of worldwide
oil prices since 2003.20 “Investment bankers are grappling with a novel
challenge,” remarked the Financial Times, “explaining to potential investors that exotic
places like Abuja and Accra, the capitals of Nigeria and Ghana, are among
the new frontiers in the international capital markets….[But] there
is a glut of liquidity in the global financial system that is helping to
fuel the current enthusiasm for far-flung markets such as those in
Africa.”21 ExxonMobil has mega-projects in the works, having wrapped up the
infamous Chad-Cameroon pipeline that runs through war-torn areas in Central
Africa, the largest single investment in Africa. ExxonMobil, the
world’s biggest oil company, invests 22 percent of its capital
expenditures in Africa, and gets 30 percent of its oil from Africa.22
Wall Street is lining up to get in on the action. JP
Morgan helped raise $300 million for Nigeria’s largest bank last
spring, and an officer for Citigroup in Nigeria celebrated the new boom
saying, “There are deals we are doing today that a couple of years
ago we would not even have contemplated.”23 In June 2007, a private equity company called Emerging
Capital raised $523 million to invest in Africa, one of the largest amounts
ever raised for the continent. The fund managers gloated about the
opportunities for investment, announcing, “Africa is open for
business.”24 The growth in volume of sub-Saharan Africa’s stock market
has surpassed that of the Far East and Eastern Europe since 2002.25 Angola, recently
dubbed an “oil industry darling,” received a $902 million bid
last year from Eni, the Italian oil company, to secure the rights to drill
offshore, one of the highest fees ever paid by an oil company.25 East Africa
is also a new favorite, with countries like Kenya signing giant exploration
deals with companies whose other global sources are running low.
The Greater Horn has become a hotbed of competition
between oil companies flush with profits. Oil companies
have hundreds of millions of dollars from high oil
prices to spend on exploration this year, but have been burned in countries
like Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Russia, which are all taking a much
tougher stance on production deals. This has boosted Africa’s
profile, while factors like growing violence in Nigeria and rising taxes
for producers in Algeria have shone a new spotlight on the eastern
seaboard. Much of the interest is from Chinese, Indian and Malaysian firms
with deep pockets, technological skills and an appetite for higher
insecurity than Western competitors.27
China’s trade with Africa “has risen more
than tenfold in a decade to $55 billion. Chinese demand for energy and
mineral resources to fuel its booming domestic economy has helped drive up
commodity prices on world markets, and contributed to the longest period of
sustained growth in Africa since the 1970s.”28 At a 2007 meeting
of the African Development Bank hosted in Shanghai, China pledged $20
billion in infrastructure and trade financing over the next three years,
with a chunk of that amount intended for electricity, roads, and other
infrastructure. Most of China’s trade in Africa is with oil-producing
countries like Sudan, Nigeria, and Angola, but it is also mining in Zambia,
Namibia, and South Africa.
China’s most significant role is in the Greater
Horn, where billion-dollar deals with Sudan and Ethiopia have established
it as a major power and threat to the U.S., all the more so because of the
Horn’s strategic proximity to the Middle East.29 China buys 60 percent of
Sudan’s oil, much of it through its largest state-owned company,
China National Petroleum Corporation. Hence, U.S. sanctions against Sudan,
announced by Bush last year, will not harm the country’s oil
production, as even U.S. officials admit.30 The stakes in Darfur are all the more clear given the
abundance of resources in the area: massive amounts of oil in both Sudan
and Chad, plus gold, uranium, copper, and bauxite in Sudan, including
Darfur.31
Chinese President Hu Jintao went on a whirlwind
African tour in early 2007, and, as the New
York Times described it, “swept through 8
nations, among them some of China’s closest allies, largest trading
partners and most prominent objects of Chinese investment. He left behind a
multibillion-dollar trail of forgiven debts, cheap new loans, and pledges
of schools and cultural centers.”32 China has followed up its own investment with recent calls
by Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, “for developed nations to
deliver on promises of aid and market access for Africa.”33
China’s involvement has generated hypocritical
hand-wringing from the U.S. and EU, distressed that China has become such a
big player in Africa and is building alliances through grants and loans
without strings attached. Western investors claim that China’s loans
to Africa could pave the way for economic crisis down the road, with
African nations tied to oil exports and world prices that have no guarantee
of sustaining high levels. The IMF has delivered warnings of a “new
wave of African debt” led by China, but also other competitors like
Brazil and India.34 The irony of Western concerns was not missed on at least
one Financial Times
writer, who commented that China’s pattern of operation in Africa,
“draws comparisons with Africa’s past relationship with
European colonial powers, which exploited the continent’s natural
resources but failed to encourage more labor-intensive industry.”35
Western powers’ real concern is that African
states will opt for Chinese deals to free themselves from the punitive
conditions of IMF-World Bank loans and other forms of financial dependence
on Europe and the United States. As the second largest source of oil in
Africa, Angola is now in such a strong position that it is rejecting IMF
loans completely. As one consultant put it, “[w]ith all their oil
revenue, they don’t need the IMF or the World Bank. They can play the
Chinese off the Americans.”36 Or more to the point, as one writer put it, “[w]ho
needs the painful medicine of the IMF when China gives easy terms and
builds roads and schools to boot?”37
Chinese threats to Western hegemony in Africa are
behind some of the recent Western cries of distress over China’s
human rights record in Africa, especially Darfur, where Western politicians
have strong-armed China into pressuring the Sudanese government to accept
peacekeeping forces. Similar base concerns motivate Western politicians
targeting the 2008 Beijing Olympics.38 “More than 100 U.S. Congressmen released a
letter…saying inaction by China threatened ‘disaster’ for
[this] year’s games. ‘This is a moral challenge for us all; if
China fails to do its part, it risks being forever known as the host of the
‘Genocide Olympics’.”39 This hypocrisy is not unique to U.S. politicians. European
investors and statesmen have done their share of finger-wagging, saying
that the Chinese “prefer” to work with
“non-democratic” governments. “A lot of the provincial
Chinese governments are active in Africa and they basically just want to
grab the minerals and go,” says Richard Dowden of the Royal Africa
Society.40 “Today most western institutions are preaching the values
of good governance and democracy,” the Financial Times claims.
“Turning a blind eye to corruption and the abuse of political power
is a recipe for political instability. It does not serve China’s
long-term interests, either.”41 Or as another journalist noted, “China is not sniffy
about dealing with despots.”42
The U.S. and European governments stoop to new lows
when they chastise China for its record on human rights in Africa, given
their own far longer and bloodier legacy of colonialism and “dealing
with despots.” As a Financial Times special report notes, U.S. cooperation with brutal regimes
in Africa “has drawn criticism from human rights groups which say the
U.S. is repeating its Middle East mistakes by cozying up to despotic and
corrupt regimes on the continent” in order to combat Islamic
“terrorism.”43
Neither Western nor Chinese investment has closed the
gap between the handful of extremely rich African elites and the majority
of ordinary people, but rather has deepened the immiseration. Much of
the billions of dollars invested in African petroleum projects every year
go to pay skilled Westerners, and profits are repatraited to the West.44 Moreover,
the massive rise in oil prices threatens to wipe out any economic gains
made over past years. As the Financial Times writes:
Yet the effect of increased corporate interest has not
always translated to economic wellbeing for African countries. Soaring oil
prices have threatened to wipe out recent economic gains on what is both
the world’s poorest continent and its fastest-growing oil and gas
exploration zone of the past decade. According to the International Energy
Agency, the increase in the cost of oil in 13 non-producing countries,
including stable economies such as South Africa, Senegal and Ghana has
since 2004 been equivalent to 3 per cent of their combined gross domestic
product. This is more than the debt relief and foreign aid received during
the same period. Even in some of Africa’s biggest producers, where
high oil prices have driven rapid economic growth, poor governance in the
use of oil funds as well as high fuel prices brought about by a lack of
refining capacity and heavy import bills have added to social woes.45
Even South Africa, the standout industrialized nation
on the continent, has an unemployment rate of 40 percent. On the rest of
the continent, conditions are far worse. Angola, “darling of
the oil industry,” earned more than $30 billion last year form oil
exports, but according to the World Bank, 70 percent of the population
lives on less than $2 a day and one in four children die before their fifth
birthday.46 Home to the most extensive oil exploration on the continent,
Nigeria shows all too clearly how multinational corporations have destroyed
the lives of ordinary Africans.
As one activist put it,
Where once there were poor but self-sufficient people
with rich farmland and fisheries, there is now an unfolding ecological
collapse of horrifying dimensions in which the land, air and water are
increasingly unable to sustain human life, but the region’s people
have no place else to go…. Twenty percent of Nigerian children die
before the age of 5, according to the World Bank. Hundreds of billions of
dollars worth of oil have been extracted from the Niger Delta, according to
Amnesty International in 2005. But according to them, its inhabitants
“remain among the most deprived oil communities in the world—70
per cent live on less than $1 a day. [And that’s i]n spite of its
windfall gains, as global oil prices have more than doubled in the last two
years.47
Trade policy and international financial
institutions
Recent decades have exposed the disastrous impact of
Western global financial institutions, such as the IMF and World Bank, on
African societies. After independence, African ruling classes emphasized
state investment and national development based on import-substitution
industrialization. The concept was that the West would lend funds through
the World Bank to help nations build infrastructure, grow domestic
industries, cut reliance on imports, and boost exports. One of the chief
concerns of the World Bank and IMF was to keep states out of the Soviet
orbit by promoting Western-led economic development.
These loans from the World Bank were the origin of
Africa’s debt—debts incurred to create industrial sectors that
could not effectively compete on the world market. Respectable growth rates
of 4–6 percent in the 1960s gave way to stagnation and decline in the
1970s, as most African states proved, as latecomers to industrialization,
unable to marshal sufficient capital resources, even with state
intervention, to overcome the legacy of colonialism.
Beginning in the late 1970s, the dogma began to
change; the World Bank and IMF mandated a shift away from industrialization
toward economies based solely on the export of raw materials and
agricultural products. Loans were now to be used as leverage to impose what
were called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)—programs that
mandated slashing social spending, eliminating price subsidies and trade
tariffs, and privatizing government-owned industries and services—all
in order to pay down foreign debt.
This approach flowed from a need to spur world trade
and help restore profitability in the advanced capitalist countries
following a series of recessions starting in the 1970s; industrializing
nations would grow their economies by focusing on producing commodities
that could be exported to the rich countries while importing the
latter’s finished goods. In practice, this had the effect, as under
colonialism, of turning Africa back to a one-way conveyor belt of raw
materials. Africa today exports the bulk of its natural resources.
The strategy had disastrous consequences. For one, it
stultified developing economies: rather than building diverse industries,
economies became entirely reliant upon the West for imports to meet
domestic needs. Further, economies reliant on a handful of exports are more
vulnerable: if the price of one commodity falls, it sends the entire nation
into recession. “Sub-Saharan Africa has seen the terms of exchange of
its export products on the global market deteriorate since the
1980s…. [T]he value of a basket of goods exported by Africa has lost
half its value compared to products imported by the North.”48
The impact was to reduce growth, and in some cases led
to a reversal of trends toward industrialization. Foreign direct investment
in sub-Saharan Africa fell from 25 percent of the world’s total at
its peak during the 1970s to less than 5 percent by the late 1990s,
according to data from the UN Conference on Trade and Development.49 The average rate
of growth in Africa in the 1970s was about 3.5 percent; by the 1980s it had
fallen to 2.5 percent, and to 2.2 percent by 1998.50 Manufacturing output
per head in sub-Saharan Africa actually fell 14.3 percent from 1990 to
1996.51
For example, “in Abidjan [Ivory Coast], one of
the few tropical African cities with an important manufacturing sector and
modern urban services, submission to the SAP regime punctually led to
deindustrialization, the collapse of construction, and a rapid
deterioration in public transit and sanitation; as a result, urban poverty
in Ivory Coast—the supposed ‘tiger’ economy of West
Africa—doubled in the year 1987–88.”52 GDP growth in Ivory
Coast stood at 1.6 percent in 1990 but by 2000, its GDP shrunk 3.3 percent;
the value of its industry declined 11 percent in that same period.53
The World Bank and IMF began to operate as global loan
sharks. African debt from 1980 has been paid back four times more than what
was originally borrowed, a total of $255 billion. The amount also exceeds
many times over the amount African exports have earned. “Long before
shock therapy in Eastern Europe or even the debt-driven
‘adjustments’ in Latin America, it was sub-Saharan Africa that
was the playground of neo-liberalism’s assault.”54 The All-Africa
Council of Churches has called Africa’s debt burden “a new form
of slavery, as vicious as the slave trade.”55
Africa is also saddled with another burden: because
their economies are narrowly tied to exports, many African nations are
compelled to import oil for their own use, and so higher oil prices
actually hurt them. Free-trade agreements also force developing regions
such as Africa to import other Western goods including food, which,
according to Oxfam, destroys the “livelihood for many small
producers…[and] the adverse impact on poverty [is]
substantial.”56 Driven off their land, small farmers have flooded urban
areas, producing the massive slums and unemployment documented in Mike
Davis’s book, Planet of Slums. The world’s highest percentages
of slum-dwellers are found in the African nations Ethiopia and Chad (99.4
percent each).57 With African economies in free fall, some of
neoliberalism’s former boosters like World Bank head Joseph Stiglitz
have been forced to conclude that free-trade agreements “are not
right for developing countries…it is not a negotiation, it is rather
an imposition.”58
But not everyone was hurt under these conditions:
“The boom in exports all too frequently benefited only a tiny
stratum. One of the most extreme cases was Angola, a major producer of oil
and diamonds. In Luanda, where in 1993 a staggering 84 percent of the
population was jobless or underemployed, inequality between the highest and
lowest income deciles ‘increased from a factor of 10 to a factor of
37 between 1995 and 1998 alone.’”59
Post-colonial economic development on the continent
proceeded unevenly, resulting in combined and uneven development that has
concentrated industrial growth in key centers such as Nigeria and South
Africa. According to the World Bank, those two countries together account
for 55 percent of the industrial value in sub-Saharan Africa, while the
other fifty-one countries share the remainder.60 Class polarization has expressed itself most sharply
in these centers, with enthusiastic ruling-class support for market-based
neoliberal reform on the one hand, and higher levels of working-class
resistance on the other.
In South Africa more than 40 percent of the population
languishes in extreme poverty while the top quarter of the population earns
85 percent of the country’s wealth.61 In Nigeria, 80 percent of the nation’s oil wealth is
concentrated in the hands of 1 percent of the population.62 As John Ghazvinian
describes in Untapped: The Scramble for
Africa’s Oil,
foreign oil companies have conducted some of the
world’s most sophisticated exploration and production
operations…but the people of the Niger Delta have seen none of the
benefits. While successive military regimes have used oil proceeds to buy
mansions in Mayfair or build castles in the sand in the faraway capital of
Abuja [Nigeria], many in the Delta live as their ancestors would have done
hundreds, even thousands of years ago.63
In much of the rest of the continent, prevented from
industrializing and developing an economic base, many nations are now
subject to the latest version of blame-the-victim, as Western investors
chide African economies as “basket cases” for having
“missed the globalization boat” because they are not set up to
compete on the world market. An accepted part of the mainstream debate on
Africa is that assistance “doesn’t work.” Africa’s
been given generous amounts of aid, goes the argument, “without
showing very much in the way of economic or social success.”64 In fact, aid to
Africa has been cut by 40 percent since the 1990s. To think about it
another way: the U.S. gives the state of Israel $4.5 billion a year, but
only $680 million to the entire continent of Africa. But U.S. military aid to Africa has
increased dramatically since 2001. For example, “since September 11,
Kenya, which the State Department describes as a ‘frontline
state’ in the war on terrorism, has received eight times more
military aid than in the preceding five years.”65
The ultimate irony is that Africa is actually not a debtor continent: because
African ruling classes deposit so much money from Africa into foreign banks, what’s called capital
flight, billions more have gone into those banks than has been lent to Africa. According to one
study, sub-Saharan Africa experienced capital flight of $196 billion
between 1970 and 1996—whereas these countries’ combined debt in
1996 stood at $178 billion.66 A good portion of
this money comes from funds siphoned off from foreign aid and sent back to
the private accounts of African rulers in Western banks. This dynamic helps
explain why African ruling classes do not refuse the World Bank and IMF
terms, as deadly as they are for the majority in Africa: they profit off of
foreign assistance.67
In the face of their disastrous track record in
Africa’s economy, Western rulers have recently declared their
commitment to reforms and ending poverty in Africa. Former British Prime
Minister Tony Blair has tried to redeem his record as a war criminal in
Iraq by making a name for himself in African debt relief, and the G8 summit
in Scotland in 2005 produced a promise to double aid to Africa by 2010. But
this rhetoric masked no small amount of posturing, as the lead up to the
2007 G8 summit in Germany made clear. The press reported that the richest
nations in the world fell well short of their goal and aid actually decreased by several billion
dollars.68 Oxfam has said that the failure to meet aid goals will mean that 45 million more children will die between now and 2015.69 The U.S. was among
the worst culprits in the drop-off of aid pledges to Africa.70
In any case, increasing aid does nothing to attack the
overall structure of inequality in the G8 trade deals, because aid itself
is a political tool that comes with strings attached. As Oxfam has pointed
out, “[t]hey are using their muscle to push for greater
liberalization and access to African markets while continuing to protect
their own markets from competition from African exports”71—the very
policy that is hurting most Africans. The U.S., for example, uses aid to
expand African dependence on U.S. exports.72
The World Bank and IMF launched the Highly Indebted
Poor Country (HIPC) plan in 1996, which effected a miniscule reduction in
debt. And the UN launched a set of targets for 2015 called the Millennium
Development Goals for child mortality, disease, and environmental
sustainability. But the actions of the U.S. and the EU give lie to the lip
service they pay to these goals. New trade deals that force African
countries to eliminate tariffs will cut 25 percent of their
income—the equivalent, for example, of Zambia’s yearly budget
for dealing with AIDS.73 Meanwhile, such so-called reforms come with requirements
for “good governance,” the favorite buzzword for new conditions
imposed on African nations for aid. But Western powers’ concern over
political instability in Africa is sheer hypocrisy, given that they have
supported the worst, blood-soaked rulers in Africa when it suited them,
while backing deregulation and privatization that “stripped the
African states of what little control they had previously exercised
over…foreign firms.”74
Neoliberal African-based reforms, like the New
Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Union,
championed by South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki and former Nigerian
president Olusegun Obasanjo, are no solution to African inequality and
poverty as they merely create opportunities for more African ruling-class
involvement in trade policy.75 NEPAD helps to create favorable conditions for Western
investment through (African-imposed) requirements for privatization, cuts
in social spending and “good governance,” i.e., subjecting
African policy-making to the political will of Western imperialism and its
allies. The response to this African “partnership” highlights
the tremendously uneven benefits of neoliberal policy across classes and
nations. In 2002, members of some forty African social movements, trade
unions, youth and women’s organizations, non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), religious groups, and others rejected NEPAD in the
African Civil Society Declaration on NEPAD.76 Ultimately, whether African elites are at the table or
not, the priorities for Africa are set by the needs of global capital
rather than the needs of ordinary Africans.
Militarism and the “war on terror” in
Africa
Economic and strategic goals are driving a new
militarization in Africa, and growing talk of a “war on terror”
across the continent. And, as in the Middle East, “promoting
democracy” has provided a useful pretext for military intervention.
Yet, as the Financial Times so cleverly put it, “Dick Cheney…once pointed out
[that] the good Lord did not see fit to put oil only where there are
democratic governments. The Horn of Africa, one of the world’s last
unexplored oil frontiers, bears this out.”77 Both the Horn of
Africa and West Africa present serious problems for the U.S. in its new
scramble for African resources. U.S. officials fear instability could
interfere with access to the region’s oil and minerals, especially
with military operations tied up in Iraq. The State Department, the
Pentagon, and industry heads have been jointly strategizing to find a
coherent policy balancing investment opportunities and security risks.78As elsewhere in the
world, the “war on terror” provides a central ideological
justification for U.S. ruling-class strategy in confronting these
obstacles, and Africa’s proximity to the Middle East and large Muslim
populations make it that much more critical.
It was the Clinton administration that first
designated Africa as a “terror” target, and dropped bombs on a
Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in 1998 to back this up. Madeleine Albright
declared in 1999, “Africa is a major battleground in the global fight
against terror, crime, drugs, illicit arms-trafficking, and disease.”79 The current plans
continue this agenda. There is the “$100 million Eastern Africa
Counter-Terrorism initiative involving Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania,
and Eritrea as well as Djibouti. Another new State Department program, the
Pan Sahel Initiative, is being implemented by Pentagon and civilian
contractors in Mali, Mauritania, Chad, and Niger. These actions suggest the
obvious targeting and encirclement of Islamic Africa.80
The Horn of Africa has been called the “hottest
conflict zone” in the world; the wars of the region—including
Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea—have created a human rights
catastrophe of mammoth proportions: 9 million people displaced and 16
million in need of humanitarian aid.81
The history of Western intervention in the Horn
extends back through the twentieth century, when colonial powers and the
Cold War superpowers waged proxy warfare in constantly shifting superpower
alliances and competition, against a backdrop of falling world commodity
prices and economic devastation. The Horn’s civil wars today must be
seen as the direct result of the U.S. and USSR arming the different sides
with billions of dollars, all while famines raged.82 The so-called
humanitarian intervention by U.S. Marines in Somalia in 1992–93 was
merely a continuation of this policy with a different name, and
humanitarianism too has become a useful ideological guise for foreign
intervention. Alongside “fighting terror,” promoting
humanitarian goals has been a watchword of both the Clinton and Bush
administrations, designed to cover for economic and military aims, and to
justify U.S. military deployment in the region.
Today, U.S. policy in the Horn centers on shoring up
local allies, especially Ethiopia but also Sudan, as partners in
counterterrorism, even as Bush denounces the Sudanese government for
permitting genocide in Darfur. As the region’s regimes line up on
different sides, supporting various Islamist groups and warlords, the
conflict intensifies. In June 2007, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for
the Bureau of African Affairs Jendayi Frazer declared, “We were
against the Ethiopian invasion.” In reality, the U.S. offensive
against Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union—ousted by U.S.-backed
Ethiopian forces—included “funding…warlords to pursue
terrorists on its behalf. By 2006, the enlisted warlords were
getting…about $150,000 a month.” In contrast, the U.S. gives
“far less humanitarian assistance to Somalia than to other countries
in the region.”83 This is the pattern for Africa as a whole in recent years:
big jumps in military aid while other forms of aid are slashed.84 The EU is also
extremely concerned about instability in the Horn, yet worries that U.S.
intervention will spark an all-out regional war.85 Declaring it potentially
“one of the most serious of all conflicts that we could possibly
imagine,” EU officials set aside approximately $6 billion as an
incentive for “good governance,” pointing to the danger of
“inflamed tensions” spreading to the Middle East and even
Europe.86
In 2003, while invading and occupying Iraq, the U.S.
military built a base in the strategic location of Djibouti, a tiny country
next to Somalia and across the Red Sea from Yemen, and has earmarked $100
million a year to support its counterterrorism efforts. The U.S. used Camp
Lemonier to train Ethiopian forces in the lead-up to the December 2006
invasion of Somalia. Washington has backed up its support for the Ethiopian
invasion with periodic air strikes against so-called terrorist camps.87 “Meanwhile,
the [Islamic] Courts’ collapse has left a huge vacuum that the
Transitional Government cannot fill. The Courts had brought [relative]
peace and stability, and their defeat has returned Mogadishu to the
warlords…of the past two decades.”88 In other words, “U.S. political and military alliance
with Ethiopia—which openly violated international law in its
aggression towards Somalia, is destabilizing the Horn region and begins a
new shift in the way the U.S. plans to have permanent and active military
presence in Africa.”89 Two hundred thousand new refugees have been created since
the invasion. Refugees trying to cross the Red Sea are reported drowning
off the Somali coast. The Washington Post reported from Ethiopia’s
capital, Addis Ababa, that “More than 200 FBI and CIA agents have set
up camp…and have been interrogating dozens of detainees… picked
up in Somalia and held without charge and without attorneys in a secret
prison somewhere in this city.”90
“The carnage and suffering in Somalia may be the
worst in more than a decade—but you’d hardly know it from your
nightly news,” wrote a Reuters reporter last month.91 Salim Lone, a Somali
spokesperson for the United Nations mission in Iraq in 2003 denounced the
occupation on Democracy Now!, saying: “The prime minister’s
attempt to lure Western oil companies is on a par with his crying wolf
about al-Qaeda at every turn…. No one believes it.”92
The Ethiopian occupation continues. Mogadishu has used
helicopters and tanks to destroy entire neighborhoods, killing at least 400
Somalis in a single assault. A recent Amnesty report on Somalia found that
“Some 6,000 civilians were reportedly killed in fighting in the
capital Mogadishu and across southern and central Somalia in 2007, and over
600,000 Somali civilians were internally displaced from and around
Mogadishu. In addition, an estimated 335,000 Somali refugees fled Somalia
in 2007.”93
The U.S. outpost in Djibouti has another role of
ostensibly winning the “war on terror” through public works
projects, in what the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof calls
“the softer touch.” In a column called “aid workers with
guns,” Kristof explains how U.S. troops stationed in Djibouti pitch
in during natural disasters, dig wells, and build hospitals.94 This
“soft touch” approach is one strand in the web of political,
economic, and military relations drawing U.S. policy-makers closer to the
African ruling class, and is designed to ease the interjection of military
power.
George Bush announced in 2007 the creation of a new
Africa command called AFRICOM, likely based off the coast of West Africa to
protect energy interests in Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea region,
“to deal with what the Christian Science
Monitor dubbed ‘Strife, oil, and Al
Qaeda.’”95 Some African leaders are refusing to consider an AFRICOM
base on their soil, but U.S. military officials are determined. As Rear
Admiral Richard Hunt, the Commander of Combined Joint Taskforce-Horn of
Africa (CJT-HOA) at Dijbouti’s Camp Lemonier explains, “Africa
is the new frontier that we need to engage now, or we are going to end up
doing it later in a very negative way.”96
AFRICOM is only the most public of a ring of U.S.
military bases operating or under construction across the continent, and
for the U.S. and the local forces it trains, “instability” and
“insurgency” are frequently code words for the revolt of
ordinary people against brutal dictatorships and their American partners.
As one U.S. activist put it:
Local Africans are demanding respect and a share in
what is after all, their oil. They are now routinely, viciously suppressed
in eastern Nigeria, in Equatorial Guinea and elsewhere, by African troops
trained and equipped with American tax dollars. When resistance continues,
as it certainly will, America is preparing to up the ante with more
American equipment, with military and civilian advisers, with bombs,
bullets and if need be, with American bodies. That’s what AFRICOM is
about, and what it will be doing in the new century.97
The U.S.’s new military base is upping the
ante for China to step up its own security in the region. Equally, claims
of genocide have provided the pretext for “bringing UN/NATO troops
into the [Chinese-controlled] oilfields of Darfur and south Sudan.”98
“Unofficial” military forces are also at
work in Africa. The U.S. hired a major military contractor called DynCorp
this spring to provide logistical and technical support to African Union
(mainly Ugandan) “peacekeeping” forces. The State Department
has asked for $40 million for Somalia alone. DynCorp also has forces on the
ground in southern Sudan and Ethiopia, including paramilitary
“security teams.”99 U.S. contractors have a long record of doing business in
Africa. Blackwater and Halliburton’s KBR provide services to bases in
Djibouti, Kenya, and Ethiopia; the Bush-connected Barrick Gold provides
“intelligence” and security for operations in Congolese mines,
and helped fuel a bloody civil war with a death toll of 5 million people.100
Interests in Africa extend to other Western powers,
and the U.S. is by no means the lone military force in Africa. The UN has
organized 11,000 troops for Darfur’s next-door neighbor, Chad, and
the Central African Republic. Chadian and Sudanese rebels, and the
governments of both sides, are engaged in a cross-border war, using Darfur
as a staging ground for uprisings supported historically by both the U.S.
and France. There are approximately 300,000 Sudanese refugees and 120,000
displaced Chadians. India, another regional competitor, has a massive navy
that dominates the Indian Ocean abutting East Africa.101 Nonetheless, only
the U.S. is presently willing to back up its economic interests with direct
force, and neither India nor other powers, established or emerging, are in
a position to challenge the military hegemony of the U.S. for quite some
time.
Beyond the Horn and East Africa, threats of
instability posed to U.S. investments in West Africa are a huge concern.
One of the most important recent examples was the April 2007 Nigerian
election, rigged in favor of President Obasanjo’s hand-picked
successor, which further inflamed resistance in the oil region. Over the
past year, attacks on oil facilities have forced Nigeria to shut down
one-fifth of production and has resulted in lost billions in revenue to the
Nigerian government; more than 100 foreign workers have been kidnapped in
the Niger Delta region, with attacks from a range of forces under the
umbrella grouping of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.
Given U.S. corporate investment in Nigeria, some policymakers have openly
called for military intervention. The Atlantic
Monthly has called Nigeria the “largest
failed state on earth,” and written that further destabilization
would threaten “the abundant oil reserves that America has vowed to
protect. Should that day come, it would herald a military intervention far
more massive than the Iraqi campaign.”102
But as Ike Okonta, a Nigerian academic at Oxford
University and the author of When Citizens
Revolt: Nigerian Elites, Big Oil, and the Ogoni Struggle for
Self-determination points out, the West is
to blame for these conditions:
At the heart of this…growing armed insurrection
in the Niger Delta, fed and sustained by five decades of economic
exploitation and political marginalization that the local communities have
suffered at such terrible cost. The United States and the European Union
backed the Obasanjo government in 1999 and again in 2003 even though there
was abundant evidence that those elections had been marked by rigging and
violence…. He was seen as a competent general who could be counted on
to rein in the youth activists in the Delta region and ensure that Western
oil companies continue to extract oil undisturbed. Local democracy and
corporate social responsibility were thus sacrificed for cheap oil.103
John Ghazvinian, author of Untapped, describes the
conditions behind the uprising in Nigeria the following way:
You have people living in Stone Age squalor, in mud
huts, you know, in swamps with no roads, no electricity, no running water.
I spend a lot of time in the Delta, and I’ve seen the way people live
there. And, you know, through their backyards you have thousands of miles
of pipelines, ultra-modern, multi-million-dollar, air-conditioned,
state-of-the-art facilities going up, and people just haven’t seen
any benefits from the oil exploration. And over time, that has turned into
a fairly nasty sort of militant insurgency, as I think shouldn’t
surprise anyone, really.104
Competition between the U.S. and China has spilled
over into this very unstable area as well, with China making massive
investments in Nigeria in exchange for oil exploration rights and arms
deals.105 As in Somalia, Chinese workers have been victims of what is
euphemistically termed a “security deficit” in the Niger Delta
region, a deficit China may be less and less willing to tolerate.106
Conclusion: possibilities for resistance
The new apologists for colonialism, the Bush
administration included, operate as if the only solution for poverty,
crisis, and civil war in Africa is to back up Big Oil with more
privatization and military force. Even many NGOs are resigned to promoting
limited reforms that fall far short of challenging the murderous terms
dictated by global corporations and Western imperialism. But these are not
the only alternatives. Africa has a long tradition of militant struggle.
Mass movements in the anticolonial period, supported by millions of workers
and peasants, shattered the political control of Europeans powers on the
continent. Left-wing national liberation movements and African
socialism—new heads of state such as Nkrumah, Lumumba, and
Nyere—inspired movements elsewhere around the globe, including Black
liberation struggles in the United States.
These newly emerging African economies, however, were
not able to fulfill the aspirations of their populations after the era of
liberation. Those that attempted to insert themselves into the world
market, or break free from it, met increasing resistance as the global
recession of the 1970s intensified competition. Widespread illusions that
political independence would create the conditions for rapid economic
development were undermined. Africa’s new national states were so
small and economically weak that they could not, without giant loans, even
begin to embark on the policy of national development they eagerly
promised. Hobbled with weak infrastructures inherited from the colonial
regimes, and insufficient capital to technologically advance, these
economies fell increasingly behind. The new nationalist elites, meanwhile,
were forced into the mold of all ruling classes: exploiters of workers and
peasants, driven by the logic of international competition.107
But the fight for self-determination did not end with
colonialism’s demise, and African workers and the poor waged a new
round of strikes and protest movements decades later against new African
ruling classes;108 over three dozen dictatorial regimes were toppled by
struggles from below in the 1990s alone.109 Just as African economic development is marked by
uneven development, resistance is focused in key centers of working-class
opposition, such as in South Africa and the Nigerian oilfields, where the
concentration of workers provides the social weight to bind together the
struggles of whole regions, overcoming ethnic barriers. Above all, the
example of apartheid’s defeat at the hands of South African
workers—with their hands on some of the most valuable minerals in the
world—shows how working-class struggle, concentrated at key points,
can unify the resistance of the many oppressed groups, from ethnic
minorities to the unemployed of the region.
Revolts against neoliberal structural adjustment
policies began in the 1980s; so-called IMF riots, and class struggle
exploded in the 1990s. These included strikes against wage cuts,
anti-poverty activism, mobilizations for AIDS treatment, struggles against
the privatization of water and electricity, and movements for debt relief.110 Many of
these struggles have laid the basis for alliances and longer-term battles
over basic needs and human rights for workers and the poor today. Activists
against privatization in South Africa have raised the demand for
reparations for apartheid, and the global justice movement has built
solidarity with those in Africa, like Jubilee South Africa’s campaign
against Citigroup, the source of billions of dollars in loans to the
apartheid regime. Along with activists across the Third World, African
activists built the World Bank Bonds Boycott that successfully forced the
world’s largest pension fund, TIAA-CREF, to drop its bonds.
The battle against the new scramble for Africa’s
resources has for years put the oil industry in its crosshairs. Movements
in Nigeria have demanded reparations and environmental justice. Oil
companies have been the targets not just of kidnappings and sabotage of oil
pipelines, but organized strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations. In May 2007,
protesters in Ogoniland carried out a weeks-long occupation of a major oil
pipeline hub that forced Royal Dutch Shell to cut production by 40 percent.111 Human rights
activists have also waged a long campaign against the World Bank’s
support for the Chad-Cameroon pipeline.112
A petition to the World Petroleum Congress stated the
following:
At every point in the fossil fuel production chain
where your members “add value” and make profit, ordinary
people, workers and their environments are assaulted and impoverished.
Where oil is drilled, pumped, processed and used, in Africa as elsewhere,
ecological systems have been trashed, peoples’ livelihoods have been
destroyed and their democratic aspirations and their rights and cultures
trampled…
Your energy future…threatens the global
environment, imposing on all of us the chaos and uncertainty of climate
change and the violence and destruction of war. Another energy future is
necessary: yours has failed!113
Movements are also taking on the blood diamonds of the
West African diamond industry, land displacement for gold mining and dam
construction, and the deadly monopoly of pharmaceutical companies. The new
scramble for Africa has produced new movements of resistance.
Above all, workers’ power in Africa has shown
the potential for uprooting the source of poverty and inequality. Workers
have shown how to take on global institutions like the IMF. For example, in
Zambia, the workers’ movement led a half-million strong general
strike against IMF-imposed wage freezes. The Zimbabwean labor movement of
the past decade has waged a fierce struggle against Robert Mugabe’s
repressive regime, including strikes and protests for wage hikes this past
spring. However, the leading opposition group against Mugabe, the Movement
for Democratic Change (MDC), depends heavily on bourgeois financing and
support, and has adopted neoliberal strategies. As Patrick Bond writes,
there is a concern that “the MDC [will] end up like the Movement for
Multiparty Democracy in Zambia. There, trade unionist Frederic Chiluba won
the 1991 election against veteran nationalist Kenneth Kaunda with a
multi-class alliance, and quickly applied neo-liberal economic policy with
even worse results than his predecessor.”114 The question of the politics and class independence of
the developing social movements in Africa therefore matter a great deal.
South Africa is where workers’ power achieved
the most important victory since the end of colonialism: the overthrow, in
1994, of racist apartheid rule, following decades of struggle in the mines
and factories alongside uprisings in the townships and schools. The rise of
workers’ struggles in the 1980s shook the apartheid system to its
core and ushered in its final days.
South African workers have continued to fight against
corporate power and inequality in its neoliberal guise, now administered by
the African National Congress (ANC). In 2001, 3 million South African
workers joined a general strike against the ANC government’s
privatization of public utilities and basic industries. The COSATU strike
slogan declared: “We did not fight for liberation so that we could
sell everything we won to the highest bidder.”115 Key pillars of the 1994
ANC program “included promises for land, water, electricity, housing,
jobs, education, healthcare. The promises were all immediately
broken.”116
Great challenges confront the building of a
workers’ movement in Africa that is capable of taking on the power of
global capital in a battle for the world’s most critical resource.
These include U.S. and Western military power; economic terrorism on the
part of the IMF and World Bank; repressive African regimes; uneven
development and vast unemployment, due to deindustrialization and economic
“restructuring.” Equally, as elsewhere, there is a pressing
need to rebuild a Left independent of both the so-called Left regimes and
top-down NGOs that refuse to shake free of the dictates of corporate and
governmental power. These are indeed huge challenges.
African workers and the poor have a proud history of
struggle, from the uprooting of colonialism to contemporary movements
against the neoliberal order. With the new scramble for wealth in Africa,
and the role workers on the continent play in producing that wealth,
Africa’s workers are crucially positioned to link the battle against
the new imperialism with the struggle against exploitation in all its
forms. African workers are tied to international capitalism and to the
potential for international, permanent revolution that links the developed
and the developing world. These connections make working-class resistance
and revolutionary struggle in Africa, and our solidarity, so important
today.
1 Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I (New York: Vintage Books,
1977), 915, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm.
2 Average world gross national income is $7,748.
Source: World Bank Key Development Data and Statistics, http:
//web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/DATASTATISTICS/0,,contentMDK:
20535285~menuPK:1192694~pagePK:64133150~piPK:64133175~theSitePK:
239419,00.html.
3 Global Aids Statistics, Global AIDS Alliance, http:
//www.
globalaidsalliance.org/info/fact_sheets.
4 Patrick Bond, Looting
Africa: The Economics of Exploitation
(London: Zed Books, 2006), 2.
5 “Questioning authority: Interview with Robert
Calderisi,” , May/June 2006.
6 Quoted in John Pilger, “Iran may be the
greatest crisis of modern times,” International
Socialist Review 53, May–June 2007.
7 Michael Watts, “Empire of oil: Capitalist
Dispossession and the scramble for Africa,” Monthly Review, September, 2006.
8 “Reducing U.S. oil dependence,” Natural
Resources Defense Council, http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/fensec.asp.
9 Monica Perin, “Oil firms flow to West
Africa,” Alexander’s Gas and Oil Connections, http:
//www.gasandoil.com/goc/company/cna25023.htm.
10 “According to data from the U.S. Energy
Information Administration (EIA), the United States imported 1.736 million
barrels per day (b/d) from Sub-Saharan Africa in February 2007—the
bulk from Nigeria and Angola but also from Chad, Congo (Brazzaville),
Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. This amount was slightly greater than imports
from the Middle East—Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and a small amount
from Yemen—which totaled 1.708 million b/d. In March 2007, the United
States imported 2.194 million b/d from sub-Saharan Africa compared to 2.095
million b/d from the Middle East.” Peter Kiernan, “Will Africa
rival the Middle East as a U.S. oil supplier?” World Politics Review, October 31,
2007, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=1292.
11 Åshild Kolås, “China in African oil: Guilty
as charged?,” Economists for Peace and
Security Newsletter, June 2007, http:
//www.epsusa.org/publications/newsletter/june2007/kolas.htm.
12 Carola Hoyos, “The new seven sisters: Oil
and gas giants dwarf Western rivals,” Financial
Times, March 12, 2007.
13 Ibid.
14 Bruce Dixon, “Africa: Next U.S. oil war
venue,” Black Star News, April 17, 2007.
15 Ibid.
16 John Ghazvinian, Untapped:
The Scramble for Africa’s Oil (New York:
Harcourt Books, 2007). Ghazvinian gives a country-by-country detailing of
the workings of Big Oil in Africa, as well as their local collaborators and
community resistance.
17 “Are African peacekeepers in Somalia to
serve Western oil and gas interests?” Somaliland
Times, February 24, 2007.
18 Watts, “Empire of oil.”
19 Interview with John Ghazvinian on Democracy Now, May 17, 2007, http:
//www.democracynow.org/2007/5/17/untapped_the_
scramble_for_africas_oil.
20 “World economic outlook: Spillovers and
cycles in the global economy, International Monetary Fund, April 2007.
21 Joanna Chung, “Sub-Saharan Africa confident
it can attract investment,” Financial
Times, May 1, 2007
22 “Majors turn to Africa for growth, but face
mounting competition (ExxonMobil Corp.),” The
Oil Daily, November 10, 2005. Dino Mahtani,
“The new scramble for Africa’s resources,” Financial Times, January 28,
2008.
23 Ibid.
24 Luisa Beltran, “Buyout firm targets
Africa,” Daily Deal/The Deal, May 24, 2007. Cf. Javier Santiso, “Africa: an
emerging markets frontier,” OECD Observer, December 2007.
25 Robert Farzad, “Can greed save
Africa?” BusinessWeek, December 10, 2007.
26 Jad Mouawad, “Angola, one of the poorest
places on Earth, is an oil industry darling,” International Herald Tribune, March 19,
2007.
27 “Are African peacekeepers in Somalia to
serve Western Oil and Gas interests?”
28 William Wallis and Geoff Dyer, “Wen calls
for more access for Africa,” Financial
Times, May 16, 2007.
29 Walden Bello, “Beijing’s turbo-charged
diplomacy sparks debate in Africa,” Pambazuka
News, February 8, 2007.
30 Jad Mouawad, “Oil may provide a way for
Sudan to escape the full pain of the new U.S. sanctions,” New York Times, May 30, 2007.
31 Ayesha Kajee, “The dirty underbelly of the
Darfur conflict,” Pambazuka News, April 25, 2007.
32 Michael Wines, “China’s influence in
Africa arouses some resistance,” New York
Times, February 10, 2007.
33 Wallis and Dyer, “Wen calls for more access
for Africa.”
34 Alan Beattie and Eoin Callan, “China loans
create ‘new wave of Africa debt,’” Financial Times, December 7, 2006.
35 Wallis and Dyer, “Wen calls for more access
for Africa.”
36 Ibid.
37 F. William Engdahl, “China and U.S.A in new
cold war over Africa’s oil riches: Darfur? It’s the oil,
stupid…” Global Research, May 20, 2007.
38 Jim Yardley, “China defends Sudan policy and criticizes
Olympics tie-in,” New York Times, March 8, 2008.
39 Richard McGregorin, “Beijing’s Africa
envoy to focus on Darfur,” Financial
Times, May 16, 2007.
40 Alan Beattie, “Loans that could cost Africa
dear,” Financial Times, April 23, 2007.
41 “Chinese model is no panacea for
Africa,” Financial Times, February 6, 2007.
42 Brian Smith, “Western concern at
China’s growing involvement in Africa,” World Socialist Web
Site (WSWS), April 10, 2006
43 Mahtani, “The new scramble for
Africa’s resources.”
44 Ghazvinian, Untapped:
The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, 14.
45 Mahtani, “The new scramble for
Africa’s resources.”
46 Mouawad, “Angola, one of the poorest places
on Earth, is an oil industry darling.”
47 Bruce Dixon, “Africa—Where the next
U.S. oil wars will be,” Black Agenda
Report, February 28, 2007, http:
//www.
blackagendareport.com.
48 Eric Toussaint, Your
Money or Your Life: The Tyranny of Global Finance (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 279.
49 “Economic development in Africa: Rethinking
the role of foreign direct investment,” United Nations Conference on
Trade and Development, March 2005.
50 Ibid, 284. See Thandika Mkandawire,
“Maladjusted African economies and globalization,” Africa Development, Vol. XXX,
Nos. 1 & 2, 2005, 1–33.
51 Ibid., 18.
52 Mike Davis, Planet of
Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 156.
53 Africa Development
Indicators, 2007, World Bank, Washington, D.C.,
2008.
54 Watts, “Empire of oil.”
55 Africa Action Press Release, August 22, 2001, http:
//www.africaaction.org/desk/wcar0108.htm.
56 “Signing away the future: How trade and
investment agreements between rich and poor countries undermine
development,” Oxfam Briefing Paper, March 2007.
57 Cited in Davis. Planet
of Slums, 23.
58 “Signing away the future.”
59 Quoted in Davis. Planet
of Slums, 164.
60 Africa Development
Indicators, 2007.
61 Jennifer Abrahamson, “Meet the buppies,” Salon.com,
April 29, 2004.
62 Ghazvinian, Untapped, 68
63 Ibid., 19.
64 Calderisi interview, May/June 2006.
65 Frida Berrigan “The new military frontier:
Africa,” Foreign Policy In Focus, September 19, 2007.
66 Mkandawire, “Maladjusted African economies
and globalization,” 8.
67 Bond, Looting Africa, 50.
68 Barry Mason, “G8 fails to meet aid pledges
to Africa,” WSWS, June 6, 2007.
69 Hugh Williamson, “Annan chides G8 on aid to
Africa,” Financial Times, April 24, 2007.
70 Alan Beattie, “G8 pledge on aid to Africa
threatened as spending falls,” Financial
Times, April 4, 2007.
71 The World is Still
Waiting, Oxfam Briefing Paper, May 2007.
72 Eric Ruder, “How Washington puts profits
before helping Africa’s poor: Condemned to death and disease,” Socialist Worker, July 18, 2003.
73 David Cronin, “African countries fight EU
for survival,” IPS, May 22, 2007.
74 Gavin Capps, “Redesigning the Debt
Trap,” International Socialism 107, June 27, 2005, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=
116issue=107.
75 Henning Melber, “The new scramble for
Africa’s resources,” Pambazuka
News, February 8, 2007.
76 The full declaration can be found at http:
//www.ifg.org/wssd/acsnepad_decl.htm.
77 “China in Africa,” Financial Times, April 26, 2007.
78 See “African Oil: A priority for U. S.
national security and African development,” Institute for Advanced
Strategic and Political Studies, Washington, D.C., May 2002.
79 Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright,
“Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee On Fiscal
Year 2000 budget, February 24, 1999, Washington, D.C., as released by the
Office of the Spokesman U.S. Department of State.
80 Bond, Looting Africa, 76.
81 John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen,
“Blowing the Horn,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007.
82 Nick Dearden, “Bush does Somalia: The war on
terror hits Africa,” Counterpunch, December 30/31, 2006.
83 Ibid.
84 F. William Engdahl, “China and U.S.A in new
cold war over Africa’s oil riches.”
85 Paul Taylor, “EU experts fear U.S. could
spark Somalia war,” Reuters, November 21, 2006.
86 Amelie Bottllier-Depois, “New EU strategy
targets Horn of Africa instability,” AFP, October 20, 2006.
87 David Whitehouse, “Massacre in Somalia:
Ethiopian occupiers carry out U.S. policy in the Horn of Africa,” International Socialist Review 53,
May–June 2007.
88 John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen,
“Blowing the horn,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007.
89 Carl Bloice, “Somalia: the hidden war for
oil,” Black Commentator, May 2, 2007.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 Interview with Salim Lone, Democracy Now! January 9, 2007.
93 “Routinely targeted: Attacks on civilians in
Somalia,” Amnesty International, May 6, 2008, 1. Typically, this
report condemns all sides equally, though it places more emphasis on the
depredations of the Ethiopian occupiers.
94 “Aid workers with guns,” Nicholas
Kristof, New York Times, March 4, 2007.
95 Bloice, “Somalia: The hidden war for
oil.”
96 Berrigan, “The new military frontier:
Africa.”
97 Dixon, “Africa—where the next U.S. oil
wars will be.”
98 Endgahl, “China and U.S.A in new cold war
over Africa’s oil riches.”
99 “U.S. hires military contractor to support
peacekeeping mission in Somalia,” Associated Press, March 7, 2007.
100 Dixon.
101 Eric S. Margolis, “The five-way contest for
oil sources in Africa and Asia,” Gulf
Times, March 19, 2007.
102 John Bellamy Foster, “A warning to Africa:
The new U.S. imperial grand strategy,” Monthly
Review, June 2006.
103 Ike Okonta, “Nigeria—danger signs on
democracy road,” Pambazuka News, April 10, 2007.
104 Interview with John Ghazvinian, Democracy Now!, May 24, 2007.
105 Walden Bello, “Beijing’s turbo-charged
diplomacy sparks debate in Africa.”
106 Thomas Pearmain, “U.S. boosts Navy to
protect Gulf of Guinea oil interests; China woos Africa at banking
conference,” Global Insight, May 22, 2007
107 See Peter Binns, “Revolution and state
capitalism in the Third Word,” International
Socialism 25, Autumn 1984.
108 Cf. Leo Zeilig, ed. Class
Struggle and Resistance in Africa (London:
New Clarion Press, 2002), 24–25.
109 Bond, Looting Africa, 144.
110 Mike Davis, Planet of
Slums, 161–63.
111 Deborah Kelly, “Nigerian protesters leave
Shell oil hub,” International Oil Daily, May 17, 2007.
112 Peter Kemp “Exxon Rapped on Chad-Cameroon
Pipeline as Oil Revenues Surge,” Oil Daily, July 26, 2007.
113 Quoted in Bond, Looting
Africa, 76.
114 Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge: Exhausted Nationalism,
Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice (Natal: Merlin Press/University of Natal Press/Weaver Press,
2003), 90.
115 David Whitehouse, “General strike targets
privatization plan,” Socialist Worker, September 14, 2001.
116 “Ten years after the fall of apartheid:
Interview with Patrick Bond,” Socialist
Worker, May 7, 2004.