INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS - LOOKING GLASS NEWS | |
Africa Needs Justice Not Charity |
|
by Norm Dixon guerilla news network Entered into the database on Monday, July 18th, 2005 @ 16:07:27 MST |
|
For Africa to escape the nightmare in which it has been plunged by centuries
of slavery, colonialism and imperialist exploitation requires a new, just and
equal system of international economic relations. Western governments deliberately confuse the symptoms of African poverty
with its causes in order to obscure a fundamental feature of the world capitalist
system: that the advanced industrialized countries continue to derive much of
their great wealth from the extreme exploitation of the vast majority of the
world’s population, who reside in the Third World, and the plunder of
their natural resources. “$55-billion debts write-off agreed,” declared the June 11 British
Guardian. “Debtor nations freed of burdens,” the Los Angeles Times
announced on June 12. “Victory for Millions,” trumpeted the June
12 British Observer. “Blair, Bono Win One for Africa,” cooed theJune
13 Christian Science Monitor. “Debt deal just the beginning, says Geldof,”
assured the June 13 Sydney Morning Herald. The hype was in response to a June 11 agreement by seven finance ministers
from the Group of 8 industrialized countries (United States, Japan, Italy, Canada,
Britain, France, Germany and Russia). The ministers agreed to immediately cancel
all the debts owed by 18 mainly African countries to the International Monetary
Fund (I.M.F.), the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfrDB). According
to the British government, this amounts to $40 billion. In practical terms,
it should save these countries $15 billion in debt payments, spread over 10
years. The June 12 LA Times lavishly claimed the deal “fulfilled a decades-old
dream of anti-poverty activists,” reporting that Treasury Secretary John
Snow had hailed the arrangement as “an achievement of historic proportions.”
The June 13 Christian Science Monitor’s article began: “It’s
been a long campaign of persistent persuasion by British Prime Minister Tony
Blair and Irish rock star Bono. But finally … they won a victory for the
world’s poorest continent.” Most newspapers quoted a gushing Geldof: “Tomorrow 280 million people
will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny
from the burden of debt that has crippled them and their countries for so long.
Money we didn’t even know we were owed, and never wanted in the first
place, and money they could never pay.” Also widely reported was [British chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon] Brown’s
grandiloquent description of what had been achieved: “It is the intention
of world leaders to forge a new and better relationship — a new deal —
between the rich and poor countries of the world and I believe that the advances
that we have made can be built upon … This is not a time for timidity,
but a time for boldness, and not a time for settling for second best, but aiming
high.” Stirring words indeed, but tragically the hype does not match the reality. The huge figures most often quoted by the press, $50-55 billion, include I.M.F.,
World Bank and AfrDB debts owed by around 20 of the other poorest Third World
countries, which may become eligible for debt cancellation in the future; possibly
nine more in 12-18 months, and another 10 or so at some undetermined date. While the $1.5 billion a year made available will certainly be of use for the
18 poverty-stricken countries, it will only boost their collective budget by
about 6.5 percent per annum. The modest sum illustrates that the Western media’s
backslapping over their governments’ “generosity” is more
than a little exaggerated and somewhat premature. Those 18 countries account
for only 5 percent of the population of the Third World, and if all 38 countries
become eligible in the future, it will still only affect around 11 percent. Britain’s annual contribution to the debt write-off will amount to between
$70 million and $96 million, which is much less than the Blair government spends
on its occupation of Iraq each year, and just a shade more than the $67.1 million
it forks out each year in payments to maintain Queen Betty Windsor and her dysfunctional
family. Washington will need only find between $130 million and $175 million a year,
which is almost three times less than it spends each year just to run its Baghdad
embassy. The total 10-year cost for the United States is around what Washington
will spend to build a new embassy in the Iraqi capital. Washington alone spends
$2 billion a month to wage war in Iraq. If those figures call into question the “historic” scale of the
West’s benevolence towards Africa and the Third World, compare them to
the U.S. annual “defense” budget, which will be more than $441 billion
in 2006 alone. Or to the G-8’s spending $350 billion year on subsidies
to its agribusinesses, which allows the flooding of Third World markets with
cheap produce that has devastated local producers. Or compare it to Britain’s
income from arms sales to Africa, which topped £1 billion ($1.8 billion)
in 2004. Or to President George Bush’s cutting taxes for the richest Americans
by $200 billion a year. It should be also noted that debts owed to the Inter-American Development Bank
and the Asian Development Bank are not included in the deal, nor are the Third
World countries’ huge bilateral debt burden (that is, debt owed to individual
rich countries). Even if all 38 nominated countries eventually have their multilateral debts
wiped, it will still represent just 18 percent of Africa’s total external
debt of $300 billion, and a tiny part of the Third World’s total debt,
which is estimated at a staggering $2.4 trillion! But surely, it’s a step forward? Not according to African anti-debt campaigners.
African Jubilee South (A.J.S.) pointed out on June 14 that to qualify for the
G-8 scheme, the initial 18 countries have had to pass what is known as the Highly
Indebted Poor Country (H.I.P.C.) initiative’s “completion point.” The 1996 H.I.P.C. was the rich-country governments’ last much hyped,
now largely forgotten, “debt forgiveness” scheme. The 1999 G-8 summit
in Cologne promised that it would lead to the cancellation of $100 billion in
bilateral debt. Just a quarter of that was actually delivered and the H.I.P.C.
countries are now poorer than when they began the program. To reach the H.I.P.C. completion point, explains A.J.S., “involves the
implementation of stringent free market reforms such as [health and education]
budget cuts, financial and trade liberalization, privatization and other reforms”
that ensure, as the G-8 finance ministers stated explicitly on June 11, “the
elimination of impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign.”
“Twenty other countries may qualify,” A.J.S. pointed out, “but
only if they are prepared to go through the same pain that the 18 countries
have already endured.” In Tanzania, 45,000 public sector jobs have been lost due to privatization.
In Zambia, the figure is 60,000. To reach the H.I.P.C. “completion point”
Tanzania and Ghana were both required to privatize their urban water supplies.
Mali was forced to agree to privatize its railways and cotton industry. The
World Bank insists that Mali’s state cotton company pay producers the
“world market price,” which is a big drop in income. Mali’s railways are now owned by a Canadian-French consortium, which
has shed 600 jobs, closed two-thirds of the stations and decimated passenger
numbers, sharply curtailing the livelihoods of thousands who relied on the lines
as a source of customers and a way to get their products to markets. The A.J.S. statement declared: “The costs of structural adjustment programs
and creditor-imposed conditionality far outweigh the amount of debt to be cancelled.
Are we to cheer when these additional promises can go the same route of other
G-8 pledges, i.e. unfulfilled? Should we applaud when the 18 countries affected
represent a tiny fraction of the world’s poor? Are we to praise the [G-8]
when these debts are not being serviced in any case (because of the countries’
inability to pay), and when they would have been repudiated a long time ago
as illegitimate debts if our governments had real political and economic independence.
The illegitimacy of the debt resides in that they were incurred by dictatorships
of various kinds, were used in consolidating and furthering their undemocratic
regimes against the interests of their people and in implementing policies that
have put millions of lives at risk.” The Southern African People’s Solidarity Network on June 17 bluntly stated:
“the so-called debt cancellations … will lead to further accumulation
of debts [because] these countries still have to toe the line and respond to
demands to open up their economies for more exploitation, capital flight and
other related imbalances that come with further liberalization.” While the July G-8 summit is almost certain to endorse the debt deal, other
proposals floated by the British government, formulated by its Commission for
Africa in an attempt to meet a series of United Nations poverty-reduction targets
known as the Millennium Development Goals, will be frustrated by opposition
from the United States, Japan and Canada. In what Gordon Brown refers to as a “Marshall Plan for Africa,”
European Union countries have promised to increase their aid budgets from the
present E.U. average of 0.33 percent of G.D.P. to 0.56 percent by 2010 and 0.7
percent by 2015. If achieved, it would increase annual aid to Africa from $25
billion to $75 billion in 2015. As big-hearted as this might seem, this has been a U.N. goal since 1970, yet
Western countries today are further away from achieving than ever. It was a
key recommendation of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s 1979
North-South Commission. However, the Bush administration is refusing to boost its aid budget as a proportion
of G.D.P., which is currently a miserable 0.16 percent. Washington’s annual
African aid budget is $3.2 billion, which is about four days’ worth of
Pentagon spending. In contrast, Israel alone received $3.7 billion in “aid”
from the United States in 2003. The European Union spends $10.8 billion a year
on Africa. Third World Revolt Why is the West now attempting to be seen to address African and Third World
poverty? In the short term, it is being driven by soon-to-retire Tony Blair’s
opportunistic wish to go down in history as something better than George Bush’s
“poodle.” Blair’s heir-apparent Gordon Brown also wants to
begin his reign with the mantle of a visionary Labor reformer, not a Blairite
warmonger. However, more importantly, Blair, Brown, Bush and the G-8 realize that a Third
World revolt against neo-liberalism is a distinct possibility and need to act
to defuse it. African Jubilee South summed it up when they noted that the imperialist
powers need to “give some extra financial breathing space for the affected
countries, while ensuring their continued adherence to the dictates of the rich
industrialized countries and the plunder by their foreign multinational corporations.
Not just through the exploitation of our natural resources but through profit
repatriation, declining terms of trade, access to increased financial and tax
incentives.” The resistance is most advanced in Latin America. In Bolivia, one of the countries
that will “benefit” from the G-8 deal, millions of Bolivians have
flooded the streets almost continuously for months, demanding the reversal of
the privatization of their natural gas and oil reserves, which was forced on
La Paz a decade ago by the dictates of the I.M.F. The Bolivian people are demanding
that the wealth be utilized to benefit the people. In Venezuela, a revolutionary
government has rejected neoliberal austerity, and the people are mobilizing
to demand the benefits of the country’s oil wealth. The G-8 leaders fear that sentiment could spread to the rest of the Third World,
including Africa from which Western corporations continue the plunder of the
continent’s massive mineral and oil resources. The signs are there. In February, Mozambique defied an I.M.F.-imposed cap on
government wages spending by hiring a further 5000 teachers. In May, Tanzania
repudiated the water privatization contract with the joint venture led by British
company Biwater, after the company failed to deliver services and investments
on time. In June, three Biwater executives were unceremoniously deported. Mali
has delayed the final privatization of its cotton industry, against World Bank
orders, until 2008. Kenyan M.P. Paul Muite, angered that Kenya was not included in the G-8 debt
relief package despite having abided by all debt obligations, has proposed that
Kenya refuse to pay its annual $1.2 billion external debt repayments for five
years and “redeploy the money to needy sectors such as education, health
and infrastructure … We need to take radical steps to re-energize our
economy. One such step is to suspend repayment of foreign loans,” he told
the June 12 East African Standard. ‘Justice Not Charity’ For Africa to escape the nightmare in which it has been plunged by centuries
of slavery, colonialism and imperialist exploitation requires a new, just and
equal system of international economic relations. Western governments deliberately
confuse the symptoms of African poverty with its causes in order to obscure
a fundamental feature of the world capitalist system: that the advanced industrialized
countries continue to derive much of their great wealth from the extreme exploitation
of the vast majority of the world’s population, who reside in the Third
World, and the plunder of their natural resources. As the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s 2004 report
reveals, “the continent received some $540 billion in loans and paid back
some $550 billion in principal and interest between 1970 and 2002. Yet Africa
remained with a debt stock of $295 billion.” African Jubilee South and other Third World anti-debt campaigners propose some
fundamental demands that are “a matter of justice and fairness, not charity”: The unconditional and immediate cancellation of all African and other Third
World countries’ debt. An immediate increase in Western aid budgets to 0.7 percent of G.D.P., to be
provided without strings attached. The abolition of all I.M.F. and World Bank conditionalities, under any guise,
and reparations for the costs of structural adjustment programs. It is obvious
that economic recovery in Africa is incompatible with these institutions’
conditionalities. An immediate end to Western pressure to open up Third World markets to subsidized
First World goods and produce. African countries want trade agreements that
allow them to choose if, when and how to open their markets, and to implement
any measures they feel necessary to protect and develop their home industries.
Western countries should provide long-term preferential access to their markets
for African and Third World goods. The repatriation of all the wealth stolen from the African people and kept
in Western countries in the past, and that resulting from corporate plunder
of Africa’s natural and mineral resources today. The restitution of that
wealth to its rightful owners, the African people, would send the right signal
to all potential looters and help Africa in its recovery. African leaders and policy makers must abandon destructive neoliberal policies
and explore genuine people-centered development, economic and trade policies.
Africa needs to reclaim its sovereign right to decide on its priorities and
its own path to development. [The 18 beneficiaries of the G-8’s largesse are Benin, Bolivia, Burkina
Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique,
Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.] |