25 March
These are serious matters, President Clinton, we hope you are serious about them.
The arrival of President Bill Clinton in South Africa on Thursday, March 26th, represents a mixed blessing for our country and our continent. In the speeches on Africa that Clinton has delivered in the past days, there are points of emphasis that have much positive potential:
However, unless approached seriously and systematically, each of these visions is likely to flatter briefly only to deceive.
Countering Afro-pessimism?
Centuries of colonialism have subordinated the African continent to the role of raw material supplier to, and periphery of, the major industrialised countries. Over the last two decades, the marginalisation of Africa has increased, not diminished. Africa's share of foreign direct investment going to the developing world has declined from an average of 16% in the 1970s, to 10% in the 1980s, to a mere 5% by the mid-1990s. Africa's increasing marginalisation is also reflected in our miniscule and declining share of total global trade - from 3% in the 1950s to barely 1% in 1995.
Over the last two decades there have been several factors behind this deepening impoverishment. But the core factor has been the brutal rolling back of post-independence social gains through enforced structural adjustment programmes. The IMF and World Bank have turned African peasants and working people into human shock-absorbers in order to rescue the First World's banking system from its own profligacy of the 1970s. Over most of the past decade and a half, Africa, the poorest continent in the world, has been a net exporter, not just of primary products, but, incredibly, also of capital.
If, in his endeavours to counter Afro-pessimism, Clinton fails to reflect critically on the underlying roots of our continent's dilemma, his new-found enthusiasm for Africa will be little more than a fleeting photo opportunity at the Cape Town Waterfront.
In particular, the SACP calls on the US to use its influence to cancel the debt of the most impoverished African countries, many of them in our own southern African region. This must be done immediately, for, while Clinton speaks of an African renaissance, his own administration has been using its powers to delay implementation of the debt reduction programme under the IMF-World Bank framework for Highly Indebted Poor Countries (notwithstanding the limitations of this programme itself).
A partner in an African renaissance?
If, indeed, it is Clinton's intention to play a constructive partnership role in the reconstruction and development of Africa, then we join others in welcoming him to our country and continent.
However, it is not clear what the US understands by a "partnership" with Africa. In the US document, "Comprehensive Trade and Development Policy for the Countries of Africa" (1996) we are told, for instance, that "Africa is the last frontier for American businesses." As Africans, we naturally remember the fate of the indigenous inhabitants of America's other frontiers. We find the reference to being an American frontier distasteful, if not plain threatening.
We wonder, moreover, whether the Clinton trip and this newly proffered partnership is less about an African renaissance, and more about US business rivalry with former colonial powers - France and Britain, in particular. After all, this trip is the direct outcome of the March 1997 meeting of the powerful American business lobby, the American Assembly, which, in its document, "Partnership with Africa" boasted: "We are now in a position to seize the opportunities provided by the emergence of new, democratically elected African leadership committed to market economies". A theme that was echoed by David Miller, chairperson of the US Corporate Council for Africa, who said: "For us to take real advantage of what is happening in Africa will require leadership at the highest levels of our government."
That leadership, at the highest level, has now arrived in Africa. We hope that it is guided by more than a vision of seizing opportunities and taking market advantages.
Fostering democracy, peace and human rights in Africa?
The SACP welcomes the emphasis that President Clinton has placed on fostering democracy, peace and human rights in our continent. But, again, the seriousness of this commitment would be greatly enhanced by a few basic acknowledgments from the side of the US administration.
In the first place, we would welcome a frank admission of the role, over many decades, that US administrations (Republican and Democratic alike) played in the support of white minority rule in South and Southern Africa. Until at least the mid-1970s, official (but secret) US policy was to back minority rule throughout our region. In 1975 the US encouraged apartheid forces to invade Angola, and there was longstanding collaboration between apartheid Pretoria and Washington in the covert destabilisation of Angola and Mozambique. Through the 1980s, prominent US strategists, close to the White House, advised the Pretoria regime in its vicious programme of repressive reform, designed to stave-off democracy in our country.
The SACP would welcome a submission by the US embassy in Pretoria on these and related matters to our Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This would be a meaningful contribution to fostering democracy, peace and human rights.
We think that public acknowledgement of the US role in supporting numerous other dictatorships in Africa would also help to clear the air. Perhaps, an apology for the US role in backing Mobutu in the former Zaire would be a good place to begin?
But the question of democracy and human rights is not just a matter of recent history. Too often, US insistence on multi-party democracy is selective in its application, and formalistic. For us, deepening democracy means fostering the sovereign capacity of democratic African states to carry through developmental programmes, meeting their electoral mandates and the needs of their people. Multi-party democracy will only discredit itself if it comes to mean simply deciding which one of several parties gets to have a five-year term implementing an externally imposed structural adjustment programme. Democracy means, in the first place, answerability to one's own people, and not to foreign bankers and donor agencies.
The prospect of effective co-operation on trade and investment?
Shortly before his departure for Africa, President Clinton spoke of the desire to increase trade and investment with Africa. "When it comes to economic development, America and Africa can help each other, opening markets, building businesses, creating jobs on both continents."
This is an encouraging vision, but can we believe it?
On March 11 the US House of Representatives approved the "Africa Growth and Opportunity Act". In its original version, the Bill was a naked trade-not-aid neo-liberal manifesto - as if most of Africa has the capacity to survive, let alone benefit from the cold winds of globalised "free trade", without considerable effort first at internal reconstruction and development. Thanks to criticism of the original draft, the new version of the Act now includes acknowledgement of the need for continued aid and debt relief. But these provisions are all located in the non-binding sections of the Act, while the rigid "free-market" formulae (cutting government spending, privatisation, the barring of protection for national industries) are obligatory conditions for any economic co-operation.
The "free market" rhetoric emanating from Washington is particularly irksome for those of us living in this continent. While, in the name of "free trade", we are barred from protecting our jobs, our agriculture, and our own frail industrial bases, the most developed countries spend billions subsidising their economies. According to Oxfam International, for instance, subsidised agricultural production and export dumping by the US is undermining market opportunities for hundreds of thousands of African households. In 1996 the OECD countries spent the equivalent of $166 billion on agricultural subsidies, with the US spending over $7 billion in subsidies for US cereal producers alone.
No to re-colonisation
The SACP harbours no nostalgia for the Cold War era (which is why we find the continued US blockade of Cuba absolutely irrational). We also have a sober understanding that our country and continent have to engage with the international realities of our time. We need foreign investment and we need trade, but we are no longer slaves.
On the occasion of Clinton's visit to our country, we affirm our commitment as South Africans, and as Africans, to being sovereign actors in our own right. We shall not allow our precious democratic breakthrough to be reduced to little more than a business opportunity to be seized. To a genuine partnership, we say -: Yes, indeed. To a plan to reduce the new South Africa to a useful enclave and springboard for the planting of dollar signs throughout our continent, we say, emphatically - No!