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The current unrest in Kenya, which is being kept in motion by its youngest adults, cannot be looked at in isolation from the troubles on the rest of the continent, just in terms of difference.
The crisis we face now is that Europe’s states in Africa are outliving Europe and America’s ability to use them for what they were set up for: exploitation of the continent and suppression of the masses if they try to oppose this. The chains have been loosened.
But the main point is that African populations have become restive. The shock of neoliberalism has worn off, the “abroad” route is jaded, and they are not going to accept what conditions were imposed on their parents (and grandparents) in the 1990s.
It’s one form of a reckoning for the African states that lost all credibility after imposing neoliberalism in the 90s.
I have long argued that there are no African failed states; what we have is the failure of the Western imagination of Africa as implemented by the states the West created here. The West is now at the point where it cannot continue to fully outpace the consequences of the internal turmoil created by its own economic model, the worst of which were historically offloaded onto us in the form of colonies, unfair trade, and migrant labour.
There are different reactions to this, depending on the play. Some Africans are trying to use the state to reform both neoliberalism and neo-colonialism as a whole, others are using it to hold back the demands for reform.
In the first group, we have many examples with varying degrees of radicalism. The prime ones, of course, are the West Sahel countries of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, now known collectively as the Alliance of Sahel States (AES is the French acronym).
These regimes are asserting greater and greater control over their mining and currency independence. It has reached the point that the AES has accused the West, and specifically France, of being the real power behind the so-called jihadist militias terrorising their respective countrysides.
In Zambia, there is a long-running feud between the Zambian state and a cluster of Swiss-owned gold mining firms. It began as a dispute over the declaration of profits and, therefore, the taxes due. It has reached the point where Switzerland is insisting on its right to parts of Zambia, just as the French president insists that his country is obliged to remain in West Africa.
Countries historically even more mild-mannered than Zambia – like Malawi, Botswana – have also shown signs of a growing willingness to directly address similar long-standing economic and trade injustices.
So, the ability of the leaders of these states to go rogue and begin looking at policies that benefit their people even at the expense of Western interests is growing. In their weakened and confused state, the Western countries are not able to manage to push back as effectively as they used to in the days of the Cold War and the two decades following.
However, on the other hand, we have African state leaders who are determined to stick to the old script. They are aware that “Massa” is sick but have resolved to keep the plantation going until he gets back on his feet. Being able to reward themselves a bit better, in the meantime, also helps.
A variation of that is to also seek out new potential masters to whom they can offer the service of handing over native resources should the former master fail to recover. And there are plenty of players, new and revived, willing to step in and take advantage of the West’s growing weakness.
There is a whole cluster of smaller oligarchs who got rich selling oil to the West over the last seventy years, running the Arab Gulf states, seeking new imperial investments.
As a result, some of these democratic stirrings are being derailed by pre-emptive moves by the fading and the rising powers. Turkey’s ruling class is still dreaming of the ports it once owned on the African side of the Red Sea, and has been taking sides in the various conflicts in the Horn, towards this end. The entire crisis in the Sahel-Sudan is being fuelled by a gold rush from some Gulf states, and Western powers are suspected to still be involved in some opposition movements in the region.
The stance of the Kenyan government perhaps best represents this second “old script” group. It has turned to one tactic after another from the playbook of many a regime on the defensive against its own population. It has engaged in propaganda wars, abductions, co-options, murdering targeted activists and disrupting communications. These may have changed the dynamics of the protests, but has not stopped their momentum.
On one level, it would be the Kenyan people who would have such staying power. Kenya has the longest continuing tradition of civic action in the region, surpassed perhaps only by the pre-war Sudan. As also the biggest functioning economy, Kenya has, or had, a much wider social base from which a homogenous civic class of working people could emerge. Furthermore, her economic history means that many Kenyans have come up in a tradition of relaying exclusively on their formal employment as a livelihood. There is a lot less of the urban-rural duality of say, Uganda. As a result, questions of governance and economic policy have an immediate effect on ordinary citizens and tend to provoke a much more immediate response.
And with the addition of the new generation increasingly speaking in one national language with little regard for region or ethnicity, they will not be a pushover, as the regime there is discovering.
United States president Donald Trump sits at the heart of this Western decline. As a reaction, he cobbled together a political coalition driven largely by a sense of nostalgia for the last days of an America that benefitted primarily white people. Trump has an imagination that he can revive the country’s fortunes by appealing to such memories.
At the heart of his problems is the simple question: how much is a United States dollar actually worth? Because on that are erected two of the great pillars of the present-day global economic system, and all the institutions of international law that safeguard it: the world reserve currency, and the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF) bodies.
America basically seized global power after the end of the 1939–1945 war. This it was able to do because it had suffered the least physical damage to its infrastructure from the fighting (just about none of which took place on American soil), and had come a little later into a conflict between powers already tired from their 1914–1918 war, and so were nearly completely burned out by this second round. Also, being the first to develop a nuclear weapon and then the only one to actually use it, made a powerful statement.
The American financial elites moved quickly to place their currency at the very centre of the new global economic system they built. The dollar became the world’s reserve currency and gold became the American reserve currency backing up this dollar. With the then massive global recovery programme using a lot of American aid, and then the Europeans having to eventually give in to the American demand that they end the direct formal ownership of empires, the 20th century basically belonged to the US.
As is the way with illegitimate power, those wielding it misused it. First, they blew their gold reserve in paying off the inflation caused by the decade-long war they took to Vietnam and lost. The dollar was separated from the gold standard. In its place, the United States quickly worked to make the emerging Arab “oiligarchs” agree to have the US dollar as the only currency they would accept for trading their oil. This was the birth of the petrodollar.
Now, having secured the demand for dollars (which radiated into sustained demand for American treasury bills, and even assets inside the US), the managers of the US economy failed to learn any new lessons: instead of rebuilding their manufacturing, they outsourced even much more of it to the cheaper labour in China. Instead of managing their inflation, they simply printed more currency. As we speak, the country is facing a largely domestic national debt of over 36 trillion dollars, which carries an annual interest of 952 billion dollars. This is a debt-to-GDP ratio of 121 per cent.
Given that many African countries were forced into neoliberal cuts to their public budgets for far less shocking ratios, it is clear that the only reason the US has not been fully shut down in the same way is because the IMF, the only body on the planet mandated to make it do so, uses the same currency, is based in the US, and was always really a tool of US imperialism.
Unless the managers of the US economy can show the world the economic base upon which they claim the value of their currency rests, there is going to be an increasing awareness in the global financial markets that investors need to get their money into other currencies and economies.
This leads to growing global unease over the future of the US dollar. Many national economic directors in countries with means are opting to hedge their bets and place more of their national funds in gold for now, which loops back to all the conflicts in the Sahel and the African Great Lakes Region.
This means that the US dollar is, frankly, running on vibes. The bulk of that massive debt is domestic, but there are some important big foreign creditors. The domestic debt has probably gone beyond whatever domestic production and exports could ever hope to recover it, and the big foreign holders are seriously looking at how to dump their bills on to someone else (at the moment, the UK seems happy to be the Americans’ financial janitor).
Trump seems to understand this aspect of the problem, and is desperately trying to reinvent the industrial economy of 1950s America. But, apart from the lack of time, loss of skills and the rise of China as an industrial global competitor, Trump’s real problem is one of focus. He is permanently distracted by the remnants of the old regime still within the state system who are hostile to his attempted solutions, and simply want to bring his government to an unscheduled end. On the other hand, Trump is plagued by the neo-liberalist imperialist regime hacks who seek to convince him that more wars will bring quicker solutions. The more he listens to them, the more his nascent ideas unravel.
As they fight it out in Washington, this is the gap in global relations that will both loosen the chains of the African neocolonial state, but also set the scene for a second Scramble for Africa.
Africans are right to be unsettled at this point. Independence was already enough of a disappointment by the 1980s, before the West, on a roll after having finally caused its great rival the Soviet Union to collapse in 1989, felt free to intensify its exploitation of places like Africa. This was how the era of neoliberalism started. It swept aside the small certainties lying amidst the shortcomings of Independence: free or subsidized state education; state-backed affordable bank credit; affordable healthcare; state-stabilized farm prices; large public bodies that employed a large middle-class workforce in the course of delivering these things. The entire trajectory of societal expectations was shifted at the stroke of a few IMF bureaucrat pens.
The current generation of demonstrators may not even be aware of just how exactly this process – that gutted the rising middle class all over Africa – brought them, as the descendants of those retrenched family heads and traders in destroyed markets, to this point.
But everything else has been tried. Their grandparents went into “entrepreneurship” and saw the capital made up from the retrenchment packages they received get swallowed up by taxes and poor economic management from the state. The spouse and children then sought refuge in working abroad, a process that has eventually degenerated into the outright slavery we see today. They tried to build on the immense and exceptional constitutional and human rights law struggles pioneered by the legendary Pheroze Nowrojee, who displayed immense courage and personal risk and sacrifice in taking on the increasingly rogue Moi regime, until it became irredeemably lawless in its actions.
They then tried “democracy” and hoped to vote in governments that would listen to them, only to be repeatedly cheated at the polls and after the swearing-in. Faced with a continued precariousness, overtaxed and unprotected, protest now is the only way.
Will they be able to rebuild the respect for constitutional practice that Nowrojee demanded of the state? Will Traoré be able to complete Thomas Sankara’s egalitarian vision?
Whether the effort at change comes from an enlightened occupant of an African state house, or from the youth risking their lives in street demonstrations, the spirit of resistance must be encouraged and built upon just as this generation of young people are working from a platform built by the work of others.
But make no mistake; this will get worse before it gets better. But it will get better.
