Imperialist sanctions and silences

Beyond the above two authors, there has been another attempt in a Review of African Political Economy article by Ian Phimister and Brian Raftopoulos to interpret, not the world-historical nature of the Zimbabwe question as such, but its current international politics.28 And, in this case, we find
the classic reduction of democratisation to a ‘human-rights’ question, over and beyond the agrarian and national questions, typical of reformist opportunism.29 We also find not so much a silence on sanctions, but innocuous mention of them. It amounts to a calculated silence on the strategy and impact of imperialist sanctions.

In their article, Phimister and Raftopoulos seek to understand the ‘politics of anti-imperialism’ in Southern Africa, and specifically the form that this politics has taken in the alliance between the two presidents, or ruling  parties, in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Th eir argument is that President Mugabe has manipulated the ‘liberal imperialism’ of the West, and especially of the United Kingdom, in order to bolster his own ‘authoritarian’ rule. For its part, the ANC in South Africa has provided cover for ZANU-PF for three reasons: fear of the ‘unsettling precedent’ that an MDC victory in Zimbabwe would have in South Africa; the popular appeal of President Mugabe in South Africa; and a ‘liberation solidarity’, broadly understood. This anti-imperialist politics, they argue, constitutes a ‘misplaced sense of Pan-Africanist solidarity’, which follows a long tradition in African politics to the effect of legitimating internal oppression. They conclude that Southern African states have yet to  embrace a pan-Africanism that rejects both external dependence and internal authoritarianism, the two being unconnected.

Despite suggestions as to a more progressive pan-Africanism, however,we are led to believe that a ‘human-rights’ politics is sufficient for the task. In practice, this ‘pan-Africanism’ is none other than the ‘liberal  imperialism’ from which they pretend to distance themselves. Indeed, they offer no tangible critique of liberal imperialism, while they devote the whole of their  energy to a critique of populist anti-imperialism from a human-rights perspective. This liberal politics is supported by a bourgeois ‘discourse analysis’, based largely on press reports, by which they strip imperialism of its material basis. Thus, if the anti-imperialism of the ruling party in Zimbabwe is a mere manipulation of liberal imperialism, as they argue, theirs becomes a manipulation of populist anti-imperialism for imperialist ends.

The absence of class analysis is a serious handicap. Nowhere do we find a systematic inquiry into the class dynamics of neocolonialism in Zimbabwe, save for the ritual charge of ‘corruption’ against the black bourgeoisie (but not the white). Instead, we are presented with a simplistic contest between ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘human rights’. Nor is the ‘opposition’ questioned in terms of its social basis, its reactionary ideology and strategy, its  direct financial relations with imperialist forces, and its own corruption. The authors tell us that ‘the regime [meaning ZANU-PF] has been able to represent the fundamental human and civic rights questions placed on the Zimbabwean political agenda since the 1990s as marginal, élite-focused issues,driven by western interests, and having little relation to urgent problems of economic redistribution’.30 But they do not tell us why the government is wrong in its assessment of the opposition.

The authors also tell us that the South-African leadership is constrained by the popular appeal of President Mugabe, but they do not inquire into the sources of this appeal. Could it be the bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy in South Africa? Could it be the absence of land reform? Could it be the perseverance of extreme class and race divisions? Our authors do not wish to get to the heart of the matter. We are also told that the ‘quiet  diplomacy’ of the ANC is simply acting out the sub-imperialist role of South Africa – that is, doing the bidding of the US government; they state that ‘when push came to shove, neither Bush nor Powell were actually prepared to go beyond the limits preferred by Pretoria’.31 The fuel and electricity subsidies extended by South Africa to Zimbabwe and its defence of the latter in international fora now appear as a mere imperialist ploy. In the same way that they do not identify the contradictions of neocolonialism, they also do not see the contradictions of sub-imperialism.

But most of all, they maintain a deafening silence on the strategy and impact of sanctions – sanctions that go far beyond the ‘preferred limits by Pretoria’. Any analysis of the Zimbabwe question, and especially one that claims to deal with its international dimension, could not fail to provide an analysis of sanctions. They are, after all, the concrete policy of ‘liberal imperialism’, and the central strategy of the domestic ‘opposition’. Their mention of sanctions is brief and concerns only the ‘targeted’ sanctions against government officials and the suspension of Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth.

A closer look would reveal a much more robust sanctions policy, one which is both formal and informal. Any sanctions policy requires a normative framework for its implementation. Since the 1990s, the framework has been that of ‘good governance’ – the ‘liberal imperialism’ to which our authors refer – which comprises of both economic and political criteria of proper international behaviour and which constitute the basis of lending by the  IFIs (the IMF and the World Bank) to indebted peripheral states. The majority of peripheral states, outside ‘emerging markets’, have depended almost exclusively on the IFIs for credit, given that they have been shut out of private capital markets ever since the onset of the debt crisis of the early 1980s. What is more, private capital today tends to follow the credit ratings of the IFIs and a handful of credit-rating agencies for their own lending decisions, such that the global management of good governance becomes highly centralised. And, given that the IFIs are dominated by the imperialist states, they are subject to their geopolitical interests, while simultaneously the same states employ the IFIs as a ‘multilateral’ cover for their aggression against indebted peripheral states; that is, imperialist states need not necessarily impose ‘formal’  sanctions of their own against transgressors.

But even beyond the IFIs, imperialist states, together with their corporate media allies, can punish a target state informally by increasing the level of economic and political ‘risk’ associated with it; this is done by propagating a discourse of ‘roguery’, whereby capital responds spontaneously by fleeing.

In this context, good governance has come to include not only economic conditionalities but also the political conditionalities of multi-party elections, respect for the rule of law, and respect for human rights. In theory, these conditionalities apply to all transgressors; in practice, they are selectively demanded of certain states whose ‘roguery’ threatens world order, and suspended for others that demonstrate commitment either to macroeconomic reforms or to the geo-strategic plans of the transatlantic alliance.

In the case of Zimbabwe, as long as the state (under ZANU-PF) was implementing IFI-led macroeconomic reforms in the early 1990s, there was no need to sanction its repression against social forces. It was only  after 1997 that relations with the IFIs and the West soured, resulting from the  political economic turn-around in Zimbabwe that entailed the suspension of structural adjustment, the beginning of active state intervention in the land question,intervention in the DRC, and debt default. At that point, all the economic and political conditionalities began to be invoked, beginning with the suspension of balance of payments support by the World Bank, and followed by a broad range of formal and informal sanctions, including a sustained propaganda campaign against Zimbabwe to the point of comparing ‘Mugabe’to ‘Miloševic’.

From 1998 onwards, formal sanctions consisted of an embargo on the sale of military equipment by the UK (hitherto a key supplier), due to Zimbabwe’s entry into the DRC conflict against US-backed rebels; and, less formally, of the UK’s renunciation of its historic obligations in the funding of land reform after the international donors’ conference of the same year. Then, in 1999, relations with the IMF deteriorated, leading to the suspension of lending.32 Thereafter, the confrontation escalated rapidly, such that, in 2000,  with the onset of fast-track land reform, the door was shut by the whole of the donor community. It is estimated that overall development assistance contracted from a peak of US$562 million in 1994 to US$190 million by 2000, which was thereafter limited largely to ‘humanitarian aid’.33 These sanctions have been ‘informal’.

In addition to these, from 2002 onwards, the UK, EU, and US governments began to formally freeze the assets of state officials, impose travel  bans, and authorise funding for NGOs in opposition to the government; in the same year, the Commonwealth suspended Zimbabwe – which retaliated in late 2003 with its complete withdrawal from the organisation.34 The confrontation escalated especially with the US government, which in the initial stages had taken a back seat to the UK. In late 2001, the US Congress passed the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, which consisted of a formal injunction to US officials in the IFIs to oppose any lending and debt cancellation for Zimbabwe, and also granted the White House authority to fund ‘independent’ media organisations in the country.35 Thereafter, attempts were made to refer Zimbabwe to the UN Security Council, culminating in the labelling of Zimbabwe as an ‘outpost of tyranny’ in 2004. In the meantime,the UK government appointed High Commissioner Brian Donnelly to Zimbabwe, previously the British ambassador to Yugoslavia, most likely due to ‘the experience he gained in undermining the Yugoslav government’.36

This set of events was accompanied by several other more surreptitious acts of aggression. US travel warnings were issued against Zimbabwe, which impacted directly on the tourism industry. Food aid was blocked, while the land reform was failing to recover domestic production, and then unblocked
and used as a political and economic tool. Assistance to the country’s HIV/ AIDS programme was also blocked due to ‘technical problems’; this resumed in 2005, but remains by far the least funded national programme by the Global Fund, despite attending to the fourth highest infection rate in the
world.37 The domestic NGOs that did not conform to the ‘opposition’line saw their own aid blocked; while pro-opposition NGOs were systematically financed by the US and UK governments via such agencies as the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, the Southern African Media Development Fund, and USAID, including its Office of Transition Initiatives.38

The economic siege, political destabilisation, and propaganda war has stopped short of military aggression, and for this, the regional and Larger geopolitical context has played a role. Undoubtedly, South Africa has provided a buffer against the militarisation of sanctions, in sharp contrast to  the proxy role that it had played during apartheid and the Cold War via the policy of destabilisation. Yet, the content of its ‘quiet diplomacy’ has  vacillated, generally providing diplomatic and some material cover to Zimbabwe, but in a deeply contradictory context, characterised by South Africa’s larger  continental subimperialist policy and Zimbabwe’s confrontation with both imperialism and sub-imperialism. In 2005, South Africa went on to enlist in an IMF-led attempt to bring Zimbabwe back into international policy-based lending – as South Africa had done before for the DRC.39 We might say that South-African sub-imperialism – post-apartheid and post-Cold War – has made the transition from a policy of destabilisation to one of ‘stabilisation’. Meanwhile, the other SADC states have defended Zimbabwe at great cost to themselves; indeed, they have been subject to repeated threats of financial punishment,  especially Malawi and Mozambique, unless they condemned Zimbabwe.40 The larger geopolitical context is also important. After 9/11, the sights of the US-UK
alliance shifted decisively to Central Asia and the Middle East, culminating in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. We do not know how the sanctions might have escalated in the absence of such a geopolitical diversion.  But we do know that the effects of economic and political sanctions alone, both formal and informal, have been grave.

It is estimated that the economy has shrunk by over thirty per cent since 2000, with drastic contractions in all sectors of the economy, while press reports routinely remind us that ‘Zimbabwe is the fastest shrinking economy in the world’. Inflation now runs above 4,000 per cent; foreign exchange is scarce; fuel queues are endless; and speculation and profiteering are endemic. It is, of course, true that the land reform has disrupted – as any land reform would – the existing production and distribution systems in agriculture, as well as the wider economic and financial linkages in the economy. This is especially true of the tobacco industry, which was previously concentrated in large-scale farming and was the principal source of foreign exchange.  But it is also true that other commodities grown by smallholders, especially maize and cotton, were not affected directly by the land reform. These were hard hit by prolonged draught and poor rainfall distribution (2001–5), the worst in the post-independence period.41 They have also been hard hit by the economic siege. It is very likely that, in less hostile circumstances, recovery would have made reasonable progress, and this despite the drought (which a decade earlier had been dealt with effectively), despite the lack of initial infrastructural support, and despite corrupt practices by elements within the ruling party.

Indeed, because of the land reform, the potential for agricultural growth in resettlement areas is now far greater, given that the new farmers (small and middle capitalists) find themselves in more favourable agro-ecological conditions, and also may crop more extensively on land which previously had been greatly underutilised (as much as forty per cent of the white large-scale sector). However, the economic siege has gravely undermined the procurement of inputs (seeds, fertiliser, tillage) and, no less importantly, has had  deleterious effects on the national health system and, consequently, the HIV/AIDS pandemic – a crucial factor in smallholder productivity.42 This economic siege has been accompanied by ‘humanitarian aid’. Th at is, instead of providing financial and technical aid, donors have opted for ‘food aid’, which  accounts for eighty per cent of total aid, and which further undermines local food production and recovery; the same donors have explicitly opposed any aid to resettlement areas.43

Imperialist sanctions and silences are accompanied by other ‘explanations’ of economic decline.44 The land reform has pride of place in these explanations. We are routinely told that the land reform ‘disrupted’ an erstwhile  ‘productive’ agricultural sector; that the new black farmers are incapable of farming productively; or that they are not compelled to do so, because they received the land at zero cost; or that property rights are insecure and cannot mobilise financial resources. To these are added the macroeconomic ‘mismanagement’ of the government, which continues to reject neoliberal orthodoxy, as well as its ‘incompetence’ and ‘corruption’.

A proper explanation of economic decline must be capable of combining the external contradictions of Zimbabwe – the international context of sanctions – with its internal contradictions, the two being dialectically related. It would thus become clear that the land reform in Zimbabwe has taken place
against an array of hostile forces whose objective has been either to  co-opt and streamline its transformative potential, or to reverse the land reform  altogether and subvert radical nationalism itself. Th at our internationalist  critics remain silent on the issue of sanctions is not merely a failure of analysis but a case of political bankruptcy.

Neocolonialism

The political crisis that culminated in radical land reform in Zimbabwe has brought about a new round of inquiry regarding the nature of state-society relations. There are several critics of left nationalism that have  focused their analyses on this issue. However, as we will see, they have operated
without a coherent theory of the state and civil society. The result is that the  neocolonial situation is obscured, and the national and agrarian questions are  replaced by a formalistic defence of civil society and procedural democracy. Historical-materialist analyses of the state and civil society in Africa  went into long decline with the onset of structural adjustment. During this time, liberal theories led the way, in support of ‘getting the prices rights’, while a new breed of Weberian approaches trailed closely behind. In the 1990s, these streams of theorising converged towards the new objective of ‘getting the politics right’. It is clear that these approaches have weighed heavily on debates in Zimbabwe, infiltrating and emptying out historical-materialist approaches, to the ultimate effect of converging programmatically on the issue of ‘régime change’.

Historical-materialist exceptions

For our purposes, it is important to preface our discussion with two  exceptions that punctuated the decline of state theory on the continent: that of Ibbo Mandaza on the neocolonial state in Zimbabwe, and that of Mahmood Mamdani on the ‘bifurcated’ state in Africa. It is worth taking a closer  look. Mandaza drew on a longer, indigenous debate on neocolonialism in Africa,whose most eloquent exponents have been Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral.45 Neocolonialism commonly refers to the type of state and society that  succeeded formal colonialism and that has been characterised, in the first  instance, by the transfer of the state apparatus to an indigenous conservative petty  bourgeoisie, and, thereafter, by the dual process of indigenous capitalist class formation and compradorisation. Mandaza argued that, despite a decade of armed struggle in colonial Zimbabwe, a negotiated settlement had bequeathed precisely a neocolonial state, but one which was ‘non-conventional’ insofar as formal political power had not been ceded to an African petty bourgeoisie alone but jointly to a ‘constitutionally safeguarded’ white settler-bourgeoisie.46

This produced a special sub-type of neocolonial politics. The ‘post-white settler colonial state’ was characterised, first, by the persisting obstruction of an African ‘national’ bourgeoisie by the settler presence, which in turn offered prospects of advancement only to a section of the petty bourgeoisie; and second, by the petty bourgeoisie’s own use of the settler presence as an excuse for developmental delays and as a means of extracting concessions for itself, while in the long run nurturing a class alliance with it, against peasants and workers. In this process of embourgeoisement of the liberation movement lay also the roots of state repression against the disenfranchised.  Alongside these observations, Mandaza made the case for the centrality of African nationalism, but also its contradictions: ‘African nationalism is the indispensable force in the movement of national liberation’, he argued; ‘and yet is the basis for neocolonialism by which the masses were betrayed’.47 Mandaza thus captured the contingency of neocolonialism, its fate being subject to the power  struggle between the masses and imperialism over the political orientation of the petty bourgeoisie. Mandaza concluded that the neocolonial state was also a‘schizophrenic state’, one that pursued developmental objectives in response to popular aspirations, at the same time as it employed the state  apparatus in the suppression of popular demands; the ideology of this schizophrenia was none other than a populist myth of national homogeneity, which the  leadership defended fiercely.

The importance of Mandaza’s interpretation, apart from its intrinsic contribution, is that it continued to link the national question – including its authoritarian manifestations – to the neocolonial situation, at a time when state theory was deep in structural adjustment. Yet, the weak point of Mandaza’s thesis was his élitist treatment of social contradictions. By focusing solely on the petty bourgeoisie occupying the state apparatus and its relations with white capital, Mandaza confined himself to a view of the national question ‘from above’, making references to ‘the masses’ casually, and shedding  no light on the politics of peasant-workers and the strategies of the state to control them.

A decade later, Mamdani engaged more directly with the strategies of control by deploying the concept of ‘civil society’, which by then had gained wide currency.48 In his landmark book, Citizen and Subject, Mamdani proposed that the institutional ‘bifurcation’ of African states between ‘tribal’ and ‘civil’ domains had constituted a ‘mode of rule’ peculiar to Africa. If in other parts of the world peasants had historically been tied by obligations to feudal overlords, or bonded as slaves to landlords, in late-colonial Africa peasants came to be subjected to a ‘decentralised despotism’ of chiefs and customary law with authority over peasant land and labour; civil law, by contrast, was reserved for urbanites (colons and later Africans). This system of ‘indirect rule’ on the part of colonial administrations evolved in various ways after decolonisation, but its essence of control over peasants by central government via local government, and especially by control over peasant land, has  remained.

The political implication of Mamdani’s thesis is that the expansion of the civil law to local government – in replacement of chiefs, customary law or other postcolonial mutations of indirect rule – would have gone a long way to strengthen internal resistance to external forces, especially the imposition of structural adjustment.

The theory of the ‘bifurcated’ state has raised an important issue peculiar to Africa. However, we wish to diverge on three points. First, it is our  view that late-colonial and neocolonial rule in Africa has been more ‘direct’than Mamdani has posited. As we have argued elsewhere,49 the labour question(the organisation of the production process) and the blunt coercion  associated with it, especially against ‘uncivil’ (non-conformist) working-class organisations, has been underestimated in the equation. Second, the specificity of settlercapitalism has not been fully reflected in the theory of bifurcation. On the one hand, the historic concentration of capital in the hands of a white minority and the resulting class-race dynamics captured by Mandaza above, are not easily grasped by the theory. On the other hand, Southern-African forms of ‘direct’ landlordism in the countryside, deriving from the same particularities above, have also been left out.

Third, Mamdani seems to gravitate to a formal concept of civil society when he suggests that indirect rule is separable from (i.e. not intrinsic to) the neocolonial situation, such that it can be overcome by enlightened bourgeois policy – while all else would remain equal in terms of the fundamental(capitallabour) and principal (centre-periphery) contradictions. Our premise is that civil society is the basic mode of rule of capitalist society, across centre and periphery. Thus, it is civil society that defines the various cultural-institutional exclusions, on behalf of capital, deploying coercion against them,backed by the state, and devising means to control them. The fact that in Africa the uncivil domain continues in large part to be institutionalised on the basis of ‘tribe’ is a particularly severe application of the logic of civil society itself. It is part and parcel of the neocolonial situation, and this cannot be undone by reforms led by the capitalist class. This is a point on which we elaborate below.