I recently travelled in Europe and unlike SA where there is the amplified silence of no discussion on the crisis, the European press and media is full of the crisis, but when walking the streets of their city centres, you experience the highest stage of capitalist consumption. No signs of unemployment and poverty, no signs of the crisis. Yet we know it is there and not just amongst the immigrants, legal and illegal that live there, and not just among the differently coloured.
 

The paradox is in SA, the most unequal country in the world and the most industrialised and richest economy in Africa, (and of what I say for SA is many times worse for other parts of Africa) we experience the crisis of everyday life. The struggle to survive with 40% unemployment, 50% of the population living below the poverty line, the crisis of 25% of your population living with HIV/AIDS. For the vast majority, I mean 70 – 80% of the population they have been living a social crisis for the last 16 years and of course, longer under apartheid.
 

So what crisis are we talking about?
 

For many in Africa when you talk of crisis they can imagine that you refer to the crisis of underdevelopment, poverty, HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, healthcare, education, water, food etc.
 

So we could be discussing

Over the last quarter of a century, the African crisis of the late 1970s has been transformed into what has aptly been called the ‘African Tragedy’.

Taken together we have to acknowledge that the African tragedy, a crisis of multiple dimensions is not new and has been acute long before the current global crisis. While many people refer to the multi-dimensional global crisis as a crisis of civilisation, it is clear that the crisis of western civilisation is killing what remains of African civilisation just like it did in an earlier era with the civilisations of the INCAS and Aztecs.

 

Now it is hardly possible to make a presentation on the impact of the global or financial crisis in Africa, that is anything more than schematic and general. Africa is a huge and diverse continent with very different histories. Africa was colonized not by just Spain or Portugal but, the Dutch, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Portugal. By the time the scramble for Africa was over some 10,000 polities were amalgamated into 40 European colonies and protectorates as land and peoples became little more than pieces on a chessboard. Allow me to quote from Britain’s Prime Minister Lord Salisbury at the time of the scramble of Africa, “We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were.”
 

Following independence and including island states Africa consists now of 54 sovereign states, of which 33 are classified Least Developed Countries.
 

North Africa is more integrated into Europe with strong linkages to the Middle East through its large Arab population. The five regions of Africa, namely North, South, East, West and Central Africa have different histories of colonialism and the struggle for independence, different languages, religions etc.
 

There are important regional formations such as the Southern Africa Development Community, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), East African Community, etc. that have distinct relations with their former colonial powers and somewhat differently integrated into the global economy. This has a bearing on their capacity to develop economic relations between these sub-regions and ensure greater inter-regional trade within Africa
 

Even though 33 of the 50 classified Least Developing Countries – LDcs are in Africa they are not homogenous, even in their economies. Some are landlocked, others have some level of manufacturing industries and others have very small populations. All of these have a major bearing on their economic prospects and of course how the global economic crisis has impacted on them.
 

Then there are more industrialized economies such as SA, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria which have features of middle income countries – especially in the case of SA. South Africa accounts for 44 percent of the total GDP of all sub-Saharan Africa, and 52 percent of its industrial output. In fact, SA, mostly to do with the evolution of the mining industry has the 12^th biggest financial market in the world.
 

Nevertheless there are some important common features that we shall focus on when we talk of Africa and the crisis:
 

John Saul and Colin Leys sum up an extremely critical feature of the greater Africa when they point out:
 

If we define sub-Saharan Africa as excluding not only north Africa but also bracket off, for the moment, the continent's southern cone, dominated by South Africa, the key fact about the rest—the greater part of the continent—is thrown sharply into relief: after 80 years of colonial rule and almost five decades of independence, in most of it there is some capital but not a lot of capitalism. Africa south of the Sahara exists in a capitalist world, which marks and constrains the lives of its inhabitants at every turn, but is not of it. Whereas Naomi Klein speaks of disaster capitalism to characterize current capitalist dynamics Africa’s experience with capitalism can be best described as an ever intensifying plunder capitalism.

 

 

What I present is quite schematic and general much more research required to provide fuller understanding.
 

Current social and economic crisis in Africa is an outcome of the way Africa was integrated into the global economy as a result of colonialism but intensified through structural adjustment transmitted through the debt crisis. This crisis has been further exacerbated through trade liberalisation via World Trade Organisation and regional trade agreements, especially now the proposed European Partnership Agreements.
 

Growth in Africa’s economic activities during 2002 – 2006 brought about through the rise in commodity prices spurred on by particularly the Chinese’s economy’s hunger for raw materials.
 

This was the situation in which the global crisis came to have an impact in Africa, i.e. not through financial system and through the exposure to toxic assets. Africa had very minimum exposure, only SA, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria.
 

Africa, because of its open economy and extreme weak institutions is very vulnerable to external shocks like the global crisis and has little capacity to offset it. Does not have the resources to implement “counter cyclical measures” aimed to stimulate demand and internal production. For example, the rate of investment in Sub- Saharan Africa is expected to decline by 12%.
 

Global crisis was transmitted through:

But not food to same extent. Although food prices did come down from the speculative hights of 2007/8 it never declined at the same rate as minerals and other primary commodities produced in Africa

Social impact
 

Social Impact
 

For example SA lost 1 mn. jobs. in 2009 and a further 235,000 jobs in first 6 month of 2010. Growth in women and youth unemployment.
 

The AU’s current figures indicate that the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, using the new 1.25 dollars per day poverty line, is 51 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and three percent in North Africa.

 

Increased hunger and malnutrition both because of increased input costs for subsistence farmers and higher food prices because of devaluation.
 

Even further cuts in social services like health, education and increased pressure for privatisation because of budget cuts.
 

Increased burden of women to provide basic care services. Young girls are the first to be withdrawn from schooling to deal with increased burden.
 

Africa will not achieve MDGs
 

Politically
 

Authoritarianism by the state: rise in homophobia Uganda, Malawi, Zimbabwe, xenophobia, Rwanda elections.
 

Warlordism and the collapse of the state.
 

When warlordism is not the path chosen by Africa’s elites and their governments then in desperation to earn foreign currency they sell the country – and not necessary to the highest bidder. This by signing on to disastrous trade agreements such as the EPAs
 

Or through facilitating a new wave of land occupation through selling vast tracks of land mostly for agrofuels and agricultural production. Not just Europe and the USA but as well as other China, Brazil, Russia and of course SA.
 

Ethiopia is one of the main targets in the current global farmland grab. The government has stated publicly that it wants to sell off three million hectares of farmland in the country to foreign investors, and around one million hectares have already been signed away.
 

The people of Madagascar were shocked to learn, via the international media, that their government had allocated a 1.3 million hectare land concession to the Korean company Daewoo Logistic
 

The programme in Mali offers a more clear-cut example of Millennium Challenge Corporaton (MCC’s) land activities and what it seeks to accomplish. Millennium Challenge Account–Mali (MCA–Mali) has taken over its own area of land in Mali’s Office du Niger – the most important irrigated land scheme in the country, and perhaps in the whole of West Africa. On the 20,000 or so hectares that it has secured, MCA–Mali has set up what is essentially an extraterritorial zone, where it is putting in place its own system of land management.
 

Indeed, the Office du Niger is already being heavily targeted by foreign investors: Libya has taken over 100,000 ha; Chinese investors 6,000 ha; Saudi investors are considering 50,000– 100,000 ha; there is an initiative by the regional body the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) following a similar approach to the MCA project on 11,000 ha; another regional formation, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), is talking about a public–private-sector project that would cover another 100,000 ha. Meanwhile local farmers are struggling to access more than 1 ha per family, and competition for access to water is intensifying, since all irrigation in the Office du Niger is dependent on the same source of water. 13

The results presented here indicate that the amount of land concerned could be as large as 51 to 63 mn ha – an area equivalent to France.
 

Few people in Benin know that Stewart International, the company guiding the reworking of Benin’s land policy for MCA–Benin, is a major multinational corporation with a direct interest in commodifying African lands. It is one of the largest title insurance and mortgage service companies in the US and in recent years it has been aggressively expanding globally. Advising governments such as Benin’s on land and real estate polices is a side business for the company’s international division, albeit a growing one. 2 It also sells the technology for cadastral systems and land record systems, and the core of its business is selling title insurance.
 

The question we must end this presentation with is can we expect a new wave of resistance, similar in scale to that the confronted the asymmetrical might of the colonisers at the time of occupation and during the struggle for independence. It would seem that these traditions of struggle and resistance will be important foundations on which a new anti-colonial anti-capitalist struggle can take form.

 

Crucial to this is the WSF process. Social forums have taken root in Africa, even if weak and fragile. Dakar is an important milestone and what we do in the next period leading to Dakar and beyond as we outline strategies to develop alternative to crisis of civilization will be critical for Africa’s development. We urgently need to involve more African in this dialogue and in this initiative.