It is apparent, but what bothers me is the way you wrote your message in the
subject box...
Charles Travis>===== Original Message From David McKnight
<[log in to unmask]> =====
>Wasn't it great to see Bush helping the poor of Africa?
>A real Christian with a moral conscience. And yet the poor guy gets such a
bad press. The mind boggles!
>
>David
>
>www.zmag.org
>ZNet Commentary
>Bush in Africa July 11, 2003
>By Patrick Bond
>
>The petro-military-commerce safari that George Bush embarked upon this week
may well succeed in the areas that progressive critics fear most. Those
critics, ranged in protest in several African cities, are not shy about what's
wrong with Washington's agenda.
>
>First, the imperial-subimperial nexus in South Africa and Nigeria will
tighten. Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Olusegon Obasanjo are pro-western in terms
of obeying the logic of multinational corporate privilege, and sufficiently
undemocratic as to coddle dictators like Robert Mugabe. Mbeki and Obasanjo are
the key boosters of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad), that
neoliberal manifesto considered by the Bush regime as 'philosophically
spot-on', as chief Africa diplomat Walter Kansteiner told Institutional
Investor magazine last month.
>
>Second, the possibility of increased US military activity on the continent
will increase in some areas (bases in West Africa and the Horn of Africa to
guard oil fields) and lesson in others (potential peace-keeping activities).
South Africa will pick up the latter duty, even in places such as the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi, both of which have seen recent
'peace' agreements -- in reality, elite deals with no durable means of
addressing long-standing local grievances -- followed immediately by intense
fighting and bloodshed.
>
>Third, US trading corporations are increasingly profitable because of the
Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), and an even further-reaching free
trade deal with pliant Southern African leaders is also making progress. This
trend leaves less revenue for states like Namibia and Lesotho which used to
count on larger import tariff funds, and leaves all of Africa more susceptible
to Washington's arm-twisting. The Bush regime is already notorious for linkage
of its geopolitical agenda with trade preferences and debt relief. Other AGOA
conditionalities include adopting neoliberal policies, privatising state
assets, removing subsidies and price controls, and ending incentives for local
companies.
>
>Fourth, Bush needs the trip to project a more compassionate public image
(especially to African-Americans in advance of the 2004 elections). That
entails promoting the very slight rise in highly-conditional donations to
Africa, as well as the miseleadingly advertised HIV/AIDS fund. The US piece of
the AIDS fund will be run by a pharmaceutical corporate executive, and
coincides with US government advisory support that makes import or local
production of generic AIDS medicines much more difficult. That, of course, is
the point of the new spending, which in any case is likely to be half or less
than the $15 billion in coming years that Bush has bragged about.
>
>There are always a few complications, of course, and these were on display in
Pretoria, where Bush spent 18 hours after his opening gambit at Senegal's
slave-trading site on Tuesday. For example, South Africa did not join the
'coalition of the willing' against Saddam Hussein, and Nelson Mandela remains
a staunch opponent of Bush (hence no meetingŻa symbolic slapdown of the US
leader).
>
>On the other hand, Pretoria seems to have profited nicely from the
hostilities by selling arms and also hyping somewhat ludicrous security
concerns to play to the local anti-imperialist audience. Thus just before the
war broke out, at a February 19 demonstration at the US embassy in Pretoria,
African National Congress general secretary Kgalema Motlanthe pronounced,
>'Because we are endowed with several rich minerals, if we don't stop this
unilateral action against Iraq today, tomorrow they will come for us.'
Likewise, health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was reported by the
Guardian to have said, 'South Africa cannot afford drugs to fight HIV/AIDS
partly because it needs submarines to deter attacks from nations such as the
US.'
>
>The high tech weaponry Tshabala-Msimang referred to will cost South Africa $5
billion, and make it possible to engage in fighting across the subcontinent.
Meanwhile, Pretoria ignored widespread calls to withdraw permission for three
Iraq-bound warships to dock and refuel in Durban harbor, and to halt sales of
sophisticated armaments to the US/UK regimes. The state-owned arms
manufacturer Denel often stated its vision of being 'an acknowledged global
player.' In the months before the war, it contracted to deliver $29 million in
ammunition shell-casing, $169 million in artillery propellants, and 326
hand-held laser range finders to the British army. Denel also sold the US
Marines 125 laser-guidance sights.
>
>If anti-war tensions were largely a 'talk-left, act-right' dance of the sort
we are so accustomed to, another tension -- over Bush's desired
non-extradition treaty aimed at circumventing the International Criminal Court
where US citizens are wanted -- at least gave Mbeki the chance to look
principled. Losing roughly $7 million in military aid from Bush was not a
terribly high cost, and kept alive the fiction that Pretoria can stand firm
against Washington.
>
>It has often been remarked, including by Mbeki, that the most striking
component of US international economic policy is hypocrisy. Treasury
undersecretary John Taylor has explained the protection of steel and
agriculture quite casually: 'You take steps forward and move back. That's
always the case.'
>
>Another example of the Washington's imposition of unsustainable development
on Africa is the genetically-modified (GM) food controversy. The EU,
Australia, Japan, China, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia have banned GM trade and
production, so Bush is clearly desperate for new markets in Africa, as he
revealed to the US Africa Business Summit shortly before his trip: 'To help
Africa become more self sufficient in the production of food, I have proposed
the initiative to end hunger in Africa. This initiative will help African
countries to use new high yield bio tech crops and unleash the power of
markets to dramatically increase agricultural productivity.
>
>But there's a problem. There's a problem. At present, some governments are
blocking the import of crops grown with biotechnology, which discourages
African countries from producing and exporting these crops. The ban of these
countries is unfounded; it is unscientific; it is undermining the agricultural
future of Africa. And I urge them to stop this ban.'
>
>The Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference replied, 'We do not believe
that agro companies or gene technologies will help our farmers to produce the
food that is needed in the 21st century. On the contrary, we think it will
destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural
systems that our farmers have developed for millennia and that it will thus
undermine our capacity to feed ourselves.' Lori Wallach, director of Public
Citizen's Global Trade Watch, interprets: 'The Bush administration is not
straightforward. It is not poverty in Africa that is the most important issue
for the administration but business considerations on behalf of the US
technology and agricultural sector.'
>
>As InterPress Service reports, 'Zambia, citing health concerns, rejected GM
corn in both grain and milled forms. One year later, President Levy Mwanawasa
announced last week that this year Zambia will nearly double the 600,000
tonnes of grain it harvested last season, providing new fuel to the argument
that GM technology is not necessary for reducing hunger in Africa.'
>
>Again, as in the case of resistance to local AIDS drugs, Bush's underlying
concern is the penetration of capital into all areas of African life where it
can make a profit. That requires the protection of patents as fundamental
property rights, so as to protect profits in other parts of the world in
circumstances where Africans are simply too poor to buy medicines or import
non-GM food.
>
>These and many other insults to Africans have generated a healthy backlash.
South Africa was one of the key sites of protest during the war and in recent
days, notwithstanding the worsening divide between the major civil society
groups and the independent left. The latter continues to mobilise as the
Anti-War Coalition, and drew many thousands to marches in Pretoria,
Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban that called for Bush to leave Africa.
>The major trade unions, Communist Party, and ANC itself mustered numbers only
in the hundreds, and issued a confusing message calling on Bush to listen to
Mbeki, but not to cancel his visit. (Only in the Eastern Cape province has
unity between the two groups been somewhat successful.)
>
>After Bush's talk with Mbeki on Wednesday, proponents of democracy in
Zimbabwe were deeply embittered, for as opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai
put it, the South African issued a 'false and mischievous' statement that
talks had already begun with Mugabe's regime. Hastily, South African and
Zimbabwe government mediators sent a delegation to request Tsvangirai's
Movement for Democratic Change to enter discussions.
>
>In any event, Bush made clear he would take the lead from Mbeki. Once again,
it demonstrated to Zimbabwean progressives that 'none but ourselves' will
liberate the country. Whether imperial Washington or subimperial Pretoria
attempts to mediate, the result will no doubt favor the worst features of the
status quo.
>
>The same sentiment appears rife in Nigeria, where Obasanjo ran an extremely
dirty election a few weeks ago, and where trade unions had a successful
national strike against a gasoline price hike last week.
>
>But perhaps due merely to my proximity, the last word should go to the
largest collection of anti-capitalist groups in South Africa: the Social
Movements Indaba (SMI), which gathered at least 20,000 last August to protest
the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development. In their communique
from the Maputo site of the African Union's second annual conference, chaired
by Mozambican president Joachim Chissano beginning Thursday morning, the SMI
announced that it:
>
>'rejects the dominance of the United States and the other G8 countries and
calls for the shutting down of their instruments of domination, including the
World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organisation
(WTO). The SMI also opposes those leaders and governments in Africa that are
complicit in imposing this neoliberal global order...
>
>It is no small surprise that the G8 has refused to fill the begging bowl. It
chooses only to support military intervention in the continent. George Bush is
visiting Africa to secure oil resources, in other words to take what he wants
whether Nepad is there or not. The African Union (AU) has been formed on the
basis of Nepad as its fundamental policy. It thus compels us to stand up to
the AU and demand that it jettisons Nepad before we give consideration to
engaging with its structures.'
>
>Not all African social movements are as tough, but the more they see of the
Bush agenda, the greater the distance will grow between those perpetuating
international minority rule (even Mbeki has used the phrase 'global
apartheid') and its African victims. The leaders of African nations who chose
to play the comprador role for Bush this week are not unaware of the US
president's agenda, and they remain on notice that their legitimacy will also
continue to suffer.
>
>
>(Patrick Bond is a Johannesburg-based academic and activist.)
Charles B. Travis
Department of Geography
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2
Ireland
353(0)87-138-6851
353(01) 608-2357
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