Wednesday, December 22, 2010

RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why is Africa in such a mess?

Oga Ikhide,

 

There is a good reason for the time honored concept of DIVISION OF LABOR. Some people must step outside of the field of action, or in and out of it, in order to maintain a clear perspective on the shifting nature of the challenges. No one ever accused Generals of sitting in the cold comfort of their command centers analyzing a war—if they are victorious. Yet, we credit every war that’s won to the brilliance and grand strategies of the Generals. Now, I do not think we are Generals in a war, maybe the very best of us are—this was why Fanon, Rodney, Cabral were all taken out. They were indeed Generals. The persistence of the problems therefore may well be that we have not found our Archimedean moment—there are NEW INSIGHTS always to be discovered and enunciated— for this failure of re/discovery only would I hold us accountable. As you well know that moment of re/discovery may not come with a bang. So, long live the debate, long live the calculus, and even the rarefied discourse, without which our fight is doomed to become A WAR OF IGNORANT ARMIES CLASHING AT NIGHT!!! We need knowledge to be free and more knowledge to live in liberty.

Peace,

Bode

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ikhide
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2010 7:57 PM
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why is Africa in such a mess?

 

Folks,

 

When it comes to matters of Africa, I am a broken record, so I may be forgiven for being silent on this matter. Let me just say that I have been mightily entertained by the debate.  Nothing new here, been there, done that. I repeat, there is abolutely nothing new here, being there, done that. Anyone who believes that he or she has just vomited new insights on the African problem is drinking apeteshie. Anyone who believes that our misrulers are ignorant of "structures and processes" is drinking ogogoro. My people, we have mastered all these things, we have crammed the books, and we know all there is to know about why and how great societies function well. We know what is missing. Our people are full of it, that is the simple truth. Let us go buy tee shirts that say: STOP THE BULLSH*T, JUST DO THE WORK!

 

I don't understand all this turenchi, we have been given grass to cut, instead of cutting the grass, we have stolen the cutlass, sold it, sent the proceeds to Switzerland, We stand on the ruined lawn talking nonsense, citing dead white men, Foucault, Marcus, Toyota, blah, blah, blah! Liberals are falling over themselves trying to convince us that our situation is not much worse than what occurs in the West, there are poor people in America, you know, and white folks are corrupt also, you know? Cold comfort can give a man a cold. The vast majority of Nigerians are not to blame in this mess; it is the cognitive elite of intellectuals and the political elite that should be held responsible for this mess. They will not accept responsibility; they are too busy drinking dunking baguettes in French wines to give a sh*t. Those that were raised at great expense to drag Africa from the hell that a racist God put her are too busy taking care of themselves. Shame on all of us for doing this to those who paid our way through school so they would be freed from what passes for life in their Africa.

 

Take Nigeria for example. Nigeria is not America and comparisons are beyond silly, they are almost criminal. We see what DEMOCRACY has wrought in Nigeria. Along with capitalism and the new Christianity, it is the worst thing that has happened to Nigeria in a long time. It is PhDs, not idiots that are running the country, they are the ones babbling inanities from Western books while they steal us blind. Democracy works when there us an alignment between the governed and the governor. In Nigeria, the elites are TOTALLY disconnected from the rest of the people, those Fanon would call the wretched of the earth. My friends ought to be ashamed of themselves. Instead of doing the work that they lied they would do, they seek to bamboozle us with big words. They don't understand why we have no respect for them, because they do not understand the word credibility.

 

It is very simple. Let us stop the bullsh*t and simply do the work. We have all the structures and processes, but we lack men and women of character and will to do the work. Our politicians aided by their sweet mouth intellectual elite are stealing us blind and we know it. Our university lecturers screw their students literally and figuratively and get up to mouth the latest continuous improvement bullsh*t. Our university administrators  have stolen all the money that they can get away with. Why do they care? Their children and those of our asshole lecturers go to school abroad, living the children of the poor and the dispossessed at the mercy of broken down classrooms, Our universities are hovels not fit for homeless dogs in the West. When you say accept responsibility, they all line behind white liberals who start mouthing avuncular stuff about how em all these problems are not unique to Africa. Who cares? Who is talking about America?

 

You should see my village and get a sense of how evil my friends are. My father lives in a place that time and thieves have forgotten. This is a man who was once prepared to die for his country. Today, he tells me he was happier during colonialism, that Abacha was infinitely better than the bastards that now rule the country in the name of democracy. His words are a mean rebuke and he knows it. The water tap in our village last spewed water in the early sixties. Some people should be shot. And here we are not taking responsibility, spouting all sorts of silly theories that we don't need. Mimicry is our name, mimicry. We want to be like the white man. Everything he wears, we must wear, everywhere he goes, we must go. We just don't want to do the work. Because it is the white man's fault. Ha! Sometimes I just want to holler! Let the debate continue. And I don't know how to spell Foucault! To hell with the motherf*cker!

 

- Ikhide

 


From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tue, December 21, 2010 6:16:47 PM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why is Africa in such a mess?

By the way, even the Walmart example has only a limited discursive utility. We know that the political and policy tentacles of the neoliberal order are the Bretton Woods Institutions (IMF and World bank). Other instruments of neoliberal influence are multinationals (MNCs). Apart from serving to illustrate the familiar point that MNCs are vehicles for co-opting more peoples and countries into the global capitalist system, what really does the Walmart narrative do to help us understand how African and other marginal peoples fair under the current regime of capital? In America, Walmart is an indisputable villain, a despised instrument of capitalist exploitation and labor abuse. But is Walmart's reputation that clear-cut in the developing world? In non-Western spaces where Walmart operates, do their workers FEEL abused or do they feel empowered, lucky, and grateful to Walmart for saving from from a lifetime of unemployment or underemployment and for giving them economic stability? Are Indians bemoaning the outsourcing boom in their country over the fact that outsourcers may not be paying them Western salaries or giving them Western-style benefits? Are the Chinese complaining about the growing Western investments in their country that employ millions of Chinese people who would otherwise be jobless? This is yet another example of how we sometimes transfer our Euro-American middle class economic discourses to African and other non-Western settings where the realities are a lot messier and the economic priorities a lot less elitist and much more basic. Yes, Walmart may put some local businesses out of operation when it expands to new territories in Asia and Africa but isn't that more than offset by the jobs it creates, the above average (not Western standard) wages it pays, and the cheap, life-improving goods that it is able to deliver to folks?

The other day, a member of this forum forwarded a story about KFC's opening in Lagos, Nigeria. On the surface it can be read as a classic example of global capitalist expansion--another Chicken sweat shop in the Third World, the extension of the exploitative hand of global capital. But don't we have to go beyond this default mode and look at mitigating variables such as the jobs it might create, the support it might give to local chicken farmers and producers of other locally made ingredients? For the staff who would be recruited, any talk of "slave wage" and exploitative labor practice is elitist talk because the job is infinitely preferable to their previous condition and has the potential to lift them out of poverty and lay a sounder foundation for the next generation in their families. For the Nigerian consumers of KFC products, KFC represents another Middle Class indulgence and a quality family experience (never mind what it will do to their arteries).

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:24 AM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

hi pius
on point 1
victims are not all equal at all. the losses incurred by outsourcing to u.s.workers does not leave them in anything like the conditions of african farmers or fishermen whose livelihoods have been unsettled by global neoliberalism. i think the only fair way to measure the effects of a megalith like Walmart, the largest corporation in the world, the bringer of cheap goods to the american public, is not by asking simply whether walmart offers adequate salaries or benefits to its workers, but what the impact it has on the workers abroad who fabricate goods at their command. some years ago i saw a report on clothing manufacturing in bangalesh where a factory owner, perfectly happy to put in fire extinguishing systems in his factory, explained that the cost would make him uncompetitive with his competitors, and as walmart insisted on the cheapest price possible he could not comply with safety measures.
i offer this as an example of how we cannot understand the global economic system on the basis of nation states any more.
to be sure there is local production controlled by national policies, but they are increasingly superseded by larger than national forces. it is most obvious in things like car manufacturing or the film industry, and gets messier when food is involved. but everyone knows the story about rice production or chicken production globally and its impact on african food production.
i would appeal to the older members of this list to remember conditions of production and distribution when they were younger and compare them with now. it would be interesting to ask all the above questions and find answers from a period of late colonialism, early independence and neocolonialism, then the passage through the 80s till now.
have the disparities in wealthy grown or shrunk? is life harder for the average, the poor senegalese or nigerian now compared with then?

2.on race i don't quite know how to respond. i would love your thoughts on it. i feel competent to speak of how racism still marks things in the u.s., or france, but am less certain how to understand it as a factor in global terms.
except for one thing: i am convinced that the genocide in rwanda would not have happened in a white country (e.g.bosnia), and that the deaths in the drc are a matter of supreme disinterest to the west.
ken



On 12/21/10 11:12 AM, Pius Adesanmi wrote:

Ken:

I see your point and agree with you to a great extent but I still see two potential problems that you are overlooking or not addressing:

1) Your victimography (apologies for that coinage) of neoliberalism is becoming more ambitious with every post. It is covering and leveling up every part of the globe too tidily for my liking. I am beginning to see a victimography in which the Agatu farmer in Moses's neck of the woods in Benue state is being levelled up with the New York factory worker as an equal victim of neoliberalism. Is it possible for some victims to be more equal than others?

2) Is neo-liberalism blind to race? Does race have a place in the victimography of neoliberalism?

Pius




--- On Tue, 21/12/10, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:


From: kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why is Africa in such a mess?
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Tuesday, 21 December, 2010, 14:58

pius
outside of maybe north korea, what country's economy and social structure does not obey the logic introduced by neoliberal capitalism. to a lesser degree in one location, to a greater in another?
for instance, neoliberalism dictates free trade and enforces it by imf rules. so it is built around a worldwide system of financial exchanges that dictate conditions for lending and borrowing. those that provide the funding are not subject to tariff rules; that that borrow are subject to tariff rules. both operate within the same system, although the impact is felt differently. the borrowers run enormous risks, as we have seen with the rules for borrowing stifling the ability of local african farmers to compete. when malawi chose to forgo the loans in order to support their own crops, things improved.
maybe the loans worked better for ghana than for mali. again, there is room within the system, as everyone has been loudly and correctly arguing, to maneuver, so that some states do better than others. but all are maneuvering within the same systemic constraints.
consider iceland's vertiginous fall, along with ireland's, before you tell me that europe stands outside the system. all are vulnerable to its effects, but not all are positioned in the same way within the system. thus germany emerges relatively unscathed; but english university students are completely screwed.

finally, it dispirits me to see moses cite approvingly the ascension of new states like india or china within this system, as proof that it accommodates positive change. there is not a shred of concern over the vast numbers of people whose impoverished conditions are exploited by the constraints of neoliberal capitalism, as though there were no price to be paid in capitalism's workings, as though there were no labor to be exploited, as though there were no police actions in china to repress workers' rights, as though the advances for the very rich offset any abuses of the working class
how far we have come from a notion of progressive politics in africa when the idea of fighting for freedom did not mean freedom to become as rich as possible, never mind who suffers as a consequence.
moses and others are right to say we are here, we can't go back to older days with socialist ideals.  but there i a huge difference between those like david brooks whose admiration for the rich and their ways is unstinted, and those like bob herbert who aligns himself with the poor and continues to fight for their rights.
now in dakar as in new york it isn't a question of simply the rich and the poor, it is the superrich, the obscenely rich, the don't-ever-dare-to-try-to-tax-me rich, the this-country=belongs-to-me-i-own-it-and-everything-in-it, and the poor whose life is marked by struggle, unemployment, and the sight of a fortress's wall, always from the outside.
whose voice am i hearing? is it gbagbo, or limbaugh?
ken

On 12/20/10 10:42 PM, Pius Adesanmi wrote:

"i stated, as clearly as i could, that africa does not stand in a different position vis-a-vis neoliberal capitalism or globalization than any other country" - Ken


Ken, Ken, Ken:

You mean "any other continent?" If our enemies rush for your jugular because of this dangerous slip up, remember to tell them that I denied ever knowing you three times before the cock crowedError! Filename not specified..

Pius




--- On Tue, 21/12/10, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:


From: kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Why is Africa in such a mess?
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Tuesday, 21 December, 2010, 2:46

chikwendu
i have two problems with your argument
first, you, and others, have constructed a straw man, or refuse to hear or accept the argument i advanced.
i stated, as clearly as i could, that africa does not stand in a different position vis-a-vis neoliberal capitalism or globalization than any other country; that the effects of today's capitalism is to generate enormous disparities in wealth, to generate a reliance on minimal state social services in the faith that corporate development will take care of social needs, and that the increasing size of the empoverished populations, in countries i listed from every continent, follow that pattern. i also acknowledge that there are disparities in power, which contribute to the weaker or poorer states and populations suffering more. but there is no more agency as such for any state, no matter how wealthy, to escape these forces. i don't know how many examples i need to give: i offered russia at one point. how about ireland and spain, portugal, the miracle states of the eu. now the catastrophe states, with enormous problems of unemployment and poverty, debt, anger in the streets, you name it.

secondly, pace pius's picture, it isn't a question of "academic arguments," but simply intellectual arguments. how much anti-intellectualism do we have to bear in these arguments. first it is foucault, misspelled to boot, then the academy or western thinkers. it is incredible that we can't have an intelligent discussion on questions of economic growth or political structures without seeking to establish some formula for authenticity as a basis for thought.
let me see...i don't like the fact that freud came from austria, as did hitler, so the unconscious must be a nazi invention
or should we ask where newton came from before we board a plane?
is the academy in which gravity's law in taught somehow less capable of understanding the forces involved than the engineer who builds the plane or the captain who flies it??  did the engineer validate f=ma? discover f=ma?
if this path of reasoning bothers you, i suggest you ignore it since it is emerging from my computer in east lansing, no doubt a very remote location from the hard realities of life.
so my question is, what is the use of thought? where is thought's home validated?
"the academy" is, in fact, yet another straw man in this argument, deflecting us from the issues at hand which are oversimplified into notions of agency that are never really given meaningful definition.

ken

On 12/20/10 3:05 PM, Chikwendu Ukaegbu wrote:
> Academic arguments that continue to paint the African as slave to structure do a disservice to the continent because the commanding heights of the global economy will not and cannot philanthropically plant national development in African countries.

-- kenneth w. harrow
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
east lansing, mi 48824-1036
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu

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-- 
kenneth w. harrow
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
east lansing, mi 48824-1036
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu

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-- 
kenneth w. harrow
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
east lansing, mi 48824-1036
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu

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--
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.


---Mohandas Gandhi

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