When Chinweizu Ibekwe, Nigeria’s pre-eminent poet and philosopher, wrote his searing assessment of the global power structure The West and the Rest of Us nearly 50 years ago, the demarcation lines were fraying as governance of the planet and its resources seemed set for seismic change.
As Chinweizu handed in his manuscript, the United States had just lost the war in Vietnam against a guerrilla movement backed by Russia and China, leftist officers in solidarity with liberation forces in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique had overthrown Portugal’s military dictatorship, and opposition to apartheid rule in South Africa was gaining global traction.
As African activists and states steer their way through today’s fragmented politics and economies, much of Chinweizu’s analysis of the structure of global power stands. Armed camps in Washington and Beijing-Moscow are glowering at each other and fighting proxy wars, although China’s economic weight has changed the pecking order.
Turbo-charged by the pandemic and the subsequent capital drought and debt squeeze, the crassest global inequality has accelerated after positive shifts in the 1990s and 2000s. More than half the world’s eight billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, says a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. It rises to 78% in Africa, mocking the UN’s target of “a world without hunger/malnutrition by 2030”.
Fluid associations and alliances
If the outlines of great-power competition appear constant – despite undulations – over the past 50 years, the landscapes of inter-state relations, technological innovation, climatic disruption and demographic shifts signal much greater upheavals ahead.
This will confront Western states and populations with clear choices about how much longer they want to jealously guard their power and privileges, and to what extent they can change the terms of their relations with “the rest of us”.
The prognosis, judging from the outcomes of US President Joe Biden’s Africa Summit or the European Union (EU)’s serial recycling of its Africa policy, is not good.
For African states, this situation offers more fluid associations and alliances as they try to redouble their focus on mobilising capital and technology to strengthen their economies. This will be a matter of political survival for national elites, given that the continent is due to have the world’s biggest population of working age by 2050.
Diplomatic acknowledgement of Africa’s growing demographic weight has triggered a flurry of invitations to global clubs. Every world leader backs a seat for Africa on the UN Security Council. The G20 has given the African Union a seat on its board – apparently with the same rights as the EU. More sluggishly, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have given Africa another seat on their executive board. But the voting power of the US and Europe still dominates those institutions and the global financial system.
On the other side of the ledger, an alternative international order is being built on the foundation of China’s headlong economic and military expansion. The BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has opened its doors to more African states – Egypt and Ethiopia – as well as to Argentina, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The total gross domestic product of the expanded BRICS trails that of the US-led G7 economies, but it surpasses them in terms of population and oil production, holding the key members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). China’s President Xi Jinping, in South Africa for the BRICS summit in August, sealed his endorsement of the expanded grouping. Two months later, Beijing was hosting a 10-year birthday party for the trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, which has spawned several hefty infrastructure projects in East and Southern Africa.
“When you give roses to others, the fragrance lingers on your hand,” Xi told guests, summing up the trade-offs. Rather more implausibly, he said: “Ideological confrontation, geopolitical rivalry and bloc politics are not a choice for us.” Only the awkward realities of China’s slowing economy, the ballooning debts of its parallel banking sector and its tightening of financial purse strings for overseas borrowers dampened proceedings.
Developing-country debt
Chinese finance to Africa has fallen in volume and changed in structure. Company-to-company deals have replaced the swathe of state-subsidised power stations, railways and ports. Chinese contractors compete on price and geopolitical side-deals with Brazil, India, Turkey and the UAE. European and US contractors are hardly in the game in Africa. A great compliment to Beijing’s Belt and Road programme is attempts by Europe and the US to imitate it. But the scale is in tens rather than hundreds of billions.
“We face neither east nor west. We face forward.”
This year, the overarching failure of both the G7 and Beijing is their inability to agree on a mechanism to more speedily restructure developing-country debt. Blame falls almost equally on both camps. That countries such as Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana and Zambia are trapped in tortuous negotiations tells its own story about the accounting priorities of the big powers. Middle powers such as the Gulf monarchies, which were meant to mediate debt negotiations, have lacked imagination and enthusiasm. Yet both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have joined in the wooing of Africa.
Saudi Arabia hosted a summit with largely unfulfilled promises of cheap money and abundant investments. The UAE has been buying up ports along Africa’s eastern seaboard and laundering Africa’s informally mined gold, much to the delight of kleptocrats in DRC, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
Where the UAE may overstep the mark is in its sponsorship of General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (‘Hemeti’) and the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan’s devastating civil war. With Hemeti and commanders in the frame for war crimes and genocide in Darfur, questions are aimed at the complicity of top officials in Abu Dhabi.
Among these shifting constellations of states, African governments have their feet in multiple camps. An adage from Ghana’s founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, argues for a more strategic approach: “We face neither east nor west. We face forward.”
Some signs of that are emerging. A good example is Nigeria’s leadership of 125 countries, mainly from the Global South, at the UN General Assembly to establish a UN tax authority, fending off efforts by Britain and the EU to kick the plan into the long grass.
This sets the case for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to cede control over tax setting. Beyond the bureaucratic battle is the prospect that Africa can start to rein in over $100bn that it loses yearly in illicit financial flows. That, and the deterrent effect on those whose business model will be threatened by transparency, is cheered by activists who have been pushing for these changes for decades.
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