Obituaries of the late Pan-Africanist Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem continue to arrive at Pambazuka, such was the stature of the man and the esteem with which he was held. In this article Okello Oculi discusses Nigeria's broader historical background in the immediate post-independence period and Tajudeen's many experiences of tumultuous times across different political settings.

I must express deep appreciation to Jeremy Cronin for his piece on the Zimbabwe election struggle (Why South Africa will never be like Zimbabwe: ). His use of the rural site of struggles (for Zanu PF) in contrast to the urban-township sites (for ANC combatants), to struggle from, is most helpful in understanding the possible power of the mass-base to monitor and discipline their post-freedom leaders.

That analysis does, however, have problems when compared with the experience of TANU/Chama Cha Mapinduzi in Tanzania (with its predominantly rural base); as compared to Kenya, where KANU under Kenyatta's determination to create a "Kenya aristocracy" (according to an interview he gave to Sunday Times Magazine in London 1967), met a different fate. In the former, Nyerere used various devices, including his stepping down from Prime Ministership for one year to tour among the rural majority so as to devise strategies for holding elected politicians accountable and committed to the implementation of "one-party democratic elections" as well as to "Ujamaa". In Kenya, Kenyatta ruthlessly demobilized the party and its branches; and eliminated all effective challengers among the political class, including Tom Mboya. Pio Gama Pinto and J.M. Kariuki.

In this regard, Cronin's quip about Fidel Castro not blaming the failure of Americans to subsidize Cuba's tobacco or sugar-based economy, is most apt in highlighting the role of bold and ideologically focused leadership. He, however, fails to bring in that invisible but creatively lethal force called the rump of the White Settler political class that had known power and political management, including electoral competition ( albeit within a limited racial electorate), since the 1920s. Their combination of control of economic power, deep political experience and bitter but resurgent ambition for power, must not be left out of the picture.

Mugabe had made the mistake of failing to constantly call attention to this critical mass of race-located economic and political energy whose critical location made them a vital entry-point for any external British, American and European Union "sabotage" initiatives against Mugabe. As an example, the political skills of this class was demonstrated during the summit of Commonwealth leaders when they met in Abuja, Nigeria's capital. The efforts of their agents to capture the debate on Zimbabwe at sessions held by civil society groups, was formidable; if crude in parts when white individuals found it hard hiding their commandist relationship with the black activists in their team.

A critical focus on this group, and its much larger and more complex sector in South Africa, must not be hidden by a form of analysis that appears like a form of 'tribalism by silence' by analysts who share or do not share their aspirations for a return to the front row in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe and post-Mbeki South Africa. Such silence inhibits a creative and continuous engagement of this group for the challenge to undertake internal regeneration towards contributing to building de-racialized political and economic cultures in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Seen in this light, their possible success in exploiting Mugabe's disadvanatges since 1980, should not be glorified without drawing attention to poisonous racism that drives it; and their failure to join hands in creating rehumanized freedom and equality-rooted new societies.

President Obasanjo went on television in Nigeria to take some of the blame for Mugabe's difficulties. He told Nigerians that in 1980 and 1990 African leaders pressurized Mugabe and Zanu PF to stay their hands off land-reform. In 1990, African leaders begged Mugabe to make it easy for the conservative white settlers in South Africa to go along with getting Nelson Mandela out of prison; and for the elections, that gave power to the ANC, to be held. This information should be put on the table as we judge Mugabe. That, as Cronin rightly insists, must not exonorate the policy failures and crimes against the people of Zimbabwe by Mugabe and the Zanu PF's class of 'primitive accumulationists'. But my stomach did get some bitter knots when I watched Jacob Zuma on a BBC interview dismissing the political delays of the election agency in Zimbabwe while failing to acknowledge shackles that Mugabe was pressured to wear by other African leaders in the interest of ANC.

I deeply appreciate Cronin's drawing attendion to the gap in the political education that the ANC went through in comparison to the highly compressed military-combat dominated schooling of Zanu-PF. A deeper exploration of such factors would give value to his analysis; and be a useful guide for comparative studies of experiences with succession traumas in other African countries.

Finally, it is not honourable to treat Mugabe as if he had tripple machine-gunned MDC challenegers. He is also decades away from Idi Amin's treatment of Asians in Uganda and Amin's use of massacres of opponents as a form of remuneration for his killer squads: from the first night of his grabbing power in 1971 to his last moments of panic and flight in 1979. Put the credit on the Catholic priests who gave Mugabe education, or Ian Smith's barbaric refusal to let Mugabe see his sick child when he was in detention; but do give Mugabe credit where he deserves it. That will help us build a healthy tradition of critical review of leadership and governance in Africa while plucking off warts from out plumes.

Triumphant Bolivian president elect Don Evo Morales touched down in Africa last week as part of a whirlwind global tour ahead of his official inauguration on January 22. Morales, who visited South Africa where he met with politicians and civil society leaders, has pledged to adopt socialist policies and resist US influence on the domestic policies of his country. Okello Oculi tells us who Morales is, what pressures he is likely to face and what his election means for Africa.

Bolivia is a country two-thirds of whose population are indigenous "Indians". The Asian connection in their Euro-centric ethnic label is a gross historical error by European travelers who after 1492 assumed that any landmass west of the Atlantic Ocean's European coast must be the fabled India. On December 18, 2005, its voters made history by electing "the first wholly indigenous president in Latin America in modern times". His name is Don Evo Morales, a bold campaigner against American opposition to growing cocoa plants for the economic benefit of his native peoples.

Morales, an Aymara Indian, won 51.1 per cent of the vote, making it the first time that a Bolivian president is not elected by the country's parliament (or Congress), and thereby denying the big white European land owners in the eastern provinces the decisive voice in an election. Morales has openly declared himself as a "brother" to leftist presidents Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Bolivia has a unique geopolitical status, sharing borders with Brazil to the north and east, Peru in the northwest, Chile in the southwest, and Argentina and Paraguay in the south. In the mid-1960s, after being disillusioned with the revolutionary potential of Laurent Kabila and his colleagues in today's Democratic Republic of Congo, Che Guevara (the famous Cuban-Argentinean medical doctor turned revolutionary armed fighter), went and started a guerrilla war in Bolivia under the theory of establishing a "focal point" for exporting liberation to the whole of South America. In 1968 the American government's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) triumphantly flashed around the world pictures of a dead Che Guevara. He had been murdered by a military unit funded by the agency.

Morales came to power leading a coalition of "trade unions and social movements" led by his own union which has pledged to legalise the growing of cocoa out of whose leaf cocaine is extracted. At his election victory rally he declared: "Long live cocoa, no to the Yankees". He pledged to re-negotiate contracts which, under the privatization programme of the previous government, gave ownership of oil and gas reserves to foreign multinational companies. Che Guevara must have smiled in his grave in Cuba, his adopted country.

Morales, like Fidel Castro, Salvadore Allende in Chile, and Hugo Chavez before him, will face stiff opposition from the United States. His pledge to "change the history of Bolivia with peace and social justice" must taste like salted human excrement to President Bush and his born-again Christian crusaders for a post-Cold War American domination code-named "pro-democracy".

The rich white minority who voted for his opponent, Jorge Quirago, will oppose his grabbing land from them for redistribution to the dispossessed "Indians"; as well as the central government's control of royalties for gas and oil. For him to succeed he must deepen the combative skills and steadfastness of his followers.

He must also implement creative policies for taking economic growth to the poor through loans to cooperative groups and small firms; supporting local mass-based technological inventiveness, while supporting patriotic big businesses and vigorously undertaking land redistribution. Such concrete economic empowerment initiatives will be the much needed anchor for sustaining the popular mandate of the election victory.

Yet Morales must not underestimate the blood-soaked record of American foreign policy in the region. The naked brutality with which the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile was crushed in 1972 and the subsequent reign of terror which President Eduardo Pinochet unleashed on his supporters, as well as the massacre of thousands of "communists" in Brazil and Argentina in the mid-1960s, must always be kept in view by Morales. Only by such vigilance will the "Movement for Socialism", which he leads, ensure the practical realisation of his assertion that "the people have defeated the neoliberals".

Morales' anti-privatization election victory is coming at a time when African leaders have been selling away national economic institutions to foreign multinationals; and doing so behind the backs of their pauperized peoples. Moreover, those leaders who took loans without putting them to development of their nation's economies are now being hunted down like thieves by Euro-American debt collectors. Morales's boldness, rooted in the mobilization of his country's trade unions and other mass associations, is therefore a vital lesson to Africa.

* Okello Oculi, Ph.D, is Executive Director of Africa Vision

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Okello Oculi looks back at a Council for Development and Social Research in Africa (Codesria) meeting that took place in Maputo early in December under the title "Rethinking African Development: Beyond Impasse, Towards Alternatives". While the decimation of African economies through the application of so-called development policies was frequently raised during the meeting, attention also focused on the poor state of African scholarship.

The Council for Development and Social Research in Africa, CODESRIA, held its tri-ennial General Assembly in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, from 6-10 December, 2005. The theme of the event was "Rethinking African Development: Beyond Impasse, Towards Alternatives", and was attended by 400 scholars drawn from within and outside Africa. Its hosting by a Portuguese-speaking country (or rather a country where the language of government is Portuguese) was a landmark in unifying Africa's scholars across colonial language walls. The election of a female Mozambiquecan, Professor Tresa Cruz da Silva, as the new President, retained the tradition of having a woman at the top, while Professor Adebayo Olukoshi, of Nigeria, remains as Executive Secretary. Professor Zen Tedesse from Ethiopia stepped down from the presidency.

The theme of "impasse" in Africa's development clearly also applied to the dismal condition of scholarship in the continent's universities. The chairman of the "Scientific Council" of the organisation reported, for example, that out of the one thousand proposals sent by those who wished to participate in the Maputo assembly, only 155 were suitable in terms of quality of research. There was virtual poverty in philosophical issues including those in the fields of law and anthropology at a time when the continent is desperately in need of new directions and alternatives to the disaster in governance and economic decay which has marked the last three decades.

A major indicator of the impasse for Nigeria was in the low level of representation by the spread of universities which sent scholars and the ranking of those who attended. Only Ahmadu Bello University, Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo, Nsukka, and Lagos State Universities, were represented with a grand total of less than 15. Like Kenya, Nigeria's more senior academics were either out of the business of active and creative scholarship or too tied down with earning money from consultancy work, or both. At a time when both countries are gripped by intense and often murderous struggle for power and over new directions for development, it was laughable that their weight was woefully light in Maputo as CODESRIA searched "Towards Alternatives".

In his opening speech Professor Adebayo Olukoshi condemned increasing calls by leading propagandists in Europe and North America for the "recolonisation of Africa". Professor Jomo Kwame Sunderam, a Malaysian scholar (whose father attended the 1945 Pan African Congress in Manchester and later named his son after Jomo Kenyata and Kwame Nkrumah who were at that Congress), ended his address by stating that: "Our challenge is to make History African", as against calls in newspapers like The Times (of London) and the Washington Post, as well as some think-tanks in London and Washington, for bringing an end to "problems of failed states in Africa" by establishing a new American Empire over the continent. Nigeria's academics and scholars are clearly not responding to these calls by increasingly choosing to watch football matches between Arsenal and Manchester United etc etc, instead of rising to CODESRIA's war horns.

Professor Sunderam drew attention to what he called " a counter-revolution against development economics" which since the 1980s hit Africa devastatingly with "trade liberalisation", "de-agriculturalisation", and negative "terms of trade". Opening up Africa's markets to massive imports resulted in de-industrialisation through the collapse of "whatever manufacturing capacity which had developed" in the 1960s and 1970s. The loss of jobs, in South East Asia, for example, hit jobs where women had sought liberation from tyrannies of household labour. Massive imports of food or food aid, and insistence by the World Bank and the IMF that subsidies to peasant farmers be withdrawn, resulted in undermining local food prices and capacities for food production, resulting in the collapse of food securities all across Africa.

The third blow has been in the prolonged decline in prices of primary commodities. Mwalimu Nyerere had long ago complained about the higher quantities of cotton or sisal Tanzania had to export in order to purchase one imported tractor. While prices of commodities from the tropics (like cotton) have declined severely, that of temperate commodities (like wool) have been much less. Moreover, the industrialized countries are producing chemical products out of Africa's plants, herbs and condiments and claiming intellectual copyrights over them.

In Sunderam's view, "intellectual property rights have become the biggest earners of foreign exchange for the United States of America". Finally, he focused on the sad fact that most governments in Africa now have "fewer instruments to be able to stimulate economic growth". This is due mainly to takeovers of local banks. In Kenya, for example, foreign banks have returned to the colonial practice of not lending to the local private sector, preferring to get 44 per cent of their earnings from buying government bonds; as well as charging interest rates as high as 26 per cent, thereby crippling productive investment.

In any case, only 20 per cent of foreign direct investment goes into the so-called "green fields" i.e. those that create new manufacturing capacities. The myth of foreign direct investment continues to hide the fact that African countries are net exporters of capital to North America and Europe either as debt over-repayments, payments for patents, over invoiced charges by multinational corporations, or stolen funds being hidden by corrupt officials.

One deficiency in the CODESRIA general assembly meeting in Maputo was that this analysis came from a scholar from outside Africa's universities. This is due partly to African governments keeping their own scholars away from government corridors and policy arena, with files marked "Secret" being more accessible to foreign researchers with dollars to pay as tips to their vigilant keepers. In addition to this, is the severe poverty of local scholars, which leaves the best of them vulnerable to funds to be earned from the IMF/World Bank - sponsored projects whose agenda have more to do with "palliative economics" than with "development economics". The promise by the Executive Secretary of the organisation, Professor Adebayo Olukoshi, that "fighting for academic freedom" will be a priority in the next three years, should include yanking open to African researchers creaky gates to government policy vaults.

* Okello Oculi, Ph.D, is Executive Director of Africa Vision

* Please send comments to [email protected]