BRICS and Resistance in Africa

Contention, Assimilation and Co-optation

Justin van der Merwe, Patrick Bond, Nicole Dodd, Justin van der Merwe, Patrick Bond, Nicole Dodd

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786996305
• eBook ISBN: 9781786996336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Economía del desarrollo

Though initially considered a welcome counterweight to Western interest across Africa, the BRICS are increasingly being viewed as another example of foreign interference and exploitation.

BRICS and Resistance in Africa explores the varied forms of African resistance being developed in response to the growing influence of the BRICS. Its case studies cover such instances as the opposition to China's One Belt One Road initiative in East Africa; resistance to the BRICS' oil activities in the Niger Delta; and the role of the BRICS in Zimbabwe's political transition. The contributors expose the contradictions between the group's rhetoric and its real impact, as well as the complicity of local elites in serving as proxies for the BRICS nations.

By challenging and expanding the debates surrounding BRICS involvement in Africa, this collection offers new insight into resistance to globalization in the global South.

1

African assimilation, co-optation, and resistance in the BRICS era

Justin van der Merwe, Nicole Dodd, and Patrick Bond

This volume brings together Africanists who cover the terrain of social and geopolitical resistance to oppression in Africa – resistance that is gathering renewed vigour due to the accelerated processes of accumulation by dispossession set in motion by the rise of the BRICS. Alongside the resurgence of nationalism and trade protectionism, Western and BRICS economic and political turbulence, as well as rising ecological threats, together increase the precariousness of those in the world’s periphery and semi-periphery (whether in the Northern or Southern hemispheres). The situation is exacerbated by global capital’s turn to hybridised, deregulated, and increasingly chaotic economic strategies to maximise exploitation and to deepen inequality.

This combination of factors has led to crises in African states, eliciting responses from local and regional elites as well as from ‘ordinary’ people and groups as they seek to push back or generate creative responses ‘from below’. At a micro level, these responses range from developing new ways of surviving in impoverished communities to civic mass mobilisation. At the macro level, new forms of development finance (development banks and regional initiatives) are generating an alternative means of accumulating, not through production but speculation, including on mega-infrastructure projects which may never pay off. Many of these initiatives, including the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), make ‘localised’ forms of generativity seem possible because they imply new sources of funds at a time when debt crises are returning to Africa. They also serve the more significant purpose of speaking truth to power, insofar as critiques of the Bretton Woods institutions are more loudly expressed by a Third World professional intelligentsia (as well as populist politicians like former South African president Jacob Zuma). However, despite their ostensibly revolutionary basis, one should question whether the new institutions are forms of acquiescence (co-option and accommodation), as opposed to true resistance to neoliberalism. If so, answers should emerge now, five years after the BRICS institutions were founded in Brazil in 2014 and four years after the International Monetary Fund was reformed to give the four BRIC countries (not the ‘S’) dramatically increased voting shares (see Chapter 3).

This book critically examines two notions of resistance involving the BRICS and Africa. First, at the global level, BRICS supporters claim that the bloc may act as a transformative agent and thereby enhance Africa’s stature; meaning that the BRICS in concert with Africa may resist Western hegemony when and where they can. Whether this is an empirical reality or not, non-Western intellectuals were particularly fond of arguing the potential for anti-imperialist politics until reality asserted itself recently with pro-US leaders like Narendra Modi, Michel Temer, Cyril Ramaphosa, and Jair Bolsonaro taking power. This proclivity is evident in the volumes of mostly International Relations literature dedicated to this topic. These volumes claim that the rise of BRICS offers a legitimate challenge to the status quo and prophesise the supposed demise of the West. The actual evidence for this is lacking, suggesting that these intellectuals may be under the influence of ‘BRICS from above’ discourses emanating from their respective governments, business sectors, and state-linked as well as commercial media.

The second, more realistic, area of resistance involving BRICS and Africa can be seen in responses by critical Africans to the BRICS. They are showing how the BRICS themselves represent new threats to Africa and suggesting scepticism and caution, in terms of how African elites engage with their BRICS counterparts. Frank discussion concerning the BRICS’ exploitative role in Africa is slightly harder to find and has sometimes been overshadowed by the more triumphalist literature, written by those based in the non-West and the West. Those who question BRICS’ role in Africa adopt a different ideological or epistemic approach to the BRICS altogether, and advance the standpoint termed ‘BRICS from below’ (see Garcia and Bond’s definitions below).

In this volume, we are primarily concerned with argumentation about BRICS from the middle and below. A critical-pragmatic and pro-African viewpoint necessitates more discussion concerning the potential benefits and dangers of BRICS’ elite-driven relationship with Africa. Are BRICS countries opening opportunities that may not have materialised for African countries otherwise? Are they helping Africa to have a place at the global ‘top table’? Alternatively, are they pushing smaller countries down to have that place, through a new mode of exploitation operating under the guise of South–South solidarity? What are the individual and societal responses to the role of BRICS across Africa?

What is certain is that the African elite is genuinely conflicted in their relationships with the BRICS countries. On the one hand, they want the BRICS nations to ‘thrive’ in the vague hope that BRICS may somehow help to kick-start development within their territories helping to propel Africa forward, without the conditionalities and loss of sovereignty imposed by the Western multilateral institutions and donor agencies. On the other hand, these African elites also feel the need to protect their resources from excessive depletion by BRICS firms, thereby inscribing a general sense of circumspection into this relationship.

This scepticism is not without merit, as the BRICS countries’ and corporations’ motives in Africa seem to be increasingly dubious, if not outright deleterious or dispossessing. There are many examples of BRICS activities in Africa resulting in threats to African livelihoods and interests. For example, local fishers in Hout Bay in Cape Town, South Africa, undertook a string of protests in September 2017 over the loss of the fishing rights that they had traditionally held. The assumption was that illegal Chinese commercial fishing was threatening traditional fishing communities in the area. This concern was not unfounded as it is estimated that more than $2 billion worth of fish is illegally taken from African waters every year with the resultant loss of 300,000 jobs in West Africa alone (Kgomoeswana, 2017). More recently in Kitwe, Zambia, in October 2018, over 100 people were arrested for protesting against China’s acquisition of ZAFFICO, a government-owned timber business (Lusaka Times, 2018). Other BRICS countries have also faced similar protests, with opposition to mining and land grabs reflecting increasingly frequently on the Environmental Justice Atlas (2018).

Trade-driven macro-level economic policy is creating localised sites of dispossession where communities are forced to merely survive, many of whom lack the resources to mobilise with, or even identify allies facing similar challenges. ‘BRICS from above’ collaboration with their hinterland counterparts is touted as beneficial, yet the way in which contracts are sometimes handled (and the corruption associated with these contracts) is anything but developmental. South Africa, as a junior and African partner in BRICS, seems particularly vulnerable to less than salubrious influence from BRICS partners. The deal between South Africa’s Transnet and China South Railways, which involved kickbacks to a narrow Gupta-empire elite and the syphoning of money to tax havens in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is a stark example of how these deals can go awry, and how with a $5 billion credit from the China Development Bank arranged by the same men who authorised the Transnet graft, South Africans will be repaying this sort of odious debt for generations (see Chapter 8). The craftiness and complexity of the attempts to launder money are indicative of the lengths to which predatory elites would go to channel African public money into private, sometimes foreign hands. Cyril Ramaphosa’s own experiences on behalf of Lonmin, MTN, and Shanduka are just the examples that have come to light thanks to whistle-blowers in Panama and London law firms (see Chapter 3).

Another similar example of misguided ‘BRICS from above’ interference is found in the Russia–South Africa nuclear deal (Chapter 12). This $100 billion deal, foisted upon the South African citizenry by the state president with such heavy-handedness and limited due diligence, threatened to send South Africa into a further downward economic spiral until it was halted by civil society (Earthlife Africa and the SA Faith Communities Environmental Initiative) using ‘street heat’, widescale social delegitimisation, and court action. Resistance to the deal is a tribute to the power of ‘BRICS from below’ and the critical forces within ‘BRICS from the middle’.

However, there are growing indications across the BRICS of threats to dissenters’ freedom to express themselves. The more established democracies in the group are partnering with those who are authoritarian, especially China whose command of the internet and social surveillance will become official in 2020 with ‘social credit’ installed by Tencent, which is 30 per cent owned by South Africa’s largest firm, Naspers (formerly as pro-apartheid as any corporation).

Instances of corruption or nepotism are reasoned away by the elite by employing cultural relativism, branding these practices as somehow different from a Western ‘way’ of doing business, yet equally acceptable. For example, India’s state-owned Bank of Baroda allowed the Gupta brothers to lubricate massive outflows of illicit funds for many years. In any case, South Africa’s corporate elites are regularly awarded the biannual PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) ‘Economic Crime’ survey rating: most corrupt businessmen on earth. After Transnet’s chief executive was fired thanks to revelations about Gupta-related corruption, the South African BRICS Business Council – on which he served as one of five directors – was dissolved in October 2018. The self-promoting group led by newspaper proprietor Iqbal Survé was simply too controversial, notwithstanding that the Council had just weeks earlier hosted high-profile networking events in Sandton and Durban. ‘BRICS from above’ participated enthusiastically, ‘BRICS from the middle’ was mainly quiet, and only ‘BRICS from below’ engaged in protest.

Questionable deals driven by ‘BRICS from above’ that result in capital outflow, socio-ecological destruction, and disruption of local economies cause the loss of global reputations (including investor confidence) while reducing the security of citizens, and normally only benefit the elite. As illustrated during the Jacob Zuma era, this is, at its worst, achieved under cover of hackneyed, anti-Western rhetoric that although sometimes justified, is often used to wilfully mislead: a ‘talk left’ in order to ‘walk right’. Given this top-down scenario, what does the rise of the BRICS mean to African citizens? Does BRICS mean anything to what might be viewed as ‘ordinary’ African citizens? Does it have any (positive) material impact on their lives or is it just an elite construct, leaving the mass of citizenry alienated and still concerned mainly with basic survival?

Although closer ties benefit ‘BRICS from above’ these ties may have devastating effects in partner countries in the sense that close association with authoritarian countries might legitimise human rights violations, especially given the fragility of Africa’s fledgling democracies. The West uses economic interventions to discipline states that violate labour laws and human rights. However, most, if not all the BRICS countries continue to trade and engage with countries with questionable track records, neutralising much of the effect of the global disciplining forces. Notably, in Africa, four BRICS – Russia, India, China, and South Africa – continued to engage with Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe until the November 2017 coup (which was considered pre-approved in Beijing), and are courting Zimbabwe’s new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa for new, low-regulation investment opportunities as that country’s economy collapses (see Chapter 6). It could be argued that these interactions prop up regimes and obstruct reform and that this will ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Politics and Development in Contemporary Africa
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements and dedication
• About the contributors
• Table of Contents
• List of acronyms and abbreviations
• List of illustrations
• 1 African assimilation, co-optation, and resistance in the BRICS era
• Part I: BRICS: Joining the dots across Africa and the periphery
• Part II: BRICS and their southern and eastern African geographies of resistance: dispossession, collusion, and local responses
• Index