Episode 22 - Brian Kagoro: Rethinking Africa's Development

In conversation with Brian Kagoro on Rethinking Africa's Development.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

I'm going to begin with um a simple question. Um as an prominent Zimbabwean scholar as a unit or an object rather of analysis of critique of thinking. Where where and how do we describe Zimbabwe today?

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Well it's a crisis of development. A crisis of development. That's it's fundamental. That is the name of Zimbabwe today. It's a crisis of development. I think that uh of course leadership uh failures and institutional failures characterize it. But even if these institutions were functioning optimally, there would still be a fundamental crisis. Um the system of constructing the state created four fundamentals. Number one, the bifurcation of the economy, where you created an economy for Africans. Uh you put them in these tribal trust lands, an economy for the white industrial class, the white agricultural class. The second thing that it created was division. You created cantonments. The tribal trust land created false rigidities in identity, identities which had been fluid. So the social cohesion problem is a problem constructed deliberately as part of the divide and conquer tactic. And what's tragic is we as Africans uh embraced it more tenaciously than we embraced religion. The third was the in the creation of the skills, uh um, there were particular skills that were um designated as exclusively for black people and others for for white people. The independent state uh tried to do address the poverty problem, but did not focus on the collective wealth creation problem. And of course, over the years, instinctively, there was an attempt through the land reform process to move towards a wealth-creating creation model. Collective wealth. And it's important to think about the collective wealth question, because a lot of independent African countries uh found this enormous poverty problem. And the enormity of the poverty problem essentially meant that you diverted most of the state resources to try and deal with a problem deliberately constructed by the colonial state. Because the poor and dependent black is a convenient to both the black and white elite, because they always need the patronage of the state. But a hollowed-out state is a convenience for international capital because it always needs international capital for its survival. So if you think about those who are running the state as purely managing it, the only thing they really have power to manage is the collective of the immiserated and impoverished. So, and they have one instrument of management. If they can't deliver goods, they deliver violence, which is the supervision, surveillance, and control. Which is, if you think about it, whether it was the Rhodesian state, the apartheid state, this idea that the fundamental preoccupation of the state was supervision, surveillance, and control. So, in essence, you have a leadership that at the beginning had some form of vision of development, but had not sufficiently studied the state and built a coherent vision of how to transform the state for purposes of achieving development. So they concentrated on controlling the uh coercive apparatus of the state, uh, state intelligence, the army, the police. And so the carnage you see in Matebilland, uh, the the the genocidal Gukuraundi during the 1980s is an instinctive reaction to a sense of threat to power. But choreographed, as you know, by Rhodesian intelligence uh operatives, playing on what they understood. Multiple dependencies of blacks dependence on local white capital. Because the vision of how to transform the capital base, the ownership of the factories, ownership of land, of the mines, and et cetera, is a vision that goes beyond slogans. These are systems that have both local roots, regional roots, and international roots. So if you're going to do the transformation, you will need to form alliances across classes, uh, and and the whites knew what to do. You conscript middle class blacks, you conscript part of the aspirational elites. Why? Once they own crumbs of the empire, they have a stake in defending the empire that they see as the sole beneficiary against this mass uprising or against any disruptive force. So let me give you some interesting things. Within agriculture, you have the equivalent, and it has happened in this beautiful country in South Africa. The big corporate supermarkets and others went and concluded lockout contracts with the primary producers, which means they cannot give up a lower price to anybody else than the price they are offering the corporate buyer. In essence, that excludes competition. If you and I form a business, we want to get into the business for the same commodity. We're essentially muscled out. The understanding of the system, the capitalist system that was operational, and how it was built around kinsfolk patronage, corruption, and an anti-black racist or white supremacist notion makes people think that it's simple. Just remove the one person, you will have solved. So why did I call it a crisis of development? The model of development that we wanted was a model that we called Gutsaru Jinji inshuana, satisfy the masses. Now, the social component was clear, and Mgabe did well on this, which is diagnose what you need in terms of human capabilities. Manpower, as they used to call it, it wasn't a the gender equitable world that we live in now. The manpower development plan was very precise. How many doctors will we need? How many pharmacists? In fact, unmatched in most of the continent and the developing world. So they went about developing these skills. But what you needed to do, so if you think about it, we trained the highest number of artisans. That's why whether you are in Angola, you are here, you are in Ghana, you're likely when you turn around and you look, you are looking for a motor mechanic, A1, or you are looking for it'll be a Zimbabwean, electrician. And it didn't start because of the exodus. It started because we now have excess capacity and minimum absorptive possibilities. Because we the economy hasn't transferred into the hands of black folks. Why? Because we got the social component correct. But the redistributional aspects, even the blacks within government, were resistant because they now were proximate to white capital, both domestic and international. And they had, if you like, they had become the biggest defenders of what they saw as the stability. And defending that stability essentially meant postponing black aspirations. Here's a tragedy. It is at the moment, soon after, within that decade, as you know, we go through this fall of the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, and etc. So the doctrine of lean state, hollowing out the state, uh is becomes operational. Balance of payment support problems for the Zimbabwean government, which at the beginning you may have dissent from what I was saying, it had two options. Do you level up in terms of development, try and bring everyone else to the standard that the white religions who were living better than most Hollywood A-listers, right? Or do you level down to try and do a massification? They chose uh uh an ambivalent position. A few elites leveled up, and there was no leveling down. So the privilege accumulated by the whites was not redistributed or distributed in the first instance. So when you now have structural adjustment programs, what had happened with the black elite who came from the war expecting to preside over a state they had liberated through blood is that they got absorbed in civil service jobs. And immediately within 10 years, they were laid redundant, as is part of the uh thinning out the state. They are laid redundant. The state instinctively adjusts urban bylaws to permit for vending. So vending stalls start appearing. Remember, the colonial legislation had been structured around this criminalization of native existence or black existence. That if you were seen, you and I were seen with three of our friends somewhere in this place, uh we would be we would be called vagrants. Or we would be called we would be accused of loitering with intent to rob. And if you were women uh loitering for the purposes of prostitution. So the laws were created to create this uh sanitized version of development that criminalized and prohibited uh uh freedom of movement by black people in their own country. So now when you do this uh redundancies, you now have to adjust the bylaws. When you adjust by laws, you have not changed the municipal police mentality. So in Harara in the 1980s, you'd see these running battles between the municipal police and ordinary vendors. The state was not creating or adapting to a new form of capital accumulation that would have enabled the now redundant uh uh uh uh workers to form a collective to negotiate the supply chains in their country. So the supply chains remained the way they had been before. So this mass of black people started, of course, looking for greener pastures elsewhere. But this mass of black uh of people also became restless and anti-establishment. Now, for people who liberated the country through so much pain, they didn't understand why these people were so ungrateful. But who were these ingrates they were unhappy with? They were former combatants, former collaborators, and their children, right? You could send people to get degrees and a splendid performance, and there was no absorptive capacity because what started happening, the small white minority uh population would send their children here to Cape Town to New Zealand and etc. maintain rules by which you bypass. They come back to be bosses of your even some of your best. The state's preoccupation with the rhetorical freedom essentially meant it took long to deal with economic restructuring questions. Uh land is only one of the dimensions. Let me give you another one. Procurement regulations. The procurement regulations for a black population which had been prohibited from owning a significant stake in the economy still required you to demonstrate 10 years, 15 years of experience in a particular, obviously you wouldn't have. So you ended up with black people seeking the patronage of white companies. You see this a lot in South Africa, right? In order to get any potential to get a tender. Or the obtuse happened, corruption. Right? You don't adjust the regulations, you simply corrupt the award a tender to people. This corruption is created by a failure to adjust to the reality of what will it take to build collective black wealth.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Let me challenge this uh proposition a little bit. Yeah, okay. Purposes of seeking its complication. If Zimbabwe um ought to be read in the terms you have put, the failure of seemingly the post-independent political leadership to disarticulate separate development and bring about this collective wealth you're speaking of. And I want to juxtapose Africa's post-developmental path. We'll come back keeping Zimbabwe in mind with post-war Europe. What many people don't want to admit is the privilege with which upon the end of World War II there was unmitigated capital investment. Like the Marshall Plan. In essence, the Marshall Plan. So it didn't quite matter the strength or weaknesses of political. That's why we don't even know majority of the political elites, they were not facing situations whether they were choosing neoliberal industrial path or they were choosing state developmental path. In the main, they had money to restart their economies. So it doesn't matter quite in the end whether Mugabe's choice was going to be an insistence on state-led development, massive state, avoid neoliberal restructuring, privatization, corporatization, all that language of the early 1990s in light of globalization. But in the end, it didn't matter what he did, there was no capital investment in the same way as, for instance, post-war England, post-war France or Paris, post-war Germany, and all of that. They had as Europe the wet the West, which which means the United States and Canada and all of them, just went and gave them money to develop.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

Here is a difference. It is correct that capital would have made some difference. It's not only capital that developed Germany. If you remember during the moment of the Marshall Plan, you look at the three visions that they came up with. And remember, I said we got the social component correct. And the reason why we didn't, Rhodesia or Zimbabwe is by far per capita. If you look at the number of human beings that live in that country and the wealth that the country has, you can't even compare it to a Germany in terms of just the wealth that's resident in the country, right? Zimbabwe is we call it little.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

I don't get that. Per capita income in Zimbabwe. Not per capita. Much higher. At which decades?

SPEAKER_00 17:02

In 1980. In 1980, 1987. Much higher. Yes, yeah. Much Rhodesia. No, no, no. That's now Zimbabwe. Okay. Much higher. In fact, here's the other thing. The reason why the first order business is to structuring yourself so that you can use whatever capital is at your disposal to develop. Let me give you a sense. Until we took the land, many people have a misnomer, especially in the rest of Africa. Adam Gabe took land and then Zimbabwean stuffed. No. The white commercial farmers did not produce the food we ate. It's a documented study. The peasant farmer, Zimbabwean farmer, on semi-arid land produced more than 78% of the food for domestic consumption. Agreed? Right. So when I said to you that the government had two options, level up or level down, there were betrayals. Let's call the betrayals what they were. There was a promise there in Lancaster House. First, it was 1.5 billion. It was raised through the Kissinger intervention, 2.5 billion for land reform. Right? That money never came because it was not included except as an addendum in the Lancaster House Agreement. Were there policy interventions that actually might have addressed some of the endemic challenges we have? That's what I'm suggesting to you. They were. And the political class made a choice. It's weird disagreement that we entered into at Lancaster. That number one, you would have this 20 minority white seats, and then in the first 10 years, you wouldn't do any land reform. Right? And as you know, land reform didn't start until almost 2000. Right. In the 10-year period, there was absolutely no reason why it didn't happen. As a student, myself, Raymond Majongwe, and others, we demonstrated saying, look, comrades, you if you don't do land reform now, by the time you do it, it'll be too late. And I'll tell you what was happening at the time. There was capital being brought in, but to build white elephant projects. Right? But how much of capital? No, no, no, no, no. How much question? So you're I mean, capital, no. We have to really break that question of what is capital. But your proposition needs to escape the error that I see a lot in when we're talking to black intellectuals. Volume is not the determinant of the progress you make with capital investment, right? Although volume matters. So there is a sense that we need a lot so that we do mega things. What Zimbabwe needed was to build. So if you look at the models, everybody looks at the mega China now. But China started with building from cottage industry to the meat production cycle, right? Because massification of production, massification of wealth is what actually creates the resilience in the long term. So if I give you capital, you build Lenin style, big industrial. If you take the Soviet Union, because you talked about the rest of Europe, you didn't talk about the Soviet Union. Lenin's approach, big industrial. Because I complained. No, they were not beneficiaries of the massive. No, no, no. But they made huge capital investments into industrial development, right? Take a different model. Two different models. Singapore is different from South Korea. South Korea, to this date, is the biggest recipient of US ODA, right? Which were concessional loans. If Zimbabwe had gotten the Marshall Plan, we still would have had one challenge. And that challenge is the political elite assumes building a big factory somewhere, building big infrastructure somewhere, answers the problem. I'm saying to you no, it doesn't. If with the capital that we had, between macro and meso infrastructure, macro and meso production sites, the country would have been in a totally different place than it is now. Let me give you what is the problem at the moment. The social indices are a problem in that Road Zimbabwe has not developed in 40 years, right? And 62% of the population, between 55 and 62, lives in Road Zimbabwe. Urban Zimbabwe stagnated. If we chose to Focus the little capital that we had, as I said to you, in things that did not enhance the advantage that Zimbabwe had. And Zimbabwe in this regard was different to South Africa and Namibia and Botswana. You had the highest number of artisans. That means your strength was in building from factories to manufacturing bases. For who? For the rest of SADAC. Did you have a base? Of course. What the Rhodesian state had done under sanctions was to focus on internal manufacturing, right? Which was import substitution model that they had, right? So we had a base. I want you to look carefully when you've had time at the acquisitions by our own business people and deliberate running down of some of those productive entities. Not because they let deliberate running down. Deliberate. Shoe manufacturing. From GD shoes to uh we had some of the best shoe manufacturing uh uh entities. Now, and the people who were working there were not white, they were black. These were the people who were then made redundant. And I'm saying what I'm suggesting to you radically says that a development model that will work, at least for this region, right, where a good part of the population is in peri-urban or rural area, and I take it through education systems like sausages, right? Could be to stimulate township economies. If you look at the South African township economy now, a trillion dollars. Let me give you a miracle sense of what happens here. The bulk of that economy is not controlled by black people, right? I have big problems understanding what township. Okay, so let me give you a sense. Let me give you a sense. The biggest mobile phone companies in the world or on the continent don't make money from people like you and I. You don't buy scratch cards because you have Wi-Fi in your house. Who buys scratch cards? It's the poor person in the township. It's that there is a whole politics around manufacturing the scratch cards, right? There is an entire economy around who manufactures the scratch cards and who actually gets to retail and what do they get for retailing. That's just for mobile telephony, food supplies.

unknown 24:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

The bulk of the people working in agriculture were black people. Right? Who is supplying food to the spazes? Who's for in Zimbabwe and in South Africa? No, it's not the people who are who are producing the food there. It's routed through somebody else, a spa or somebody who then supplies. So that if you quantify the volume of money that poor people spend nourishing rich people, and you ask yourself, could we change this model? And actually keep this money in the hands of the people as a collective, right? So there are many models, as you know, that have been tried from cooperatives to and uh, etc. And then you look at the discrimination against those same people who are still buying from these guys. Here, your stockfells produce annual savings, 50 billion rands. If you want to go and borrow from the bank, they don't treat a stock file, they don't treat uh uh as a as a they would a company. In fact, you and I going with a paycheck from someone would get higher uh uh financial uh uh flexibility from the bank than folks who have uh more money than you and I, but that are in a collective. So the ra what I'm suggesting to you is that an adjustment in the regulations from procurement to insurance to pensions would have unlocked capital. We continued to invest a lot of our patients in the US and in the UK. And who was paying pension? Who are the people paying pension? Who are the majority of the people paying pension? So what I'm suggesting to you is yes, external capital, concessional loans, very important. But when those are not forthcoming, what can you do if you're thinking about collective wealth creation to unlock the wealth potential that you have? And the the era of Zimbabwe is likely to repeat itself in South Africa. I'll tell you why. As long as we don't pay attention, which is China took a different path as did India. They paid attention to what? Because there was a hostility. And they knew nobody would give them enough capital to develop to exit the dependence. So that what they needed was a blend of what you can get by way of concessional loans, but also the investments in innovation, Dr. Dodge. Nobody's gonna give you enough money. In fact, a lot of those concessional loans, the difference was Germany got actually money to invest in innovation, right? A site of experiment, as did South Korea, but nobody else has gotten that kind of money. So Africa hasn't received that kind of a deal. This is a fact. But do they let me ask you a question? Can we unlock within Africa our own capital? Never mind what people like President Becky have identified, money we lose through illicit outflows and et cetera. I'm giving you a sense. This country has massive pension amounts that are building fancy buildings, right? That are not building anything significant to employ the sons and the daughters of the pension.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Suddenly, the South African situation strikes in those terms uh very differently. There is a lot of money, South African money that is put in South African banks not being invested. I'm trying to understand. But this was the developmental crisis that you were describing in Zim.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

But the Zimbabwe, a lot of you judge Zimbabwe only now. The Zimbabwe pre-1991, for both per capita to wealth, what we're producing as gross national income is performing much better than South Africa within the same period of 10 years within liberation. So the Zimbabwe we are judging now is one of the same Zimbabwe public value. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

So we had You're saying the crisis was the failure to unlock local capital, but also to invest it in such a way that empowered economic activities of Perry and Perry, Urban M Gar.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Develop, if you like, if you take a capitalist lens, develop microenterprise in the rural areas. So Zimbabwe had a plan since 1958, refined by the liberation parties. If you look at the development plans of both ZANU and uh Zapu, right, the development plans were very clear. In if you develop on and off farm storage, right, you were likely to unlock further wealth for the producer. Remember what the producer's problem was access to the market. What structural adjustment did, how did we access the market? Grain marketing board, minerals marketing board, and et cetera. So when we're disbanding the SOEs, the state-owned enterprises, we disbanded the enabling statutory bodies. When you disband the enabling statutory bodies, you have to invest something. Otherwise, what happens? The local producer in the rural area is not able to access the market, right? And the investment on off-farm storage, warehousing is not that big. And you know why I say this rather uh without dismissing the importance of external concessional capital is this we were buying fancy cars, three, four, five cars for ministers. Right? And and for me, we're still doing it now, right? We're handing out vehicles, fine. But if you think about two vehicles could build off farm storage, could get refrigerated trucks to get goods from rural areas to the market, could do warehouses, could do an agricultural exchange market, and could do thousands of things. This is not money we don't have. I'm talking about the money we have that we choose within the political class to spend. And I don't want to be simplistic and suggest that they should not have cars at all and etc. No, I simply want to suggest that priorities do matter when you are constrained. And priorities do matter if you choose a development paradigm that's opposed by people who would ordinarily give you capital. So you have to say, I'm against this, and there will be some consequences. And in the place I've placed myself in, I have to be adaptive and look at changing the model of accumulation, the model of distribution and redistribution within the economy.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

Let me take you then to the immediate point, which is a similar experience, not just in ZIM, but this African crisis of indebtedness. If you look at the debt and you're thinking, what is the debt doing? Over the many, many decades, uh, in some instances, in some countries, is beyond the 1980s, it will be the 1970s and all of that. What is your I'm obviously suspecting where you will go, but what is this, what is your reading of the of the debt crisis across the continent?

SPEAKER_00 32:28

It baffles me, but because I have a sense of what the structure is. Number one, uh uh we started uh using short-term instruments of borrowing to invest in long-term things like infrastructure. Uh they were necessary in some instances, but the infrastructure does not give you an immediate return. So if you take an instrument, a five-year instrument that has high interest rates, it's a short-term borrowing instrument. What you need is long-term capital whose maturation is long-term. Which is interest-free. No interest. Commercial plan. There was no interest. Low interest. Well, low even low interest. So that's when there's been uh bona fiddles, there's been good faith where we've borrowed and you actually can see the infrastructure. The idea was that you would borrow, and I call it a Eurocentric perspective. You'd borrow and then build a big road, put tolls, and then ask ordinary Zimbabweans or South Africans to pay tolls. Of course, this is this is always going to be for you to make up the money that's required to pay back that loyalty, you keep raising these tolls. But the wages are not raising, are not rising. So that's one, the short-term borrowing instrument. The second is do you know we borrowed a lot more money in the last uh 10 years for weapons, for military security-related weapons, including police-related stuff, tear guns and something, than we did for education and healthcare. So countries that actually don't have dialysis machines, CAT scans, and all borrowed to buy fancy fighter jets and drones. Right? So this uh borrowing for the coercive, and we don't have interstate wars. But borrowing for security for media. Most wars are civil, yes. Yes. So the regime stability-related borrowing. The third is, I think we must call it what it is, diversion of uh uh borrowed money. So you would come to a country like Senegal, where now they have something called a hidden debt. What is a hidden debt? That money was borrowed, so clearly, if it is a hidden debt, that means it wasn't applied to me. Right? It would have been misappropriated. But the new government comes in and discovers that the debt fit the register they were using is inaccurate. There's a lot more money. And you remember the Mozambican case involving where credit suisse forced Mozambique to take a loan they didn't need. So the private lenders' uh debt has shot up. Uh the multilateral debt situation is such that I think the multilateral institutions always treat Africa unfairly. In part, the lenders, both private lenders and uh MDBs, lend to Africa on the basis of risk perception. Now, this way they standard and poor, so on and so forth. If something happens in Zimbabwe, they'll say, oh, there's a risk generally, the risk contagion, right? It's uh it's almost something happened in Africa. So Africa risk profile is X. Yes. Why is risk profile important? It means a European country or Southeast Asian country going to borrow will borrow maybe at 4% or 3%. You, because of your risk profile, you borrow at 12%, the same amount of money. So that essentially means your the your repayments are much higher. So clearly you will never catch up as long as that is not dealt with. So there's an international debt governance crisis. And the other interesting thing, the private lenders are not within the common debt governance frameworks. Uh and and and then there's the domestic governance problem. Why do you end up in some countries with hidden debt? Not all debt procured by governments goes through parliamentary oversight. So what has ended up happening is a head of state or his wife or someone visits a country, we actually see them on TV signing deals. But those deals are not paid by their children. Those deals are paid by the workers, the taxpayers. They'll be paid by future generations. So, in essence, fiscal indiscipline and sometimes this creation of fifth domes where people are told they need things that they don't and there is no technical backup. I mean what's curious now is we're borrowing to build pots and uh uh uh and develop uh certain uh entities for the benefit of extraction of natural resources. And in essence, I wonder whether the problem is we're not bringing enough people with expertise to advise our governments. I watched uh I was invited once to China by the ambassadors in Beijing to come and talk about the experience uh Africa and the eighth uh fork. Uh and I said, and then at the time talking to them before my presentation, many of them were not consulted before their governments. Actually, you know, people came from the capital, they didn't talk to the expert in Beijing, and they proceeded to sign things that were in Mandarin, so they didn't fully read the text, not the interest, not the dispute settlement, nothing. There is a debt alcoholism. Alcoholism. This idea that we we gotta borrow, we gotta keep borrowing, we borrow. And and because of this short-termism in thought, like people have five years, we gotta perform, we gotta um the debt procurement is not linked to national development strategy. And and I And in some instances there is no national development strategy developed.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

So let me circulate back to your earlier argument. This this is a very consistent uh thing you always put about um firstly, earlier the capacity of the continent within itself to raise capital in its own economic activity, uh, and then this uh dead alcoholism, which just means we're borrowing uh in order to borrow again tomorrow and all of that. Uh we're in dead, but you don't see what we were buying with the money that we were getting. How does this logic tie to your argument on reparations? Isn't a demand for reparations or the return of a conversation about colonial reparations, slavery reparations, another form of um campaign inspired by this alcoholism. Uh the developed the Chinese were equally devastated by multiple forms of invasions, of war, of colonization. Uh I mean, the opium wars were thorough, uh, as you know, in China. Once they got their country together, you know, they didn't make a case uh for a handout, so to speak. Take us through, in light of the argument you have developed thus far around raising capital from our activities, debt alcoholism, and seemingly your support, I would say. Firstly, what is the argument today for reparations and why do you support it?

SPEAKER_00 40:51

Uh um uh we distinguish two things, slavery and chatel enslavement. Chatel enslavement, there are many civilizations that enslaved people. Chatel enslavement was unique to how blacks became property. There was a British act in Barbados in 1630. That said, uh blacks are not human. They became chatel. That same act was taken to Virginia and throughout the colonies. Here's the difference. A chatel property, there is a, as you know in Roman Dutch, common law and other European uh etu tendi, you should tend et abtendi, which means the right to use and to abuse. You can destroy, you can kill, you can do, you can sell, and it's inherited, you can inherit it. That's what was unique about the enslavement of black people, right? Number one. It essentially meant, if you if you think about it, when they were being freed after the so-called abolition, the black slaves were required to pay back the slave owners for loss of property. Which property? The slaves themselves, right? Right and uh and the farmers and then the British. No, no, no. The British compensated. In fact, the compensation ended, I think, in 2015 to the slave-owning families. For what? For loss of property. Whose property? The black slave, right? So if you look at Lloyd's bank, Bucklace Bank, all those insurance and banking, what we now call global corporates that were built from that time until now. Their wealth was an accumulation of not only the free labor of enslaved people, right? But the free lands. Right? So bring it back home. So colonization happens, and there's a foundational case in the British Privy Council that I like to cite in Red Southern Rhodesia. It records in the highest English court judgment the logic of the colony, which is black people are not fully human like us, they're not civilized. It says it in those words, they have no right, they have no sense of ownership. So therefore, the land, whether in South Africa, in Bapados or wherever, that the blacks have, it's not theirs, because they have no sense of ownership. That land can be taken including their ancestral graves, their crops, including the Kois and the Kwason uh cattle, including so the violent dispossession alienation. Now, here's the difference. The co the settler class sought to make itself indigenous. And that too is unique. The Japanese are not they didn't lodge the settler. And two, here is also the difference. The established ownership recorded it as guaranteed and protected by the sovereign in France, in England. Then you take the Frank Francophone Africa, Haiti rebels to free itself from France, enslavement and colonization. What happens? They levy repressions that were still being paid up to now. Right? And what are those reparations? What is the net impact of the reparations that Haiti had to pay? It of course couldn't become stable, couldn't it become economically viable? The francophone countries, their economies, their currencies were tethered to the uh say five France, the natural resources, everything. And of course, France was getting for repittance because France was buying using domestic currents, where others were using foreign currents. And if you look at the development scandal, if you look at uh when uh uh uh uh Thomas Sankara took over Burkina Faso, the levels of um illiteracy, the levels of the health crisis, so France saw no obligation to spend back uh uh for all it was taken. But this was against their own laws, never mind our laws. And these things continue to the present day. So when we say we have a climate crisis, overconsumption, ecological overreach in the global north has consequences on former enslaved peoples, former colonized people who are now being asked to borrow in order to offset what? The fact that the mines that are owned by people uh who are protected by this international system uh are polluting water in Limpopo, polluting water with cyanide in Zimbabwe, are polluting air, are polluting so the diseases that the blacks now have, the cancers, we have to borrow as governments to do what to address this health crisis created by these same problems. It's because the question of accountability. Let me give you something else. The amount of money spent by donor agencies from these countries to help us hold black people to account, uh, our dictators from 1960 runs into billions of dollars.

SPEAKER_01 46:48

The the NGOs get funding for accountability. This funding is far bigger than the money invested in productive activity.

SPEAKER_00 47:04

But the yes, but the accountability question focuses on the following black atrocity, the failure of black governments. So basically, there is an attempt to create historical amnesia as though human rights violations only started when black people took over political power. So the white person has the arrogance to even say colonialism was beneficial. Let me describe it to you. You create concentration camps in Namibia, you wipe out 50% of Bayherero and over 30% of the Nama Aqua people. In Zimbabwe, during war of liberation, you pour napalm on children in refugee camps. Here in South Africa, you detain, you kill people for sport. You create inhuman conditions for detention, you destroy families totally. And for some reason, the black person's only thing that you are allowed to do is to forgive. When you forgive, you become a hero, you get a Nobel Prize. But when you say, look, I don't agree with you that my ancestors were not fully human. We are human. Let me add just one little anecdote. When the settler or when the colonial powers were settling their own disagreement that you referred to in Europe, the Great War, so-called in the First World War, they met at Versailles under the Treaty of Versailles. And in it is included the doctrine of reparations. Right? Not only that, in it the question of crimes of the Ottoman Empire is included. But they agreed amongst themselves that what they were doing in Namibia across the colonies were not crimes. Why? But what are you looking for? I mean, all of this is where can we? So repar reparations is five, is got five key components. Number one, I think acknowledgement and accountability.

SPEAKER_01 49:29

What does that do for the Africans?

SPEAKER_00 49:31

No, it does.

SPEAKER_01 49:32

Why am I borrowing money from people who owe me? Let me let me complicate the argument so that we have it in a much more productive way. Yeah. The relationship between Africans and capital, you have mapped it out with two aspects, so to speak. This borrowing, uh, which you have characterized as a debt uh alcoholism. But also the incapacity, seemingly an ignorance or a misunderstanding or a misreading of internal economies themselves, that there's actual capital here that you can raise, and uh you have to use it in a specific way for it to multiply and all of that. Internal to each country and internal to the continent. Internal to, for instance, you're making this argument on township economies. Yeah. That there's actual capital, but also with pension funds that are pensions of the peoples of South Africa, the peoples of Zimbabwe, and all of that. And you say, but Europe owes us. And the true are not inconsistent. Of course. But what I want to ask, you you've already realized throughout the last 70 years of liberation, those chaps are not interested, they're not remotely interested in giving you a handout.

SPEAKER_00 51:03

It's not a handout. A demand for a debt owed. So let's take uh I mean they have to be benevolent to say we are paying back. No, no, no, no, Europe without African markets is a broke former colonial power cluster. Agreed, agreed. Look at that. So Africa is a very important thing. What do you want reparations?

SPEAKER_01 51:26

No, no, no, no, for no Africa has leveraged in what way, but when you make an argument for reparations, you are asking something from Europe. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:35

So there are instances. Why do you think they'll give you no, no, no? Why do I think? Because right now, seeing as the impact that the revolts, just in the Sahel states, the three states, has caused uh the bleeding in the economy. Look at the feuds this week. Uh there are disagreements on what to do with Russian assets following America's washing its hands of uh European cartonage in the Ukraine. Oh, yeah. Europe is in a precarious state, it needs Africa more than it has ever needed. And why is the answer reparations? No, no, no. But Africa has always related with Europe on the basis of begging Europe because it felt it had no leverage to address historical and continuing things. Why is the answer reparation? Let me go back to something you said. You said Marshall Plan, right? You said there was no Marshall Plan after the Holocaust. Yes, there was a Marshall Plan for Israel. On what basis? It was reparations. Agreed. Right? They are still paying those reparations. They are still paying those reparations. But to paying to who? It's white people. It's internal. No, no, no. So the so let's get the the the fact.

SPEAKER_01 52:46

In 10 dollars, then we two white countries going to so be so benevolent.

SPEAKER_00 52:51

So then someone say, let's give 50 billion dollars all the slavery, then we're not benevolent. So in the US, for example, there are 30 ecosystems and three states, including New York, just recently. New York actually has passed the Reparations Act, right? It seemed impossible before. But what is it that has changed? It is the ability as a collective. You see, we talk about critical minerals and things like that. Africans just sit and say we have critical minerals. And the inability to convert your capital into negotiation power is what makes you give it away because you always feel you have less. You need someone else. What I was suggesting is if you come together as a collective, that's why when we say Pan-Africanism is not a luxury, it's not just Africans getting together, singing Africa Unite. No, it's us saying to create value based on our values that will determine a change of a colonial paradigm, which was based on devaluing our assets, natural assets, and taking them for free off repittance, devaluing our lives so that you say we're not human, we're just a tech, and devaluing what it takes for an African to exist, so that what you do, even when you are paying them, you pay them a royalty for the same goods. That's a fraction of what you'd pay for for gold of a similar quality to somebody else. I'm saying Africa is in the best position it has ever been to collectively negotiate historical and continuing injustices in both economic terms, financial terms, ecological terms, and political terms. Africa, right now, if this African leader should.

SPEAKER_01 54:44

So let's say, let's hide, let's let's practicalize this. Uh the African Union takes, there is a delegation, and then they meet somewhere in the Atlantic, somewhere in the Mediterranean, depending on whatever, with a delegation from European Union and maybe uh some chaps in America, in the Americas, the your United States government and Canada government, so that it's Euro-American. Now we're in the meeting, and the Europeans say, okay, uh, you want reparations for slavery. In for colonialism, and apartheid. Um in the Congo, in uh South Africa, in Namibia, and many, many other parts of the continent. Tell us how that conversation unfolds. Trump is there, Macron is there. These are the chaps.

SPEAKER_00 55:44

Yeah, but why why I find that startling. Let me take the example of this country. How you end up with uh black-ruled South Africa. With a black-ruled South Africa. What was this conversation when Mandela and Core started it? Right? The same impossibility. Struggle does not happen because it looks possible. Struggle happens because it is just, right? If you don't remedy the historical and continuing treatment of black people, whether as migrants or as Africans, you know, these same folks come and abuse you here in your own countries. If you don't remedy that problem, the next four generations.

SPEAKER_01 56:32

I agree. I'm just not sure why the remedy another But reparation is not a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 56:40

No, no, no. It's not another conversation. No, no, it's not another conversation. Uh I'm not saying give us. I mean, let me give you a sense. Yeah. Let me give you a sense. When you go to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and you raise the question of equity. Equity vis-a-vis black ownership, what are you saying? You're saying, are you asking for charity? You're not. When you raise in South Africa, there's a reparations issue. Remember, reparations include land reparations. When you say in South Africa, uh, we want our land back, what are you asking for? A handout? Of course, you know what will happen. The minute you say we're going to take the land, you get the sort of thing that happened in the U.S. in the White House. And there's a genocide against white whites. Yes. But that is the nature of the struggle. Uh global anti-black racism is not going to roll over and die simply because blacks are demanding. But here's the difference. As long as you demand, uh as Dr. Nrozzi, and I demand as Brian or Kagoro and someone else, if we don't come together, it's easy to nitpick. We'll nitpick Nigeria and South Africa. Why? These hegemons have the potential to unite the continent around not just reparations, justice for the things that are happening now. But as long as we can keep you apart and get you into survival mode, and as long as none of your scholars are studying the impact of what has happened in the Sahel on the French economy over the next 20 years and what leverage it gives, as long as none of your scholars are studying what is happening in the meltdown in Europe, right? Then we constantly are in this position of weakness where we think we are negotiating against much stronger people. Even at a time, my brother, when the Angolan economy seemed poised to overtake the Portuguese economy, a lot of Angolans still were looking to Portugal as a standard. So this inability to see and understand own strength in relation to the comparative strength of some of similar circumstances. Global Africa, if you look at the Caribbean, you look at the Africans, you look at the African Americans, you look at Afro's in Europe, you look at Afro's in Brazil, you look at, we will demographically constitute a global majority.

SPEAKER_01 59:11

Let's go to this difficulty then of African unity. Would I be correct that Pan-Africanism it's at its lowest in many, many decades? There's more antagonism, there's more inward lookingness in the continent. The levels of inward lookingness are higher than they ever have been. Antagonistic feelings on each other, or what some have characterized as Afrophobia, are at the highest than they've ever been, and therefore making almost impossible, or undoing, as it were, on the one hand, undoing this Pan-Africanist movement, the capacity to organize, speak together, act together as Africans. But on the other, the reality that African institutions have actually been either complicit or they've been vehicles of different forms of circulating corrupt uh dividends amongst the African political elite. And when a crisis happens like it does, for instance, in Tanzania, you don't quite hear where the African institutions at. If a crisis happens like look at the Sudan, um, you don't you you can't quite understand where's the African Union, where are the African institutions. So you've got that on the one hand, a total detached African institution by name. On the other, these levels of Pan-African unity, Pan-African thinking together, acting together on the ground have been also eroded. They've been coming down and down because every country at the moment is looking out for its own interest. Is that any close to your observation as you move around the continent?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:23

Actually, it's it's it's mixed. English-speaking Africa is the weak link. If you see in uh French-speaking Africa, there's a growth of solidarity, of Pan-Africaness flavor. In fact, historically, we always thought the French-speaking Africa would be less radical. They've been more radical. And what has happened is English-speaking Africa is now scrambling all over each other to try and get favor with Macron, with France. And France is trying to get to Nigeria, to South Africa, to because he's losing the control that they had over French-speaking Africa. Why is that so? A pathet in South Africa, Calabine, Rhodesia, or Zimbabwe, created something that we need to fully understand. It created a social immobility, economic immobility, and it created an intellectual or epistemic immobility amongst our people. The insularity. You recall people in 1994 killing each other in the hostels here and elsewhere. As I said when I described the creation of Zimbabwe, was you needed to create in the mind of a black person that the other tribe was the threat. Was the enemy and the savior is the white man. And the white man gets to pick and choose which blacks to work with. So when it seemed as though the blacks in South Africa would become insurrectionary, white card reached to Malawi, to Mozambique, to Zimbabwe to build oneella. Right? And so this use of division as an instrument of management and use of difference. But why is this even an interesting point for me? Until black South Africans, including the Black South African middle class, arrived at a stage that the Zimbabwean elites arrived at rather late. There was a Rhodesian exceptionalism which became a Zimbabwean exceptionalism. Zimbabweans believed that they needed. Very few other people. Of course, there were uh Lord Mgabe was a lot more pan-Africanist and etc. and etc. What happened is that we didn't imagine how black South Africans could create wealth in Mozambique. So South African troops go to Congo, to Burundi, they go. The South African businesses that go there are white-owned businesses. So if you go to Inyambani, you go to the entire coast of Mozambique. The number of South African black businesses in Zimbabwe, it's just Mzi Kumalu, maybe um Bekish Malachi and a few others. But the bulk of South African, whatever opportunities exist, notwithstanding their ability to access capital here, they don't see Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and elsewhere. But here's the contradiction. Because I want us to bring the political economy for all this into the center. MT five of South Africa's biggest companies now make in excess of 50% of their equity value outside of South Africa. Right? If you just look at the their annual statements as declared, MTN is making a lot more money outside of South Africa than it does here. We saw this in Zimbabwe, where the court calls and the other companies started making a lot more money. And we were threatening, we will take land, we will do that. We were talking the politics of redistribution. In the meanwhile, they were externalizing and cushioning themselves, subdividing farms, building homes for black people to buy because black people wanted to live in condos and et cetera. So, in essence, the what then happened is that we feel invaded not by the East Europeans, we feel invaded not by Asians, we feel invaded by the most proximate. I suspect if you took all the Zimbabweans out and say in the next five years. Let's have all the Zimbabweans out. Why are the Zimbabweans? The Zimbabweans were not necessarily a problem for South Africans. There is a problem, of course, South Africans don't want to deal with. If any Zimbabwean who's in Devele, I'm sitting in what used to be called the Transvaal. The last king on the Transvaal was a Zimbabwean king called Mr. Gazka Mashoa. And you read this in South African history. It's not made up. You only crossed over into Zimbabwe retreating from Paul Kruger. So I'm supposed to tell the Ndevele people. Go back to South Africa. I mean it's it's it's it's almost ahistorical, but why is this a problem? I want to suggest that it's a it's a problem for certain white constituencies that's been nicely fed into black constituency. And I'm not suggesting there are no problematic Zimbabweans engaging in crime and other things. No, I won't be that simplistic. The neighbors have been living in semi-autonomous modes for some time, and they've learned business complexity, like this building. Remember, I kept saying to you, big money makes money from our people. These people, the Somalis, the Zimbabweans, the Nigerians, I'm not talking about the ones that may be involved in crime or are illegal, the legal ones. Where are they setting up? They're setting up in the middle economy. They are setting up in the townships. And who are they threatening?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:41

They are threatening shop rights.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:43

Yes. And so it is those sort of so our people end up fighting battles for somebody else. On behalf of shopright. Yes, for somebody else.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:54

They're fighting uh the spaza shops on behalf of shopright. Perhaps they will say they want the spaza shops.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:01

No, no, no. But if that was the fight, I would say to them, hey, come, you have access to capital. Come and set up in Bad Bridge. Come and set up in Gwanda so that Zimbabweans are not crossing here to come and buy. Not from you. Because look at how many Zimbabweans cross into this country. Thousands that don't stay, that cross just to buy. So why is South African black business in yeah, or in Bed Bridge and City? In Bay Bridge, yes. Spare yourself the cost. I will make a little bit more money because I'm getting paid dollar. Ready, since you guys are using US dollar, and I'm saving you the trip. I can even set up a delivery. You order from your home in Sakuba will deliver because it'll still be cheaper than you having to pay, bribe people at the border, make a risky it the intra-southern African black community that united to fight against colonial occupation apartheid needs to have an economic logic to it. That actually says we have differences, they're very practical. Let's not pretend that having Zimbabweans, Mozambiqueans, and others won't cause a strain on the healthcare system here. But let's ask ourselves a more practical question. If you look at how much money is being made out of Zimbabwe by South African business, out of Nigeria by South African big business, right? Out of, you surely must, as black people, we must be getting to a stage where we're saying, hang on. How do we turn our problem into our benefit? How do we talk to the Department of Trade and Industry and others and say, under the so-called Continental Free Trade Agreement, how do we create collectives of black business that enables a broader wealth base through investing in manufacturing, whatever it is that we're doing? Because isn't it ironic?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:57

So your answer essentially, Prout, is do you want to solve the big uh immigration question in South Africa? The solution is go set up businesses in Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans won't come here because they will work for you, they will buy from you.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:14

The bulk of the Zimbabweans who come here don't stay. The bulk of the Zimbabweans who come here don't stay. If you go to Bay Bridge Border Post, they don't stay. And it's a very interesting thing. Think about it. Nobody talks about the generation of Zimbabweans that came here in the 1930s. Right? And the 1950s cities that came for this way and other things. The children were born here. In fact, some of them don't even know that they are Zimbabweans. It's only when they die that some And Malawians is a significant naturalized Malawian population.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:47

But there are a lot of Zulus in Malawi who went there with this arrangement. Yes. Was it in Zwendau? Yeah, in the Zwangenda in the 1800s.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:59

So now you will say Jan van Rybek's niece or nephew or grandchild is more indigenous than grandchildren. I mean, it's think about this, right? The Zulu King goes to Malawi for Engwala. Right? That's a celebration. They recognize that these are their people, same elsewhere, same, and then these people are supposed to be Makwera Kware.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:28

But you I didn't want to interrupt you that much. I want to complete that thought of the practical turning around of a crisis into an opportunity around the crisis seemingly of immigration.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:42

I think it's not just South Africans. Remember, I said apartheid created a limit uh limited mobility. The idea that's been created to South Africans that for a long time to Zimbabweans, we can only survive here. Your entire lot is here. So localization or localism was a pejorative term of a non-global native. Right? And you you you and that to me is a problem because we say to people the world was globalizing, it's opening. But it's open, it's the native must stay in their place. The opening means bring the same foreigners where the former colonizer and others to take. But the native cannot move because immigration laws in Europe and elsewhere and now in America prohibit the native from moving. But in the rest of the continent, where we're saying there's freedom of movement, as and black people generally are the least robust players in emerging economies. By emerging economies, I don't mean in countries that are called emerging economies. I mean pockets of production and reproduction in the economy where people can actually generate new value. So the the the if you if you get a sense, the the we have English teachers now going to China, going from South Africa. They are needed in Burundi. They are needed in many other places where they could get better conditions and et cetera. It seems to me that to go back to your point, African institutions have had one failure: the failure to translate themselves into pan-African institutions with a pan-Africanist ideal and ethos. Let me explain. The problems of Africa cannot be solved through robust technically. There is a politics that must drive. And that is a politics that you can't say African solutions to African problems. And then when there are African problems, you go to Qatar, you go to France, you go to find the solution. But you can't also sit back and say the ideal is there, but we haven't invested in building the institutional wherewithal, the capacity to do so. We have ignored governance crisis. They've mutated into migration crisis, into economic crisis, into, and if you ask us why are we molecadling people who are destroying their countries and creating for their neighbors a signal in challenge? No reason. No real reason. It's toxic uh toxic respect or toxic uh the second thing is we have ignored one point. There is a turnaround happening in global economic thinking about what will drive the economy over global economies over the next 50, 60 years. And that turnaround, the data is regurgitated to us every day. Uh these things called critical minerals. Now, let me give you a sense. We import food in excess of 70 billion dollars. So if you ask, okay, what does Africa need? We need about 68 billion dollars annually, if you are talking about the capital to come in. But man, we're importing food, including from Singapore. Why is this continent with such importing food? I'll tell you why. We imported wheat. Oh, we're importing wheat from Ukraine, apart from Zimbabwe, which was wheat self-sufficient, which is an interesting statistic. How many African countries can produce wheat? Our people consume wheat, we don't produce it. The things we produce, our people don't eat. So our food exports, in comparison to our food imports, there is a deficit. And if you ask Pan-African institutions, they've had uh cut up in Neppard and etc., why are we not moving from a framework to actually just doing this nonsense? Why are we not saying we're going to incentivize these five countries to produce wheat? We're going to make the contribution. They have the farmers, they have the know-how. And so that we stop importing wheat as a basic minimum. And it seems to me that is the fundamental problem. We come up with frameworks, we expect someone else to pay for it. Or someone else to come and do it. But there's a disconnect you referred to. A disconnect between those that govern and the governed, a disconnect between the generation of old people and the young people, a disconnect between the different linguistic blocs on the continent. But now a disconnect between the military class, the civilian class, and et cetera, our young people are actually cheering soldiers as they come to take over power. Because they believe that the soldiers will address corruption, they'll be more visionary. Of course, if you've lived under military rule, you'll say this will end in tears. But why are they cheering it? Because they're saying, you promised us democracy. The only thing it created was opportunities for you to accumulate wealth as a small kick. It didn't create opportunities for the rest of society. So the disconnect between the political model, the economic model, and the social aspiration is always going to produce two things a revolt and an anti-establishment feeling. And when you produce revolt and anti-establishment feeling, you lack the essential ingredient that you need for marshalling a national vision for self-transformation, which is I cannot be patriotic towards I cannot support a leadership whose interests I do not understand. And if this leadership has captured institutions, I cannot support institutions that are captured by a leadership whose interests and loyalty I don't understand. And this for me is what's making us feel uh beyond South Africa and a few countries, there's a Zimbabwean uh politician who said a few uh weeks ago we don't want foreigners. And the response from society was virtual. They had to climb down, right? Because the general ethos that you see amongst ordinary people is let's not create little red herrings. Right? You can't be stealing, and then you blame uh foreigners. But South Africa cannot continue to carry the burden of SADAC. And I think we need to be realistic about this. And South Africa can't solve the burden that it is carrying simply by saying, oh, we don't want you to access healthcare, we don't want you to access, because here is a logic. When you were in university, you will know that foreign students that came here pay double the amount. So the universities that are being forced to become more commercial bring in more foreign students because they pay more money. And if we don't change that model, it will essentially diminish the opportunities if the scholarships don't increase for South Africans. And the resentment grows with it. So there is an entire logic. That's what I was trying to say around how we are approaching not just South Africa, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere, that I actually think that we had an opportunity in creating regional institutions. I think there are a lot of South African engineers, a lot of South African doctors, a lot of South African professionals who actually could earn more, live better, if our diplomacy across the region was a diplomacy that actually says you have a glut of capacities. We have a shortage of capacities. And now we're importing these capacities from Asia, from Europe. We're importing doctors who are not trained in tropical diseases within the context. But you have doctors who are trained who can do diagnosis of the things we're suffering from. Pharmacists. Right? We're buying poison. We don't have enough pharmacists. So a wide range of skills that are needed. I suspect that a pan-Africanism based purely on rhetoric risks discrediting itself. And the Pan-Africanism of Nkrumah was not based purely on rhetorics. He was clear about the economic dimension of that pan-Africanism, which was resource sovereignty. Right? He was clear about the political dimension, which is unity in order to negotiate collectively. He was also clear about the institutional dimensions. I wondered why he was so obsessed about insecurity and security. But seeing what's happening in the Sahel, what's happening in Mozambique, what's happening in the Gulf of Eden and Ogadin, I now understand the fundamental role that security could insecurity plays in facilitating plunder.

unknown 1:21:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:09

Yeah. Thank you so much. I think there has to be a second dimension to this, which is possibly to locate Africa's fortunes in the changing trade uh the global economy. But thanks so much, Brian. Thank you, sir. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you. That's it.