HOW THE CIA OF THE USA OVERTHREW NKRUMAH

Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah

By Paul Lee

Declassified National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency documents provide compelling,' new evidence· of United States government involvement in the 1966 overthrow of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah.

The coup d’état, organized by dissident army officers, toppled the Nkrumah government on Feb. 24, 1966 and was promptly hailed by Western governments, including the U. S.

The documents appear in a collection of diplomatic and  intelligence memos, telegrams, and reports on Africa in Foreign Relations of the United States, the government's ongoing official history of American foreign policy. Prepared by the State Department's Office of the Historian, the latest volumes reflect the overt diplomacy and covert actions of President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration from 1964-68. Though published in November 1999, what they reveal about U.S. complicity in the Ghana coup was only recently noted.

Allegations of American involvement in the putsches arose almost immediately because of the well-known hostility of the U.S. to Nkrumah's socialist orientation and pan-African activism. Nkrumah himself, implicated the U. S. in his overthrow, and warned other African nations about what he saw as an emerging pattern.

"An all-out offensive is being waged against the progressive, independent states,” he wrote in Dark Days in Ghana, his 1969 account of the Ghana coup. "All that has been needed was a small force of disciplined men to seize the key points of the capital city and to arrest the existing political leadership. "

"It has been one of the tasks of the C.I.A. and other similar organisations," he noted, "to discover these potential quislings and traitors in our midst, and to encourage them, by bribery and the promise of political power, to destroy the constitutional government of their countries."

A Spook’s Story.

While charges of U.S. involvement are not new, support for them was lacking until 1978, when anecdotal evidence was provided from an unlikely source - a former CIA case officer, John Stockwell, who reported first-hand testimony in his memoir, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story.

"The inside story came to me," Stockwell wrote, "from an egotistical friend, who had been chief of the [CIA] station in Accra [Ghana] at the time." (Stockwell was stationed one country away in the Ivory Coast.)

Subsequent investigations by The New York Times and Covert Action Information Bulletin identified the station chief as Howard T. Banes, who operated undercover as a political officer in the U.S. Embassy.

This is how the ouster of Nkrumah was handled as Stockwell related. The Accra station was encouraged by headquarters to maintain contact with dissidents of the Ghanaian army for the purpose of gathering intelligence on their activities. It was given a generous budget, and maintained intimate contact with the plotters coup was hatched. So close was the station's involvement that it was; to as a coordinate the recovery of some classified Soviet military equipment by the United States as the coup took place.

According to Stockwell, Banes' sense of initiative knew no bounds. The station even proposed to headquarters through channels that a squad be on hand at the moment of the coup to storm [Communist] Chinese embassy, kill everyone inside, steal their secret records, and blow up the building to cover the facts.

Though the proposal was quashed, inside the CIA headquarters the Accra station was given full, if unofficial credit for the eventual coup, in which eight Soviet advisors were killed. None of this adequately reflected in the agency's records, Stockwell wrote.

Confirmation and Revelation

While the newly-released documents, written by a National Security Council staffer and unnamed CIA officers, confirm the essential outlines set forth by Nkrumah and Stockwell, they also provide additional, and chilling, details about what the U. S. government knew about the plot, when and what it was prepared to do and did do to assist it.

On March 11, 1965, almost a year before the coup, William Mahoney, the U.S. ambassador to Ghana, participated in a candid discussion in Washington, D.C., with CIA Director John A. McCone and the deputy chief of the CIA's Africa division, whose name has been withheld.

Significantly, the Africa division was part of the CIA's directorate of plans, or dirty tricks component, through which the governor pursued its covert policies.

According to the record of their meeting (Document 25 1),1 one was the" Coup d'etat Plot, Ghana." While Mahoney was satisfied

According to the record of their meeting (Document 251), topic one was the “Coup d’etat Plot, Ghana, “While Mahoney was satisfied that popular opinion was running strongly against Nkrumah and the economy of the country was in a precarious state, he was not convinced that the coup d’état, now being planned by Acting Police Commissioner Harlley and Generals Otu and Ankrah, would necessarily take place.

Nevertheless, he confidently and accurately, as it turned out, predicted that one way or another Nkrumah would be out within a year.
Revealing the depth of embassy knowledge of the plot, Mahoney referred to a recent report which mentioned that the top coup conspirators were scheduled to meet on 10 March at which time they          would determine the timing of the coup.

           

However, he warned, because of a tendency to procrastinate, any specific date they set should be accepted with reservations. In a reversal of what some would assume were the traditional roles of an ambassador and the CIA director, McCone asked Mahoney who would most likely, succeed Nkrumah in the event of a coup. Mahoney again correctly forecast the future: Ambassador Mahoney stated that initially, at least, a military junta would take over.

Making it happen:

But Mahoney was not a prophet. Rather, he represented the commitment of the U.S. government, in coordination with other Western governments, to bring about Nkrumah's downfall.

Firstly, Mahoney recommended denying Ghana's forthcoming aid request in the interests of further weakening Nkrumah. He felt that there was little chance that either the Chinese Communists or the Soviets would in adequate measure come to Nkrumah's financial rescue and the British would continue to adopt a hard nose attitude toward providing further assistance to Ghana. At the same time, it appears that U.S. and the U.K. would come to his financial rescue and proposed maintaining current U.S. aid levels and programs because they will endure and be remembered long after Nkrumah goes.

Secondly, Mahoney seems to have assumed the responsibility of increasing the pressure on Nkrumah and exploiting the probable results. This can be seen in his 50-minute meeting with Nkrumah three weeks later.

According to Mahoney's account of their April 2 discussion (Document 252), "at one point Nkrumah, who had been holding his face in his hands looked up and I saw he was crying. With difficulty he said I could not understand the ordeal he had been through during last month.

Recalling that there had been seven attempts on his life." Mahoney did not attempt to discourage Nkrumah's fears, nor did he characterize them as unfounded in his report to his superiors.

"While Nkrumah apparently continues to have personal affection for me," he noted, "he seems as convinced as ever that the US is out to get him. From what he said about assassination attempts in March, it appears he still suspects US involvement. " Of course, the U.S was out to get him. Moreover, Nkrumah was keenly aware of a recent African precedent that made the notion of a U.S.-organized or sanctioned assassination plot plausible namely, the fate of the Congo its first prime minister, his friend Patrice Lumumba.

Nkrumah believed that the destabilization of the Congolese government in 1960 and Lumumba's assassination in 1961 were the work of the "Invisible Government of the U.S.," as he wrote in Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of imperialism, later in 1965.

When Lumumba's murder was announced, Nkrumah told students at the inauguration of an ideological institute that bore his name that his brutal murder should teach them the diabolic depths colonialism can descend.

In his conclusion, Mahoney observed: "Nkrumah gave me the impression of being a badly frightened man. His emotional resources seemed to be running out. As pressures increase, we may expect more hysterical outbursts, many directed against US." It was not necessary to add that he was helping to apply the pressure, nor that any hysterical outbursts by Nkrumah played into the West's projection of him as an unstable dictator, thus justifying his removal.

Robert W. Komer

Smoking Gun

On May 27, 1965, Robert W Komer, a National Security Council staffer, briefed his boss, McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson's special assistant for national security affairs, on the anti-Nkrumah campaign (Document 253).

Korner, who first joined the White House as a member of President Kennedy's NSC staff, had worked as a CIA analyst for 15 years. In 1967, Johnson tapped him to head his hearts-and-minds pacification program in Vietnam. Komer's report establishes that the effort was not only interagency, sanctioned by the White House and supervised by the State Department and CIA, but also intergovernmental, being supported by America's Western allies.

"FYI," he advised, "we may have a pro-Western coup in Ghana soon. Certain key military and police figures have been planning one for  some time, and Ghana's deteriorating economic condition may provide the spark."

"The plotters are keeping us briefed," he noted, "and the State Department thinks we're more on the inside than the British. While we're not directly involved (I'm told), we and other Western countries (including France) have been helping to set up the situation by ignoring Nkrumah's pleas for economic aid. All in all, it looks good."

Komer's reference to not being told if the U.S. was directly involved in the coup plot is revealing and quite likely a wry nod to his CIA past. Among the most deeply ingrained aspects of intelligence tradecraft and culture is plausible deniability, the habit of mind and practice designed to insulate the U. S., and particularly the president, from responsibility for particularly sensitive covert operations.

Komer would have known that orders such as the overthrow of Nkrumah would have been communicated in a deliberately vague opaque, allusive, and indirect fashion, as Thomas Powers noted in the Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA.

It would be unreasonable to argue that the U.S. was not directly involved when it created or exacerbated the conditions that favored coup, and did so for the express purpose of bringing one about.

Truth and Consequences

As it turned out, the coup did not occur for another nine months.

After it did, Komer, now acting special assistant for national security affairs, wrote a congratulatory assessment to the President on March 12, 1966 (Document 260). His assessment of Nkrumah and his successors was telling. "The coup in Ghana," he crowed, "is another example of a fortuitous windfall. Nkrumah was doing more to undermine our interests than any other black African. In reaction to his strongly pro-Communist .leanings, the new military regime is most pathetically pro-Western." In this, Komer and Nkrumah were in agreement. "Where the more subtle methods of economic pressure and political subversion have failed to achieve the desired result, “Nkrumah wrote from exile in Guinea three years later, "there has been resort to violence in order to promote a change of regime and prepare the way for the establishment of a puppet government.

Editorial

AFRICA AND THE ICC

African leaders meeting at the 28th summit of the African Union (AU) have finally agreed that the International Criminal Court does not serve the interest of the peoples of Africa and called on member states to pull out.

Even though it has taken too long to come to this position, it has been expected that African leaders would stand up for their own dignity and that of their citizens.

Throughout its existence, the ICC has focused mainly on Africa, creating the impression that the continent is the worse abuser of rights.

Interestingly whiles African leaders have been hauled before the ICC, leaders like George Bush whose actions and inactions have led to the killing of millions of people have been held up as international statesmen.

The Insight unreservedly endorses the decision of African leaders and encourages all Third World countries to also pull out.

The ICC has nothing to offer the people of Africa.

BARZINI SPEAKS

Comrade Barzini Tandoh, an activist of the International Socialists Organisation (ISO) is billed to speak at the observance of “Ghana’s Day of Shame” on Friday, February 24, 2017 at 4:30pm.

The event which will take place at the Teachers’ Hall in Accra, will be chaired by Comrade Kyeretwie Opoku, Convener of the Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG).

Other speakers are Dr. Yao Graham, Co-ordinator of the Third World Network (TWN) and Comrade Albie Walls of the All Africa People’s Revolutionary Party (APRP).

The event has been organised consistently By the SFG every year for the last 15 years.

It has served as a rallying point for left individuals and organisations over the years.

Speakers at previous observations have included, Dr. General Nasser Adam of the University of Ghana, Professors Atta Britwum and Raymond Osei of the University of Cape Coast and the late Dr. Tajudeen Abdul Raheen of the Pan African Movement.

Organisers say they have invited the trade unions, youth and student groups, the diplomatic community and the political parties.

FDA To Monitor Palm Oil Use In Schools

By Bertha Badu-Agyei

As part of their planned activities, the Food and Drugs Authority

(FDA) would monitor palm oil used for cooking in schools in the eastern region to ensure its safety for consumption.

Mr Samuel Kwakye, the Regional Director of the FDA, who was speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency said although the contamination of palm oil with sudan 4 dye, a chemical, considered to be a cancer agent, had reduced considerably, there was the need to focus on institutions used palm oil in large quantities.

He said the move had become necessary because of large student population in the senior high schools across the region, where palm oil was supplied in large quantities for cooking.

Mr Kwakye said apart from that, monitoring would also be carried out at all the palm oil production sites and the open marketsthrough testing and analyzing samples to prevent the use of the deadly chemical.

Other activities planned for the year, he noted would include; monitoring of sachet water and herbal medicine production sites, adding that those two industries needed to comply with several regulations and laws of the FDA to protect consumers.

He said the FDA had noted with concern, the influx of herbal medicines, in the open markets and vehicles in the region and Koforidua especially and indicated their readiness to descend on all the illegal productions in that industry.

Mr Kwakye, explained that because herbal drugs had direct implications on the body just like all drugs, it was important for the components of each drug to be tested to ascertain the efficacy for human consumption and the environment under which they were produced to avoid contamination.

He said they would also step up their sensitization and education to create awareness for consumers to appreciate the need to read information on products to ascertain its safety, and to report any unusual detection to the FDA for action.

Government asked to extend NHIS to Orthopedic patients

Kweku Agyemang Manu, Minister of Health

By Julius K. Satsi

Professor Oheneba Boachie-Adjei, President of the Foundation of Orthopaedics and Complex Spine (FOCOS), has called on the government to extend the National Health Insurance Scheme to cover the treatment of orthopaedic care.

Prof Boachie who is also Professor Emeritus of Orthopaedic Surgery said: “If the cost of treatment is GH? 10,000.00 for instance, the NHIS could decide to take up GH? 2000.00 as the patient takes care of the rest, which we can help to make part payment and start a payment plan.”

Prof Boachie-Adjei made the call during a media tour to the FOCOS Orthopaedic Hospital located at Pantang in Accra as he decried the country’s low performance or attention to health care.

He enjoined Ghanaians to make use of the FOCOS Orthopaedic Hospital in Ghana without having to travel outside.

Prof Boachie-Adjei said the FOCOS Orthopaedic Hospital was open to solve all spinal and joint disorders – treatment hitherto done only in the United States.

He encouraged Ghanaians to take the treatment in Ghana because it was much less than outside the country to salvage musculoskeletal disorders.

In an interaction the Ghana News Agency, Prof Boachie-Adjei called on Ghanaians to embrace charity to help people with spinal and joint disorders to be treated due to the high cost of treatment.

Prof Boachie-Adjei who started the FOCOS Hospital with volunteers from both Ghana and other countries has been treating the disorder in the country since 2012.

He associated musculoskeletal conditions in the country to the poor infrastructure, behaviour and the low level of education for especially sitting posture as well as poor squatting and bending habits.

Dr Irene Wulff, the Head of Anaesthesia at FOCOS Orthopaedic Hospital, advised Ghanaians to undertake regular checkups for early detection and prevention of spinal and joint disorders.

Dr Wulff expressed gratitude to both international and local sponsors who have been very helpful to the cause of providing orthopaedic care in the country and the sub-Saharan Africa.

Since its opening with the state-of-the arts facilities and international team of medical volunteers, the FOCOS Orthopaedic Hospital has performed more than 1,000 complex spine and joint surgeries and has treated more than 27,000 patients.

The facility, which spends more than two million dollars on electricity annually, receives both local and international patients for evaluation and treatment.

Prof Boachie has expertise in scoliosis (the lateral curving of the spine usually developing in pre-and early adolescent), kyphosis (an abnormal backward curve to the vertebral column) and spine reconstruction in both adults/paediatric patients as well render general medical care.

The Hospital performs world-class surgeries to correct club foot, complex spine- deformities and degenerative as well joint replacement trauma.

It also provides Out-Patient Department (OPD), surgical, physiotherapy and rehabilitation, diagnostic services as well as community pharmacy and nutrition and dietary services. 

The Hospital is a project of the FOCOS; a non-profit organisation established in 1998 by Prof Boachie-Adjei as an auxiliary of the foundation.

FOCOS Hospital is sustained by donations, sponsorships and revenue generated internally through its outpatients and surgical operations.  

It intends to be an independent, orthopaedics and rehabilitation hospital providing free care to needy patients.

Promoting women’s rights the highlight of Dlamini Zuma’s legacy

Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma

By Liesl Louw-Vaudran 

The AU Commission chairperson has stepped down, leaving behind a mixed bag of failures and successes.

On Tuesday 31 January, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC), sat on the podium facing African heads of state attending the bi-annual AU Summit in Addis Ababa for the last time.

After four-and-a-half years at the helm of the organisation, Dlamini Zuma has stepped down. All went well and heads of state reached a consensus, her successor was elected at the 28th Summit, which started last week with preliminary meetings.

Dlamini Zuma returns to complicated politics back home in South Africa – though some say she never really left – where she is considered one of the frontrunners to replace President Jacob Zuma as head of the African National Congress and eventually the country. Her legacy and competencies has become the subject of much debate. Will her time spent in the prestigious AU position stand her in good stead in the succession race?

Dlamini Zuma vowed to turn the AU around and promote a ‘people-centred’ organisation

For millions of Africans, the AU is a distant organisation that holds meetings and drafts documents in Addis Ababa, but with little or no effect on the ground. Dlamini Zuma’s task at the AU was to show that the organisation really matters. Following her election in 2012, she vowed to turn the AU around and promote a ‘people-centred’ organisation that would make a difference to ordinary Africans. Not an easy task altogether.

A cornerstone of Dlamini Zuma’s plan was the launch of Agenda 2063 – her blueprint for a ‘peaceful and prosperous Africa’. While there was limited communication on anything else she did during her term, Agenda 2063 was popularised through massive campaigns and road shows. Pretty much every AU official has a T-shirt or a hat with ‘Agenda 2063’ branding. But for now, this remains a blueprint and is largely a political project. It will be up to member states and her successors to implement it.

During her term, the former South African minister made enemies on many fronts at the AU. Her near-absence from several burning issues, such as ensuring free and fair elections and mediating in peace talks, has certainly tarnished her legacy at the AU. Dlamini Zuma was seldom seen on the spot when crises erupted, and rare was the interview in which she’d take a strong stand on current affairs in Africa. In fact, she gave very few media interviews on any issue.

She was also strongly criticised for not spending enough time at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa. The decision to deliver a ‘State of the Continent’ address in Durban, South Africa, rather than in Addis Ababa at the end of 2016, is indicative of this.

Meanwhile, Dlamini Zuma’s decision not to run for another term at the AU gives rise to questions about her commitment. Four years is not a long time, and much of her term was spent elaborating the ambitious Agenda 2063, – a project that also has its detractors. Some say a 50-year plan is too far into the future and that long-term socio-economic development shouldn’t be prioritised over more immediate issues. And much work remains in uniting the various linguistic and regional blocs within the AU, which are still often at loggerheads.

However, many positive developments also happened at the AU during Dlamini Zuma’s tenure. Her spokesperson Jacob Enoh Eben told ISS Today that decisions around self-financing of the AU; continental integration, with the launch of an e-passport for Africans; and kickstarting important reforms are an integral part of her legacy. She also ‘increased the visibility and reputation of the AU as a continental and global player,’ he says.

Clearly, on some of these issues, Dlamini Zuma did play an important role, but in many instances, it wasn’t hers alone. For example, she prioritised the self-financing of the AU – an organisation that is still heavily reliant on outside donors, like the European Union. She emphasised this on numerous occasions, and strongly supported the plan – which was adopted by heads of state at the 27th Summit in Kigali last year – to finance the AU through a 2% levy on imports.

Yet this might have happened regardless of her support. The AU has long realised the importance of ensuring its autonomy, especially given the pressure of dwindling aid funding.

Before Dlamini Zuma took up office in October 2012, expectations were high that she would be able to bring much-needed reform to the AU as an institution – much like she did in her portfolio of home affairs in South Africa. It was hoped she could turn the organisation around and make it far more effective.

Certainly, reforms such as video conferencing; more thorough financial audits; and curbing unnecessary travel by AU staff were put in place. Her tenure also saw the launch of an AU Leadership Academy to train staff.

Drawn up by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and a team of experts, a new plan to reform the AU Commission is also on the table and will be discussed at the upcoming 28th AU Summit. However, the Commission still suffers from huge problems such as a lack of young professionals (the majority of AU employees are civil servants and the average age is 50), and a lack of capacity to carry out funded programmes.

Where Dlamini Zuma has really made a difference and did show some impact, however, was her commitment to promoting women’s rights in Africa. Even though some would argue that this is a ‘soft issue’ and perhaps not the core mandate of the AU, it is a worthy and urgent cause given the dire situation faced by many women in Africa.

For two years in a row, the AU theme, discussed at its bi-annual summits, focused on women. This didn’t please everyone. ‘We will definitely not have another woman chairperson at the AU – she clashed with too many people,’ one North African diplomat in South Africa recently quipped during a discussion about the succession race for the AU’s top job.

But Dlamini Zuma continued with her campaigns regardless. The most visible of these initiatives has been the drive to include more women in political participation in Africa, to try and highlight the plight of women in war situations by appointing a special envoy for women, peace and security, and the campaign to stem child marriage. The latter might be the one campaign that succeeds in making a dramatic difference to the lives of millions of girls, even in the short term.

According to statistics released by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), there are up to 125 million girls in Africa under the age of 18 who are already married – some before the age of 15. In some countries, like Mozambique and Zambia, the number of girls below 18 who are already married is close to 50%.

This has a devastating effect on the lives of adolescent girls. They are forced to leave school, suffer health problems due to bearing children at such a young age, and are often helpless against abuse from their much older husbands.

During her tenure, Dlamini Zuma attempted to persuade governments to enforce legislation and international agreements on combating child marriage. She targeted heads of state and criss-crossed the continent to discuss the topic with them. In November 2015, the AU also organised the first summit in Zambia on this issue.

Still – has the campaign made any real difference? Or is it just all talk and no action?

So far, the number of young girls getting married is slowly dropping, thanks to campaigns like that of the AU, but also global campaigns by the likes of UNICEF. The decrease in the number of child marriages is mostly in urban areas and among the more affluent.

The campaign is also slowly filtering through to local level in individual countries, and will hopefully see traditional leaders and cultural groups moving away from this practice. At the end of last year, both Nigeria and Liberia had joined the AU campaign, which has now reached 18 African countries.

If these figures drop even further and more girls go to school instead of being forced into marriage, it will be, in part, thanks to these campaigns. Dlamini Zuma’s tenacity seems to have paid off on at least one score.

African labour and social militancy, Marxist framing and revolutionary movement-building

Franz Fanon

By Patrick Bond

It is a great period to be a revolutionary activist in Africa. Yet the sense of stop-start progress and regress in so many sites of struggle reflects in part how poorly the working-class, poor, progressive middle class, social movements and other democrats have made alliances. The African uprising against neoliberalism hasn’t yet generated a firm ideology. In this case the best strategy would be a critical yet non-dogmatic engagment with the various emerging forces on the left.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik’s victory in Russia. It set the standard, at least initially (before Joseph Stalin took over in the mid-1920s), for a party of workers and other oppressed people capturing state power. At least briefly, it confirmed the potential for shop-floor and grassroots base-building even within a repressive national regime (the Czar), then a jumping of scale to participation in an intermediate semi-democratic state (the Mensheviks), and then national economic control and massive international influence.

Crucially, the 1917 events in Russia were guided at the critical moment by a revolutionary party, which reaped the whirlwind because it had a clear ideology, a vanguard of advanced cadres and steely leadership (especially Lenin and Trotsky) able to grasp the opportunities. The vast masses of unorganised peasants, the small half-hearted middle class and the army and police did not prevent the proletariat’s victory, notwithstanding being outnumbered and immature compared to the huge working classes elsewhere in Europe.

After its rapid degeneration, the Soviet Union’s errors were explained as due either to a democracy deficit and stifling bureaucracy (as a chastened former defender, SA Communist Party leader Joe Slovo argued in 1990) or (as Pallo Jordan famously rebutted a month later) to the “class character of the Soviet model” which crushed workers’ and society’s self-emancipation. The gaping difference in those narratives endures today.

Meanwhile, contemporary power exercised by shopfloor and grassroots activists in Africa is typically under-rated. There are various ways to measure this power, including police statistics,[2] journalistic accounts and business executive surveys. For example, the world’s protest activity is recorded in the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), initiated by George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, drawing upon millions of media reports. Latest data from November 2016 (not typical because of Donald Trump’s election and India’s currency controversy) show Africa well represented: hot spots included Tunisia, Libya, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and South Africa.

Additional sources of ‘Big Data’ on social unrest include the US military’s Minerva programme, which has a project – Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (Acled) – tracking Africa’s violent riots and protests. Compared to 2011, when North African (‘Arab Spring’) protests reflected a dramatic increase on prior years, many more protests across Africa were recorded five years later. While 2016 appeared to have slightly fewer than 2015, there is no question that in most places on the continent, the rate of protesting was far higher than at the peak of the commodity super-cycle in 2011.

Another dataset – based on subjective impressions not objective event reports – is the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual survey of 14 000 business executives in 138 countries that informs its Global Competitiveness Report.[2] One survey question relates to labour-employee relations, and whether these are “generally confrontational or generally cooperative” on a scale of 1-7. In the 2016-17 report, the WEF found the most cooperative labour movements were in Norway, Switzerland, Singapore, Denmark and Sweden (scoring above 6.1).

The least cooperative was, for the fourth year in a row, the South African proletariat (with 2.5). Other African countries with very militant workforces are Chad (3.5), Tunisia (3.6), Liberia (3.7), Mozambique (3.7), Morocco (3.7), Lesotho (3.7), Ethiopia (3.8), Tanzania (3.8), Algeria (3.8), Burundi (3.8), and Zimbabwe (4.0). These dozen were in the top 30 countries in terms of labour militancy. The most placid African workforces were found in Rwanda (5.3) at 18^thmost cooperative, Mauritius (4.8) and Uganda (4.6). In general, African workers are the least cooperative of any aggregated in the world’s continents.

At a time mainstream observers have memed, “Africa Rising!”, surely a better term is that Africans are uprising against Africa Rising mythology. This uprising is by no means a revolutionary situation, nor even a sustained rebellion. One of the main reasons is the failure of protesters to become a movement, one with a coherent ideology to face the problems of their times with the stamina and insight required.

Frantz Fanon himself complained in Toward the African Revolution, “For my part the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles, the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology.” Amilcar Cabral agreed: “The ideological deficiency within the national liberation movements, not to say the total lack of ideology – reflecting as this does an ignorance of the historical reality which these movements claim to transform – makes for one of the greatest weaknesses in our struggle against imperialism, if not the greatest weakness of all.”

Was Numsa’s insurgency just a ‘moment’ – or a future movement?

Within South Africa, the largest union – with 330 000 members confirmed at its December 2016 congress – remains the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa).[3] What many observers have remarked upon – often critically (e.g. most writers in this week’s Pambazuka News) – is Numsa’s intense rhetorical militancy, in the wake of its bruising battle with labour nationalists and Communists affiliated to the African National Congress (ANC), as well as with “Middle Class Marxists.”

To put the fierce exchanges between various fractions of the South African Marxist left into context, consider some recent history. Although there are many targets of its ire ranging from white monopoly capital to the independent left intelligentsia, Numsa’s most decisive war has been with former comrades in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and its intellectual guide, the SA Communist Party (SACP), which began in earnest during the last Numsa congress, in December 2013. My own overwhelming impression from that event was how 1400 delegates (mostly shop-stewards) drove the union rapidly leftwards, to the point of formally calling for President Jacob Zuma to resign.

It was an extraordinary U-turn, given Numsa’s strong support for Zuma to replace President Thabo Mbeki in 2006-08. Like many in the Cosatu-SACP circuit, the expectation was that in exchange for that support, Numsa would benefit from a radical leftward turn in macro-economic policy and much greater state subsidies to improve working people’s livelihoods.

As some of us grimly predicted, however, Zuma dutifully stuck with the neo-liberal project and inevitably broke working-class and Communist hearts. Inevitably, anti-Zuma grumbling reached the point of active protest. And so it is not surprising to hear Zuma’s desperation ‘talk left’ gimmicks, such as last November in Pietermaritzburg when he described the BRICS as an apparent distracting tactic: “It is a small group but very powerful. [The West] did not like BRICS. China is going to be number one economy leader… [Western countries] want to dismantle this BRICS. We have had seven votes of no confidence in South Africa. In Brazil, the president was removed.” (The following week in Parliament, Zuma was asked during the president’s Question Time by an opposition legislator: “Which Western countries were you referring to? How did they plan on dismantling BRICS? And what will the effect of their actions be on our economic diplomacy with these Western countries over the next decade?” Zuma replied, according to the Hansard, “I’ve forgotten the names of these countries. [Laughter.] How can he think I’m going to remember here? He he he he.”)

My sense in December 2013 was that a key reason for Numsa’s revolt against the Alliance was the still-strong memory of the August 2012 Marikana massacre of 34 platinum mineworkers who demanded a living wage of $1520/month. Numsa delegates were literally stunned into silence when they viewed Rehad Desai’s film “Miners Shot Down,” which later won the Emmy Award for Best International Documentary.

The seeds of this radicalisation were sewn when Irvin Jim became leader in 2008. Like any good union, Numsa has had to direct enormous resources into the bread-and-butter activities of member support that any force in organised labour must promote before doing serious politics. While there are always setbacks along these lines, Numsa has nevertheless made remarkable steps away from labour corporatism – the Alliance that has served workers so poorly since 1994 – and towards independent militancy. Since 2008, Numsa leaders and cadres have:

·         restored the internal Numsa left’s strength (after the union’s self-destructive Mbekite era under Silumko Nondwangu’s leadership);

·         pushed forceful new arguments into the public sphere about the character of the ANC neoliberal bloc’s long-term (transMandela-Mbeki-Zuma) class betrayal;

·         helped identify where SACP and Cosatu forces were most weak in defending the ANC, and thereby opened a healthy debate culminating in the 2013 Numsa special congress where the first call to toss out Zuma was made;

·         survived what many feared might be a serious (and KwaZulu-Natal-centric ethnicist) challenge by former Numsa president Cedric Gina’s new metalworkers’ union;

·         won a five-week national metals strike in 2014 and coped with massive deindustrialisation pressures ever since, as the prices of aluminium and steel hit rock bottom and as dumping became a fatal threat to the main smelters;

·         built up membership to today’s 330 000;

·         pushed the political contradictions to break-point within Cosatu by 2015, resulting in not just Numsa’s expulsion but also the firing of the extremely popular general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, who leaned too far left for other Cosatu leaders’ comfort;

·         put members on the street in fairly big numbers (e.g. around 30 000 protesting corruption just over a year ago, in spite of a clumsy breakdown in alliances with other groups in the more liberal reaches of civil society);

·         maintained member – and broader proletarian – discontent with the class character of specific rulers, including Zuma, Ramaphosa, Gordhan and Patel (even though the latter two were at the 2016 congress unsuccessfully attempting to sweet-talk Numsa), so as not to be co-opted into playing a role (again) in the 2017 ANC electoral congress’ internecine battles (as is Cosatu on behalf of Ramaphosa);

·         knit together Cosatu dissidents into a rough bloc (at peak having nine unions) and then set up a process for the announcement (May 2016) and launch (sometime this year) of a new workers’ federation; and

·         quite realistically opened the door for a new workers’ party (and this is just a partial list.)

The latter two soon-to-be accomplishments – a new federation under the leadership of Vavi and a potential workers party – are the main projects on the horizon. The United Front project rose briefly in 2013-14 and then crashed by 2016 (for important reasons that this article cannot properly integrate), alienating many logical allies and losing respected staff in the process, as well.

And although Vavi represents a broad, open-minded socialist current that spans from NDR to radical civil society, Numsa has recently emphasised a definition of its own particular ‘line’ regarding a National Democratic Revolution. That line, with its category of a “Marxist-Leninist trade union” prior to a vanguardist workers’ party, is dismissed as “rigid Marxism-Leninism!” by independent-left intellectuals, to which Numsa ideologues reply: “useless petit-bourgeois radical-chic parasites!” or words to that effect. This is the extent to which certain ships are passing in the South African night.

But if we are frank, Numsa has a massive vessel plowing through choppy waves above deep, torturous currents in unchartered waters, and the left intelligentsia occupies a dinghy limited to well-known shallows. (The latter site is where someone like me typically splashes, as conditions haven’t matured yet in South Africa to play anything much more than what becomes a substitutionist or worse, ventriloquist function, instead of what can be termed a properly “scholactivist” role.)

However, what if by the time of the 2019 election the Numsa vanguard finds a way to run alongside (parallel) or in direct coalition (or even merger) with the country’s main leftist party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)? Recall that after its formation in 2013, the EFF went from 6% of the vote in the 2014 election to 8% of the vote in the municipal poll of 2016, enough to throw the ANC out of the Johannesburg and Pretoria city councils, as the EFF coalesced with the centre-right Democratic Alliance. (This unhappy marriage could result in divorce before 2019, probably amidst EFF and ANC contestation over an inevitable upturn in township ‘service delivery’ protests.)

With the ANC down from its 2004 high of 69% in a national election to its 2016 low of 54% in the municipal poll, it is quite conceivable that in narrow electoral terms, enormous potential exists for a left party to play a decisive role in national politics, as did the EFF in Johannesburg and Pretoria municipalities. However, if the self-declared Marxist-Leninist leaders of both Numsa and the EFF ever find each other in coalition, could what is termed the ‘Numsa moment’ become a Numsa-EFF movement?

This scenario is not looked on favourably by many on the independent left, because of a general concern that EFF leader Julius Malema – whose record of ANC patronage in Limpopo Province still chills leftist spines – will take the EFF’s 10+% voting share in 2019 back into the ANC in the event that (as in August 2016 in Joburg and Tshwane) he becomes a kingmaker. This scenario assumes the ANC vote falls below 50% and that all opposition parties gang up to deny the ruling party any further national spoils. Malema told an audience last year that if such an opportunity arises in 2019, he might first destroy the ANC then rebuild it in alliance with the EFF. But if it is either Cyril Ramaphosa, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma or Zweli Mkhize running the ANC, that hijack won’t be easy to sustain.

In such a scenario, the antidote would be a workers’ party ally or influence on the EFF, to prevent regeneration of neoliberal nationalism with new elites. This is what some in Numsa would argue is their historical role, once the petit-bourgeois radicalism of the EFF peaks and retreats into populism – a stance for which I hope they will be proved wrong. But we really have no way to judge ahead of 2019 given the unpredictable character of left politics in South Africa. If matters were more predictable, I’ll conclude, the conditions for much stronger movement building – a “United Resistance” of left forces, as it’s now being termed in the United States against Trump fascism – would have already generated a bottom-up communism, instead of the residual Capital-C Communism that still dominates in so many terrains of real politik.

The deep roots and fragile surface of South African communism

To illustrate the conundrum – and by way of further vital context – think too what it means to have fought these battles first and foremost, as did key Numsa leaders, in the Eastern Cape Communist Party tradition. Bearing that in mind, the M-L rhetoric makes sense, because it appears to be the case that:

·         the SACP-within-the-ANC is in its dying days (with continual rumours of Party leaders in the Cabinet suffering a forthcoming purge, and with the youth putting walk-out pressure on the party bosses), and

·         Cosatu’s failures on nearly all policy and political fronts could take several important member unions to the brink not only of demanding that Zuma be replaced as president (he probably won’t be before 2019) but also of breaking the Alliance within a year or so.

If these are the most proximate political processes looming, then the Numsa rhetoric might be seen not as M-L dogmatism, but instead as careful positioning to capture a great many cadres who are now finally giving up on the ANC. (Some Numsa shopstewards already moved into the EFF in the last election.) The Numsa political push into the hearts and minds of a prestigious liberation movement is something that in Zimbabwe was tried – and that failed – in the case of the Movement for Democratic Change, which also began as a workers’ party (in January 1999 at the Chitungwiza Working People’s Convention) but quickly moved to the right. To pull at the ANC from the left using its own NDR language may well be successful, as an alternative to the political alienation faced by so many working-class activists whose mass political experience is grounded in traditional loyalty to the ANC.

Numsa’s historic role, in my view, is to continually remind a huge ANC NDR-supporting constituency that there is a logical explanation for SACP-Cosatu failures within the Alliance: namely, that the Party and labour leaders became fat-cats indistinguishable from the bosses. (This is a fate some observers accuse Numsa leaders of reproducing, too, with the ‘social distance’ between leadership and workers still vast, just as is the distance between Numsa workers – many of whom have struggled hard for five-digit monthly salaries – and the poorest South Africans.) So the Numsa rhetoric is quite clear. Its simple message is that the NDR and two-stage revolution were correct as conceptualisation and strategy, but that the wrong people were given the task of implementation, because the ANC, Cosatu and SACP together grew far too comfortable maintaining the neoliberal nationalist status quo. 

Now, that line of argument may not readily appeal to most Pambazuka readers considering these sentences, fair enough. Still, bear in mind that the NDR tune remains especially appealing to those who still consider the ANC’s pre-1994 populist nationalism to be South Africa’s most prestigious political project. Even though we are nearly 23 years past ‘liberation,’ this tradition retains deep roots. And it is likely that, with its new leadership (probably either Dlamini-Zuma or Ramaphosa), the ANC can continue to maintain its 50%+ majority in the next election and beyond.

So while some readers may have big problems in principle and theory with the NDR argument and the sell-out thesis, still, it is hard to dispute in empirical terms. The ‘first stage’ – the ‘political kingdom’ – was substantively reached in 1994. A ‘second stage’ – economic justice – is long overdue. And the persuasiveness of the SA comprador class – ranging across the main intra-ANC divide (i.e., from the Zuma-Gupta ‘Zupta’ patronage machine to the neoliberal Treasury bloc) – represents the main barrier to the revolution’s second stage.

With South Africa in a profound state of crisis, it is tragic that in spite of Numsa and EFF efforts as well as SACP-Cosatu anti-capitalist rhetoric, only two narratives dominate the political space: first, Zupta and second, neoliberal good-governance. Hence, breaking through with tried and tested NDR-speak might well work, and leaders like Malema, Jim and Vavi certainly know their constituencies far better than I do.

To address the left intelligentsia, have those middle-class Marxists (like me) made profound errors that could distract Numsa from gathering its strength? Of course. Every initiative by South Africa’s far left has failed to attract working-class membership, much less leadership. Unlike the North African cases in 2011, the mix of that intelligentsia, progressive NGOs, social movements, frustrated citizens and creative labour activists in South Africa have not found anything like the mass support of EFF and Numsa.

It may not be the 2019 election, but in South Africa there will be a point when looking beyond the rhetorical battleground and the immediate cadre-gathering becomes far more important than the current conjuncture. At a time much closer to a crunch moment, when alliances are really vital to make, might the masses from Numsa workplaces take to the streets in combination – not contradiction – with the left movements’ regroupment trajectory?

After all, what an excellent period to be an activist (or like me, an armchair academic) promoting justice in South Africa:

·         Numsa hasn’t folded to repression and divide-and-conquer and still holds up the strongest class challenge to capitalist power; the Food and Allied Workers Union walked away from Cosatu, and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union wasn’t beat back into oblivion during the 2014-16 mining crisis;

·         the working class as a whole is still considered the world’s most militant at a time SA inequality has soared and the capitalist class is considered (by PricewaterhouseCoopers) to be the world’s most corrupt;

·         the EFF have grown stronger and less politically erratic;

·         the new terrain of Gauteng urban politics (where EFF and ANC will likely compete to support – if not catalyse – community protests) will get very interesting as contradictions continue to emerge;

·         communities continue protesting at very high rates over service non-delivery or excessive pricing or politicians’ arrogance, notwithstanding the state’s ever-stronger repressive and surveillance techniques;

·         although student movement momentum recently faltered after a spectacular 2015 national debut, they have lots more potential for future mobilisations and alliances; and

·         social movements, the Right2Know coalition, women, LGBTI activists, Equal Education, Treatment Action Campaign and other protesters make their voices heard and often win important battles along the way.

For 2017, can the infrastructure supporting all of this (even including support structures inhabited by obscure academics and others reading this) expand at the rate needed, so as to move forward as quickly as reality will demand?

Conclusion: a whirlwind to catch

The African uprisings since 2011 have taught progressives that in the pro-democracy and social justice scenarios of mass demonstrations that made several countries so fertile for a change of state power – Gambia (2017), Burkina Faso (2014), Senegal (2012) and Tunisia (2011), for example – the moment of change comes without warning. There is typically a build-up in social grievances and an explosion. The aftermath includes a profound threat of counter-revolution, which in Burkina Faso was repelled in 2015, but which in Egypt and Libya have been successful in suppressing democratic, progressive social movements since 2011 (in both cases with Western imperial aid and arms to the counter-revolution).

Will South Africa find itself, as Moeletsi Mbeki predicted, facing “Tunisia Day” – a kind of joyous (yet threatening to elites) uprising such as January 2011 – as early as 2020? Can Africans update the threat, to encompass the extraordinary advances that have become evident in post-dictator regimes, or in sites like South Africa itself where the overthrow of (Moeletsi’s brother) Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS-denialist policies in 2004 raised life expectancy from 52 to 62 thanks to nearly four million people getting medicines for free?

The sense of stop-start progress and regress in so many sites, including South Africa, reflects in part how poorly the working-class, poor, progressive middle class, social movements and other democrats have made alliances. The Africans uprising against the neoliberal Africa Rising strategy of export- and resource-dependency, hasn’t yet generated a firm ideology. Such an ideology was much more apparent when in the 1960s-70s the phrase “self-reliance” accompanied much leftist discourse. The Lagos Plan of Action even reflected this ideological approach.

It may be that an eco-socialism associated with Ubuntu philosophy and deglobalising economies will emerge. It may be that some uniquely South African version of the Marxist-Leninist framing will come from Numsa. Nothing can be readily predicted in the current conjuncture. The only strategy it seems to me worth following is a non-dogmatic appreciation of the various forces, so that whatever principles, analysis, strategies, tactics and alliances that do emerge on the left can be treated with both respect and comradely critique.

The debate over Numsa may not yet have arrived at that healthier stage of inquiry, but at least there is a debate and an inquiry – the first steps to reclaiming some sort of profound ideological breakthrough so that the pessimism of the Fanon and Cabral warnings becomes a genuine Afro-optimism worthy of the ongoing struggles by so many African activists.

* Patrick Bond is Professor of Political Economy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

End notes

[1] These are often unreliable, as regularly demonstrated by University of Johannesburg researchers Jane Duncan, Peter Alexander, Carin Runcimann and Trevor Ngwane.

[2] This is “the longest-running and most extensive survey of its kind, capturing the opinions of business leaders around the world on a broad range of topics for which statistics are unreliable, outdated, or non-existent for many countries.” Although Africa is the continent with least coverage, at least several dozen executives were surveyed in 34 countries, with Rwanda’s survey pool of 120 the highest in Africa (the US had 485 executives surveyed), and Gabon’s 33 was the lowest in Africa and internationally. Of interest to us, the specific question each year is “In your country, how do you characterize labor-employer relations? 1 = generally confrontational; 7 = generally cooperative.”

[3] Disclosure: I attended the Numsa congress as an occasional volunteer to the union in the “Friends of Numsa” category so the next pages are written with at least some sort of bias, albeit with no role in crafting the M-L language discussed below.

THE COLLAPSE OF CAPITALISM

By Edgar Hardcastle

There is a notion widely held in certain circles that capitalism is in a state of collapse, or at least, that its collapse is imminent; and this is interpreted to mean that the existing system of society will reach a point at which the production and distribution of commodities will cease, and the whole of the mechanism of Society will fail any longer to operate. Those who propagate this conception naturally accept the view that the tactics of the working class organisation must be framed with this collapse always in mind.

The illustration given recently by one of them—Mr. Palme Dutt—was the comparison of the present social order to a house admitted to be in a far from perfect condition. Of the occupants there was a section which considered redecoration and repair to be sufficient, while another section thought that nothing less than demolition and building anew would meet the needs of the situation. These sections represent the reformists and revolutionaries respectively. Now, however, the war and the Russian revolution have brought new factors to bear, and the dispute has been removed to another plane, the only question now being not whether to destroy, but how to rebuild. The house is said, in fact, to have collapsed about the ears of the dwellers through its own rottenness.

This sounds plausible indeed, but argument by analogy is dangerous. Has capitalism collapsed? and to what extent have the war and the Russian revolution altered, apart from having merely intensified, the previous structural defects?

The Third International lays it down that “The present is the period of the breakdown of Capitalism,” but does the evidence support this or do the “Third’s” adherents act as if it were true? The answer is decidedly no.

In America Max Eastman (Communist) says “This statement is not true of the United States in the same immediate sense that it may be true of Europe. We are not in the period of the breakdown of Capitalism . . . ” (Liberator, October.)

He continues: “We (the American Communists) are employing tactics that could never be appropriate in any other period.” Now, the American Communist Party has “gone west,” and it is generally agreed that part, if not all, of the cause of their failure, was their attempt to apply a policy based on a condition of affairs which did not exist. Does that support the view that Capitalism is in collapse?

In Canada, which was wildly alleged to be on the verge of revolution at the time of the post-war Winnipeg strikes, a general election has just taken place which has led to the defeat of the conservative party by avowedly capitalist Liberals; the election having been fought on a tariff issue. There has not, apparently, been one Socialist returned.

In Australia, despite its heavy roll of unemployed, and its wage reductions, the "Proletarian” (Melbourne, 7th November) writes: "But until the full force of the present world depression reaches our shores the Australian working class will not be very susceptible to Communist propaganda.”

In Europe, where the full effect of the trade depression has been felt, does the economic system show any noticeable lack of vitality, or do the capitalists act in any but their accustomed aggressive manner towards the workers? In spite of the enormous amount of unemployment, curtailment of production, and relative overstocking of markets, are there any strikingly new factors to be considered after one has allowed for the expected after-war depression, the destruction of the war and the blockade, the new political frontiers and the chaos of the exchanges, all of them more or less normal phases of capitalism or the usual experiences after previous wars?

The struggle for markets may have been intensified, but does this call for new revolutionary tactics?

What of the Russian revolution? Here, again, the importance has been overestimated. The replacing of Czarist feudal Russia by a capitalistic republic even if the latter remains permanently under the Bolshevik Government, is the net result of the revolution, and it has only loomed so large because of the more or less accidental circumstances that it was the Bolsheviks who were brought into prominence by it.

If capitalism were in collapse would the Bolsheviks be relying on capitalist enterprise to rebuild Russia, a process which they admit will take decades at least? Would our own Communist Party feel the need to ally itself with the Labour Party to get the latter into power? The fact is the capacity of the capitalist system to recover from its depression has been under-rated and the Communists have in practice been forced to discard their theory. From the day when Marx and Engels wrote “There is a spectre haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism" there have continually been people who have under-estimated, as well as others like Hyndman, who never understood, but were always seeing revolution imminent in every momentary pause or set-back in capitalistic development.

In the minds, too, of some of its adherents, this theory of collapse is nothing but a failure to appreciate the Marxian viewpoint. The idea of an actual physical stoppage of production is not Marxian. Societies do not collapse like jerry-built houses. Marx wrote :—"The knell of capitalist private property sounds when the monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with it, and under it,” but as Boudin particularly points out (Theoretical System of Karl Marx) "He does not say that production under the old system must become impossible before a revolution sets in" and again, "as far as the purely mechanical breakdown of capitalism is concerned . . . it is not a physical breakdown, as would be necessary in order to exclude the necessary intervention of conscious human activity, but rather a moral bankruptcy. Certainly there is absolutely nothing in the capitalist system to prevent it from relapsing into a sort of new feudalism or slavery . . .  ” (p. 253). What Marx did mean, therefore, by the idea of the breakdown of Capitalism was the working-out of its inherent contradictions plus recognition by the workers that the continued existence of a system of society based on their exploitation is unnecessary and intolerable and that the class of exploiters no longer performs useful social functions. The moment of that recognition is the moment of the overthrow of class domination.

But it may be said “Capitalism can no longer employ its wage slaves, nor feed the unemployed.” But did it ever? Is unemployment new? and did Capitalism even in its days of most virile expansion and development provide an adequate standard of living for workers, employed or unemployed? Did the capitalists trouble about security for their victims? Everyone knows they did not: and yet the system survived.

It is of no use waiting for the system to collapse, nor preparing a new economic structure to replace it. It will not go until the workers determine that it shall go, and the pressing service revolutionary organisations can perform is to prepare the workers’ minds for the possibility of the immediate establishment of Socialism. To return to Palme Dutt’s analogy, we have not yet reached the stage of convincing the worker that there is anything wrong with the house at all; he still thinks it is the unneighbourliness of the people upstairs or in the house next door.

Edgar Hardcastle