RW Johnson: The inevitable fate of African liberation parties

Key points:.Liberation movements decayed into corrupt, inept elites clinging to power.Foreign powers exploit resources, fueling a new wave of neo-colonialism.Civil unrest looms as rigged elections and state failures erode legitimacy..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here..If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.By RW Johnson___STEADY_PAYWALL___.As the liberation movements of southern Africa decay and shrivel they become hollowed out. At the top there is the same lot of greedy opportunists as ever, shouting the same old slogans, but beneath them there is a vacuum. The younger generation have already despaired of them, want to be rid of them and, often, want to emigrate to get away from them. .But of course, the old liberation elite clings on for dear life. Typically, this elite has few talents, is poorly educated and is wildly corrupt. They owe their position to the now remote moment of liberation – in Portuguese Africa it came 50 years ago in 1974, mainly thanks to a rebellion by the Portuguese army. In Zimbabwe it came in 1980 thanks to pressure from the US, Britain and South Africa. In Namibia it came 34 years ago thanks to pressure from the US and USSR. And in South Africa it came over thirty years ago thanks to the ungovernability of the townships and pressure from the US, Britain and the collapse of Soviet Communism. .But that moment is long gone and in every case the promises of freedom, democracy and development have been betrayed. In Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe the liberation elite only hangs on thanks to grotesquely rigged elections. In South Africa and Namibia the liberation parties have lost much of their old support and the elite is now having to consider whether to allow that trend to continue or do their own election rigging..The key point is that none of these liberation movements are really capable of governing their countries – though the nearest thing to an exception is Namibia simply because the population is small and the problems more manageable..In their early years all these movements enjoyed large-scale support both domestically and internationally but as this ebbed away – in large part because of corruption and incompetence – these movements reduced to mere elites with poor skills, corrupt and ideological – a deadly mixture. But nature abhors a vacuum and as the liberation state starts to fail its space is typically invaded by interlopers of one sort or another. .In the most benign cases – Angola and Namibia – foreign oil companies have moved in and dominate (or in Namibia's case, will dominate) the economies of these petro-states. But, of course, such a situation allows for the most extreme corruption – seen in Angola under the Dos Santos regime. Virtually no benefit from Angola's oil riches has been allowed to be felt by the mass of the population. Isabel dos Santos, the President's daughter and once a multi-billionaire, has fled Angola, is wanted by Interpol, is barred from entry to the USA and now resides in the UAE – a perfect symbol of elite corruption. .Read more: Why do liberation movements fail when they come to power?: SA, Namibia are cases in point.In Mozambique the Frelimo elite is similarly corrupt and is deeply entangled with the international drug syndicates which use Mozambique as a key transit point. (Guinea-Bissau, ruled by the PAIGC, another liberation movement, is now a full-blown narco-state.) In addition, Frelimo is now having to share its national patrimony with a rebel Islamic movement, the armed forces of several SADC countries and Rwanda. Currently the entire country is in uproar over Frelimo's election-rigging. .In Zimbabwe the liberation movement, Zanu-PF, is utterly corrupt and has rigged every election since at least 2000. It has also used torture, murder and intimidation on a vast scale to keep its Opposition at bay and has seen around one third of Zimbabwe's entire population leave the country. The economy has never recovered from Mugabe's land seizures in 2000-2008 and mass emigration continues. The Zanu-PF regime has become progressively more reliant upon the army, so much so that it is regarded by many as a de facto military regime..The main interlopers in Zimbabwe are the Chinese – 85,000 of them, for Chinese enterprises refuse to employ Zimbabweans and employ only Chinese. China is utterly rapacious and is pillaging Zimbabwe for raw materials – Zimbabwe has some of the biggest iron ore deposits in the world, no less than 9 billion tons of chrome and enormous supplies of lithium. China will shortly export 5 million tons of lithium concentrate a year from Zimbabwe – but various other precious metals are typically found together with lithium so it is likely that while the Chinese will pay some $4 billion a year for the lithium, they may in fact be taking away minerals worth several times as much. .In addition, much of Zimbabwe's tobacco goes to China as does a quarter of its annual gold production. No one knows exactly how the Chinese are doing that – but everywhere there is open-cast mining, large investments in milling and extracting machinery etc. The Chinese have a cavalier attitude to local law. In their experience most African bureaucrats and politicians will take some time to realise what is going on and, when they do, they can easily be bribed. The Chinese also have zero interest in the environment so areas where they mine are left completely wrecked. There is no attempt to replant trees and bushes and restore the environment in the way that is common for more enlightened Western companies..China now utterly dominates the Zimbabwean economy, exclusively to the benefit of China. The Chinese have a controlling interest in the Marange diamond fields which have produced $30 billion of raw diamonds since 2008 and they are also mining and importing large quantities of Zimbabwean coal. Chinese-owned real estate is to be found all over Harare. But the Chinese make no effort to build infrastructure other than what their own operations require and nor are they interested in beneficiating any of the minerals they are digging up. (There is no lithium refinery, for example.) Even the steel plant they have built only produces raw steel billets which are then exported to China to be turned into the finished product. .Read more: Abandoned Angola camps reveal historical messages from liberation army and link to South Africa.The entire emphasis of the Chinese presence is to extract the maximum value from Zimbabwe and do nothing whatsoever to benefit Zimbabwe, not even pay wages to Zimbabweans. In addition, the Chinese now own the coal mines which provides fuel for ZESA (the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority) – at an exorbitant price. .(The Chinese are in Namibia too, where they also have a license to prospect for lithium. In December 2024 the Namibian government woke up to the fact that the Chinese, without saying a word, had found lithium and were already mining it and exporting it without permission.).All of this bears comparison with the way Russian mercenaries have moved in on a number of West African states and, in return for propping up the local military regimes, are allowed to take over and exploit local gold or uranium mines. (Russia in now taking at least $1 billion a year in gold from its various African neo-colonies – though some reporta say that Russia is extracting $2 billion a year in gold from Sudan alone.) This is the new colonialism and it is a great deal more rapacious than late Western colonialism – yet African nationalists, usually so vocal about colonialism, have nothing to say about the Russian and Chinese variants. .Currently there is a major scandal in Brazil where a Chinese company has imported Chinese workers who were working "under slave labour conditions". The Brazilian authorities have stepped in to prevent such abuse and anyway demand that China should employ Brazilians when investing in Brazil. Yet African nationalists have thus far failed to emulate even that. It is perfectly obvious that Zimbabwe's generals and some Zanu-PF politicians have become rich thanks to Chinese pay-offs – but that is all. .In South Africa the decline of the liberation movement and increasing state failure has also seen a growing Russian interest in the country, with the ANC becoming dependent on Russian subventions to pay its way. But the larger phenomenon has been the expansion of criminal syndicates into every area of life, extorting and extracting money to some extent in defiance of the state and to some extent in cahoots with ANC politicians. In a sense the Guptas were simply the first of these criminal syndicates..Read more: 🔒 Speaking of bias, Mr Johnson: Hermann Pretorius.The current crisis in Mozambique has occurred because the corrupt Frelimo elite rigged the elections and the liberation movements of the surrounding SADC countries were only too keen to endorse the elections as free and fair, a verdict reached by their own (ideologically pre-determined) election monitors. One result, of course, is that internationally no one any longer trusts African election monitors, but the more serious result is that Mozambique is now in full revolt against Frelimo and civil war seems entirely possible..The further decay and collapse of these liberation movements seems inevitable, however. It will be a messy business not only because the ruling elites will fight as dirty as necessary to cling on but because the nature of the alternatives is far from clear. Naturally, the liberation movements keep trying to insist on their historic legitimacy. Yet at the end of the day they have proved incapable of governing their countries properly, let alone honestly. .The picture is obscured by the fact that during their heroic struggle period many of these liberation movements were led by impressive and selfless men. Eduardo Mondlane of Frelimo, for example, struck me as an intelligent and honourable man, and Amilcar Cabral of the PAIGC was an outstanding figure. But the arrival of independence entirely changed the game and the new regimes found themselves overwhelmed by the demands of millions of very poor people and a pervasive culture of get-rich-quick..I often think of Luis Cabral, whom I met in Conakry during the PAIGC's struggle for independence for Guinea-Bissau: a very decent man, I thought. A few years later his brother, Amilcar, the PAIGC leader, was assassinated with the result that Luis became the first PAIGC President when Guinea-Bissau became independent in 1974. .In 1980 a military coup removed Luis from power. He was arrested and detained for 13 months, before going into exile, first in Cuba and then in Portugal. Meanwhile, civil war raged in Guinea-Bissau. In 1998 its prime minister called for Luis to return but he pointedly refused, saying he feared for his life. Later his main enemy was deposed and Luis was invited to come back as President and leader of the PAIGC. Luis replied that he no longer wished to play any political role, to be President or to rejoin the PAIGC. He preferred a private life in Portugal. And there he lived with his family until his death in 2009. The choices he made suggest clearly enough his own disillusionment with liberation movement politics and all their works..In South Africa the heroic struggle elite has almost completely left the stage. Instead the Mandelas and Sisulus have been replaced by unscrupulous populists like Panyaza Lesufi or township wide boys like Paul Mashatile, who finds it impossible to explain the sources of his considerable wealth. Both come from Gauteng where the ANC has suffered its steepest loss of votes. Should either one succeed they will have little popularity or legitimacy. For here too we are nearing the end of the line..Read also:.🔒 RW Johnson: The strange, unhappy world of Julius Malema🔒 Best of 2024: Unparalleled insights from tribe favourite RW Johnson🔒 RW Johnson: Why BELA Bill is an existential threat to GNU as Friday's deadline looms

RW Johnson: The inevitable fate of African liberation parties

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