Uhuru Revisited: Interviews With African Pro-Democracy Leaders by Ron Singer
Reviewed By Jim Feast
(Trenton, NY: African World Press, 2015)
Ron Singer's Uhuru Revisited, in which he interviews progressive leaders in countries as diverse as Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, is a selfless effort, in both senses of the term. It is so in a positive sense in that in many of his empathetic interviews with such leaders as Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka, daring Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega, and educational reformer Patrick van Rensburg, he stays very much in the background and so is able to get to the inner core of his subjects, not only garnering their thoughts on social issues, but often getting them to speak autobiographically, so that they reveal what struggles and life experience have brought them to their current progressive stance. In a negative sense, though, his book is so absolutely centered on the viewpoints of his interlocutors that he avoids hard questions and, in the last section, where the focus is on political corruption, he allows unchallenged statements that would appear to border on the delusional.
Let me underline that this problem does not affect the first two-thirds of the book where he celebrates a number of heroic reformers who come to life in his thoughtful interviews. Let me turn to those first.
For readability and emotional force, the high point of the book comes in the trip to South Africa. To my mind, this is because the people he interviewed are on-the-ground activists, working at the grassroots on housing and municipal service issues. In other sections of the book, he interviews such people as journalists and progressive politicians, who may be involved in daring and inspiring projects, but generally don't appear to have such close ties with the common folk.
One of the key players among these South African grassroots workers is Orlean Naidoo. When she moved to the Westcliff Flats area of Durban in the late 1990s, she found "there was already the sense of people being faced with evictions, disconnections, and stuff." Around these issues, she and others organized "the first protest in South Africa, post-apartheid." As she explained to Singer, "The emergent social-protest movement not only fought specific ills -evictions, disconnections, and crime (by forming neighborhood watches) - but rekindled the lost sense of community."
Another activist on the Westcliff scene, is one Singer calls "Comrade Kosti" 'to protect the man's identity." Kosti supplements his own organizing activities with more direct action. What happens if a local resident can't pay the bill and loses her/his electricity? Kosti and friends step in, as he explains, "In Kliptown [one of the neighborhoods], we've managed to reconnect electricity. ESKOM [the power agency] is saying we steal electricity. We don't see it as stealing, because when you steal, you sell it somewhere." They don't sell the electricity but simply provide it to needy residents.
The electric company has tried to stop these interventions by installing new, tamper-proof meters in the district. But, as Kosti says, "ESKOM can't come to our side, in Dhlamini, because we blow whistles [when they arrive to install the new meters] then we take whatever equipment has been carried by ESKOM in their cars."
By the way, it's rather ironic that in an interview with a politician, Ghanaian minister Kan Dapaah, in the last part of the book, there is more talk about electricity, but this time from the perspective of the elite. Dapaah insists, "I have always said somebody must pay for electricity. Ideally, it should be the customer." He elaborates that "where only about 30 percent of the country have access to electricity," it would be wrong for the government to subsidize them.
Singer pipes up, "But suppose the 30 percent can't pay? Then what?"
The politician's cynical answer, "If you can't pay, then join the 70 percent!"
To return to the narrative, Singer's talks with journalists also yield valuable insight into how many valiant cultural workers have striven to bring some transparency to the politics in Ethiopia and Kenya, countries he uses to draw a contrast between more and less repressive regimes. The former country allows for little press freedom. Indeed, the country's minister of communications tells news writers they should practice "'developmental journalism': in other words, [as Singer interprets this recommendation] the media should serve as a private chamber of commerce for the government."
The Ethiopian journalists he interviews talk less about scoops than about their legal troubles, and time in jail or exile. Writer Serkalem Fasil even gave birth in jail. The baby was premature and needed to be placed in an incubator. However, when the infant got to the one hospital where they had an incubator, the administrators refused to allow it to use the medical device. They said, "Someone needs to sign for this baby to be placed in an incubator, either the father or the mother." But the mother was far away in another hospital, deathly ill, and the father a jailed journalist. The doctors said to the police, "'Let the father sign.' The response of the police officer that was in charge of the baby was 'You know, the father is in prison.'" The baby was refused the incubator. As another writer puts it, "Politics [and writing about it] is a dangerous game in Africa."
In Kenya, the journalists are not has harassed by censorship but are influenced by partisanship (producing writing that favors one party or another) and feeling the need to not offend advertisers. Singer sums up the situation when he asks one editor this rhetorical question: "Is it true that here the limitations on press freedom are more a matter of economics and harassing people than the government saying, 'You may not print this, broadcast this'?"
In this section, utilizing multiple, in-depth interviews, Singer presents an illuminating contrast between the countries that allows the readers to measure the ways press freedom is being valiantly fought for in different national contexts.
He also sets up a contrast in his third and final discussion as he examines political corruption in Ghana and Nigeria. As I suggested earlier, here his strong, sole reliance on the information of those he interviews does not serve him as well as it did in the earlier sections and means he never seems to get a grip on the situation. Evidence for this appears, for one, in the type of piecemeal reforms the leaders he interviews suggest as a way to stem governmental malfeasance. Summarizing much material, Singer explains the preferred corruption-fighting method in Nigeria. "You convict one eminent thief, then another; you get rid of one bad law, then a second; one election is fairer than the previous one," and so on. In Ghana, Kan Dapaah believed corruption can be ended or at least diminished by changing the national budgeting method. He says, "I said to myself, 'How come these things [so much corruption in politics] don't exist in the developed countries,' and to me . it is simply because the steps on the budget are not there in Ghana. It's a huge problem, but the solution may not be that complex." He explains that all that is needed is "a couple of efficient accountants."
I'm simplifying a bit, and I'm not denying that both these strategies may bring limited success, but the fact that, for Nigeria, for example, the corruption has been ongoing for 40 years (!), something Singer acknowledges, suggests the recommended solutions are not only inadequate but ill-conceived. None of the politicians want to face the bigger issues.
David McNally, in his superb book on Nigeria, Monsters of the Market puts the corruption issue in a global context. Forgive the longish quotations, but McNally lays out two factors that are crucial for grasping the status of African states.
[The] postcolonial states inherited spatial-administrative structures (often binding together hundreds of ethnic groups) that lacked organic social unity. While a radical political project might have generated new solidarities, official processes of decolonization were frequently hastened in order to deprive radical social movements of time to build a mass-base with which to contest elections. ... colonialists would [then] oversee the installation of conservative elements in office. Once in control of the state machinery, these forces typically used patronage and spoils to construct an elite-coalition, often drawn from specific ethnic groups, which dominated state and economy. This set in motion a truncated dialectic in which opposition parties and movements in turn appealed to the excluded on grounds of ethnicity, not class. . [Add to that] Since African capitalism is decidedly weak . indigenous ruling classes generally lack viable bourgeois national projects that could rally the support of considerable social strata whose members [could] see themselves as beneficiaries of a growing and developing national economy.
Those are the internal elements that make for corruption, but then add the international components. "While the neoliberal programmes of structural adjustment promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have as one of their ostensible aims the rooting out of corruption from African regimes, these programmes of mass impoverishment have ...merely reshaped the terrain for looting and swindling." These structural adjustments include layoffs, closing of schools and hospitals, and the end of subsidies, such as those to electricity, which Dapaah calls for. The end result has been "economic freefall. Across the 1980s, as structural adjustment was implemented, national output per capita persistently contracted in one African nation after another: for the continent as a whole, the average decline was about two percent per annum."
In other words, with no national consensus and the inability of the elite to engage in economic projects that might unite the counties, added to the increasing disenfranchisement and impoverishment caused by structural adjustment, which allows the West to loot these poor countries further, the elite have no way to acquire wealth except through corruption.
Let's be clear. The grassroots fighters in South Africa, the ones Singer studies, are well aware of these factors and engage in direct action and organization to fight the cutbacks. The journalists, heroic as they are, don't talk about these larger issues, perhaps because they are so harassed just for reporting the most basic factors of governmental wrongdoing. Those fighting corruption, also with their own brand of heroism, are so narrow-focused on the government in power, that they have become unaware of the larger, controlling factors behind this corruption.
In one sense, it may seem uncharitable to blame Singer for not asking the corruption fighters to look at the bigger picture. After all, if as an interviewer, he had prodded them about these concerns, they probably would not have given him illuminating answers. More likely, they would have quickly shown him the door. Part of his ability to get these activists to open up was that he tactfully avoided any uncomfortable questions about such issues, as, say, imperialism. Yet, I can't help wishing the book had been more dialogically constructed. Couldn't the deep insights the South Africans generated about society have been used to press both the journalists and the corruption fighters a bit harder? As it is, the reader of this impressive and energetic book has to create that dialogue in her or his mind.