By CJ

“Development is not things, it is people” – Julius Nyerere

I’m in Kajulu, writing this long overdue essay as my nephews and nieces run rings around me. I can hear Okuto shouting my name as he walks down the wide path next to the house – he is drunk and probably talking about he will change his name to Yuri Gagarin like last time, or maybe to Usain Bolt this time. The Kisumu sun came out with its twin today, they are scorching us. The indigenous trees and grasslands that brought rain are no longer with us; they have systematically been cut down and replaced with western species or concrete. Everyone here hopes that in six hours, which is around the time I intend to finish writing this essay, a gentle and cooling breeze will descend down the majestic slopes of Got Jajuok.

Unbeknownst to me, I will actually end up spending the next six hours browsing through the bookshelf and breaking fights between the children.

 

The rural heat and its sibling, the rural breeze, are my other temporary companions and a short, pleasant break from the never-ending nightmare that has characterised my stay in Nairobi these past few months. In June 2023, the Kenyan Parliament passed an IMF-instigated Finance Act that raised income taxes whilst simultaneously increasing taxes levied on basic commodities – essentially pushing an already-high cost of living beyond the reach of most Kenyans. As 2023 came to a close, Kenyans were again confronted by a government proposal to privatise at least 30 state-owned entities including the Kenya Pipeline Company, Kenya Co-operative Creameries, Kenya Seed Company, Mwea Rice Mills and the state-owned publishing house, Kenya Literature Bureau. An IMF-backed privatisation process is today in steady motion: the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980’s are back!

Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, is today unlivable for the majority of her population. In any case, no capital city is named a capital city by chance. A capital city is where capital and its instruments reside – it is the home of capital. Those who do not own capital are not allowed to get too comfortable here, as elsewhere.

 

That is why poverty stares at the depths of your eyes just a short distance from the glass towers and huge infrastructure projects that crowd the Nairobi skyline. That is why 60% of Nairobi’s population occupies a paltry 5% of the land demarcated as residential space within its boundaries, while a handful of people live lavishly at the expense of this downtrodden majority. That is why in this country of 50 million people, a paltry 8000 people own as much wealth as the rest of us combined. That is why our people still die from treatable diseases like Malaria. Like in many other African countries, colonial patterns of economics live on here.

That, comrades, is why we engage in struggle. But our engagement in struggle requires the unity of people and ideas. Our engagement in struggle demands that we adopt a correct political line anchored on a long-term strategy.

 

1. Is the working class the only revolutionary force today?

Marx and Engels argued that the working class is the energy force for the revolutionary transformation of human society. The capitalist system is structured to extract maximum profit from the exploitation of this working class during the production process and to then direct this profit to the owners of factories, banks, technology and land – the owners of capital. This exploitation of the working class and its resultant engagement in struggle to better its material conditions is what makes it a revolutionary force both historically and in the present.

 

In the 20th Century, globalisation enabled a consolidation of capital across the world, opening pathways for transnational corporations to shift millions if not billions of industrial jobs to the Global South where operational costs were deemed to be lower. Our experience in the global South has today made us understand that ‘lower operational costs’ was, and still is, another blanket term for lower wages, unsafe working conditions, tax evasion, illicit financial flows, environmental degradation and countless other exploitative relations which only serve to exacerbate hitherto-existing layers of oppression in different corners of Africa and the rest of the third world.

The shift in industrial jobs under globalisation means that the vast majority of proletarians today live in the Global South. The increase in size of this class of highly-exploited workers in the Global South has sharpened class contradictions over decades – and is reflected in the high levels of social inequality and emergent struggles aimed at reversing exploitative economic relations, including through revolutionary organisations, social movements, cooperatives and labour unions.

 

However, most labour unions in Africa have today lost the clarity and militancy that guided them during the anti-colonial struggles of yesteryears, and have in many of our countries become appendages of ruling parties if not extensions of the internal and external forces that keep these parties in power. The political position of such unions, however, does not necessarily translate to the position of majority workers – for the working class is every-other-day engaged in struggles to ultimately better its conditions across different territories.

While it is true that the working class is the motive force of history, we also recognise the fact that in many of our countries, the under-employed and unemployed outnumber the employed. The unemployed – the forgotten, unseen and unheard – are repeatedly at the receiving end of the big stick wielded by capitalism. They live in the informal settlements, jumping over sewers to access their houses, everyday subjected to poor healthcare and education. In some instances, this group is politically-educated and able to relate its conditions to historical and present economic patterns. It resultantly often finds itself at the forefront of progressive or radical political processes in society, making sacrifices and history along the way.

 

Our movements and organisations must thus engage in organising that not only recognises the critical role of the working class, but which also brings the lumpenised millions of our people within its organising orbit, effectively turning this large class into a potent force for struggle and revolution.

 

Capitalism as a system is at the root of the oppression of workers, and the rest of society by extension. But while the owners of capital are united in their quest to exploit and extract profit on a global scale, the western working class, in many instances, does not share a unity of purpose with the exploited and brutalised people of the Global South. They are stuck in a state of trying to fabricate solutions for the South, constantly advising, patronising and ‘inventing’ unworkable solutions to the problems that confront us. When decisive moments arise, this western working class scatters in all manner of directions, actions as divergent from rhetoric as night and day.

Today, we affirm and reiterate the words of those who came before us.

 

We remind the western working class that the exploitation of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other oppressed territories enables the capitalist structure to extract and accumulate, in turn enabling western society to cushion its workers who are themselves victims of exploitation. This cushion comes in the form of social services and safety nets, economic subsidies and even social democratic dispensations that help to ward off currents from below that would potentially eat the capitalist class in the west.

The western left must therefore recognise that it can not succeed in crushing capitalism in that part of the world without extending genuine solidarity and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the oppressed peoples of the world – especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Instead of engaging in endless debate or other forms of doing-nothing-isms, the western left must work hand in hand with progressive forces in the Global South if we are to defeat capital at a critical point – the point of extraction. This, however long it takes, would significantly weaken the capacity of the capitalist class to primitively accumulate, setting the stage for their eventual decline as a dominant economic force.

 

In the neo-colonies, the fall of this global capitalist class would weaken the local enforcers and beneficiaries of these exploitative relations – a comprador class which commands the economic, political, bureaucratic and military sectors in many of our countries. It would hasten the people’s march.

 

At that juncture, the oppressed people commence their leap into history.

 

2. Africa’s rural-urban divide: Revisiting the Arusha Declaration

Africa has seen massive urbanisation over the past five decades, and today has the world’s fastest-growing urban population. In 1990, Africa had around 300 cities, a figure that had doubled to around 600 cities by 2022 – and which was accompanied by an increase of Africa’s urban population has increased by over 500 million people since 1990. According to the United Nations department of Economic and Social Affairs, more than two thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050 – and most of these new additions will be from Africa and Asia. What does this mean for today’s rural populations and the already-existing uneven levels of development they experience?

 

Urbanisation on the African continent over the course of the last century has been marked by a deliberate concentration of industrial development and employment opportunities in urban areas, resultantly swelling the ranks of the urban working-class through sustained rural-urban migration. It has additionally meant a comparatively higher level of state investment in physical and social infrastructure in urban areas as compared to rural areas, cementing illusions of urban prosperity that further exacerbate rural-urban migration. At a fundamental level, this migration deprives rural areas of the labour capacity needed to effectively develop or maintain hitherto-existing levels of economic development.

 

As I wrote in a 2021 article titled In Defense of the Westminster Three;

“Throughout history, our species has moved towards and settled around resources. Early humans settled on lands that were capable of producing and sustaining life. Later, changing patterns of land ownership, economic conditions and the search for sustenance herded many into cities which had a higher concentration of industry, financial resources and more opportunities for work… Countless more now flee hardship and deprivation caused by changing climate patterns that have rendered rich farmland into dry and unproductive soil. In certain parts of Africa, massive environmental changes have forced whole villages to relocate into cities where conditions are even more dire.”

 

Massive rural-urban migration coupled with deliberate underinvestment in the social sphere over long periods of time have negatively impacted urban spatiality resulting in the creation of urban slums where iron-sheet and mud structures pass for housing, where drainage is non-existent, and where humans drop dead every other moment without the world blinking an eye. These settlements are often declared illegal by authorities, and only exist in defiance of the numerous threats to demolish them. A great majority of Africa’s urban working class calls these informalised settlements home. Here, they constantly face a precarity of existence.

Pre-colonial African societies did not have slums, for the majority of indigenous cultures and systems were egalitarian. They ensured access to basic needs like land for farming and housing. “Development”, as Mwalimu Julius Nyerere reminds us, “is not things, it is people”. But the social infrastructure in our cities is neither people-centred nor is it designed with human development at its core.

Frustrated and humiliated in this urban landscape, most of Africa’s young people are left with few options – some see crime as a viable option while many turn to drugs to escape reality. Others attempt risky crossings across the Mediterranean Sea hoping to access Europe’s concentration of wealth and opportunities. Some of them know that this wealth was accumulated over the course of these past centuries through the ruthless exploitation of black and brown people, their lands and resources.

 

The Arusha Declaration and TANU’s policy of self-reliance

In the 1960’s, newly independent Tanganyika (later re-named Tanzania after the Union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar) grappled with fundamental questions regarding the rural-urban divide. The Arusha Declaration, which outlines TANU’s(Tanganyika African National Union) policy on socialism and self-reliance was published in 1967. Ever-relevant, this document provides pointers as to how TANU struggled to ensure that the urban areas did not become exploiters of their rural counterparts in the post-independence era.

The rural areas of Africa that have consistently maintained high levels of production over the decades are likely to be either agricultural zones or mining areas. Though the muscles of rural workers and peasants strain all day to produce enormous quantities of minerals or export crops like tea, coffee, cacao, cotton, and livestock  – they are soon summoned by history to bear witness to socio-economic stagnation at the point of production, which their plains and hills, rivers and lakes, forests and villages represent, while proceeds of their labour finance urban development. Urban development for the owners of capital and middlemen who live off the sweat of workers and peasants. .talk about primitive accumulation.

 

TANU makes it clear in its policy of self-reliance that in order to ensure economic justice, the state must have effective control over the principal means of production. That it is the responsibility of the state to intervene actively in the economic life of the nation so as to ensure the well-being of all citizens, and so as to prevent the exploitation of one person by another or one group by another, and so as to prevent the accumulation of wealth to an extent which is inconsistent with the existence of a classless society.

TANU further outlines three important facts on the contradictions that exist between rural and urban development within the context of an underdeveloped economy, which Tanzania was at the time. In the-then context, these were:

 

“1.Our emphasis on money and industries has made us concentrate on urban development… Yet the greater part of this money that we spend in the towns comes from loans. Whether [we] use it to build schools, hospitals, houses or factories, it still has to be repaid. But it is obvious that it cannot be repaid just out of money obtained from urban and industrial development. To repay the loans we have to use foreign currency which is obtained from the sale of our exports. But we do not now sell our industrial products in foreign markets…

2.It is therefore obvious that the foreign currency we shall use to pay back the loans used in the development of the urban areas will not come from the towns or the industries… We shall get it from the villages and from agriculture.

3.This fact should always be borne in mind, for there are various forms of exploitation. We must not forget that people who live in towns can possibly become the exploiters of those who live in the rural areas.”

 

While [1]  it is arguable that…

The bent back  peasants, weathered by successive seasons of sun and rain, today remain under siege – heavily taxed and coerced to repay loans for development that never seems to reach them. In Kenya, like many other African countries, most small-scale coffee farmers cannot consistently afford a good cup of coffee in the bustling urban coffee houses while multinational corporations and middlemen who control and manipulate the coffee auctions mint billions of shillings every other year.

Kenya has a rural minimum wage of 8,109 shillings per month (equivalent to around $50.6 by today’s exchange rates). Given today’s high cost of living, it is safe to assume that even magicians cannot perform the magical art of living on such low wages whilst also paying tuition fees for their children. Many other countries, like Uganda for instance, do not have a set minimum wage meaning that many workers and producers are left at the mercy of semi-feudal structures, especially in rural areas where they live at the mercy of their overlords.

 

Our organisations and movements must be conscious of this rural-urban divide and consistently work towards smashing it. We must moreover be conscious of the fact that even the urban areas of Africa do not really benefit under the current economic architecture, for while production and extraction happens on our continent, most of the processing and value addition happens in other parts of the world – Europe, North America, Japan and today, in China.

 

We must invest in rural economies and engage in internal value addition of produce, locating relevant industry and adequate social infrastructure like schools and hospitals in the rural areas to improve the deplorable economic and social conditions. Establishment of local industry creates linkages; a farmer-owned co-operative coffee processing plant can, for instance, create dignified working conditions and help raise wages of rural workers and incomes of agricultural peasants; boosting the local economy and spurring demand for other products thus strengthening various local industries.

 

Internal value addition means that areas that produce coffee should have coffee processing plants, lands that have cacao should have cacao processing plants, while territories that produce minerals such as diamonds should have diamond-cutting plants. This value addition and creation of rural industry should however be done with care so it does NOT pollute the environment or exacerbate the ecological crisis that already confronts our communities.

 

But where are our frames of organising in all this?

 

While many of our organisations and movements are urban-based, the vast majority of the population of many African countries still is the rural peasantry. By solely organising workers whilst ignoring the peasants, our organisations make a fundamental mistake. This is in addition to our first fundamental mistake, which as we observed above, is to ignore the lumpenised urban masses.

 

You cannot stand under a coconut tree and expect a mango to fall from above.

 

We engage in struggle to overthrow the capitalist regime that has exploited, subjugated and humiliated our people these past centuries. We engage in struggle to change the material conditions of our people. We engage in struggle to install new worlds – worlds of joy, love and dignity. We engage in struggle out of our love for our people.

 

We are struggling toward a society that will accord our people freedom, justice and dignity. A society where the majority does not have to live in shacks that get swept away by raging water each and every time it pours heavily. A society that guarantees adequate food, healthcare, education, housing and sanitation. A society where our beautiful children do not have to die from bloody malaria. A society devoid of patriarchy and racism.

 

Our struggle is inter-sectional. Our struggle is multi-dimensional.

We recognise that the problems that confront our communities are political, and that their solutions will be political. Our struggle is thus a struggle for political emancipation. It demands that we organise ourselves into mass-based organisations and movements, whether they be political parties or popular movements. As always, organisation is key.

 

More fundamentally, our struggle is an economic struggle, for political power exists in the service of economic power. It follows that political power will only serve our people if the productive base is usurped from below and common means of ownership and use implemented. This struggle demands the creation of new worlds – a revolution.

As we struggle to create these new worlds, our generation must stay alive to the fateful reality of history. To the fact that capitalism cannot be defeated from a single front. That capitalism has today managed to enforce a hegemony of thought, ideas and consumption patterns – especially through its mass-media which reaches even the remotest corners of Africa. All those working towards the Africa we want must today and tomorrow start propagating alternatives to the capitalist mode of production among the masses in repeated fashion until it becomes clear that another world is possible.

 

We must form workers unions. We must form cooperatives, especially rural cooperatives. We must form worker-owned cooperatives. Quite importantly, we must, as the comrades at Cooperation Jackson remind us, not form cooperatives for the sake of forming cooperatives – our cooperatives must be[2]  class-conscious cooperatives.

We must form organisation. We must create and organise political instruments capable of capturing power, reorganising the state, and defending the revolution.

 

We must extend our solidarity and organising to a transnational scale, for capital and its operations are transnational. That is why we came together as young Africans to start Mwamko.

Mwamko, as Comrade Alieu Bah says, is a coming together, a gathering of wishes and aspirations of a new generation of Africans who desire and want an Africa liberated from the clutches of both internal oppression and external dominance. It proffers a newness for a new context and age even as it connects itself to longer genealogies of resistance and rebellion of African people home and abroad.

 

A luta continua!

Love and freedom!

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