Nov.

7, 2019

Limjoco, Nadine Kate D. Reaction Paper

2 ENP 1 Introduction to Agribusiness
Prof. Julio Esmade

Development is one of those words that has been used to dehumanize Africans
and other global southerners over the years. Think about terminology like:
Developing Countries, Least Developed Countries, Underdeveloped Countries,
Developed Countries, and if I may add, OVERDEVELOPED Countries!
Development is also a word that is used to de-politicize poverty. There is a
profession called ‘Development worker’! There is even a discipline called
“Development Studies”! What is development? Who is developing who? Who gets
to define who is developed and who is not? What if the developed one is the cause
of underdevelopment in the underdeveloped one?

I have been reading a bit of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere of late and I really like his
thinking around development and capitalism.

Our struggles for independence were national struggles, involving the rights
of all the inhabitants. We were not aiming to replace our alien rulers by local
privileged elites, but to create societies which ensure human dignity and
respect for all. The concomitant of that is that every individual has the right
to the maximum economic and political freedom which is compatible with
equal freedom for all others; and that neither well-fed slavery nor the
necessity to beg for subsistence are acceptable human conditions.
Absolutely. We have a very serious situation in Africa today. We have colonizers
who look like us. Black skins white masks a la Franz Fanon! Most countries are
still designed around the extractive logic implanted on the continent during the
colonial occupation 1.0. Now in colonialism 2.0 we are quickly realizing that
nothing much has changed. We are still enslaved! We are still in the plantation! Our
African leaders have become both participants in the new economic order and we
remain at the bottom of the racial caste system around which this world is structured.
This is not the kind of development that MJN was dreaming about and working
towards.

In practice Thirds World Nations cannot become developed capitalist societies

without surrendering the reality of their freedom and without accepting a
degree of inequality between their citizens which would deny the moral validity
of our independence struggle. I will argue that our present poverty and national
weakness make socialism the rational choice for us. Under capitalism, money is
king. He who owns wealth owns also power.

This was written in the 60’s in his text ‘Man and development’. Is it not a prophecy?
Which African country is a capitalist nation? Some of them, like Kenya Colony brag
about being capitalists and look down upon neighbouring countries like Tanzania
and Uganda, but all we see there is an ogre-fest where those two-mouthed ogres that
had a mouth both at the front and the back and ate using both, as told in African
stories, dominate and devour everything and everyone on the landscape. Where is
the critical mass of African capitalists to be found? Who owns the mines in Africa?
Who owns the land? Who owns plantations of various crops that Africa grows to
feed Europe? Who owns the water? Who owns African bodies? Kenya colony, a
delf-declared capitalist country, recently imported doctors from a socialist country
(Cuba), after collapsing its healthcare system. How do you explain that?
By the way, a note on ‘Third World’ – This terminology was created during the
stupid cold war and literally meant countries that were neutral – not aligned to either
of the two waring sides. Today it is synonymous with underdevelopment and
poverty. Hail to all my fellow third worlders! Moving on…

Capitalism is a fighting system. Each capitalist enterprise survives by

successfully fighting other capitalist enterprises. And the capitalist system as
a whole survives by expanding, that is, by extending its area of operations and
in the process eradicating all restraints upon it, and in the process eradicating
all restraints upon it, and all weaker systems of society.

In other words, capitalism is war. That is why countries that claim to be capitalist
like Kenya colony are oozing with violence from every pore!

Third World capitalism would have no choice except to co-operate with

external capitalism, as a very junior partner. Otherwise it would be strangled
at birth. You cannot develop capitalism in our countries without foreign
capitalists, their money and their management expertise. And these foreign
capitalists will invest in Third World Countries only if, when, and to the extent
that, they are convinced that to do so would be more profitable to them than
any other investments. Development through capitalisism therefore means
that we Third world nations have to meet conditions laid by others – by
capitalists in other countries. And if we agree to their conditions, we would
have to continue to be guided by them or face the threat of the new enterprises
being run down, of money and skills being withdrawn, and of other economic
sanctions being applied against us.

Enter IMF (What Nyerere referred to as the International Ministry of Finance) and
the World Bank and other Lords of Poverty! Is there any African country that does
not operate like this? People in the tech world in Kenya colony have been talking
about how the industry is dominated by white people. Alas! Who has the capital?
People (incl yours truly) in my beloved field of conservation have been talking about
the white capture of conservation. Africa remains an appendage of the west because
African leaders have refused to imagine other ways of structuring their
economies. With capitalism the global south just becomes a subsidiary. Capitalism
entails a fight between capitalists themselves and also between capitalists and
workers.

The exploitation of the masses is, in fact, the basis on which capitalism has
won the accolade fro having solved the problem of production. There is no
other basis on which it can operate. For if the workers ever succeeded in
obtaining the full benefits of their industry, then the capitalists would receive
no profit and would close down the enterprise.

Capitalism cannot operate without exploitation. There has to be an exploiter and the
exploited. If you are economically weak, you are the exploited. Nyerere tried a
different system in Tanzania, but was severely sabotaged by western capitalists.
While there were inherent weaknesses in the system itself, a fact, he fully agrees
with, we cannot overlooking or downplay the influence of the west on the collapse
of the Tanzanian model – Doing so would be tantamount to being ahistorical.

In so-called capitalist countries extreme wealth and poverty walk hand in hand.
Nyerere provides this example:

Look at the developed capitalist societies. Then we can see malnutrition

among the people of the Apalachian mountains and of Harlem contrasted with
the gadgetry of suburbarn America; or in Britain we can see the problem of
homelessness while colour television sets are produced endlessly; and in the
 same societies we can observe the small resources devoted to things like
education and health for the people as compared with those spent to satisfy
the inessential desires of the minority.

Proliferation of fast-foods and other western-culture-inspired goodies is considered

a sign of development in many African countries. It is seen as a step towards
ascending to modernity (read being white or whitening their darkness). Spending
huge sums on elections when citizens lack water and food is capitalism or stupidity?
Paying politicians huge salaries when there is no medicine in hospitals or books in
schools is capitalism or open thuggery? Clear-cutting forests to grow flowers for
Europe, diverting water from rivers to irrigate flowers and other horticultural
produce for export to Europe is capitalism or sheer plunder of people and their
environments?

Capitalists and pseudo-capitalists are to be heard bragging about how their GDP is
growing and how they want to achieve double-digit GDP-oriented economic growth.
You can sell heroine and other drugs and grow your GDP, you can traffic human
beings, ivory, and other animal products and still grow your GDP. You can blow up
all the mountains, clear-cut forests, poison all the water and still grow your
GDP. Mwalimu sums it up nicely:

successful harlot, or a favoured slave, may be better off materially than a

woman who refuses to sell her body, or a man to sell his freedom. We do not
regard the condition of the harlot or slave as being consequently enviable –
unless, of course, we are starving, and even then we recognize the possible
amelioration in our circumstances as being uncertain and insecure.

Question: If we look back to human origins – who told Homo-habilis, Homo-erectus

and previous groups that they were underdeveloped and needed to develop to Homo-
sapiens? I thought they just figured it out and adapted to, and innovated within their
environments, to best use available resources. If that is the case, is it possible to
develop another person or for a country to develop another one? The answer must
be NO. The development industry is a SCAM!

Nyerere was possibly the most honest man among the generation of African
founding fathers. He did not use his position to accumulate a vast fortune. He himself
stated that he should have been a preacher rather than a politician. This, of course,
did not prevent him from instituting a one-party state, on the pretext that multiparty
democracy was a luxury that nascent African nations, with the great need for unity
in face of the headwinds ahead, could ill afford. Ujamaa, the Swahili word
for familyhood was a manifestation of what Nyerere called African socialism. He
had two main goals:

1. Stave off the capitalistic propensity for creating extreme wealth inequality.
2. Achieve economic self-sufficiency.
The goals were laudable. The medicine administered, however, resting on a
simplistic and idyllic vision of what pre-colonial life had been like, was worse.

At first, he merely encouraged peasants to move to Ujamaa villages, where farming

would be communal. When, after a few years, the population proved slow to take
him up on his suggestion, his policies turned coercive. More than 10 million people
were relocated to villages. The planning had been poor. Party officials tasked with
implementing the policy had a greater incentive in demonstrating their zeal than in
making sure their plans were actually workable. When people resisted by returning
to their old homes after having been relocated, they would find that their homes had
purposely been made uninhabitable.
Communal farming, of course, depressed the profit motive. Food production
predictably fell. Tanzania became more reliant on food and economic aid than it had
been before the experiment. Nyerere, however, did not think that Ujamaa was a
failure. He compared the situation his country found itself in to the pain experienced
by a man who had just been vaccinated from smallpox. Since the man had never
experienced smallpox, he could not know what he had avoided, and he might even
regret getting the vaccine. But, in the end, he would be better off.

The country was better off in many respects. Extremes of wealth inequality had not
materialized. Literacy rates and life expectancy had increased dramatically. But
much of that success had been achieved through external aid. And by the time he
retired from the presidency in 1985, Tanzania was one of the poorest nations in the
world.

That is the legacy of Ujamaa, an experiment imposed on the population of an entire

country by one man. However well-meaning he may have been, the results were an
abject failure.