Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! no. 96 – August/September 1990
So far this year riot police have been out on the streets of Gabon, Benin, Ivory Coast, Zaire, Zambia and, in July, Kenya: all one party states where the ruling parties have held power for eighteen years or more. By the end of 1989, Africa’s foreign debt stood at $250 billion, forcing the continent to pay 40 per cent of its export earnings in debt repayments. Falling commodity prices have cost Africa an estimated $5.5 billion over the past decade. Annual average income per head has fallen from £534 in 1978 to £353 today: Kenya’s figure is £225, Zambia’s £1,883. In ten years, the continent’s employment rate has dropped 16 per cent, health and education spending cut 25 per cent. Illiteracy, hunger, disease and death are rampant: to revolt is vital.
As the economic and social crises have intensified so the political pressures on the imperialists’ stooge elites have grown. Since February, when Kenya’s Foreign Minister was killed, the tensions have multiplied. President Moi called in British police to investigate, but Moi himself is generally blamed. His KANU party has been in power since independence in 1963. Kenya’s deteriorating condition over the past decade has produced demands within and without KANU for political reforms. Their proponents have been hounded and slandered: several have wound up in the notorious Hole camp, former site of British troop murders of Kenyan political prisoners. The beatings-up and arrests have reached as far as ex-cabinet colleagues of Moi who see a multi-party system as the beast way of fulfilling their thwarted political ambitions.
The government attack on the July rally for democracy triggered an explosion of anger that ignited in towns across Kenya. Ngugi wa Thiongo, spokesperson for the underground Mwakenya, an organisation that revives the traditions of the suppressed Mau Mau war against British colonialism, exclaimed, ‘Suddenly, the culture of silence and fear, which I’ve been writing about for the decade since I came out of detention, is not there anymore … Moi can never rule again in the old way’. The US government is threatening to suspend aid. No doubt Thatcher will reconsider her line that Kenya is an example to others of respect for human rights. They will understand that Moi must compromise with his bourgeois rivals if the revolutionary conclusions of the masses are not to be drawn.
Zambia, like Kenya, inherited a bourgeoisie and political system designed by the British ruling class to ensure that country’s continued plunder. Since 1973 opposition political parties have been banned by President Kaunda. Under pressure from international banks, Kaunda doubled the price of maize in June. Within a week student demonstrations had escalated to fighting across Lusaka and into the copper-belt: copper accounts for over 90 per cent of Zambia’s export earnings. At the end of June elements in the military staged a coup attempt.
Zambia’s foreign debt is $7 billion with arrears on payments of $1.2 billion to the IMF and world bank. Kaunda is attempting to resist an increase in the limit on repayments set at 10 per cent of export earnings. Kenya has been undergoing an IMF ‘enhanced structural adjustment facility’. Kenya’s debt repayments already consume over a third of export earnings, which are largely controlled by Unilever, Lonrho and Del Monte anyway. International finance capital has no solutions to the problems killing Africa’s masses, the people have begun the process of finding solutions for themselves. Imperialist greed has narrowed the space within which its parasitic African class allies can manoeuvre their own survival.
Trevor Rayne
