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Leading African Academic Says Africa is faced with a New Drive to Marginalise its People
March 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Speaking at Day 1 of the launch conference of the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), Professor Dani Wadada Nabudere, a director of the Afrika Study Centre & Marcus Garvey Pan-African Institute, Uganda, highlighted the key challenges facing the global political economy and the future trajectory of the African continent. “We are heading for a new colonization. This is because the land grabs that are under way are aimed at offloading the effects of the global capitalist crisis on the backs of the African people.”
The academic and former Minister of Culture and Community Development (Uganda) explained that Africa is being faced with a new drive to marginalise its people through the hastened combination of the ‘Green and the ‘Gene Revolutions’.
According to Nabudere, what is characteristic of all countries are the growing inequality, poverty and galloping food prices. The crises in the Middle East and North Africa have been sparked off by the food crisis, which is only one aspect of the inequality. The crisis of the financial and service sectors now under way is an indication that there can be no return to heavy industrial production in the West because money capital has exhausted itself in this core sector of capitalism. As a consequence, agricultural production increasingly became a sector to which capitalism resorted in order to engage in some control over global markets.
“This became a global agribusiness phenomenon beginning with the Rockefeller driven ‘Green Revolution’ in Mexico, India and other Asian countries with the objective of monopolising the seeds,” says Nabudere. “The ‘Green Revolution’ has now caught up with Africa, but with a vengeance. This is because it has now been suggested that the African Green Revolution must ‘kill two birds with one stone’. In addition to hastening the ‘Green Revolution,’ it has at the same time to adopt the ‘Genetic Engineering Revolution’ or the ‘Gene Revolution.’
Adds Nabudere, “the ‘Gene Revolution’ is especially going to influence the trends and resistances to a new global economy, which is being advanced by agribusiness.”
Yet although the current global capitalist crisis affects Africa more than other continents, it still offers opportunities for Africa to get out of the crisis. For one thing, says Nabudere, the crisis has undermined the very rationale of the capitalist economy.
“As the Chinese maxim tells us “Every crisis is at the same time an opportunity” and this opportunity should be seized upon. South Africa should lead African states to link with emerging economies such as China, Brazil to help Africa disentangle itself from the aprons of the imperialist powers.”
He highlighted the concepts of Afrikology and agricology, which have “universal implications that apply to all communities and their capacities to create local capacities for their survival through their knowledge created through their languages.”
Adds Nabudere, South Africa can lead a new ‘GLO-CAL’ economy by interacting with regional markets.
“The approach has GLO-CAL implications in that the future of the global economy will have to be locally based everywhere – hence we must be moving towards a GLOCAL economy and a GLOCAL citizenship. That, in my view, is what the future for Africa holds.”
In response to Nabudere’s rather controversial take, Professor Dominick Salvatore, Professor, Department Chair and Director of the Ph.D. Program inEconomics at Fordham University in New York, stated that despite their “narrow world view,” capitalist economies do in fact still have much to contribute to the global economy.
The leading international economist agreed that “we need a reconciliation of the social sciences,” but argued that the supposedly pernicious effects of the move toward a ‘bio-economy’ need to be examined more closely.
“Is the sharp increase in global food prices a result of the inadequate supply due to conversion of land use, or is it a result of increasing demand, and the market forces at work?”
Salvatore added “the challenge for modern capitalism is to look at the betterment of society from a broader point of view – not just an income point of view.”