Coup trio’s exit from West Africa bloc shakes region:
The military regimes in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have announced their immediate withdrawal from the West African bloc, Ecowas, accusing it of posing a threat to their sovereignty.
Burkina Faso and Mali said they had sent the Economic Community of West African States “formal notice” of their exit, with Niger expected to follow suit soon, after the three countries unveiled their move in a joint statement at the weekend.
Some observers fear the exit of three founding members of the Ecowas, formed in 1975, could compromise trade and push back the return to civilian rule in the countries concerned as they battle jihadist violence and poverty.
The three slammed Ecowas’s “irrational and unacceptable posture” after the 15-member bloc imposed a range of sanctions in an attempt to hasten a return to democratic rule.
In August, Ecowas threatened military intervention after the toppling of Niger’s president, Mohamed Bazoum. Although that did not materialise, the fallout notched up tensions that had been brewing following coups in Mali in 2020 and Burkina Faso in 2022.
On Sunday, the trio — who have formed an Alliance of Sahel States (AES) — said Ecowas had come “under the influence of foreign powers, betraying its founding principles” and was a “threat to member states and peoples”.
Burkina Faso and Mali were supposed to hold elections later this year, which would meet an Ecowas condition to drop sanctions. But the military authorities want to extend the “transition” periods, citing the insecurity engendered by jihadist unrest.
Niger’s military leader, General Abdourahamane Tiani, has yet to unveil an intended timeline for restoring civilian rule.
Fahiraman Rodrigue Kone, a Sahel regional expert for the Institute for Security Studies, suggested that “the AES states anticipated a coming debate on the end of the transitions”.
“Withdrawing from Ecowas seems to put that on the back burner.”
Le Patriote, a pro-government newspaper in Côte d’Ivoire, commented: “Well ensconced and enjoying the trappings of power, they [the AES leaders] wish to linger forever in their presidential chairs.”
Withdrawal will hit hard given that Ecowas guarantees visa-free travel and right of settlement and work in member countries. Losing such benefits will cause concern, as will the potential effect on regional trade.
All three countries are landlocked and their main coastal economic partners, notably Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, are, like them, members of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). The grouping also guarantees “freedom of movement and residence” between its eight members, as well as tariff-free trade on certain items along with tariff harmonisation and trade norms.
One country that could feel the effects of the triple withdrawal is Nigeria, which is not a WAEMU member. Nigeria accounts for more than half of Ecowas’s overall GDP and is neighbouring Niger’s main economic partner — although much of their shared 1??500km border is poorly controlled both in terms of security and trade.
“Even if it’s through smuggling, goods and people will return to Niger. You can’t separate Sokoto [northern Nigeria] from Konni [Niger] — it’s the same people,” said Chaibou Tchiombiano, secretary general of Niger’s import-export and wholesalers’ union.
Although the military regimes say they are withdrawing “without delay”, Ecowas regulations stipulate that requests to leave must be made in writing a year beforehand.
Ecowas said on Sunday that it had not received notification.
“Legally, withdrawal with no delay is not possible,” Kone said. “These states will have to find some form of agreement and negotiations will go in the direction of finding the means to undertake withdrawal gradually.”
Amid jihadist advances in the Sahel, “the region is fragmenting, becoming the object of stronger geostrategic competition, and this is not good news for stability”, Kone warned.
Sharp criticism of the CFA franc, the common currency of WAEMU members, by the military regimes and their supporters could see Alliance of Sahel States countries leave the organisation and renounce the free exchange of goods and labour. — AFP
Why a basic income grant would benefit everyone:
Nosisi Mayamo’s voice wavered as she told me that, halfway through the month, she had run out of money for electricity. She had also run out of food.
Mayamo, 64, lives with her 16 grandchildren in a damp, two-bedroom house in Dimbaza, Eastern Cape. Three of her eight children have died and the remaining five have moved to Cape Town to look for work. Only one has found a job.
Mayamo spent half her life living under apartheid, which denied her a good education, decent work and the ability to save for older age.
Her household’s only financial support comes from government social grants — the older persons grant for herself and child support grants for her grandchildren.
“It’s a very tough situation,” she said. “A lot of people think because of the grants, I should be able to afford things, but we have so much we need to do with that money.
“The children are always running out of school shoes.”
The older persons grant makes up a sizeable proportion of the government’s budget for social grants and goes to about four million people aged 60 and older. The government describes it as “a grant to see you through your old age”.
It is not designed to support whole families, yet many older people, such as Mayamo, use it to support their unemployed adult children or supplement the meagre child support grant, a mere R510 a month, for their grandchildren. A new basic income grant for everyone aged 18 to 59 would relieve pressure on such households’ limited resources.
Even setting aside familial expenses, the older persons grant is not enough to support a decent standard of living for the single person it is intended for.
At R2 090 a month for those aged 60 to 74 and R2?110 for those 75 and older, it is one of the highest social grants available in the country.
But it is still less than half the R4 474 they would earn each month working 40 hours a week at the national minimum wage and the Global Living Wage Coalition’s assessment of a living wage in rural South Africa of R4 876.
Meanwhile, the Decent Standard of Living project has calculated a single person needs nearly three times as much — R6 034 a month — to have a decent standard of living.
Rising costs have hit older people’s pockets hard, just as they have everyone else’s. Annual inflation averaged 6% last year but prices soared for some items, with potatoes 52% and eggs 38% more expensive by the end of the year.
Any annual increase in the older persons grant in the upcoming national budget that fails to reflect these rises would in effect be a cut, meaning Mayamo could afford even less.
“The only option I have is to borrow money from loan sharks but that leaves me with a whole lot of debt because the interest is very high at 40%,” she told me.
People aged 18 to 59 require greater financial support too, given the high unemployment rates. The retention in this year’s national budget of the social relief of distress grant, introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic, would continue supporting some people in that age group.
The potential successor to the social relief of distress grantt, a basic income grant for everyone 18 to 59, would relieve some of the pressure on older people to use their older persons grant to support family members.
Such a basic income grant has broad support from civil society, trade unions and, this election year, from diverse political parties, including ActionSA, the ANC, the Democratic Alliance, Economic Freedom Fighters and Good.
But South Africa should not pay for a basic income grant by reducing spending on existing social grants, which are already too low for an adequate standard of living. Instead, it should explore options such as additional progressive taxation and other non-regressive funding measures to raise the extra revenue.
Everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living. Unless the government increases the older persons grant and the child support grant in the budget to reflect rising prices, and soon introduces an adequate basic income grant, it will be a long time before Mayamo and her grandchildren will enjoy that right — or can afford a whole month of electricity and food.
Bridget Sleap is the senior researcher on the rights of older people at the Human Rights Watch.
Everybody wants white privilege:
Allow me some hyperbole for a moment — it seems that everybody wants white privilege these days.
Of course, there is a long history of local and global projects geared to securing systems of racialised and gendered privilege — white privilege.
In South Africa, the Dutch settler-colonisers resented being colonised by the British and fought a bitter war opposing British rule.
At schools, apartheid-era textbooks made use of the verb “annex” to talk about Britain’s invasion of Southern Africa. As a child, I don’t recall history teachers using the verb “colonise” to describe what the Dutch, Portuguese, Germans and British were doing in the region.
History teachers called this bitter colonial war the Anglo-Boer War but, more recently, some historians have become inclined to call it the South African War because all South Africans, both black and white, were involved in it. Some fought with the British and some with the Boers.
Black people who fought with the victors of that war probably hoped for some respite from the violence of colonialism but it was not to be.
In their efforts at “toenadering” or, more likely, to co-opt those who identified as Afrikaners into the British colonial project, the victors extended the benefits of white privilege to the Boers but not to black people.
Both British and Dutch settlers would get to partake in the systems of racialised privilege afforded to colonisers. But this was not enough.
The stigma and shame of being seen as “verarmde boere”, who suffered at the hands of English oppressors, who denied them the hope of a promised land as set out in the Old Testament, was too real from the perspective of Afrikaner nationalists.
They dreamed of an ethno-nationalist state that would construct systems of privilege for white Afrikaners.
They had positioned themselves as God’s chosen people in the battle for a Boer republic … a promised land, Zion. Read: an ethno-nationalist state that secures white privilege for white Afrikaners using religious texts to justify its racism.
But like the British after the South African War, Afrikaner nationalists needed to offer incentives for those not thought to be white or Afrikaner to participate in their ethno-nationalist project; they co-opted white English people alongside various categories of black people in the form of tribalisation, and the contested “coloured” racial category, to create hierarchical systems of privilege and dispossession — apartheid.
Divisions among various categories of black people was essential to the success of this system of oppression and dispossession. (Compare Steve Biko positioning blackness as a political affiliation and marker of solidarity with all colonised people.)
The opposite strategy was employed with those accepted as white. From a racist perspective, not all categories of white people were valued equally.
While Greek, Portuguese and Jewish people were themselves subjected to interpersonal racism and prejudice, the National Party welcomed (perhaps grudgingly) these categories of white people to bolster the number of white settlers who would be loyal to the party and its apartheid policies.
It is from this perspective that we come to see that whiteness, like blackness, is a political construct that serves political and economic ends. Those who were accepted as white by the apartheid state were given access to the systems and structures that created and sustained white privilege.
Perhaps this is how we got to the paradoxical scenario where we had Jewish South Africans both oppose and support the system of apartheid as the National Party tightened its grip in South Africa.
Some saw apartheid for the unjust racist system that it was and opposed it, while those with Zionist sympathies saw the opportunity of supporting and benefitting from systemic racism.
They saw a way to access white privilege and, therefore, supported the apartheid state (cf. Steven Friedman’s book Good Jew, Bad Jew: Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Assault on Meaning).
In an opinion piece on the Mondoweiss website, titled Zionism and Colonial Modernity, Muhannad Ayyad writes about the links between colonial modernity — a take on modernity that challenges racist associations of modernity with assumed European superiority and, instead, highlights modernity’s roots in colonial dispossession — and Zionism, an ethno-nationalist project.
Ayyad argues that the Zionists wanted to join the European colonial project, instead of opposing it: “The problem with the answer of Zionism, however, is that instead of challenging the spurious and violent racialisation of Europeans into ‘Semites’ and ‘Aryans’, instead of standing up to the European colonial project and joining together with colonised and racialised communities across the world to dismantle colonial modernity and the Euro-American colonial project, Zionism proposed an answer whereby they would join the project of colonial modernity.”
Zionists wanted to partake in systems that created racial hierarchies and white privilege. They, too, wanted to be settler-colonisers.
Intra-Jewish racism became a feature of life in Israel, interestingly. It’s no wonder that the settler state of Israel found a friend in the apartheid state during the era of National Party rule in South Africa.
Both states employed religious texts to create ethno-nationalist founding myths to justify their systems of racialised oppression and dispossession.
Israel is now widely recognised as an apartheid state. It is therefore profoundly symbolic that it is post-apartheid South Africa that pursued legal action against Israel in the International Court of Justice.
Perhaps the people of Palestine will defeat apartheid, just like the people of South Africa defeated it.
But for that hope to be realised, we need to acknowledge that ethno-nationalism is experiencing a revival in many parts of the world — from the dominance of Hindutva in India to the rise of the far right in Europe and the ethno-nationalist, xenophobic logic that brought us Brexit.
Importantly, we see the rise of the far right in the US Republican party under former president Donald Trump, whose supporters seem ready to abandon democratic governance.
More worrying, the Democrats under President Joe Biden stubbornly support Israel, despite signs that it might openly defy the recent ruling of the International Court of Justice.
The investment in systems of racialised privilege are so substantial that we seem to be facing violent confrontations on so many fronts.
But there is an upside. These investments are hard at work to construct race and privilege in self-serving ways. Race is a malleable concept; it bends to suit the political interests of those who lay claim to power.
Biologically essentialist understandings of race have long been discredited as the bad science that brought us the shameful history of eugenics; what is left is for us is to see power and the abuse of power for what it is — bereft of morality.
Zionists have no moral claim to Palestine — certainly no more than the BJP has to India, Afrikaner nationalists had to apartheid South Africa, Nazis had to the Third Reich or the AfD has to a white supremacist Germany.
It is time for us to call time on systems of racialised privilege and oppression.
Adam Haupt is professor of media studies and director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies at UCT. The National Research Foundation rates him a B2 scholar. He is co-editor of Neva Again: Hip-Hop Art, Activism and Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa with Quentin Williams (University of the Western Cape), Emile Jansen (Heal the Hood) and
H Samy Alim (University of California, Los Angeles).
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