African Nations Face a Daunting Decade Ahead

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

As we enter the third decade of the 21^st century, what are the prospects for Africa? Its nations face some daunting problems.

First, there remains the continuing problem of flawed elections.

Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara won a controversial third term Oct. 31. Since opposition groups boycotted the election, only 54 per cent of the electorate cast a ballot.

They maintain Ouattara violated the constitution, which limits presidents to two terms. Main opposition candidates Pascal Affi N’Guessan and Henri Konan Bédié announced a rival “transitional government” in protest.

In Guinea, Alpha Condé won a third term as president on Oct. 18. In March the 82-year-old Condé, who has ruled for almost a decade, pushed through a new constitution that allowed him to run for two more six-year terms.

Dozens of people were killed during protests and Condé’s rival, Cellou Dalein Diallo, was trapped inside his home for over a week.

There were two contests in extremely poor states on Dec. 27. The Central African Republic saw the re-election of President Faustin Archange Touadera. His main challenger, Anicet Georges Dologuélé, was a former prime minister supported by former President François Bozizé.

Bozizé’s own candidacy was rejected by the country’s constitutional court after he was accused of planning a coup.

The opposition insisted the elections were an “electoral farce,” with widespread ballot stuffing, and a third of voters unable to cast ballots because of violence. Fighting has continued nationwide.

In Niger, former Interior Minister Mohamed Bazoum led in first-round balloting to succeed outgoing President Mahamadou Issoufou, his close ally. Bazoum was far ahead of former president Mahamane Ousmane, who was backed by Bazoum’s main opponent, Hama Amadou. But Bazoum fell short of the 50 per cent mark needed to win outright. A run-off will be held Feb. 20.

Amadou, who came second in 2016, was declared “ineligible” to run by the constitutional court on Nov. 13 because of a one-year prison sentence related to a baby-trafficking investigation.

An election in Uganda Jan. 14 saw President Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986 and winner of five previous elections, returned to office. The home of opposition candidate Robert Kyagulanyi (popularly known as Bobi Wine) was surrounded by security forces and internet access was cut off. There were also unprecedented levels of violence and murder, and Wine rejected the results as fraudulent.

Africa also faces ongoing terrorism. In Nigeria, Boko Haram continues to create mayhem and the authorities seem unable to stop it. For a decade, the group has killed tens of thousands of civilians in their stronghold in northeast Nigeria.

The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara has been conducting attacks in the border regions of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. In Niger, gunmen killed more than100 people in a terror attack Jan. 2 near the border with Mali. Several armed groups took over the town of Bangassou in the Central African Republic Jan. 3.

This cycle of violence has also played out in Somalia and, in a recent troubling addition, northern Mozambique.

Corruption is another major hindrance; the continent loses about $100 billion each year due to this. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranks countries on a scale from 100 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt). On the most recent CPI, the African average score was 32, with corruption especially prevalent in the public sector.

 Under Julius Maada Bio’s presidency, Sierra Leone’s Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) has actively tackled this practice. 

Government ministers and members of parliament are required to declare their assets and liabilities within three months of assuming office. Sierra Leone’s former president, Ernest Bai Koroma, is himself facing a corruption trial. In October, he and 120 officials who served in his 2007–2018 administration were barred from leaving the country.

South Africa’s recent corruption scandals have centred around COVID-19 funds and pushed the country towards new anti-corruption measures. Allegations of widespread mismanagement has undermined confidence in a government that had initially received international acclaim for its response to the pandemic.

It has become a source of embarrassment for President Cyril Ramaphosa, who was elected on a platform of stamping out corruption. He called those accused “a pack of hyenas circling wounded prey,” and announced a new law enforcement unit to investigate the allegations.

 

Biden Administration Faces Unprecedented Challenges

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Perhaps no president other than Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt comes into office facing greater problems than does Joe Biden, who becomes the 46^th president of the United States today. But few have had more experience in federal politics.

This alone makes the contrast between him and outgoing president Donald Trump, who never held any elected office until 2016, all the more stark. Biden served as a U.S. Senator from Delaware for six terms from 1973 to 2009 and was vice-president under Barack Obama.

The new president faces a somber domestic political situation. The election results were razor thin. The country is fiercely divided, geographically, culturally, and politically. A mob stormed the U.S. capital Jan. 6, creating mayhem to make their point.

Biden, at 78 years of age, is by far the oldest man to move into the White House. Not surprisingly, then, health care remains a top priority for him, and he supports adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act, a centrepiece of Obama’s presidency.

First and foremost, though, Biden must deal with the worst public health crisis in 100 years. He must quickly scale up the manufacture and administration of hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines, in the most complex logistical operation in generations.

Millions of Americans are now unemployed and tens of thousands of businesses have been destroyed. There will have to be a massive stimulus plan, on the scale of Roosevelt’s New Deal, to bring the economy back from the abyss.

Biden has announced plans for a “American Rescue Plan” that will include a new benefit for children in poor and middle-class households, plus $2,000 in stimulus payments, unemployment benefits and other assistance for the ailing economy.

He has also promised that he will push to raise taxes on the richest households and partially reverse tax cuts granted to companies during the Trump administration.

Biden’s ambitious plans on climate change may face hostile Republican lawmakers in Congress. To do an end-run around them, he may seek to use sweeping executive power, but this invites pushback, perhaps even by the Supreme Court.

Though the Democrats will now control both houses of Congress, Biden will face pressure from his party’s own progressive wing. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who both opposed him in the party’s primaries, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among many others in the House of Representatives, have their own domestic agendas.

They will try to push him hard on various radical measures they support, such as the Green New Deal, debt forgiveness for college graduates, and “Medicare for all,” the single-payer measure they advocate.

On the foreign policy front, Biden has picked Antony Blinken, his closest foreign policy adviser, for secretary of state, a job which will entail dealing with China, Iran and Russia, all countries with which Washington has perennial problems.

Blinken will have as his new deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman, a lead negotiator during the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement talks. Renewing the agreement, which was abrogated by Trump, is something Biden hopes to revisit. But it may not be possible to reconstitute the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in its original form.

Biden is choosing Victoria Nuland as under secretary of state for political affairs. A fierce critic of Russia, she is sure to anger President Vladimir Putin.

Washington also needs to confront China on its human rights violations and aggressive behaviour in Asia. As well, Biden will have to tell Central American states to take on the corruption, violence, and endemic poverty that is driving people to leave their homes there.

What about the Middle East? In an interview last year, Biden called Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan an “autocrat” and has described Saudi Arabia as with a government that has “very little social redeeming value.”  

There is one problem that the Biden administration will lose less sleep over: after the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Bahrain, and the Moroccan-Israeli peace deal, the Arab-Israeli conflict has become less critical.

But symbolic gestures to reassure the Palestinians that they have not been forgotten are in the pipeline, such as reopening U.S. consulates in East Jerusalem and the PLO mission in Washington.

 

Morocco and Israel Normalize Ties -- at the Expense of Western Sahara

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Last month the North African kingdom of Morocco became the fourth Arab country to normalize ties with Israel, following the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.

The move is the culmination of a successful year of upgrading Israel’s relations with Arab and Muslim countries, beginning with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting Chad and meeting Sudan’s leader in Uganda, followed by the Abraham Accords, as well as the warming relations and cooperation with Saudi Arabia.

 Early in 2020, Israel proposed to the White House that normalization of relations with Morocco would come in conjunction with American recognition of Western Sahara as part of the kingdom.

Morocco has always had fewer hostile views of Israel than other Arab states, something emphasized by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the Dec. 10 agreement.

“Everyone knows the warm ties of the kings of Morocco and the Moroccan people to the Jewish community there,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of Jews moved to Israel from Morocco and they form a living bridge between the people of Morocco and Israel. This solid base is the foundation on which we build this peace.”

Morocco already had semi-normal relations with Israel. The late King Hassan II tried to be a behind-the-scenes catalyst in the Arab-Israeli peace process. In July 1986, he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in an effort to stimulate progress.

Two months later, Hassan met with a delegation of Jews of Moroccan origin. In 1993, after signing the Oslo Accords with the PLO, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin paid a formal visit to Morocco. 

This latest deal was brokered by Donald Trump. Following the announcement, Trump spoke with King Mohammed VI of Morocco, who agreed “to expand economic and cultural cooperation to advance regional stability.”

The king, Morocco’s “Commander of the Faithful,” has pushed for a tolerant Islam that ensures freedom of worship for Jews and foreign Christians. One of his predecessors, Mohammed V, resisted the anti-Semitic laws promulgated during the Second World War, when the country was a French protectorate and, for a time, under the rule of the fascist collaborationist Vichy regime.

Fouad Chafiqi, director of the Education Ministry’s academic programs department, announced that Jewish history and culture in Morocco will soon be part of the school curriculum. The decision “has the impact of a tsunami,” remarked Serge Berdugo, secretary-general of the Council of Jewish Communities of Morocco.

Education Minister Said Amzazi and the heads of two Moroccan associations also signed a partnership agreement “for the promotion of values of tolerance, diversity and coexistence in schools and universities.” At the end of December, a Moroccan delegation arrived in Israel to prepare to open a liaison office.

The presence of Jews in Morocco stretches back more than 2,000 years. Before the founding of Israel in 1948, estimates put their number as high as about 275,000, some 10 per cent of the population. It was the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world. Jewish Moroccans have held cabinet-level positions and advisory roles to multiple monarchs.

Today, after vast waves of departures over the years, only about 2,000 Jews remain in Casablanca and about 500 elsewhere in Morocco.

Most cities have a mellah, an old Jewish quarter, along with Jewish cemeteries and synagogues. The last Moroccan Jewish day school, Neve Shalom, is in Casablanca, the economic and business centre of the kingdom.

For years thousands of Jews of Moroccan origin, including from Israel, have been visiting the land of their ancestors, to celebrate religious holidays or make pilgrimages.

The Museum of Moroccan Judaism in suburban Casablanca, was opened in 1997., Last January, King Mohammed VI inaugurated the House of Memory, which celebrates the coexistence of Jews and Muslims in the port city of Essaouira.

The losers in this deal were the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony. Morocco annexed it in 1975, but it is claimed by the Sahrawi Democratic Arab Republic. It hosts the Polisario Front, the separatist group fighting for independence, which controls about one-fifth of the desert territory. Washington is opening a consulate in the Western Saharan city of Dakhla as well as providing $4 billion in economic and military aid to Morocco.

 

Russia’s Return to Africa

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In October 2019 around 40 African heads of state attended the first Russia-Africa Summit and Economic Forum, held on the initiative of President Vladimir Putin at the former Olympic village in Sochi.

The summit’s final declaration set out ambitious objectives — Russia aimed to double trade with Africa within five years — and called for a second summit to be held in 2022, probably at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, seat of the African Union.

This confirmed Russia’s return to Africa, and its renewed interest in the continent as part of an overall foreign policy strategy.

“The development and strengthening of mutually beneficial ties with African countries and their integration associations is one of Russia’s foreign policy priorities,” Putin said.

Soviet influence in Africa for many years followed the progress of decolonisation and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. It became a foreign policy issue for the Kremlin in the 1950s, as the Belgian, British, French, and Portuguese empires began to collapse.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union gave massive economic and military support to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and took an interest in other national liberation movements.

From 1956 the Soviet Union forged close links with the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria fighting the French. The Soviet special forces centre at Perevalnoe, in Crimea, trained anti-apartheid fighters from Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo).

The Soviet Union also deployed soft power, establishing the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University (now the People’s Friendship University of Russia), named after the Congolese independence leader. It was created in 1960 to provide higher education to Third World students. It became an integral part of the Soviet cultural offensive in nonaligned countries.

But Moscow’s interest in Africa was diminished following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Over the course of the next two decades, post-Soviet Russia showed little interest in the continent and only in the late 2010s did the Kremlin once again begin to play a greater geopolitical role; sub-Saharan Africa re-emerged in Russian political discourse as trade and diplomatic traffic increased.

Moscow revived its associations with Africans who had studied in the Soviet Union and launched initiatives to lure more students to Russia. It rekindled relations with Soviet-era clients like Mozambique and Angola and forged new ties with other countries.

Under Putin’s leadership, the country has once again become a major force on the continent. The Kremlin aspires to pull African states into the network of geopolitical alliances that it has built to cast itself as a revitalized great power, international mediator, and effective counter-terrorism partner.

Part of Russia’s current engagement with Africa is military. The Russian army and Russian private military contractors linked to the Kremlin have expanded their global military footprint in Africa, seeking basing rights in a half dozen countries and inking military cooperation agreements with 28 African governments, according to an analysis by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.

The Wagner Group – a military enterprise connected to the Russian state –expanded its actions south of the Sahara. U.S. officials estimate that around 400 Russian mercenaries are operating in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Moscow recently delivered military equipment to support counterinsurgency operations in northern Mozambique. Russia is also now the largest arms exporter to Africa, accounting for 39 per cent of arms transfers to the region in 2013-2017.

Russia also sees an opportunity to boost trade with Africa and mitigate the negative economic consequences of its deteriorating relationship with the West after sanctions were imposed on Moscow in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea.

Moscow tripled its trade with Africa from $6.6 billion in 2010 to $18.9 billion in 2018. Russia also broadened its economic strengths beyond arms sales, adding investment in oil, gas, and enhancing nuclear power across the continent, while also importing diamonds from the CAR, bauxite from Guinea, and platinum from Zimbabwe.

Times have changed since the Soviet Union’s efforts to counter Western imperialism in Africa through Marxist ideology. Russia’s foreign policy today has no such ideological ambitions, yet its narrative continues to stress opposition to Western interference in the domestic politics of African states, be it through the promotion of democracy and human rights or military interventions.

Many African leaders have therefore welcomed Russia’s renewed interest, because it aligns with several African political, security, and economic objectives. Russia’s overtures in Africa also enable African governments to play the United States and Russia off each other: If Washington presses too hard on democracy and human rights, African nations can threaten to move closer to Moscow.

 

Cuba's Once-Glorious Revolution Has Faded Away

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Until the coronavirus struck, Canadians seeking a cheap winter holiday looked at Cuba as a vacation spot. A million of us visit every winter. But the days when the island inspired Canadian left wingers are long gone.

Cuba, the first Communist nation in the western hemisphere, was considered a model throughout Latin America and as far afield as Africa and Asia – though it was probably admired more as a beachhead of anti-imperialism and defiance of the United States than for its Communism.

As a Soviet ally, so dangerous did it seem to Washington that the world narrowly averted a nuclear war in October 1962.

I wrote an MA thesis on the Cuban revolution at McGill University and visited the island in 1975. Those were the days when college students would hang posters of Che Guevara on their dorm walls. He was an icon in the true sense of the word.

Back then, you couldn’t fly to the island directly from Canada (not to mention the United States). I took a Russian-made airplane to Havana from Jamaica.

Though Fidel Castro and his 26^th of July Movement came to power on New Year’s Day 1959, the Cuban Communist Party was holding its first formal party Congress that year, and the country was full of Russians and east Europeans. Tourism was non-existent.

How things have changed, especially with the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, which left Cuba in dire economic straits.

Cuba struggled desperately during the so-called “Special Period in Time of Peace.” Factories shut down and supply shortages became part of everyday life. The economy shrank by half between 1989 and 1992. In August 1994, angry mobs shouted “Freedom” and “Down with Fidel.” Some 33,000 Cubans fled for Florida in homemade rafts.

Castro’s death in 2016 had little effect on the functioning of a state that had been run by his brother Raúl since 2008. In October 2019, Raúl passed the presidency on to Miguel Díaz‑Canel, a 60-year-old bureaucrat who was born after the Cuban revolution. However, Castro still heads the Communist Party.

Under the Economic Modernization Plan of 2010, the state opened opportunities for small private business, such as family-run restaurants and home hotels. Farmers were given more autonomy and price incentives to produce more food.

However, the government still controls the lion’s share of the economy. Díaz-Canel is widely expected to represent continuity, and few Cubans have seen any dramatic shifts. The island still bears the stamp of half a century of “Fidelismo.”

Health and education remain free in Cuba. The country has the most doctors per capita of any country in the Americas, and life expectancy is 79.

Human rights groups say that the government continues to punish dissent and public criticism. Censorship affects literature, the arts, and the media. However, the number of long-term political prisoners in Cuba dropped significantly under Raúl Castro.

In today’s Cuba, 62 special stores offer a wealth of goods for sale – but only in a currency other than the Cuban peso. The move has seen an economic divide between people across the island. On one side, there are those people who receive their salaries in Cuban pesos, on the other, there are those who have relatives abroad and are able to get money, mainly U.S. dollars, transferred to them.

COVID-19 has made things far worse. Though the country has managed to contain the coronavirus quite well, tourist travel to Cuba has plummeted and the island lost an important source of hard currency, plunging it into one of the worst food shortages in nearly 25 years.

That left the Cuban government with far fewer sources of revenue to buy the products it sells in state-run stores, leading to shortages of basic goods throughout the island.

Despite resuming diplomatic relations in 2015 under President Barack Obama, Cuba and the U.S. still find themselves on poor terms. Under Donald Trump, the American economic embargo was tighter than ever.

But the prospect of a détente between Washington and Havana under Joe Biden may ease Cuba’s economic troubles. He plans to bring the U.S. closer to normalized relations with Cuba, reversing many of the sanctions and regulations imposed during the Trump administration

 

America's Economic Divide Isn't Going Away

By Henry Srebrnik. [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

J.D. Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, now adapted into a Netflix film, is a poignant account of the destructive combination of de-industrialization, joblessness, addiction and family breakdown among America’s white working class. The book in effect foretold the election of Donald Trump that same year.

When the real estate bubble burst late in President George W. Bush’s tenure, America’s financial system nearly collapsed. Individuals and then the institutions that funded them defaulted on their loans and the entire economy went into a deep dive.

Vance’s book was published eight years after the 2008 crash. But people had already realized that the Great Recession, as it came to be called, had left a lasting imprint.

Already in 2012, opinion columnist Harold Meyerson, in an April  commentary in the Washington Post, “A Very Exclusive Recovery,” was aware that the so-called recovery was “different from all other recoveries.”

Almost three years after economic growth had resumed, he wrote, the real value of Americans’ paychecks was “stubbornly still shrinking” and “real average hourly earnings continue to decline.”

Why? Because most of the jobs being created were in low-wage sectors. Even manufacturing job wages were falling. At a new high-tech locomotive plant in Muncie, Indiana, workers were being paid $24,000 a year to assemble some of the most sophisticated machinery being built.

“That’s not the kind of money you can send your kid to college on, or use to shop for much more than your daily bread,” he observed.

Where was the money going? To profits and dividends, so that income growth went to the wealthiest 10 per cent of households. How had this come about?

Between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, workers expected to have their jobs for as long as they chose. But in the late 1970s, plants began to shut down and jobs were gone forever.

American multinational corporations now locate much of their production abroad. And with the rate of private-sector unionization down to 6.9 per cent, workers have no power to bargain for higher pay.

Even before the 2020 pandemic had hit and destroyed tens of thousands more jobs and small businesses, urban demographer Joel Kotkin, in the winter 2019 issue of the journal American Affairs, called this “America’s Drift toward Feudalism.” Income growth has skewed dramatically towards the ultrarich, he asserts, “creating a ruling financial and now tech oligarchy.”

The richest four hundred Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 185 million of their fellow citizens com­bined. While the top one per cent in America captured just 4.9 per cent of total U.S. income growth from 1945 to 1973, in the following two decades the country’s richest classes “gobbled up the majority of U.S. income growth.”

The income gap between the top one per cent of the population and the remaining 99 per cent is now at an all-time high.

Where is much of this wealth concentrated? In a few mega-technology firms -- Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix – which have achieved a combined net worth equal to more than the next 282 firms combined.

Silicon Valley is increasingly divided between an entrenched ultra-wealthy class and its dependent poor, work­ing largely in the service industries the moguls require. Many rely on public or private assistance.

This new feudal order’s ideologues – academics, teachers, public intellectuals, consultants, lawyers, and gov­ernment workers – have mostly attended elite universities, and their shared belief in meritocratic superiority binds them to the political order dominated by the oligarchy and helps legitimate its rule.

On the other hand, contends Kotkin, the fading prospects for the new generation outside this sector are all too obvious. “Once upon a time, when the boomers entered adulthood, they en­tered an ascendant middle class.”

But today’s millennials are be­coming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation. Three-quarters of American adults today will not grow up to be better off than their parents.

They will face a future without home ownership or secure employment. A recent Pew Research Centre analysis found that 52 per cent of young adults today resided with one or both of their parents.

This is not a recipe for a healthy democratic republic. There may be more Trumps in America’s future.