Claire Whitaker | Chair - 51�Թ�

FO° Talks: Rank Hypocrisy: Do Global Rankings Misrepresent India?

Claire Whitaker — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 06:47:13 +0000

Interview with Professor Salvatore Babones

Professor Salvatore Babones is a man on a mission. He wants to restore India’s place in the global democratic rankings.

“I’m not Indian, I’m not Hindu, I’m not getting any money for this,” says the American academic, currently based in Australia. “It’s simply a matter of justice.”

In this interview with 51�Թ�’s Claire Price, Babones outlines how and why he disagrees with the global rankings drawn up by , the and the , all of which have downgraded India under Modi’s premiership.

Claire Price: Last year, you became quite a hero in India after you criticized the democracy indices by Freedom House, the V-Dem Institute and the Economist Intelligence Unit. We’ll go through all of those in detail, but first, can you give us a general overview of your arguments?

Salvatore Babones: There are three major democracy indices; they range from the most objective, the Rise of Democracy Institute rankings and Freedom House, to the most subjective, the Economist rankings. Ironically, it’s the most subjective rankings that rate India the best, which we should get into. The most objective, the V-Dem rankings, rate it the worst, but these rankings are very much driven by politics and by people’s own political views.

Claire Price: Sweden’s Freedom Institute was bad for India last year, but frankly it’s even worse this year. India has plummeted in the Electoral Democracy Index from 93rd to 108th in the world. So that’s below countries like Tanzania, Bolivia, Mexico, Singapore and Nigeria. What’s your issue with their methodology?

Salvatore Babones: There are very serious problems with V-Dem’s methodology. V-Dem is composed of five sub-indices of democracy; two are supposedly objective and three are subjective. The objective indicators are whether or not you have elections and whether or not you have universal suffrage. Virtually every country in the world gets a perfect score for those, including Vietnam, for example, which has a single-party communist party state. They get a perfect score because they’re purely looking at the constitution. So if the constitution says that officials are elected and if the constitution says that everyone can vote, then right away you get a perfect score. That means countries that are not democracies at all are starting with the same perfect score.

With a country like India, which is a bona fide democracy, the differentiation in V-Dem comes from its more subjective indicators. We’re asking experts to evaluate things that don’t necessarily have much to do with democracy. So for example, on free and fair elections, Hong Kong is rated to have freer and fairer elections than India. Why? Because when you look at the actual questions on V-Dem, the questions are things like, is there any violence at the polls? Well, yes, in India, every year there’s violence. At the polls in Hong Kong, no, it’s an orderly state. Are there any complaints to the electoral commission? In Hong Kong, no. Why would you complain? It’s a communist-party-run area. We have these same problems in Vietnam; Vietnam is really on a par with India for free and fair elections despite the fact that there’s only one party in Vietnam. What matters is that the formal process in Vietnam goes off without a hitch.

Now what we should be asking is, can you realistically unseat the government? Can you oppose the government? Could someone else win an election? Those are really what democracy is about. Those questions aren’t even in V-Dem. So, in effect, India is being downgraded for questions about process when autocratic regimes are scoring better.

Claire Price: There are also some conclusions in their reports. For example, that India is one of the top ten autocratizing countries in the world. Isn’t it true that we are seeing this centralization of power under Modi to a greater extent now than we ever have in the past?

Salvatore Babones: No, look, this is an artifact of what we call the “charisma of statistics.” V-Dem has set a series of score points on its indices. If you’re below this score, you’re an autocracy. They’re not doing a deep evaluation of India’s governance standards, they’re simply asking if your score is below, say, 0.6. If you’re below this point you become an autocracy. So they’re simply saying that India’s score on V-Dem has declined. Now they’re interpreting that in words without doing any actual analysis of governance procedures in India.

Claire Price: Some members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is aligned to the Bharatiya Janata Party, have said that the Indian Administrative Service has too much power now. So isn’t that criticism coming from those who are in theory aligned with the government?

Salvatore Babones: There’s a legitimate debate all around the world of presidential versus cabinet systems, of consensus government versus winner-take-all systems. We see that debate not just in India, but in lots of other countries as well. But that debate is not in the V-Dem rankings. There are no questions in V-Dem, as far as I’m aware, that ask, “Is government consensual?” or “Is government centralized?” because we accept that centralized and consensual systems are both forms of democracy. So yes, there may be these complaints in India.

On the other hand, other people may complain that the administration in India is inefficient and too decentralized. I mean, there are various points of view on whether administration should be centralized or decentralized, but that’s not something unique to India, and I stress that it is not the reason for the declining ranking on V-Dem. The declining ranking on V-Dem is driven entirely by declining scores on specific questions asked of Indian political scientists. And those scores, I think, in some cases are probably biased. That is, the people they’re asking have a bias against the current government. They see the Electoral Commission as being less independent because Modi won. And to some extent, those questions are simply methodologically poorly constructed. Is a free and fair election really one in which the electoral roll is complete and there’s no violence in the polls? Or is a free and fair election one in which you can oppose the government? V-Dem says the former, I think the latter is a much more intuitive understanding.

�ʰ��:��There are complaints by those in India that there’s been a centralization of power, not just at the prime ministerial level but also at the state level, with Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and M. K. Stalin in Tamil Nadu. Isn’t that a trend that people can see, not just something that’s been twisted in the statistics?

Babones: Well, I think there is a trend in India towards more centralized government, but I don’t see that that’s in any way anti-democratic; democracy theory really says nothing on this and I don’t see that it’s necessarily even bad. India is a poor, developing country with a lack of administrative talent, and when things get brought into the Prime Minister’s office, they get done. When things are left to the broader bureaucracy, they often don’t get done, so it’s a recipe for making sure that promises made by politicians actually get enacted. Now I know many people will feel that their ideal of democracy is a decentralized democracy where everything is local—until their local authority makes a decision that they think is reprehensible or against human rights, and then they want things to come from above.

Price: One word we haven’t mentioned so far is corruption. Transparency International actually ranks India 85th in the world for corruption. It says that the country schools remain stagnant, so it hasn’t worsened, but some of the mechanisms that could help rein in corruption are weakening. Do you dispute that finding?

Babones: India is relatively clean from the standpoint of a developing country. It’s number 85th in the world despite being much poorer than 85th in the world, but it is relatively corrupt compared to Western Europe or North American countries. That’s just a fact. Corruption is not worsening by any account, and by most accounts—this is anecdotal, I can’t vouch for these in any kind of data-driven way—the Modi government has made anti-corruption a serious effort. The one thing we do know where corruption has been dramatically reduced is in the most important area—not licensing for 5G telecom or defense procurement—but in the most important thing of all, service delivery to the poor.

We know that moving to direct benefit transfers, which has been a key policy achievement of the Modi government, has cut out all the middlemen who were previously taking part of the cash that was supposed to be going to poor people. Poor people now receive their full benefits instead of having to face corruption at every stage. So that’s a big win against corruption.

What is the true level of corruption in India? I can’t tell you. Surveys can’t tell you. Transparency International almost entirely surveys large businesses. So they’re big business perceptions of corruption. We don’t even have any proper indices of ordinary people’s perceptions of corruption. We don’t know how corrupt India is. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re doing a good job for a country with $2,200 GDP per capita.

Price: So, lack of data might explain, for example, why The Economist relies so much on experts for its findings. They, in 2022, described India as a flawed democracy and downgraded it two places to the 53rd position. What’s your view on their rankings?

Babones: Flawed democracy, quote unquote. “Partly free,” to use the Freedom House terminology. I remind people, that’s not a value judgment. That’s a score judgment. If you fall below a certain score on your index, they have a range that is “democracy,” a range that is “flawed, democracy,” a range that is “non-democracy.” Same thing with Freedom House—a range that is “free,” a range that is “partly free,” a range that is “unfree.” That’s not a judgment that it’s suddenly become flawed, where it wasn’t flawed before. All democracies are flawed democracies. The Economist has now downgraded India for the last few years. That’s the opinion of their editorial team that India’s democracy is no longer as good as it was, but I strongly suspect that that opinion is shaped by the press coverage they see coming out of India, by the NGO reports they see coming out of India; it’s not driven by a deep expertise on India.

I remind everyone, The Economist is not ranking India. The Economist is ranking 170 countries. Freedom House, the same thing. V-Dem, the same thing. These are not India rankings. These are broad global rankings. The Economist, of all three of these, has the least country expertise embedded in its rankings. Ironically, it produces the best ranking for India. V-Dem, which relies almost solely, 85%, they say, on in-country experts, rates India the worst. So, use a grain of salt, take it whatever way you want, but it’s certainly not very meaningful to say that India has gone from being “free” to “partly free” or from being a “full democracy” to “flawed democracy.” All that represents is a declining score on their index.

Price: Now let’s look at the Freedom House report because that focuses particularly on rights. Freedom House downgraded India from “free” to “partially free” in 2022, and it maintains that view this year. It said in its report that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist BJP have presided over discriminatory policies and a rise in persecution affecting the Muslim population. Are they wrong?

Babones: Oh, I think they are wrong. I think we have some good data that they’re wrong. They are picking up on a number of policies that have been portrayed by NGOs as being anti-Muslim or being transgressions of rights. In fact, if you look at them carefully, it’s an NGO interpretation that is being spun from those policies.

The most clear example is the Citizenship Amendment Act, which is cited by Freedom House in its report. The CAA is an act that gives a pathway to citizenship for people who are members of persecuted religious minorities fleeing Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These are officially Sharia-law, officially Muslim countries that have historically persecuted people of other religions. Now what the CAA says is that if you’re a Muslim refugee from Afghanistan, you are not automatically granted refugee status. You have to apply. If you’re Sikh, if you’re Hindu, because of your religion, you are considered a legitimate refugee. If you’re Muslim, you have to show persecution.

Now, I think that’s an unnecessarily strict construction of refugee status. I think there could have been more leeway in it. For example, Ahmadi Muslims are persecuted in Pakistan, even though Pakistan is an officially Muslim country. Allowing anyone who’s persecuted on behalf of religion would have probably been a more generous and better-drafted way to write the law. But instead of saying anyone’s personal on the basis of religion, the law actually lists a series of religions. That’s poor drafting, it’s not a perfect law, but it’s a very liberal law.

Price: I think that’s one aspect, but if you look at what Human Rights Watch for example is saying about India, they talk about summary punishments. They talk about shops and homes being demolished, excessive force, public floggings. So these are actual things happening to Muslims in India. We’re not just talking about whether they accept Muslims from neighboring countries.

Babones: These things have occurred as incidents in India, and they have been investigated and they’re subject to litigation in India. That’s the key point. We all respect New Zealand, we all think it’s a wonderful democracy and it’s rated in the top five of all the major democracy rankings. Well, if I told you that the largest mass killing of Muslims in the last five years occurred in New Zealand. “Oh, are you serious? More Muslims have been killed in terrorist attacks in New Zealand than in India in the last five years?” Oh, that’s right, the 2019 Christchurch massacre. We forget about it because we think it’s a good country. Now, if 200 Muslims have been killed in a terrorist attack in India for being Muslim, we would never hear the end of it because we have a preconception that India is anti-Muslim.

With New Zealand, we trust that the perpetrators are going to be tracked down, that these are going to be redressed and there is going to be, and there was, a national outpouring of sympathy for the community that was attacked. And really, that’s what we should be looking for in India. We can ask if any police person in India has ever transgressed the rights of Muslims. And the answer is yes. As the answer is yes, in England, in the United States, in New Zealand, in every country in the world. The question is what happens to the person who does it? So for example, you mentioned the case of the whipping of the Muslim man who was tied to a post and whipped by police; those police officers were promptly arrested. Now I don’t know the exact progress of the case, but they were arrested. They were dismissed; they’re facing legal action.

And that’s what we really need to look to. I mean, India is a country that has a GDP per capita on par with sub-Saharan Africa. We shouldn’t be expecting that India have a level of education and civility that is similar to a well-settled country with 30 times its GDP per capita. So the question for India is not, “Do things happen that are wrong?” They happen in New Zealand, they happen in the UK. These things happen everywhere. The question is, “In a robust, well-institutionalized democracy, does the machinery of government respond appropriately?” And I think in India the answer is largely, and I stress “largely,” yes.

Price: Tell me why you think these rankings matter.

Babones: They matter for many reasons. First, they matter because they matter for international affairs. Narendra Modi just visited the United States. There is a willingness in the United States to work with India because of the perception that it is a growing economy and an important country, but the American establishment is, in effect, holding its nose when it works with India. All of the statements, they’re all along the lines of, “Well, we know India has problems, but we want to work with them anyway,” instead of saying, “Actually, these accounts of problems in India are wildly exaggerated.” We saw Barack Obama recently in a very controversial interview in which he said that India had to address these problems, or it might soon face a second partition. Now this affects how the United States works with India, whether it works with India as a true partner or simply as a customer, someone who might buy defense equipment. It affects how much India pays for its international bonds, right?

Price: So there are real-world effects?

Babones: Bonds are all benchmarked to the sovereign bond rate, and the sovereign bond rate for India is partly benchmarked to government standards. Those government standards in large part come from the V-Dem survey, which then enter into the World Bank and United States Agency for International Development governance standards. So there are indirect but real effects. There’s just also the matter of simple justice. I mean, I’m an academic. I’m not a spokesperson for India.

Price: You say you’re not a spokesperson for India, but you make no secret of your support for India on Twitter. You’re wearing a “Make India Great Again” hat and you’re raising money for an Indian think tank.

Babones: Look, any think tank has to raise money and that’s just a fact of life. Any reporting organization has to earn money. We have to earn money to do things. Now that money is not going to me, I must stress everything I’ve done for the Indian Century Roundtable has been pro bono. My “Make India Great Again” hat is a joke. I’m very much a humorist on Twitter, and in fact I write a humor column for an Australian journal. But that is not in my academic writing.

�ʰ��:��Are you worried about your perceived objectivity? You met Modi, for example, last month and you exchanged some comments on Twitter, which showed you were very proud to have met him.

Babones: Well, of course I am. I think that’s a perfectly normal human being to do. Look, I am not an arbiter. I’m not a judge. I’m not a journalist. I’m a person and an academic who’s writing what he believes, and I also have a personal life. Now, if I had a responsibility to defend India, I would probably be much more guarded about things I say personally on Twitter. I am not the guardian of India. I’m not the defender of India. I’m an academic who has a viewpoint. You can take my viewpoint or leave it. But the point is what I’m bringing to the table is factual data about India.

We haven’t got into any of those facts today in this interview. I can give you lots of survey data about India. I can give you lots of factual data about India. Now, whether or not people like me or like what hat I wear, the factual data are the factual data. And I get people, almost always, coming back with ad hominem attacks. If I write something that is exculpatory about Narendra Modi’s India, someone will say “Oh, he’s a Trump supporter.” Well, first of all, whether or not I am a Trump supporter (and I’ve never taken any public position on that) is irrelevant about whether the facts about India are true or not. I mean, the data on journalist deaths are the same data whatever you think of me personally. The data we have on attitudes of Muslims in India, that is Muslims’ self-reported experiences of discrimination in India are the same. I’d like to talk about the data, not so much about myself.

Price: Tell us more about what your think tank is aiming to achieve.

Babones: Well, the Indian Century Roundtable is something I’ve tried to get started up in Australia. I should stress it’s an Australian think tank and our goal is to present a factual narrative about India. Our launch report was a report about the V-Dem rankings, and again, it’s not a report that just complains that the V-Dem rankings are unfair to India. It’s a technical analysis of V-Dem. My own background is as a social statistician. I teach our statistics curriculum at the University of Sydney, and my major academic work is about methods for quantitative macro-comparative research, which is a book about statistics used for international comparison. So this is exactly my own area of academic expertise.

We’re also looking to commission papers on other controversial issues in India, just to try to get a factual account. When I commission those papers, we go to experts that have knowledge on the subject. We’re not trying to give a policy recommendation for India. Instead, we’re simply trying to get a factual account of India.

Our next paper will be on the national identification number system. Right now if you go for information in the West, all you can get is either glorifying articles from the business press about how wonderful it is that everyone has a bank account or condemnatory articles from the NGO press saying that this is a system for cataloging people to prime them for repression. Well, we put together a factual account. “How does the system actually work?”

We’re commissioning a paper on the collegiate system for appointing judges. India has a very distinctive system. The closest parallel is Israel, pre-Netanyahu reforms, for appointing judges. Judges essentially appoint themselves in India’s judiciary. Well, does that ensure judicial independence, or is that a recipe for nepotism? We’ve commissioned a report from a senior barrister, an Australian barrister, to just take an objective look at the system.

I have no position on these things. I’m not Indian. I’m not Hindu. I’m not getting any money from this. I’m doing this because I’m looking at the data and saying the data are completely at odds with the narrative. Then when you get deeper into the narrative, we see highly political people who are pushing the narrative. Then reporters, and forgive me, it’s not nice to criticize the fourth estate, but reporters instead of going to the data, just repeat, via quote, “This NGO person said this, this NGO person said that,” without asking \hard questions of them. Wait a minute, why are you saying that? Is that true?

The simple thing that I keep going back to, is the Committee to Protect Journalists, which tells everyone that journalists are in danger in India because more journalists are killed in India over time than in any other country outside China. You think, “Oh, that’s terrible.” Well, no reporter, as far as I could tell, has ever asked the Committee to Protect Journalists if they have adjusted for population size. It doesn’t take a social statistician, who writes books on statistics, to just ask that simple question. Yes, more people have black hair in India than in India than any country outside of China. Tell me what the stats are. I’d like to see the fourth estate not only holding me to account—I’m happy with that—but holding NGOs to account, holding politicians to account, going to the data. That’s what the Indian Century Roundtable is all about. It’s all about going to the data.

Price: Thank you so much, Professor. I think we’ll have to leave it there.

51�Թ� is a platform for citizen journalism with over two and a half thousand contributors from over 90 different countries. And we would love you to join the conversation. So if today’s discussion has prompted any thoughts, do get in touch. You can follow us on social media, you can write for us and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Babones: Thank you.

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: Rank Hypocrisy: Do Global Rankings Misrepresent India? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

FO° Shorts: An Inventor Now Seeks to Turn the Tables on Apple

Claire Whitaker — Tue, 16 May 2023 13:37:07 +0000

“They’ve called me a patent troll but in fact I’m about as far removed from the spectrum as you could possibly get.” So argues British inventor Patrick Racz, who has taken on Apple for copyright infringement. It’s a complex case spanning the past two decades. And it’s taken over his life. But Racz has vowed not to give up.

“They stole my technology and they used it to build the biggest company in the world…. So I will see this through to the end. They’re not going to get away with it.” Remember the days of the iPod, before the iTunes store was invented? That’s when Racz had his lightbulb moment.

A Case of Intellectual Property Theft?

“I’m asked what I invented. I invented particular devices and methods for combining payment functionality, secure downloading, storage and rules for the use of content on portable devices.” In short, Racz invented the backbone of Apple’s iTunes store.

Racz says the problem started when their lead technology partner, a company called Gemplus, “pulled the rug from under our feet” and started claiming the technology as their own. “What I didn’t know at the time was that there were very deep ties and a revolving door between Gemplus and Apple.” The first he knew about Apple using his technology was when it launched its music store in 2003. “That’s when it first got nicked.”

You’d think a patent would have stopped this kind of infringement. But despite applying for a patent back in 1999, it wasn’t granted for a whopping nine years. And by 2008, the genie was out of the bottle.

“I was powerless to do anything,” says Racz. “I had to watch as Apple released product after product after product.” “They took my technology and they created a walled garden. They prevented other device manufacturers from having access to it. And then they taxed everyone at 30%.” It took Racz three years to raise the money to go after Apple.

His company Smartflash filed a lawsuit against Apple in 2013. They went to trial in 2015, and won. “We proved wilful infringement. We proved that Apple stole the technology, we proved that they’d used it extensively.” They also proved that Apple hired a former Gemplus employee as head of digital rights management to implement Racz’s technology. A jury awarded Smartflash $532.9million.

But as Racz puts it, “we just haven’t been paid.”

A Case of Injustice?

Immediately after his victory, Apple released a statement saying that “Smartflash makes no products, has no employees, creates no jobs, has no US presence, and is exploiting our patent system to seek royalties for technology Apple invented. We refused to pay off this company for the ideas our employees spent years innovating and unfortunately we have been left with no choice but to take this fight up through the court system. We rely on the patent system to protect real innovation and this case is one more example of why we feel so strongly Congress should enact meaningful patent reform.”

Apple appealed the verdict at both the Patent Trial Appeal Board (PTAB) and the Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit. This time, it was their turn to win.

“It was rigged,” says Racz. “It transpires that the judges at the Patent Trial Appeal Board were ex-lawyers working for the defendants.” He also claims that the panel of judges at the Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit was switched at the last minute—to those with close ties to Apple.

“This is no longer a case about patent infringement… It’s about more than that.” “The US patent system has been the subject of regulatory capture. The PTAB is owned, operated and managed by Big Tech. It’s a kangaroo court.”

So where does he go from here? Does he count his losses or double down to fight both Big Tech and the US patents system? You guessed it—both. There isn’t an active case yet but Racz is preparing for more litigation.

Does he ever think about giving up? “Never,” Racz says. “I’ve taken on four of the ten largest companies in the world and the USPTO so you’d think they realize that I don’t give up easily.” He goes on to say: “This is my legacy. And the legacy for my family who’ve suffered through this too. So we’re going to see this through.”

Time will tell if David overcomes Goliath in the 21st century.

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Shorts: An Inventor Now Seeks to Turn the Tables on Apple appeared first on 51�Թ�.

FO° Talks: Making Sense of the Ukraine War

Claire Whitaker — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 04:49:30 +0000

Moderator: Claire Price, ex-AFP Africa (Video) Head and Chair of the Board of 51�Թ�

Speakers: Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies

Speaker Bios:
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of both CODEPINK and the international human rights organization Global Exchange. She is the author of eight books, including Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control and Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J.S. Davies is an independent journalist and a researcher for CODEPINK. He is also the author of Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Outline of Discussion:
Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in February this year has brought war back to Europe. Publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal put the blame squarely on an autocratic and bloodthirsty Vladimir Putin.

In their book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies put things in context. They examine the events leading up to the conflict, survey the different parties involved, weigh the risks of escalation, evaluate the consequences of the destructive war and highlight opportunities for peace.

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: Making Sense of the Ukraine War appeared first on 51�Թ�.

High Time for Africans to Reclaim Their Agency

Claire Whitaker — Sun, 16 Oct 2022 16:38:57 +0000

In this edition of The Interview, Nigerian academic Professor Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò explains why Africa’s decolonization movement has got it wrong – and why Africans urgently need to reclaim their agency. Táíwò works at Cornell University in the US, where he is Professor of African Political Thought and Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center.

Táíwò is a noted scholar and a provocative thinker. His views can be controversial. He says: “A lot of the decolonization movement is complete nonsense, it’s totally irrelevant. And I use very strong language because these people are causing a lot of damage in the continent.”

It is for this reason Táíwò fights back against the movement that spurred “Rhodes Must Fall’ and called for colonial reparations. Before this interview, he had just returned from Nigeria where his mother passed away but Táíwò says he’s keen to take his mind off his loss. And while he starts off gently, his appeals become more impassioned as he warms to his theme.

��áí��ò’s , Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, prompted a FO° Live discussion on June 28 earlier this year: In 2022, Can and Does Africa Determine Its Own Destiny?

��áí��ò’s book has now been recommended by The Financial Times. As per this venerable British newspaper, the book “makes a powerful case for how Africans can get out of their malaise: not by being trapped in a psychological state of victimhood, but by reclaiming their agency.”

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Claire Price: Agency is a big theme of your book – how do you define it?

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò: One of the central tenants of modernity is the idea of the self. That’s the agency that I’m talking about – that the individual is the author of her or his life script. Many of us are messed up and write very terrible scripts for ourselves but however we write it, what is important is that we own it. The colonialists substituted themselves for the agency of the colonized. While that lasted, the colonized didn’t give up their agency – they kept on contesting the power and authority of the colonizers. But much of the decolonising literature does not take seriously this agency of the African. And by making it seem as if colonialism is the axis on which to plot Africa’s entire phenomenon is just wrong.

Price: Do you feel that many African writers deny their own agency by blaming colonialism for their problems?

��áí��ò: Much of the decolonising literature, not African writers but decolonising literature, is vested in that. But the fact that we can’t blame colonialism for everything does not mean we can’t blame colonialism for anything.

Price: Have you faced criticism that you underplay the impact of colonialism?

��áí��ò: Unfortunately no, I haven’t faced criticism.

Price: Is that fortunately or unfortunately?

��áí��ò: Unfortunately! Who knows, in this book, I might get some people’s goat and they might challenge it. But previously, it was thought that colonialism brought modernity to Africa. I argued in my first book that modernity was introduced to Africa by the missionaries and that those ideas were stifled by colonialism. And 12 years since its publication, no-one has challenged this thesis. That’s not a boast, it’s just the honest truth.

Price: I’m going to go through a few things that people blame colonialism for. First, borders. Isn’t the decolonisation movement right to blame Europeans for drawing up arbitrary borders and causing all sorts of trouble?

��áí��ò: I have argued in the book that it’s been 60 years now that most of Africa has been independent. If Africans don’t like their borders, they could do something about them. Those borders are not sacrosanct – look at Eritrea, Sudan and the secessionist movements in Cameroon. There is no country in the world that is natural, all borders are artificial. In fact, most of the world’s countries are multinational states. Just look at the United Kingdom and Russia.

Price: The second charge is tribal conflict, which people claim was exacerbated by the colonizers’ divide and rule policy. We can see how that played out in the recent Kenyan elections.

��áí��ò: First, you need to get rid of that terminology. There are no tribes. That’s straight out of racist colonial anthropology. You don’t look to the national group that I belong to and call it a tribe. It’s global, it’s multi-ethnic, there are a lot of different dialects with regional variations. It has a civilization that dates back at least one thousand years.

When Europe was making the transition to modernity and the feudal structure was being broken up, they migrated to cities under their tribal affiliations. As capitalism grew, they started organizing themselves according to guilds and that was the start of the trade union movement. Africans wanted to do the same under the colonial movement – but the colonial authorities pre-empted them and insisted that Africans organized themselves by tribal unions.

Price: So they can be blamed?

��áí��ò: Yes, they could be blamed for exacerbating tensions but some Africans have tried to craft different identities since independence – and some of their experiments have succeeded. For example, you don’t have those tensions in Tanzania, which is made up of various ethnic and national groups. That’s not the way they organize their elections. Even when you talk about Zanzibar, those tensions are religious rather than ethnic. And in Senegal, everybody now speaks Wolof – we’re seeing the Wolofisation of Senegal.

Claire: You’ve talked about languages there. Can African thinkers be truly “decolonized” if they write in English or French?

��áí��ò: Why do people assume that you cannot domesticate a language? We live in a world of several Englishes. I work in the US and I went to school in Canada and they don’t speak the same English. And they are not the same as UK English. Why are Indians celebrated for calibrating English in their own way and Africans are treated as if they are still minions. It doesn’t make sense.

That’s the reason why a lot of the decolonisation movement is complete nonsense, it’s totally irrelevant. And I use very strong language because these people are causing a lot of damage in the continent.

English did not just come with colonialism. Africans have been writing in English since 1769. Formal colonialism did not come to West Africa until 1865. Do you want to throw away 100 years of history?

And who insisted that Africans should speak their own indigenous languages and only speak enough English to service the colonial machine? The colonizers!

Talking African Literature With Chigozie Obioma

Price: Ethiopian American academic Adom Getachew has said that: “Acknowledging that colonial history shapes the current inequalities and hierarchies that structure the world sets the stage for the next one: reparations and restitution.” What are your thoughts on that?

��áí��ò: Honestly, I don’t touch that. And the reason why is a very simple one. There’s a reparations movement for those who were forcibly brought to the Americas, which was later expanded to include reparations for colonial rule. People need to separate the two.

As an African immigrant to the United States, I cannot be part of the reparation movement for black people in this country because there’s no basis for it. If I come from West Africa; a country like Nigeria, Ghana or Sierra Leone, from which many people were shipped off as slaves, I need to do some very serious genealogy. Because if I’m from one of those families that profited from it, I should be paying reparations! We need to take history very seriously.

The idea that people went in and kidnapped people – yes that’s how it started but eventually a market was created. Willing buyer, willing seller. Unfortunately, we’re still making the same deals. If we say we were coerced then and we’re still being coerced now, then we’re permanent children.

In 50 years, maybe our grandchildren will be asking the Chinese for reparations for what they’re doing in Africa right now. And that’s the fault of the Chinese? No, I’m sorry. We need to have internal debates about this. We should not pretend that Africans are victims all along.

Price: Why do these ideas matter?

��áí��ò: As I did my research for this book, I said wait a minute, is this what people are peddling about pre-colonial history? Are you suggesting that how life was led in Africa in 15^th century was the same as in the 19^th century?

The kind of granular engagement with the complexity of life and thought in different parts of Africa is being effaced on a daily basis. That cannot be good for the future of scholarship about the African continent. That for me is not just a disservice, it’s really bordering on the criminal.

I’m sorry that I have to speak in very strong terms. This is not a divergence, it’s not academic. It’s about how Africa is going to deliver for its citizens. These are ideas that go to the heart of human dignity.

I don’t see the decolonisation movement getting into all that. It’s all about chasing slights. Not slights for ordinary people but for academics.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post High Time for Africans to Reclaim Their Agency appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In 2022, Can and Does Africa Determine Its Own Destiny? | FO° LIVE

Claire Whitaker — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 10:15:00 +0000

Welcome to FO Live, to make sense of Africa’s colonial legacy.

For centuries, Europeans used Africa as land for exploitation. They raided the continent for slaves, then engaged in a “Scramble for Africa” and stole both land and resources.

So in 2022, can and does the African continent determine its own destiny – or is it trapped by its colonial past?

Professor Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò hails from Nigeria and now works at Cornel University in the US, where he Professor of African Political Thought and Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center. He’s just written a book called ‘Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously’.
Natasha Uwimanzi joins us from Rwanda, where she is an international social development and research consultant with passion for education in Africa
Martin Plaut is a former Africa editor at the BBC World Service and senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and King’s College London.

FO° Live is brought to you by 51�Թ�, a platform for citizen journalism which has two and a half thousand contributors from over ninety countries – and we’d love you to join the conversation. Sign up for our newsletter, subscribe to our channel and follow us on social media – and publish with us too.

The post In 2022, Can and Does Africa Determine Its Own Destiny? | FO° LIVE appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Marikana: The Massacre After the Massacre

Claire Whitaker — Sat, 17 Aug 2013 03:44:10 +0000

A year after violence escalated in South Africa, conflicts still persist.

It has been a year since 34 striking miners were shot dead by police at Lonmin's platinum mine in Marikana, South Africa. What appeared to be a conflict between miners and police was in reality more complex: It was a war between miners themselves. That war, tragically, continues today.

I visited Marikana on Monday, to research a story about life at the mines one year after the massacre. By 11am that morning, a mineworker had been shot dead outside her home within the mine's married quarters. The mineworker was a mother of three, and a foster mother to a further three children, who worked as a shop steward for the National Union of Mineworkers. Her colleagues told me they have little doubt she was killed for her role in the union.

The murder is the latest in a string of tit for tat killings between the established National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the radical Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). Several union members have been shot on both sides, as the two unions vie for power.

Ongoing Conflict

The NUM is part of COSATU, the group of unions that forms the tripartite alliance with the ANC and the South African Communist Party. Trade unions such as NUM played a massive role in the fight against apartheid. Yet the hope and unity of those days has degenerated into the inter-union rivalry we see today.

It is easily forgotten that the police intervened last year because of violence between the unions. Ten people died in the days preceding the massacre on August 16, 2012, in a dispute over a wildcat strike, which AMCU supported but NUM did not.

That divide is as deep as ever — and is becoming increasingly violent. Tension between the two unions has intensified in recent months, as the AMCU toppled the NUM as the biggest union in the platinum industry. The AMCU is now officially the majority union at Lonmin, with over 60 percent of the miners on its books. How it achieved this success is questionable, however.

Fear and Intimidation

"One of the strategies of these people is to instil fear on our members, for them to be scared to belong to NUM," said Mxhasi Sithethi, NUM's regional organizer. "That's why they keep terrorizing people."

It is not just NUM members being terrorized. AMCU members are also being threatened and killed. But no matter which side the miners fall on, they are united in one aspect: fear.

"Everybody's scared, everybody's scared," said Thandi Mateyisa, the latest victim's niece. "You start talking, you start doing anything, so you don't know what might happen to you."

As a result of this fear, witnesses are too scared to speak out and perpetrators go unpunished. The atmosphere after Monday's shooting was eery. Neighbors stood quietly around the body of their friend, refusing to testify against the person who had shot her in broad daylight. One of the reasons for keeping quiet is a lack of trust in the police.

"We don't see any reaction from the police. There is no security, we are not secure," said Adelaide Mfana, a friend of the dead woman.

In public, the leaders of both unions have been calling for an end to the killings. AMCU President Joseph Mathunjwa recently invited his NUM counterpart to help lead a memorial for the victims of the Marikana massacre, "to preach peace and demonstrate that workers' unity is a strength." Yet their soothing words have made little difference so far.

More than Random Violence

It is impossible to know how much violence at a grassroots level is coordinated from the top, since police have failed to charge anyone in relation to these murders. But I find it hard to believe that union leaders are unaware of the intimidation, abuse, and killings that go on between their members on a daily basis.

A disturbing factor has been how many of the killings have been carried out in an "execution style" with a single bullet. Monday's victim was shot once, through her back, according to police on the ground.

Could these murders be carried out by random criminal elements? Or are they in fact orchestrated? And where is Lonmin in all this? Should they not be doing more?

The question is where we go from here. Union leaders are making the right noises, but now is the time to take action. Something needs to be done to stop these killings, and bring an end to the fear which pervades the homes and mines of Marikana.

Would it not be a fitting memorial to those 34 miners if, instead of planting crosses and singing hymns, we found a way to stop more lives being claimed?

*[Note: This article represents the views of the author and not the perspectives of AFP.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Marikana: The Massacre After the Massacre appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Zimbabwe: Diamonds Are Worth More Than Democracy

Claire Whitaker — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 07:57:09 +0000

Whether Zimbabwe's elections are free and fair matters little for the international community.

Amid the hand wringing from the outside world over how free and fair Zimbabwe's elections will be, one uncomfortable question lingers. Does it really matter? Yes, 1 million dead voters remain on the voters roll. Yes, Robert Mugabe has banned all but African election observers. And no, the new constitution has not ushered in a new era of press freedom.

The Brussels-based International Crisis Group sums up the concerns. "The voters roll is a shambles, security forces unreformed and the media grossly imbalanced," it said in a report released on Monday. "Conditions for a free and fair vote do not exist."

And yet Zimbabwe's neighbours do not appear to care. South African President Jacob Zuma says Zimbabwe has "done the best so far" considering the short amount of time they had to organize this election. His thoughts echoed that of his ex-wife, the African Union chief, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma who claims she has been assured by Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission that problems have been rectified and everything is in place.

Realpolitik Trumps Principles

So why does South Africa and the rest of the African Union turn a blind eye to the concerns raised by the outside world? It comes down, according to one observer, to realpolitik.

"I think whether a free and fair election is possible is totally irrelevant at the moment," says Muhamed-Nur Nordien, a political analyst in Johannesburg. "Stakeholders within SADC (Southern Africa Development Community) really just want to see this election happen, and for it to go off as smooth as possible. Trying to contain whatever happens post this election is probably more important from a realpolitik perspective than whether the election really is free and fair."

It is a sad fact of politics that pragmatism trumps principles. The last thing South Africa wants is an unstable Zimbabwe, which could lead to a refugee crisis on its border. It is also reluctant to criticize Mugabe's political party, Zanu-PF. If South Africa points out that a liberation movement can lose its democratic credentials, what does that say about the African National Concress (ANC)?

Western powers also appear to have resigned themselves to an extension of Mugabe's 33-year rule. The European Union lifted most of its sanctions after Zimbabwe's new referendum was approved in March. And US Secretary of State John Kerry offered to “revisit” current sanctions against Zimbabwe if upcoming elections are transparent and peaceful — or at least are seen to be.

So despite the best effort of activists, there's no political will to criticize these elections. Diamonds, it seems, are worth more than democracy.

It matters little whether ordinary Zimbabweans' votes are cast freely or counted fairly. What matters most is that this election does not disturb the status quo, so that everyone can all go on with business as usual.

*[Note: This article represents the views of the author and not the perspectives of AFP.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Zimbabwe: Diamonds Are Worth More Than Democracy appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Claire Whitaker | Chair - 51�Թ�

FO° Talks: Rank Hypocrisy: Do Global Rankings Misrepresent India?

Interview with Professor Salvatore Babones

FO° Shorts: An Inventor Now Seeks to Turn the Tables on Apple

A Case of Intellectual Property Theft?

A Case of Injustice?

FO° Talks: Making Sense of the Ukraine War

High Time for Africans to Reclaim Their Agency

No owners, no ads, just global voices and first class editors. We’re a nonprofit that puts real journalism first. Join us — subscribe to our free newsletters — now.

Talking African Literature With Chigozie Obioma

In 2022, Can and Does Africa Determine Its Own Destiny? | FO° LIVE

Marikana: The Massacre After the Massacre

Zimbabwe: Diamonds Are Worth More Than Democracy