Top 15 Issa G. Shivji Quotes

Our leaders tell us there is only one world: the existing world, the globalised world, the hegemonic world. ‘Either sink or swim’, they say. The truth of the matter is that the working people are sinking in the globalised world, while the elite are swimming in it. It is clear therefore that there is a contest between two worldviews: one which wants to maintain the existing world; the other that wants to create an alternative world. Which worldview do we share? We must make a choice, and act in accordance with our choice. [...] The pundits of the status quo have in common with all dominating classes and hegemonic powers the assumption that the existing world is the only realistic world, and no alternative world is possible. Yet, it is the struggle for an alternative world, a better world, which has changed the past and will continue to change the present for a better future. We, the activists, together with the working people, must continue to fight for a better world. An alternative world is possible.

We activists are not in the business of brokering power where expediency and compromise rule. Our business is to resist and expose the ugly face of power. We are guided and our work is informed by deeply held human values and causes. It seems to me that consistency of principles and commitment to humanity should inform all our work, thought, activism and advocacy.

African nationalism, as some of the fathers of African nationalism realised, is and must be pan-African. Pan-Africanism, they argue, is the nationalism of the era of globalisation; and only pan-Africanism can carry forward the struggle for national liberation in Africa. Without a pan-African vision, there is the danger that the resurgence of nationalism as a reaction to the new imperial assault could degenerate into narrow, parochial, nationalist chauvinism, even ethnicism and racism. But this new pan-Africanism must be a bottom-up people’s pan-Africanism, and not a top-down statist pan-Africanism. In the hands of the African state and its ‘leaders’, pan-Africanism will degenerate into ‘NEPAD-ism’, or phony African renaissance.

‘A better world is possible’ according to the NGO slogan. But to build a better world we must understand the world better.

Needless to say, policy-making is a terrain of intense conflicts of interest, and has nothing neutral about it. The question is, as always, which interest is being served by a particular policy. A question about which there can be neither neutrality nor non-partisanship.

Policy-making, an attribute of sovereignty for which the government of the day is supposedly accountable to its people.

The separation between politics and economics, between state and civil society is how the bourgeois society appears and presents itself. But it is not its real essence. In reality, politics is the quintessence, or the concentrated form of economics. The political sphere is built on the sphere of production, and there is a close relationship between those who command production and those who wield power. Yet the NGO sector, which according to its own proclamations stands for change, accepts the ideological myth that it is the third sector: non-political, not-for-profit, having nothing to do with power or production. This bourgeois mythology mystifies the reality of capitalist production and power, thus contributing to its legitimisation. NGOs by accepting the myth of being non-political contribute to the process of mystification, and therefore objectively side with the status quo, contrary to their expressed stand for change.

The international and national orders within which we are functioning are unequal and there are conflicting interests. To pretend that society is a harmonious whole of stakeholders is to be complicit in perpetuating the status quo in the interest of the dominant classes and powers. In the struggle between national liberation and imperialist domination, and between social emancipation and capitalist slavery, NGOs have to choose sides. In this there are no in-betweens.

Colonial and imperial history are at the heart of the present African condition. History is not about assigning or sharing blame. Nor it is about narrating the ‘past’, which must be forgotten and forgiven, or simply remembered once a year on remembrance of heroes or independence days. History is about the present. We must understand the present as history, so as to change it for the better; perforce, in the African context where the imperial project is not only historical, but the lived present. Just as we cannot ‘make poverty history’ without understanding the history of poverty, so we cannot chant ‘another world is possible’ without accurately understanding and correctly describing the existing world of five billion slaves and 200 slave masters. How did it come about and how does it continue to exist? Indeed to answer these questions, we must understand history as the philosophy and political economy that underpin the existing world and the vested interests – real social interests of real people – that ensure and defend its existence.

How can you make poverty history without understanding the history of poverty? We need to know how the poverty of the five billion of this world came about. Even more acutely, we need to know how the filthy wealth of the 500 multinationals or the 225 richest people was created. We need to know precisely how this great divide, this unbridgeable chasm, is maintained; how it reproduced itself, and how it is increasingly deepened and widened. We need to ask ourselves: What are the political, social, moral, ideological, economic and cultural mechanisms which produce, reinforce and make such a world not only possible, but seemingly acceptable?

NGO activism is presented and based on the ‘act now, think later’ mantra. Theory, and particularly grand theory, is dismissed as academicism, unworthy of activists. Yet, we know, that every practice gives rise to theory and that every action is based on some theoretical or philosophical premise or outlook. NGO action is also based on certain theoretical premises and philosophical outlooks. In their case however, theory is written off as ‘common sense’ and therefore not interrogated. [...] The ‘common sense’ theoretical assumption of the current period underpinning NGO roles and actions is neoliberalism in the interest of global imperialism. It is fundamentally contrary to the interests of the large majority of the people.

While some NGOs may be quite involved with and appreciated by the people whom they purport to serve, ultimately NGOs, by their very nature, derive not only their sustenance but also their legitimacy from the donor-community. In the current international conjuncture, even political elites located in the state or political parties seek legitimacy from so-called ‘development-partners’, rather than from their own people. Not surprisingly, there is a fair amount of circulation of the elite between government and non-governmental sectors.

Globalisation in Africa is manifest in the neoliberal economic and political packages, centering around trade liberalisation, privatisation of national assets and resources, commodification of social services and marketisation of goods and services, both tangible and intangible. In sum, the underlying thrust of neoliberal and globalised development ‘discourse’ is for a deeper integration of African economies into global capital and market circuits, without fundamental transformation. It is predicated on private capital, which in Africa translates into foreign private capital, as the ‘engine of growth’. It centres on economic growth, without questioning whether growth necessarily translates into development. It banishes issues of equality and equity to the realm of rights, not development.

Colonialism left by the front door and returned through the back door in the form of neocolonialism. Radical nationalists such as Nkrumah and were over-thrown in military coups. Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara were assassinated in Western sponsored imperial adventures. The few who survived including Nyerere and Kaunda did so through compromise and a game of hide-and-seek. Others, for example Sékou Touré, became paranoid and despotic, apprehensive of being overthrown or assassinated. Others – Kenyatta, Moi, Houphet Boigny and Senghor – simply became compradors in the bidding of their imperial masters.

Economists have described the 1980s as Africa’s lost decade. The 1980s were also a transition period marking the beginnings of the decline of and the rise of neoliberalism, euphemistically called globalisation. The lost decade signalled both the decline of the developmental state and the loss of its political legitimacy: the loss of both development and democracy. Internally, political stirrings and rethinking began, both practical and ideological. But as the African political economy has again and again demonstrated, the continent is firmly inserted in the imperialist web. Instead of allowing a space to open up for internal popular struggles, the opportunist imperialist intervention derailed it by imposing top-down, so-called multi-party democracy and ‘good governance’. Western powers took the opportunity to reassert their political and ideological hegemony. They recovered the ground lost during the nationalist decades, a trajectory worth recapitulating.