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Social Movements and Nation-building in South Africa and Nigeria (African Renaissance, Volume 8 No 1 2011)

About This Edition

ISSN : 1744-2532 (Print) 2516-5305 (Online)

Table of Contents :

E. C. Ejiogu (Guest editor)5

TRIPARTITE PROCESSES: Explaining the On-Set of A New Phase of Resistance against the Nigerian State in the Niger Delta
E. C. Ejiogu8

Since the 1980s, there has been the resurgence of the age-old resistance by especially the inhabitants of the lower Niger that were carved into Nigeria who use same to dispute and challenge the authority and legitimacy of the Nigerian state and its control over them and their affairs. Their resistance dates back to the early days when imperial Britain used military force to subdue and impose colonial on them (Tamuno 1972). Particularly noticeable have been the contentious eruptions in the Niger Delta. In the succinct discourse that follows, I examine the resistance of inhabitants of the Niger Delta—particularly the Ogoni—which they have directed at the Nigerian state, with the use of intellectual tools derived from the scholarship that studies contentious politics and social movements.

The Ogoni struggle marks the on-set of the new chapter in the resistance of inhabitants of the Niger Delta directed at the Nigerian state in the context of the scholarship of contentious politics and social movements. The discourse reveals why Ken Saro-Wiwa’s role and efforts in this regard translate to a unique and fresh impetus in the struggle by inhabitants of the Niger Delta to on the one hand, compel the oil companies that operate under the protection of the Nigerian state, to cease the degradation of their environment in the process of drilling for hydrocarbons, and to also compel the Nigerian state to cede control of the wealth that accrues from those hydrocarbons to them. The paper ties the tripartite processes of political opportunities, framing of perceived wrongs, and mobilizing of people and resources to seek redress, all together, and concludes that in the Ogoni case framing was crucial. Saro-Wiwa’s effective framing of the Ogoni cause actually got underway to enable them and the others with whom they inhabit the Niger Delta to harness the political opportunities that abound in the Nigeria social environment and used them mobilize and press their demand that the wrongs against them must stop and be made right.

Transforming the Labour Reserve? Asymmetries of the New Agrarian Policy in South Africa
Gilingwe Mayende25

A central feature of the emerging strategy of the South African government on rural development is its almost exclusive focus on the communal areas, or ‘former homelands’, as they are commonly known[1], as the ‘rural areas’ within which the envisaged development will take place. Paradoxically, these rural areas are also seen as having some intrinsic capacity to provide the basis for a thorough-going agrarian transformation process that should lead not only to the eradication of poverty but to ‘vibrant and sustainable’ communities characterised by high employment, reasonable incomes and decent living standards. These regions, established as labour reserves in the wake of the well-documented processes that spanned the past three and a half centuries, of land dispossession, forced proletarianization, social and economic marginalisation, and underdevelopment in South Africa, have indeed seen little change since 1994. Battered by the combined effects of increasing urban unemployment, mirrored by aggravated rural poverty and inequality, these regions in fact entered the current era of multi-racial democracy already in a severe spiral of deepening decline and the generalised pauperisation of households and communities.

Over the past 16 years, in-effective delivery of services by the government to the public coupled with a degree of administrative ineptitude in a considerable number of instances, have served to accentuate the trend of marginalisation and peripheralisation of these regions and their populations from the national economy. Social development has largely been held in abeyance and, auspiciously perhaps, the role previously played by migrant workers’ remittances that help many households in these regions to keep hunger at bay has been replaced by the ubiquitous social grants. These regions have over the past two decades also undergone a perverse type of ‘transformation’, from reproducers and exporters of cheap labour to the country’s metropoles, to reproducers and exporters of both labour and poverty, whilst also moving inexorably from a degree of subsistence to virtual stagnation.

Kwandiwe Kondlo & Mashupye H. Maserumule66

The title of this paper, ‘The Reluctant President,’ emanates from an interview conducted by Dr Essop Pahad with Kgalema Motlanthe, six months after his appointment as President. The interview is for a publication called The Thinker (Vol. 3, 2009, 7-10). When asked about how he felt when he was offered the post of President, Motlanthe indicated,

“I had a deep sense of ambivalence about it in that I had been asked by the ANC to join Cabinet, as you know, and the main rationale behind my role in Cabinet was to be part of the team that would look at End of Term Reports and prepare handover notes to the new administration. There was a sense that someone coming from outside of government might be able to perceive things that would be lost to those who have been in Cabinet all along. As I was beginning to buckle down to that task, the recall of comrade Thabo happened, and I found myself thrust into the deep end”.

Kwandiwe Kondlo100

Perhaps the ‘big question’ that needs to be posed from the outset is: how would one best define and understand the period that South Africa is going through, especially since 2009 up until the first half of 2010? South Africa as a country seems to be ‘passing through a period of stress’ (Bundy 1988) in the areas of economy, national unity and overall democratic performance. Despite the many positive initiatives of the new administration, there is a persistent sense in which democracy itself seems to be hitting a vicious circles. As Meshack Mabogoane wrote, (Sunday Times 21/03/10), “for a country to have gone from the much-vaunted miracle to the present miserable situation, is in itself, mysterious”. A massive groundswell of popular discontent and the uncertainty of hope has come to strongly characterise South Africa at this stage. The way in which black townships are once again, gradually becoming centres of protests, flooded time and again, by the police and intelligence operatives who unleash the misty fog of teargas over the skies of protesting Black townships, gives the impression that the country is unravelling to the foundations of the pain which animated the pre-1994 national liberation struggle.

But what exactly is the nature of the problems that cause the stress? Is the stress due to a ‘transition’ of some sort or due to ‘cracking foundations’? The feeling that the foundations are beginning to crack underlies the caution made by FW de Klerk, in his meeting with President Jacob Zuma in August 2009, that it was necessary not to “undermine the historical compromise which is encapsulated in our Constitution” (The Times, August 25, 2009). De Klerk explained that “we struck a balance between becoming a federalized State and a centralized one. There is a hybrid somewhere in between a federalized and a centralized state and I believe it is very important that the delicate balance should not be disturbed” (The Times, August 25, 2009). The inclination towards a more radical agenda in the utterances of prominent members of the ANC alliance, including internal contestations of economic policy direction (Business Day, 14/05/09; Sunday Independent, 28/02/10; Business Day 16/09/09; Sunday Independent, 7/03/2010), the numerous protests and strike actions, together generate concerns as to whether the country is going for a ‘third transition’ – (following the transition to the Mandela ‘rainbow’ administration and thereafter the Mbeki logic and implementation period) – or, alternatively, the cracks are beginning to appear on the foundations the democratic state?

[abstract]


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