The G20’s prescriptions for the global crisis will only worsen the situation for Africa


Montréal, June 24, 2010 – The global recession and the failure of traditional mechanisms of global regulation have provided, yet again, an ideal opportunity for powerful States to assert their control over reforming an ailing capitalism and coordinating global governance. The cooptation of emerging countries, struggling themselves to save global capitalism, will do nothing for Africa, whose role is to tag along with reforms which, so far, have done nothing but exacerbate its crisis.

The G20 is an anti-democratic club that regulates the world order and perpetuates the elitist transgressions that have blighted the 20th century. It was born out of a desire to impose the post-Washington consensus and to remedy the Asian crisis at the end of the 1990s. In the context of the current crisis affecting the most vulnerable countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, the G20 has little to offer and will certainly do nothing to dismantle global capitalism’s predatory mode of production and consumption.

During the G20 summit in Pittsburgh,[1] efforts against financial deregulation were certainly an acknowledgement, against its members’ will, that capitalist countries could no longer allow unbridled market forces to mortgage the future of humankind with impunity. In attempting to expand the States’ margin of manoeuvre, while coming to the rescue of the very forces that contributed to the global economic crisis (the Bretton Woods institutions, financial and techno-industrial transnationals), the defenders of the G20 resuscitated those forces, destroyed decades of development efforts, increased unemployment and shifted the worst effects of the crisis onto the most vulnerable populations, while mortgaging our public services, social programs and the environment.
The prevailing discourse would have us believe that, in Europe, the crisis affecting Greece is mortgaging the Euro and the European Union. Yet Greece, which represents only 1.2% of the GDP of the European Union and 3.6% of the EU’s debt, along with Portugal, Ireland and Italy, are, in fact, the weak links and the victims of a tug-of-war between financial speculators and stock brokers backing the dollar over other currencies, including the euro and yuan. The American economy’s reliance on over-consumption and war has abused its mint in order to artificially inflate its currency vis-à-vis its more productive partners and competitors. While the international order should opt for a global currency—like the Bankor—which would fairly reflect the economic and financial reality of the currency baskets of our era, the G20 persists, on the one hand, in anchoring the dollar as the reserve currency and, on the other, in insisting on regulating the world order with tired hegemonic formulas obsessed with growth and the neoliberal market.

Africa is paying, and will continue to pay, a high price in terms of the environmental impacts of global warming caused by the G20 countries. This is unjust. Moreover, it is often said that Africa is only marginally integrated into the global economy, and some of its elites have recently vaunted the integrity and healthy standing of Africa’s financial spaces untainted by toxic capital.
On the one hand, this ignores the ongoing pillage of the continent’s resources, and on the other, in particular, it ignores the outrageous flight of illicitly obtained capital into tax havens and countries of the centre. For example, in 2004, some 40 African countries had transferred—over a 30-year period—some $607 billion.[2] For its part, South Africa, which has been coopted into the G20, abandoned its RDP plan in favour of GEAR, an economic program that has led to the creation of an embryonic black elite and has divided the political class that overthrew apartheid. In this case, economic independence was deferred at the expense of social equality, a decent standard of living and comprehensive public services.

The African masses must convey to the African Union and their comprador elites that Africa’s accelerated integration and self-relient development,[3] the abolition of colonial currencies and the development of a single currency pegged to south-south cooperation are its alternatives. The reformulation of mining codes and the third-generation pursuit of structural adjustment is draining the continent’s wealth and exacerbating pauperization, while diverting entire sections of civil society towards institutional roadblocks. Unable to impose social and environmental biding accountability codes on transnational and large financial groups, the defenders of the G20 are perpetuating their impunity. The Canada of the late Lester B. Pearson, who 40 years ago demanded, in vain, that public development assistance attain 0.7% of the GDP of rich countries, is a well-known example. In addition to allowing the legal harassment of researchers who are tracking the criminal actions of its transnational firms,[4] Canada is even attacking the reproductive rights of women in Africa and the Third World,[5] and undermining the anti-poverty efforts of its international cooperation organizations.[6]

Africa does not need handouts. What it needs is social justice and fair international trade and agricultural policies. It needs the equitable management of its resources and an end to all forms of impunity. And last but not least, its needs imperialism’s stranglehold to be broken and an end to support for anti-democratic regimes.
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Group for Research and Initiative for the Liberation of Africa
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