South Africa: The Gentle but Subversive Power of South-South Cooperation
Analysis
By Alexander O'Riordan
2 Oct 2014
In 1995 the World Bank took the rare step of commissioning a documentary on
its negotiations of a structural adjustment programme in Uganda. The
documentary crew followed negotiations for six months in Uganda and at the
Bank headquarters in Washington D.C., having access to meetings at the
highest level such as between the presidents of Uganda and the World Bank.
The documentary demonstrates that that there is never really any doubt about
whether the World Bank will provide funding to Uganda or not. By the time
the World Bank is negotiating a programme, it has already been decided to
award funding at the highest political levels.
In the case of Uganda in the mid-nineties, the West wanted to support a
Uganda recovering from the ravages of Idi Amin's dictatorship and still
struggling to put down a resistance and mass executions of civilians in the
North. The cold war was winding down and brewing conflicts in the Congo,
Burundi, Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda made it vitally important to secure
stability where it could be found.
Surprisingly the documentary shows that the World Bank's attention is not
really on what one would expect. The Bank is not really interested in
increasing tax revenue or reducing spending but rather on getting access to
the most intimate details of Uganda's governance processes.
The documentary shows how the Bank officials pedantically request access to
Uganda's military budget much to the frustration of the president and the
cabinet.
The Bank officials openly acknowledge that how much Uganda spends on defence
is not really significant but they cannot tolerate Uganda's unwillingness to
share every detail of the military budget. The whole documentary is
overshadowed by the World Bank' dogged pursuit of this information that is
quite reasonably classified in most countries around the world.
The documentary clearly exposes how the nature of aid is transforming: the
Cold War relationship that was about donors giving or taking away money to
curry influence is giving way to a more sophisticated relationship based on
surveillance and access to information. The World Bank is not concerned
about what happens to the money or what happens to Uganda. Its only concern
is that Uganda opens every aspect of its governance processes to
international scrutiny.
The negotiation is about sovereignty and dignity more than anything else ...
it is almost as if Uganda has already agreed to get screwed and now the
negotiation is about whether to do so in the dark or not. Uganda's line on
the defence budget is essentially symbolic. Uganda is arguing for some shred
of dignity in what is decidedly an unwanted invasion of privacy. On the
other hand, the Bank is quite clear: it has negotiated for every secret and
private detail that Uganda has and it will have its way.
While the documentary focused on the World Bank, the nature of the
relationship is no different with any other donor. African governments and
their donor partners agree at a political level how much money is to be
spent and on what. The remainder of the time, the relationship between
donors and African governments is almost exclusively about collecting and
making available ever increasing and ever more detailed data on the workings
of the government and other local actors.
Twenty years later, looking at the nature of development cooperation today
the World Bank documentary should be seen as illustrating the future of aid.
Today the aid relationship is even more obsessively focussed on access to
data and information than it was in the nineties. Western donors have
expanded their research and analytic capacities at incomprehensible rate.
Western universities arguably control more expertise on Africa than there is
in Africa itself. Vast networks of Western think tanks and philanthropies
set the developmental agenda and international organisations like the World
Bank hold all the data so much so that African governments often need to
consult the World Bank databases to find information about their own
country.
What all this means is that the aid business has essentially become a
surveillance machinery. What this achieves is a sense by Africans that they
are always being watched and that any decision their governments make is
immediately scrutinised by the West. When governments look outside for
information all they see are thousands of eyes looking back at them.
This sense of pervasive and perpetual surveillance is incredibly powerful
because it creates compliance at an unconscious level with the authority of
Western perspectives and agendas. The real power of aid, then, is not in the
size of the funding but in the disproportional power relationship encoded in
conversation and dialogue between African governments (that are presented as
lacking) and Western experts (who are presented as having the solutions).
Now, however, for the first time since the end of the Cold War there are
signs that Southern actors might be able to meaningfully challenge this
decidedly coercive power relationship in which control of all data,
discourse and developmental narratives in the hands of Western powers.
The rise of China and in Africa, Ethiopia and Rwanda is instilling greater
confidence in the ability for Southern actors to offer an alternative vision
of development. Furthermore, Southern powers are finally putting resources
behind their international agendas such as through the establishment of the
BRICS bank but also in South Africa, India, China, Turkey and Brazil
financing international cooperation and development programmes.
More importantly, though, Southern powers are making progress on creating an
alternative dialogue that will in time, displace a Donor-Recipient dialogue
with one based on 'South-South' cooperation.
On the surface South-South cooperation is innocent enough being about
sharing developmental experiences and exchanging information. However, what
is happening in reality is much more subversive. South-South cooperation
creates a space for dialogue in which Western donors who present themselves
as having all the solutions are left out of the room and instead developing
countries are able to discuss the limitations of these proffered donor
'solutions'.
By creating dialogue between Southern actors, what is actually happening is
that the global South is gradually rewriting the terms, definitions and
assumptions inherent in the dominant development narrative.
Over time, South-South cooperation could meaningfully generate a consensus
on the limitations and risks of blindsided adoption of Western 'democratic
standards', economic regulation, trade regimes and intellectual property
rights. Furthermore, because this South-South dialogue is primarily
happening outside of the mainstream, it disrupts the current Western
controlled management of information, concepts and narrative.
It remains to be seen if South-South cooperation goes anywhere or not but it
offers an enormous opportunity for a new space and alternative developmental
narrative that puts Southern voices front and centre.
For South Africa, there are some signs that the government is paying
attention. The South African embassy, with other Southern powers like
Mexico, participated in a forum in Jamaica to help restructure the aid
relationship there. South Africa is also publicly supporting alternatives
with the BRICS Bank and the Southern African Development Partnership Agency
(SADPA).
On the other hand, South Africa's participation seems lacklustre at best
when one considers that South Africa's embassies in countries like South
Sudan and Mozambique do nothing to represent South Africa's interests in
local forums.
While the occasional South African ambassador is forward thinking enough to
participate in shaping the relationship between Jamaica and its Northern
development partners, in most places in the world and in Africa, South
Africa makes no effort at all to participate in or shape developmental
relationships. Similarly, South Africa often seems much more interested in
using its resources to improve the reputation of South Africa as a 'peace
keeper' rather than focusing on real developmental challenges.
Being a peacekeeper is flying in to save the day and not valuable to how
development shapes national government policy. For example, flying troops
into the Central African Republic (CAR) may look good but it is expensive
and has no influence on how CAR structures its economy and governance.
If South Africa wants to participate in and support Southern voices through
'South-South' cooperation it needs to recognise that what may appear as a
sexy emergency response is costly and in the end considerably less effective
than seemingly mundane activities such as training CAR's diplomats and
working with them to develop a foreign policy in their own country's
interests.
The biggest problem, however, is that South Africa's commitment to
South-South cooperation often appears to be nothing more than lip-service.
If South Africa is to compete on the international stage it will need an
intellectual authority that is simply not possible to build inside
government departments. Building South Africa's intellectual authority is
impossible without investing in academia and civil society and vital to
convincing other emerging countries that South Africa can offer an
alternative developmental model.
The power of Northern donors does not reside with its bureaucrats but rather
with its powerful networks of civil society organisations, think tanks and
academic institutions. If South Africa is to make good on its intentions to
be a global player, the government needs to step up and invest considerably
more in the sort of think tanks, civil society networks and academic
institutions that can credibly compete and offer compelling alternative
developmental models.
The global political agenda will only become more balanced if Southern
actors are able to advocate and shape the global narrative; to do so South
Africa needs critical and authoritative voices and not just flag waving
bureaucrats.
O'Riordan is an Aid Effectiveness and Donor Funding Researcher.