Africa’s political class has been content to reproduce and maintain the colonial order as far as agriculture was concerned, President Thabo Mbeki said on Thursday.
An example of this was very low budgetary allocations to the sector, he told delegates at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) 23rd African regional conference in Johannesburg.
While colonial ”extractive” policies had left African agriculture backward and undercapitalised, African states had also neglected this area since independence. This included the failure to allocate sufficient resources to agriculture, to develop rural infrastructure, to reduce producer input costs, and to promote agricultural research.
”This means that we have to work hard and consistently to guarantee the success of the African agrarian revolution,” Mbeki said in his speech.
”This is a political rather than a technical task. It is about ensuring that we break with a tradition that has marginalised African agriculture and the peasant masses from our domestic, regional and continental transformation process.”
Mbeki quoted Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiongo, who described the neo-colonial order as uncomfortable with the masses and distrustful of local initiatives. This order, the writer said, measured its success by how effectively it could reproduce and maintain the colonial order.
”We have a responsibility and a task to ensure that the agrarian programmes we elaborate and implement, rather than what we say, prove that we are not the creatures Ngugi sought to denounce,” the president said.
To the extent that the continent has neglected agrarian reform, ”Ngugi was correct to observe that Africa’s political class has been content to oversee the reproduction and maintenance of the colonial order, at least in the area of agriculture”.
Mbeki urged African nations to involve the continent’s peasants in defining a development agenda.
”We cannot afford to pay less attention to the peasant question, seeing these peasant masses as nothing more than voting cattle to return our parties to power, with no other role.”
Development, he said, was not about helping a few people get rich or creating a handful of ”pointless protected industries that only benefit the country’s elite”.
An estimated 80% of Africa’s population was rural. The peasant population formed 70% of Africans categorised as extremely poor and under-nourished.
Therefore, efforts to achieve a better life for all, alleviate poverty, improve working conditions, and achieve the emancipation of women, should focus primarily on rural people. Because of the continent’s neglect of agriculture, and its failure to pay sufficient attention to the ”peasant question”, dependence on imported food had increased significantly — entrenching Africa’s position as a net importer of food, Mbeki said.
He hoped that continental initiatives would break with a past which produced the current ”African agriculture crisis”.
”We can say that, however belatedly, we have drawn the African road map that signifies that we are determined to break away from the neo-colonial route that Ngugi wrote about,” the president said.
”The remaining, and perhaps more difficult task, is to ensure that we implement our decisions.” – Sapa