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Файл:Будущее Африки. Борьба новых и старых акторов. Материалы международной научной конференции. Москва, 13-14 марта 2012 г.
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81
Е.Н. Корендясов
Таблица 2
Страны-поставщики
Эволюция удельного веса России и Африки в поставках
природного газа в страны европейского Средиземноморья (в %)
Россия Страны Африки
Годы Изменения Годы Изменения
Страна-импорт
2003 2009 2003 2009
Источник: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2010; Мир Африки. М., 2010, № 1. С. 23–25.
Франция 23,3 16,7 – 6,6% 23,7 24,0 + 6,3%
Италия 32,1 30,0 – 2,1% 43,9 46,0 + 2,1%
Турция 59,8 62,6 + 2,8% 23,5 15,7 – 7,8%
Греция 73,2 62,3 – 10,9% 26,8 21,3 – 5,5%
82
Новая роль Африки в мире
Важным условием успешного продвижения интересов российских горнодобывающих компаний в Африке является достижение оптимального сочетания интересов российского бизнеса и африканских
партнеров. Африка (как и Россия) плотно сидит на «сырьевой игле».
Горнодобывающий комплекс является сегодня и будет еще в течение ближайших десятилетий важнейшим, а для многих африканских
стран – единственным источником бюджетных доходов и получения
инвестиционных ресурсов. В этой связи африканцы настойчиво добиваются организации возможно более глубокой обработки добываемой
руды, вплоть до производства конечного продукта на месте. Они упорно
настаивают на соблюдении установленных международных стандартов
в области корпоративной социальной ответственности бизнеса.
Перед лицом трудностей и препятствий для деятельности российского бизнеса в Африке необходима его системная поддержка со стороны государства. Следовало бы разработать концепцию российского
участия в освоении африканских природных ресурсов, где были бы
прописаны условия и пределы участия государства и частных инвесторов. В числе целей можно было бы наметить:
- создать своего рода дополнительную зарубежную ресурсную
базу для пополнения собственного потенциала качественным и менее дорогим сырьем, используя возможности, возникшие в результате
интеграции России в мировую экономику;
- обеспечивать увязку инвестиционной активности бизнеса с ликвидацией узких мест в развитии отечественного горнодобывающего
сектора, имея в виду восполнение дефицита по отдельным минералам
и сокращение сырьевых расходов национальной промышленности;
- использовать расширение инвестиций в горнодобычу в Африку для наполнения внешнеторговых обменов с континентом оборудованием, другими промышленными товарами;
- сформировать систему поощрения и поддержки инвестиционной активности российского бизнеса в горнодобывающей сфере партнерства с африканскими странами.
И в России, и в Африке декларируются намерения добиваться
качественного повышения уровня отношений сотрудничества, признается большая роль, которую может сыграть это сотрудничество в
решении национальных задач в сфере экономического развития и в
международных делах. Однако объявляемые намерения все еще не
находят адекватного отражения в практических делах. В России этому
препятствуют ограниченность ее материально-финансовых ресурсов,
отсутствие у российского бизнеса достаточной информации и опы-
Леонард Нейл Джентл
83
та, отсутствие четко обозначенной и стабильной российской государственной программы в области развития отношений с континентом,
а в Африке – забота о сохранении кооперационных связей с западными экономиками, неуверенность в профессионализме и надежности
российского бизнеса. Между тем, важность сотрудничества с Африкой по мере структурной и технологической модернизации российской экономики будет возрастать.
Необходимость выстраивания действенных и системных отношений с Африканским континентом будет становиться также все более
настоятельной по мере проявления Россией большей решимости и
последовательности в утверждении и укреплении своего международного статуса на основе продвижения собственных стратегических
интересов во всех крупных регионах земного шара.
A. Hopfmann. It is nice and debating what Russia to Africa and what is
Africa interested in Russia, Russia’s interest to import to Africa. It’s also a very
nice presentation on the question of the humanitarian intervention. I think it will
cause a lot of fruitful debates.
Е.Н. Корендясов: Россия – и новый актор в Африке, и старый. Россия
выступала еще в начале XIX века против раздела Марокко на три зоны –
французскую, английскую и германскую. Дорогие друзья, дело в том, что
Африка и Россия друг без друга не смогут. И я думаю, что российско-африканское сотрудничество имеет огромные перспективы. Сейчас основной
вопрос – понять необходимость развития и его целесообразность на уровне
политической и бизнес-элиты.
Леонард Нейл Джентл (Южная Африка)
SOUTH AFRICA AND THE BRICS:
A NEW WORLD ORDER?
In April 2012 South Africa will attend its second meeting of the BRICS
group of countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – in
India. That host country has just announced in March 2012 that the BRICS
countries intend to launch a BRICS Bank
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
When the latest global crisis of capitalism started in 2008 the Chinese
Central Bank put out calls for a new reserve currency to replace the
dollar.
– a rival to the International
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South Africa and the BRICS: A New World Order?
A March edition of the Financial Times noted that «During the upcoming
BRICS summit, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are due to
sign an agreement to grant one another loans in their national currencies …
The move is almost certain to weaken the position of the dollar».
In recent times there have been two notable attempts to circumvent the
dollar. They both ended in tears. Saddam Hussein wanted to do the Iraqi oil
trade in euros – and was overthrown.
Gadda’s Libya was not a member of the Bank for International
Settlements (BIS) – through which world trade takes place, in dollars –
forcing countries to buy its oil in Libyan dinars. Gadda was reduced to
cowering in a sewer while his regime was overthrown.
A battle is being waged over the roll of the dollar. A battle which, if
historical precedent repeats itself, may turn ugly but whose outcome will
shape our world in new ways.
Yet when South Africa rst joined the BRICS group of countries in
2011 there was largely a media silence. At best there were some footnotes
in the business media. This was accompanied by some bemusement at
SA’s ‘inappropriateness’ for membership and some criticism that SA was
kow-towing to, and being seduced into the orbit of, strange bedfellows
(in reference to China).
Much of this has got to do with the origins of the acronym – coined
by Goldman Sachs. The focus then was on return on investments in coun-
tries which were having and increasing percentage of global GDP (18%);
world trade (15%); global currency reserves (40%) and even population
(40%).
But with these as the criteria South Africa seemed to make an odd
choice – too small a population at only 50 million people and too small an
economy (at about $500 bn). With these criteria Mexico, Turkey or Indo-
nesia would make better candidates some have argued…
So the Goldman Sachs idea – pitched at speculators and fund managers
with one eye on the “next big thing” for making a quick buck – has haunted
analyses of the BRICS and South Africa’s membership.
Analysts initially examined the BRICS through the lens of trade relations. In this regard the picture is uneven. China has become South Africa’s
biggest trading partner, but this is followed by the EU and the USA, not
India or Brazil, and certainly not Russia. To be sure the ongoing crisis in
the EU means that South Africa is vulnerable to a downturn in European
trade and China is for certain the next big thing in world trade but this does
not explain the need for a formal bloc of this nature.
85
Леонард Нейл Джентл
Mindful of this, commentators then shifted to the notion that SA is a
“gateway to Africa” for investors. Its role is, therefore, as a means to ends
pursued by other agents – notably China and India. And so the talk is of a
new scramble for Africa – for the continent’s resources and for access to its
new middle class. The debate then becomes one of comparing the relative
merits of the new “colonial” powers against the Old in terms of Africa’s
development.
But there is no need to form a bloc to pursue such an agenda – and
certainly not one roping in potential rivals for such an agenda – like China
and India – in the same bloc. And while Brazil, for sure, is stepping up its
investments in Lusophone Africa, Russia is hardly a player at all.
And, more than this, far from South Africa being a mere conduit for
foreign investment it is by far the biggest “foreign investor” in the rest of
the continent. SA Transnational Corporations and parastatals dominate investment in SADC countries – by 80%, and at 40% for the continent, as a
whole, it simply dwarfs the USA and the EU, not to mention China, India
and Brazil.
People in Ghana, Tanzania and Malawi – those in formal employment-
work in gold mines owned by South Africa’s AngloGold Ashanti or in
sugar plantations and mills owned by Tongaat Hulett or Illovo. Nigerians
watch their soaps on DSTV, owned by Naspers, whilst juggling a cell-
phone linked via South Africa’s MTN or Vodacom and pigging out on Nandos. When the wealthy ones get sick they go to a private Netcare hospital.
Meanwhile neighbouring Ghanaians are protesting about the privatisation
of their water where the state has negotiated a water concession with South
Africa’s Rand Water. Wealthy Angolans y for their holidays to Mozambique where the legendary Polana Hotel is managed by SA’s Protea Group.
Meanwhile Standard Bank is the biggest supplier of investment loans on
the continent, whilst Zambia’s new president had to reverse the sale of
Zambia’s national bank to FNB. SA Mutual is the biggest investor on the
Harare Stock exchange, whilst Robert Mugabe’s eyeing of DRC’s wealth
(when he sent troops to support Kabinda) was frustrated when found SA’s
Anglo American and Mvelaphanda already dominating the scramble for
the Great Lakes-centred mineral wealth.
In its own back yard SA is economically more dominant than Brazil is
in Latin America or India and China in South East Asia. So it is not a weak
partner in the BRICS or a mere conduit. The rationale for its membership
needs another explanation.
For this – we now know, on the verge of the fourth summit – the battle
over the role of the dollar is the key.
86
South Africa and the BRICS: A New World Order?
The dollar was the lubricant that fuelled US power since World War.
Its, potential, supercession shows us a battle for a new world order taking
place today.
The early 20th century saw the transfer of power from Great Britain to
the USA as the dominant imperial power. The Bretton Woods agreement in
1944 completed this process when the world’s nance ministers gathered
to shape a post-War world. With the USA dominating world trade and
investment, and its military strengthened, it had the political authority to
shape the capitalist world as it saw t. Its currency – the dollar – became the
world’s trading and reserve currency and it was the controlling shareholder
in the two banks set up at Bretton Woods – the IMF and the World Bank.
With the dollar as the world’s currency the USA is the only country in
the world that can expand its buying power simply by printing its currency.
Any other country doing so (as Zimbabwe did recently) – in a world of
global trade – would simply cause rampant ination and currency collapse.
At the same time any act of devaluing its currency immediately lowers its
foreign debt (because this is also in dollars) and lowers everyone else’s
reserves (which are also in dollars). This is a source of enormous political
power – as much as its economic and military power.
Today the USA is in effect relying on “borrowing” $1 billion each day
to cover its decit in trade. Much of the debt is treasury bonds owned by
the Chinese state, which is the main buyer of US Treasury Bonds. This
increases the value of the dollar and keeps China’s currency, the Rinminbi,
down making Chinese exports cheaper and China have a huge trade
surplus – which it then uses to buy more US Treasury Bonds. In sum, China
is lending the US money it needs to buy Chinese goods.
But on the other hand all the trump cards are not simply in China’s
hands. The “Chinese goods” are often components of US Transnational
Corporations taking advantage of China’s cheap labour. The Chinese-US
relationship is thus a symbiotic one – marked by growing tensions and yet
inextricable linkages.
But tensions have been exacerbated by US Fed initiatives such as the
two rounds of Quantitative Easing – which are driving down the dollar
and ooding all countries with cheap dollars. China therefore wants a new
global nancial architecture, but one which does not come about through
direct confrontation with the USA.
The USA’s relative decline has opened the door to a number of potential
challengers. Most importantly, China
– but each of India, Brazil, Russia
and South Africa is a rising regional power.
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Леонард Нейл Джентл
India was for decades China’s main ally in the Cold War as the USA
focused its geo-political interests on Pakistan – India’s historical enemy.
Inside India a growing national bourgeoisie has been at the helm of a new
India, aggressively pursuing wealth for its steel, car and pharmaceutical
interests. It even proudly announced that it had become a nuclear power –
thumbing its nose at the West.
Brazil has taken advantage of the new independent path of Latin
American countries, who rejected the US’s Free Trade Agreement of the
America’s and favour their own region project, Mercosur. For many years
various military dictators in Brazil favoured a national project which included a nationalised bank and its own energy company – Petrobras. Under
ex-President Lula Brazil became an independent force in global affairs promoting its own capitalists in relations with Lusophone Africa, intervening
militarily in Haiti and even trying to broker a deal with Turkey to help Iran
avoid the threat of a US-Israeli war.
Russia, under Putin, is another example of such a bourgeois nationalist
project seeking independence from the West. After the collapse of the
Berlin Wall the whole of Eastern Europe became open season for World
Bank economists and Western TNCs eyeing the ailing car companies, the
oil and the gas elds. But, in Russia, a class of oligarchs got in there rst
grabbing the privatised oil and gas companies and rebufng the BPs and the
Standard Oils. Putin has acted at the head of a project ruthlessly crushing
any act of further break-ups of the Russian Federation and safeguarding the
interests of Russian elite.
This is not to say that these “national projects” – in India, Brazil, Russia
or China – are being pursued with the well-being of their people in mind.
One would be hard-pressed to see Putin’s manouvering to get back into the
Presidency and the brutal crushing of dissent in its contested republics, as
democratic or progressive. China’s brand of forced capitalism – based on
cheap labour and primitive accumulation – may have produced impressive
growth rates and changed the economic balance of power in the world but
it seethes with discontent.
India may have its Guptas and Mittals, its nuclear bomb and its cheesy
Bollywood glamour, but thousands of poor farmers commit suicide annually
and its millions are dirt-poor. Brazil may well have overtaken Britain as
the world’s sixth largest economy but ex-President, Lula’s, nurturing of a
Brazilian bourgeoisie has come at the expense of the very social forces that
brought Lula, and his successor, to power
– the social movements of the
MST and the radical labour movement.
88
South Africa and the BRICS: A New World Order?
So these projects are not necessarily “national” in the sense that they
galvanise all social classes towards some perceived common goal. But at
the same time they are “national” in the sense that in a world dominated
by US interests – one in which the global architecture has US power at the
centre of its design and one where all states concede national sovereignty
as a trade-off for ourishing in that design – these projects are directly
challenging that power on behalf of national elites.
Which brings us to South Africa …
Unlike their BRICS counterparts the SA bourgeoisie is not seeking to
promote some kind of national project. South Africa’s super wealthy are
white and, if anything, unpatriotic. These are the people who beneted from
decades of apartheid’s white rule and only went along with majority rule
when the ANC negotiators guaranteed their investments. Even with these
assurances the spectre of democracy was enough to send them scurrying
off to shield their operations from political interference by setting up shop
in London, Amsterdam and Sydney.
With unseemly haste they joined the “shareholder value” movement
globally (where they have been remarkably successful) becoming the world
biggest resources company – the Gencor-dominated BHP Billiton; the
biggest paper manufacturer in Europe – Mondi; and the second biggest beer
company in the world – SAB Millar; amongst others. This relocation has
caused a balance of payments problem for SA as prots and dividends have
to be sent to London and Sydney etc, whilst denuding the scus of tax.
Because their main assets in SA are Rand-denominated, successive
ANC governments have had to pursue policies of maintaining a strong
rand and lowering exchange controls (so that they can get their money
out easily). They are also the main investors in Rand denominated bonds
(which are served by the high interest rates). But the high value of the rand
and the high real interest rates are however killing SA industry – some 1m
jobs have been lost since 2008.
Meanwhile the owners of maize and wheat have simply used the
relaxing of agricultural market restrictions to join global futures markets –
selling SA’s grain surpluses at huge prots, so that today we have become a
net importer of the staple food of the poor – maize – even though it’s grown
right here, and we’re also one of the biggest exporters.
Even the Russian oligarchs were more “patriotic” than that
And in the rest of the African continent South Africa’s credentials to
represent the continent are suspect. There is cold comfort for ordinary
Zimbabweans, Malawians and Congolese people when their experience
of South African corporations is one of destroying local producers – as
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Леонард Нейл Джентл
Shoprite is doing to small-scale Zambian producers; tax breaks and
capital repatriation – as AngloGold Ashanti is doing to Ghana; and losing
competitiveness – as the strong rand is doing to the SACU countries and
Zimbabwe (where the rand has become the medium of exchange).
The problem with SA’s involvement in the BRICS is not about its
relative economic merits for candidacy of such a huge, power-shifting,
project. Its problem is political.
In each of the other BRICS countries there is continuity between the
objectives being pursued by the political leaders driving the project and
their social base – their own national elite. This is not so easily the case in
South Africa.
Faced with this tension between a project seeking to shift world power
relations quite dramatically and the character of the national elite the ANC
government is faced with the same political contradictions that challenge
it domestically… The tension between serving a poor, black electorate and
having to satisfy a rich, white, globalising elite.
A case in point is the differing responses of the SA government to what
is at the heart of BRICS – the currency question. Despite speaking to the
BRICS consensus of trading in “non-third party’ currencies or even setting
up a BRICS bank, South Africa has responded in opposite ways to its
allies. When the ow of cheap dollars – which saw investors speculate in
Brazil and South Africa – drove up currencies like the Real, the Rand and
the Rouble in 2011, Brazil re-imposed capital controls to tax these ows,
whereas SA cut controls even more. Whereas Brazil, Russia and China hate
a strong Real, Rouble or Rinminbi, SA simply loves a strong Rand.
It is even notable that South Africa differs on concrete instances of
foreign policy. Whereas China, Russia, India and Brazil abstained from
Resolution 1973 on Libya
– used as a justication for NATO’s overthrow
of Gadda – South Africa supported the resolution. And whereas SA
supported calls for sanctions against Assad’s Syria, Russia and China
have refused vetoed this seeing it as a prelude to another Western military
adventure. And as the US bullies countries into cutting Iranian oil imports
South Africa has backed down whilst both Russia and China have simply
told the USA where to get off.
Which brings us to the question: Is this challenge to US global
power a good thing?
We cannot answer this question from the relative merits of any of
the BRICS countries as some kind of new alternative hegemon. We’re a
long way from such an eventuality and even China
– the most powerful of
90
South Africa and the BRICS: A New World Order?
the BRICS – has neither the military capacity, nor the moral authority to
attempt such to a replacement. Instead we must view this question from the
perspective of a social justice movement struggling for global democratic
governance and a better life for all.
From this perspective it is better to have a weakened multi-polar world
than strong “world policeman” – dominating the world militarily and in
currency terms. In that sense the BRICS represents both a decline of the
USA and the space to do something different in the world because no new
power has replaced the US as the imperial hegemon.
Already we can see that the weakening of US domination has been
a signicant factor in allowing Latin America’s pink tide to emerge.
Whereas past movements for liberation were imply crushed by the CIA
or US-surrogates in Latin America today the mass social movements of
Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Brazil were able to bring in populist
political leaders that act independently of the US and are forging a
development agendas.
The Arab Spring could blossom in the backyard of US puppets like
Ben Ali and Mubarak, precisely because the US was no longer the able
to simply impose its will. Even the holding back of new imperial military
adventures – like a US invasion of Iran – is a direct result of the current
balance of forces.
And, most importantly, popular movements everywhere can now pose
more radical solutions to the current neo-liberal order because the epicentre
of that order – the USA – is itself in economic crisis. So an alternative pole
to the US – symbolised by repudiating the dollar, and only possible through
some serious global arm-wrestling – would be a good thing.
But BRICS is not the only alternative for South Africa. In the last few
years we saw other initiatives. For instance, before the talk about a BRICS
bank a number of progressive Latin American countries set up a Bank of
the South, as a real development bank without neo-liberal conditionalities
of the IMF and the World Bank. South Africa declined an invitation to
join.
At the 2010 Copenhagen meeting on climate change Bolivia proposed
a new alliance of countries that would ally with ordinary people to protect
the earth, outside the discredited UN framework. This won’t be spoken of
in New Delhi and South Africa avoided this option too.
In this it reects the ongoing symbiosis between a state and government
drawing from a liberation tradition and the powerful South African ruling
class, which that government now serves.
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