Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

Mohammed Sheriff: This is Professor Patrick Bond Bond A bond is a stake in a debt issued by a company or governmental body. The holder of the bond, the creditor, is entitled to interest and reimbursement of the principal. If the company is listed, the holder can also sell the bond on a stock-exchange. . He is a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg, the Director of the Centre for Social Change. He is an author and critic of neoliberalism, colonization, BRICS BRICS The term BRICS (an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) was first used in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, then an economist at Goldman Sachs. The strong economic growth of these countries, combined with their important geopolitical position (these 5 countries bring together almost half the world’s population on 4 continents and almost a quarter of the world’s GDP) make the BRICS major players in international economic and financial activities. , and climate injustice. His recent academic works are on BRICS as well as U.S.-South Africa political tension. Professor Patrick Bond has agreed to sit with us on this edition of Unpopular Opinion to discuss Africa-BRICS relations, the multipolar myth, and new globalization. Prof, thank you very much for joining us on this edition of Unpopular Opinion. For a start, you’ve been a fierce advocate against globalization, where you said African nations often export their wealth and import poverty. Where do you think BRICS, as an economic bloc claiming to challenge Western hegemony, fits within this dynamic? Is it a disruptor or a perpetuator of unequal globalization against the African continent?

Patrick Bond: Mohammad, thanks for having me on your show. It’s a very, very important platform, especially because we really do have a problem on the continent. There’s certainly a myth that major forces from the new BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—plus new members including Indonesia (this year), and Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (last year), with Saudi Arabia being invited but not really saying yes or no, are somehow offering an alternative.

So we have 10 official BRICS members now, plus several partners. Nigeria has joined, Uganda has joined as partners—second-class status, not yet a full member. Algeria is thinking about it, Turkey is thinking about it, Vietnam is thinking about it. Countries like Cuba and Bolivia, on the left of the political spectrum, have just become members. However, more authoritarian regimes in Central Asia like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are also members, as well as Thailand and Malaysia in Southeast Asia.

We’re looking at a very mixed bag of countries without the kind of coherence that the five original BRICS had. Unfortunately, those five BRICS didn’t do anything to regulate how they deal with Africa. They left it to South Africa.

And I must say, sitting in Johannesburg, our elites—who run the BRICS and our ruling economic elites—didn’t have any interest Interest An amount paid in remuneration of an investment or received by a lender. Interest is calculated on the amount of the capital invested or borrowed, the duration of the operation and the rate that has been set. in changing the existing neocolonial relationship in which Western companies, Western states, and multilateral institutions controlled by the West (now with BRICS as partners) just loot the continent.

The looting is typically to extract raw materials but not pay sufficiently. The term we use is unequal ecological exchange. They also exploit workers, even child labor. Look at something as simple as a cellphone—it contains minerals from Eastern DRC mines, particularly those run by Chinese companies, where child labor is used, with no trade union representation or worker safety. The extracted minerals are often sent illegally through Rwanda to China, where exploited Chinese workers assemble the final product. But who gets the real profits? Not the Congolese. The profits still go to Cupertino, California, to Apple headquarters, or to Tesla—where South African-born Elon Musk uses lithium and cobalt from Africa. Even companies in South Korea, like Samsung, profit Profit The positive gain yielded from a company’s activity. Net profit is profit after tax. Distributable profit is the part of the net profit which can be distributed to the shareholders. more than the local African workers.

So what I’m driving at is that the BRICS didn’t change the global division of labor or reform multilateral institutions like the IMF IMF
International Monetary Fund Along with the World Bank, the IMF was founded on the day the Bretton Woods Agreements were signed. Its first mission was to support the new system of standard exchange rates.

When the Bretton Wood fixed rates system came to an end in 1971, the main function of the IMF became that of being both policeman and fireman for global capital: it acts as policeman when it enforces its Structural Adjustment Policies and as fireman when it steps in to help out governments in risk of defaulting on debt repayments.

As for the World Bank, a weighted voting system operates: depending on the amount paid as contribution by each member state. 85% of the votes is required to modify the IMF Charter (which means that the USA with 17,68% % of the votes has a de facto veto on any change).

The institution is dominated by five countries: the United States (16,74%), Japan (6,23%), Germany (5,81%), France (4,29%) and the UK (4,29%).
The other 183 member countries are divided into groups led by one country. The most important one (6,57% of the votes) is led by Belgium. The least important group of countries (1,55% of the votes) is led by Gabon and brings together African countries.

http://imf.org , World Bank World Bank
WB The World Bank was founded as part of the new international monetary system set up at Bretton Woods in 1944. Its capital is provided by member states’ contributions and loans on the international money markets. It financed public and private projects in Third World and East European countries.

It consists of several closely associated institutions, among which :

1. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, 189 members in 2017), which provides loans in productive sectors such as farming or energy ;

2. The International Development Association (IDA, 159 members in 1997), which provides less advanced countries with long-term loans (35-40 years) at very low interest (1%) ;

3. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), which provides both loan and equity finance for business ventures in developing countries.

As Third World Debt gets worse, the World Bank (along with the IMF) tends to adopt a macro-economic perspective. For instance, it enforces adjustment policies that are intended to balance heavily indebted countries’ payments. The World Bank advises those countries that have to undergo the IMF’s therapy on such matters as how to reduce budget deficits, round up savings, enduce foreign investors to settle within their borders, or free prices and exchange rates.

, or WTO WTO
World Trade Organisation The WTO, founded on 1^st January 1995, replaced the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). The main innovation is that the WTO enjoys the status of an international organization. Its role is to ensure that no member States adopt any kind of protectionism whatsoever, in order to accelerate the liberalization global trading and to facilitate the strategies of the multinationals. It has an international court (the Dispute Settlement Body) which judges any alleged violations of its founding text drawn up in Marrakesh.

. I’d even go so far as to say, Mohammed, that the BRICS have amplified these problems. They haven’t acted as an alternative to Western imperialism. Instead, they are a sub-imperial ally of the West when it comes to looting the African continent.

Mohammed: Thank you very much for that explanation, Prof. In your recent article, you call BRICS a multipolar myth. Will you unpack that for us?

Patrick: Yes, Mohammed, there are really three positions, aren’t there?

1. The unipolar, Western-centric system. Now, Donald Trump embodies a confused ideology and positionality. The U.S. government is fracturing—Europe and the U.S. are heading in different directions regarding global governance. However, we can still say that Western power dominates the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and even the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
2. The multipolar alternative. Since the West isn’t doing a good job, and the U.S. has abused its hegemonic power (e.g., using the dollar to print limitless wealth), some argue we need a multipolar world—one in which power is more evenly distributed. The BRICS created the New Development Bank, a Contingent Reserve Arrangement (as an alternative to the IMF), and even talked about a BRICS credit rating agency Rating agency
   Rating agencies Rating agencies, or credit-rating agencies, evaluate creditworthiness. This includes the creditworthiness of corporations, nonprofit organizations and governments, as well as ‘securitized assets’ – which are assets that are bundled together and sold, to investors, as security. Rating agencies assign a letter grade to each bond, which represents an opinion as to the likelihood that the organization will be able to repay both the principal and interest as they become due. Ratings are made on a descending scale: AAA is the highest, then AA, A, BBB, BB, B, etc. A rating of BB or below is considered a ‘junk bond’ because it is likely to default. Many factors go into the assignment of ratings, including the profitability of the organization and its total indebtedness. The three largest credit rating agencies are Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings (FT).
   
   Moody’s : https://www.fitchratings.com/ and a BRICS alternative internet. But in reality, these projects have failed. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement exists but does nothing. The New Development Bank operates exactly like the World Bank—but worse, with more corruption and ecological destruction. Multipolarism is a myth. When BRICS countries enter multilateral institutions like the IMF and WTO, they don’t make them better. They amplify the problem. For instance, when China, Brazil, India, and Russia put more money into the IMF in 2015, their voting shares increased—but that came at the expense of African and Latin American countries. Nigeria and Venezuela lost 41% of their voting shares. South Africa lost 21%. The injustice of global capitalism isn’t being challenged by BRICS; rather, BRICS elites are simply trying to climb into the existing power structure, stepping on African countries in the process.
3. The non-polar alternative—G20 G20 The Group of Twenty (G20 or G-20) is a group made up of nineteen countries and the European Union whose ministers, central-bank directors and heads of state meet regularly. It was created in 1999 after the series of financial crises in the 1990s. Its aim is to encourage international consultation on the principle of broadening dialogue in keeping with the growing economic importance of a certain number of countries. Its members are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, USA, UK and the European Union (represented by the presidents of the Council and of the European Central Bank). from below. Instead of BRICS or the G7, we need grassroots, people-led movements for real change. The two biggest movements right now are climate justice advocacy and solidarity with Palestine. These movements challenge the global order from below, rather than relying on failed elite-driven structures like BRICS.

Mohammed: Prof, you describe South Africa as a “deputy sheriff” within BRICS. With China’s “debt trap diplomacy” in Zambia and Nigeria (where Chinese loans are collateralized by oil and resources), and Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries operating across Africa, do you think BRICS is simply replicating Western extractivism under a multipolar facade?

Patrick: Yes, absolutely. Each of these cases requires detailed analysis, but I wouldn’t even use the term “debt trap diplomacy”—because that’s what the West has always done! The IMF and World Bank have put postcolonial nations into so much debt that they effectively run those countries from their Washington D.C. offices. The real tragedy is that BRICS hasn’t challenged this system—they’ve become part of it.

Chinese-financed infrastructure projects are designed not for African development, but to extract resources more efficiently for Chinese corporations. It mirrors colonialism. Likewise, Russian mercenaries and Indian conglomerates like Vedanta exploit Africa in ways no different from Western corporations.

Mohammed: I also want to ask about the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). It aims to boost inter-African trade by $450 billion. Do you think BRICS supports this vision, or are they undermining African industrialization by simply extracting raw materials?

Patrick: I fear you’re right in asking whether the BRICS are going to sabotage the ideal of an Africa Without Borders, so that we can have more efficient economic systems—we’re not divided into 54 different operating entities with borders that include customs and excise duties. But right now, the elites in most of Africa don’t want to lose those customs and excise duties, so you see, they’re moving very, very slowly towards the African free trade common area, and one of the reasons is also the lack of a financing operation.

I must say that South Africa has played a very detrimental role in refusing [continental financing]. And we have very big banks here—one of them, Standard Bank, is all over Africa—and these banks probably don’t have any particular interest in seeing alternatives to US dollar-based financing; that’s what they trust. So South Africa is not doing its part to set up financing mechanisms to get over those barriers at each border, where you have to say, “Well, this is worth so and so many kwacha, this is worth so much in ZimGold,” you know, a sort of new currency. Or, you look at the Pula in Botswana and all of these—although we have our own Southern African Customs Union, where you can rationalize different currencies for the rest of Africa—I fear that, really, the BRICS have got relationships, just as the Western banks do, that depend upon the US dollar for trading Market activities
trading Buying and selling of financial instruments such as shares, futures, derivatives, options, and warrants conducted in the hope of making a short-term profit. as a sound mechanism.

Even though there’s rhetoric, Mohammed, about the de-dollarization that would allow local currencies to be used in trade in cases with trade imbalances—and in much of Africa we are sending goods to China, but we’re also importing manufactured goods just as the old neo-colonial relationship defined it—and unfortunately we’re not seeing the Chinese Yuan, the renminbi, open up as a relatively convertible currency. They have very strong exchange controls. The same for the Indian rupee. So we’re not seeing yet, though it might change, a commitment by the elites of BRICS to really break through the barriers, especially finance for trade.

But also, I would say, African elites should take some blame, particularly South Africa, because we do get such a large share Share A unit of ownership interest in a corporation or financial asset, representing one part of the total capital stock. Its owner (a shareholder) is entitled to receive an equal distribution of any profits distributed (a dividend) and to attend shareholder meetings. of revenues in many African countries from the import duties, the customs and excise duties. And we’re going to start seeing in the trade wars—especially the United States, as it drops its African Growth and Opportunity Act—instead of having much more exports to the United States because the tariffs are lower for African goods. For South Africa, big companies like BHP Billiton for aluminium, ArcelorMittal for steel, Sasol for petrochemicals, Mercedes, BMW, VW, Toyota for cars—along with some vineyards and some corporate agriculture—those are the bulk of beneficiaries.

And there’s such a good debate going on here about how do you handle the United States if it’s going to cut off AGOA; South Africa will certainly be thrown out. My prediction, given what Donald Trump is doing with tariffs, is that he’s going to end AGOA at the first opportunity—this African Growth and Opportunity Act—and that, I think, will force African countries to say, “Well, we don’t have this export benefit that we used to.” Therefore, the demand from the United States will decline.

So maybe we should reorient our economies to the African continent and have more coherent relationships, and not just continue with each one of us doing exports of cash crops, minerals, and fossil fuels. Instead, let’s get some coherence. So that’s our vision; that’s the hope I think everyone in the continent has—but to get over these elites who play games with trade and finance, it’s going to be a big challenge.

I think, like we saw maybe in Senegal—or we’ve seen attempted in Kenya—to throw out bad governments: the Ruto government was the target of GenZ last year. In Mozambique, as we speak, there’s continuing unrest and desire to throw out the corrupted Frelimo government. There are lots of debates in South Africa about throwing out our corrupted government. Well, I think that process has to continue and will probably get more intense the more we go into a world recession and as the conditions of ordinary people get more desperate—the more their budgets are cut, as we’re going to see here in South Africa today.

Mohammed: And President Trump’s continuing to withdraw the U.S. from major institutions—like you initially stated—do you think BRICS have the capacity to fill in the gaps that would be left behind by the United States, or that’s been left behind by the United States?

Patrick: Mohammed, let’s look at a couple of the examples: like the World Health Organization, which the US is defunding. It won’t be the BRICS that make up the gap. Unfortunately, one of the richest men in the world, Bill Gates and his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have already made the WHO, the World Health Organization, a sort of experimental lab, and they want to play their own games and try all sorts of, you know, different things with the WHO.

We got an example of the WHO failing Africa during Covid-19 because there were two major BRICS countries providing vaccines—not just the Western, particularly US, German, British, Norwegian, and Swiss, and the French, as well, were providing vaccines. We also had China and Russia. Yu remember the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines and we also had Russia’s Sputnik vaccine. Now, those vaccines could have gone to the WHO with a coherent strategy for distributing them across the world, in view of the fact that the Western regimes—especially Angela Merkel in Germany and Boris Johnson in the UK—refused to waive the intellectual property to make it possible to produce all of these vaccines with generic production facilities in Lagos, or in Harare, or in Johannesburg. Instead, we had to import expensive vaccines from the Western producers. But the Chinese and the Russian producers didn’t change that; they didn’t join the leaders of India and South Africa—Narendra Modi and Cyril Ramaphosa—in the World Trade Organization to get rid of those. The West set up a very dubious scheme in the World Health Organization, from which the North benefited more than the South. And it’s in those respects that the multilateral system, again and again—especially in an emergency where you need a global public good, where you need everyone in the world to work together to get rid of vaccine apartheid—and then we see the material interests of big companies, particularly from the West’s big private corporates, but also from China and Russia.

A second example is in the climate negotiations. Yes, the US has also walked out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Well, we knew they were going to—that’s what Donald Trump campaigned on—but also, we knew that they’d done it before, in 2017. So I would always ask anyone—including the African group of negotiators, for example, Ali Mohamed from Kenya, who was running the AGN last year in Baku—”Why don’t you punish the United States?” They should be thrown out. Well, they’ve walked out, but they should be given major punishments, like tariffs on any goods and services that are sold from the United States anywhere in the world. It should be a global move to punish those countries which are irresponsible climate denialists, like the United States. Now you’re walking out, you’re not going to pay loss and damage; that is, you’re rejecting polluter pays, which is a standard logic of environmental management: if you make a mess, you pay to clean it up, not the victims who’ve been messed on. And Africa has so many cases where disasters have happened—here in South Africa, 500 people killed in one day, April 12^th, 2022, because of a rain bomb, that is, 350 millimeters of rain hit in Durban, the third largest city, killing 500 and doing billions of dollars of damage—and you never see the United States saying, “Yeah, we polluted more than anyone else; we should pay.” So, as a result, we need to start finding creative means of punishment.

The most creative, actually, is interesting—it’s to tackle a man from Johannesburg where he was taught at a high school, Bryanston. The richest man in the world—who happens to be the man Donald Trump has chosen to chop through the US bureaucracy, withdrawing aid, including the vitally needed PEPFAR, the Presidential Executive Program for AIDS Relief, which is keeping millions of Africans alive. Here in this country, we have about 7 million people who are living with HIV, and many of them do get their medicines—their antiretrovirals—from the public health sector, and the US has just chopped 20% of our budget for it. So these are the ways in which I think we’re going to have to start to say it’s time for the US to pay some penalty.

And what about Elon Musk, the major figure in the Trump regime, who was born in South Africa and raised—to some extent he was bullied by kids at the school Bryanston High School, where normally those rich kids are meant to learn the habits of white South Africa, running the apartheid system in the late 1980s, when Elon Musk was there, running the most corrupt corporate city in the world, according to PWC: Johannesburg.

And it’s in that sense we feel very guilty. Mohammed, Johannesburg has given you Trevor Noah and Tyla, a great singer, and Charlize Theron, the great actress. But we still have to apologize and make up for having given you Elon Musk.

And so what’s happening around the world is that his car company, Tesla, is crashing—it was valued at about $1.3 trillion dollars when Trump took over; it’s now down to $900 billion and falling. People are setting fire to these cars—they’re dumping them, they’re rejecting them. Likewise, X—which was Twitter, that Elon Musk bought for $44 billion—people are walking out of that one, and likewise his Starlink, which I hope African countries are careful about; many African countries—even a country like Zimbabwe—use Starlink, but you should know that Elon Musk abuses your data. So I wouldn’t trust my internet link to you today, Mohammed, if it were going up into the satellite system of SpaceX called Starlink.

And I think we all have to say, “Okay, what are the things that we can do even individually?” And it means, I think, boycotting, divesting, and sanctions against the US, just as we do with Israel, to make it weaker so that it isn’t committing the genocide against Palestine. Those are the sorts of ideas I’m hearing, and I’m hearing it from the Nairobi-based Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance calling for worldwide sanctions against Donald Trump on the climate walkout. I’m hearing it from the South African Federation of Trade Unions—our second major trade union federation here in South Africa—calling for BDS USA. Really, it’s time, I think, for Africans especially to think: Is Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk going to do us so much damage that we better actually start to de-link from the US and think about not just AGOA ending, but maybe we need sanctions and tariffs against the US for the enormous damage that Donald Trump is doing now.

Mohammed: I want us to talk about the African youth. You know, the African youth unemployment exceeds more than 40%, and BRICS, as an economic institution, is investing in extractive industries in African countries—not in education, especially in science and technology. Do you think this is a deliberate attempt by BRICS to suppress what you have termed as demographic dividends for African countries, and how can BRICS invest in digital education to harness the potential of the African youth, who are the future of the African continent?

Patrick: Let’s think, Mohammed, about what some of that digital investment looks like. I mean, if it comes from the West, you know that we get addicted to some of these social media apps whose objective is simply to draw us in deeper and waste our time. And it’s actually similar if it’s a TikTok, which operates in the West and is a Chinese company, but it’s probably not going to remain Chinese—they’re going to be forced to sell to a Western company. But it’s also companies in China, and the two big ones, Tencent and Alibaba, are not much different; and what you see them doing with the Chinese government is participating in surveillance of the people. I do worry that Africa will get sucked into a Fourth Industrial Revolution without adequate defense mechanisms.

However, what I’m very convinced of, seeing what’s just been happening in Mozambique with the movements for a fair election, and in Nigeria in the Days of Rage that occurred last August, and in the GenZ in Kenya. I see the youth, the Young Lions of the continent, beginning to roar. Are they doing so in a coherent and ideologically clear way? Yes, to some extent, and in other places—well, still coming.

The most impressive, I think, was Kenya, with their dictatorial leader, William Ruto, whose police shot 44 dead on just one day of protest, June 25, 2024—and the pressure was so much that Ruto had to get rid of his cabinet, and they shook up the Parliament. That work is still in process, to really make Kenya a democratic country.

But what they also realized is that the big problem behind Kenya, with the fiscal oppression that led to lots of new taxes in Kenya—which sparked the Gen Z to protest—that pressure came from the International Monetary Fund. So what was crucial, which our country here, South Africa, is also beginning to learn, is that you can’t just stop with your own leader; you really have to deal with this IMF.

And what the Gen Z protesters did just two days after storming the Parliament, then they went to protest the IMF and the World Bank, and that was part of their ideology to say, “We want economic justice.” I think what it means—and they called for this, a ‘debt audit’—and I hope all Africans say, “What were our parents up to? What was the older generation doing by putting us, the next generation, into debt, by taking away the next generation’s share of our natural resource wealth, our non-renewable minerals and fossil fuels? Why do the older generations burn the hydrocarbons in our coal in South Africa, our oil and gas, instead of leaving them for our generation and our children, who can use the fossil fuel not to burn?” Burning fossil fuel would be ridiculous because of the climate crisis, and because Africa has good potential for renewable energy. Instead, we need to keep fossil fuels underground, because we would use the hydrocarbons for lubricants or plastics or other synthetic materials for pharmaceutical products, or for tarmac.”

If we can get a youth interest in the rights of future generations to add to the ideology—which is, “out with the old corrupt guys!”—then we’ll really be leading the world. I’m hoping the young lions of Africa, as they go and protest, also realize that their conditions are based on underdevelopment—not only because of bad leaders or the IMF putting them in debt, Chinese debt on top of it—but also because of the whole economic model based on extracting non-renewable resources, which is our own economic sovereignty, right? That’s where I’m hoping the ideological maturing of the youth goes—just the way it did at the time of Independence, when throwing out the colonizers gave that space initially for the postcolonial governments to actually try to figure out how to use natural resources.

In some cases, they did so before the debt crisis of the high interest rates Interest rates When A lends money to B, B repays the amount lent by A (the capital) as well as a supplementary sum known as interest, so that A has an interest in agreeing to this financial operation. The interest is determined by the interest rate, which may be high or low. To take a very simple example: if A borrows 100 million dollars for 10 years at a fixed interest rate of 5%, the first year he will repay a tenth of the capital initially borrowed (10 million dollars) plus 5% of the capital owed, i.e. 5 million dollars, that is a total of 15 million dollars. In the second year, he will again repay 10% of the capital borrowed, but the 5% now only applies to the remaining 90 million dollars still due, i.e. 4.5 million dollars, or a total of 14.5 million dollars. And so on, until the tenth year when he will repay the last 10 million dollars, plus 5% of that remaining 10 million dollars, i.e. 0.5 million dollars, giving a total of 10.5 million dollars. Over 10 years, the total amount repaid will come to 127.5 million dollars. The repayment of the capital is not usually made in equal instalments. In the initial years, the repayment concerns mainly the interest, and the proportion of capital repaid increases over the years. In this case, if repayments are stopped, the capital still due is higher…

The nominal interest rate is the rate at which the loan is contracted. The real interest rate is the nominal rate reduced by the rate of inflation. of the 1980s hit, the commodity prices fell, and Africa then, like today, fell into a debt trap. And because repaying debt is a generational injustice, the biggest question for Africa is: “why pay the odious debts?” That’s a technical term, odious means the loan shouldn’t have been made—it’s terrible that a loan was made, often for a corrupt project. And we all ask, if we do a debt audit, can we find out who we are owing money to. It’s a legitimate question. And when you ask that question, then the IMF and World Bank run in the other direction as fast as they can; they know they’ve been part of extremely corrupt indebtedness.

And then you look at the US Federal Reserve FED
Federal Reserve Officially, Federal Reserve System, is the United States’ central bank created in 1913 by the ’Federal Reserve Act’, also called the ’Owen-Glass Act’, after a series of banking crises, particularly the ’Bank Panic’ of 1907.

FED – decentralized central bank : http://www.federalreserve.gov/ , who’ve put the interest rates up since 2022, leaving Ghana, Zambia, and Ethiopia to go into default because they couldn’t pay their debts. And then you say, “Well, maybe it is time for Africa to find an alternative to that US dollar,” which gives the US such power over interest rates and printing money: quantitative easing one day and putting on these extreme austerity measures the next.

I hope that’s the ideology that links the political economy in which Africa gets exploited and now needs to fight back, to the political ecology in which our resources are drained, often now by the BRICS countries, but the final product, like my cell phone, is profiting the West. And thirdly, the social mobilization—that is how we get people together so that the alliances, like in Kenya, which, you know, used to be full of ethnic divisions or political party alliances—and you see GenZ sweeping out political parties of all sorts, and really saying, “This is the youth’s time.” That’s what we need, isn’t it?

Mohammed: Thank you very much. You know, when it comes to GenZ protest, it’s been highly praised by many youth organizations across the African continent, and an example of that was replicated in Ghana, where you had countrywide protest. And as spoke to some of the young people from Kenya as well, they said that they were being inspired by the protest in Nigeria—I think somewhere around 2018, the SARS protest—so some of them said that they were inspired by that. And we also saw protest in Liberia, where they talk about “fix our country” or “free the citizens.” All of those protests are happening across African continent, but yet we’re seeing that things are not changing the way we expect them to change. But I think the young people will continue to put pressure, exert more pressure on the governments to ensure that we have governments in place, or systems in place, that will lead to further development of our continent. I want us to go to another aspect of the discussion, which is the alternative to BRICS. Do you think African countries, or the African Union, can provide an alternative to BRICS?

Patrick: Well, yes. Let’s say that we need to talk about BRICS as being part of a global division of labour in which now you have extractive industries, especially from China but also India, Brazil, South Africa—here in Johannesburg—Russia, and they’re taking the resources out, so the BRICS are the new middlemen in the process, and we need an alternative. Yes. And will it come from the West? Pretty obviously not. The United Kingdom has just dropped its aid; Germany is spending more on arms; we know the US is utterly unreliable and people depending on PEPFAR are dying, so we can’t really count on the West, and the BRICS are more exploitative.

So is there an alternative? Now, we saw especially where African countries have been divided and conquered on the question of supporting Israel, because Israelis bribed many countries—I mean, I’ll name some, like Morocco or Uganda or recently Zimbabwe—and so we’re looking, in a way, to figure out how we can get a collective reply. And I think the leadership on that does come from South Africa, and it’s called the Hague Group. Hague—that’s the capital city of the world’s courts, the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court.

So the alternative to a BRICS formation, where so many of the BRICS countries and their companies are making profits—I mean, Chinese drones help to kill the Palestinians as much as any; South African coal goes to Israel in a very hypocritical way; so does coal from Russia and oil from Brazil, and India’s arms. India and China privatized Haifa Port to allow them to import more military goods that will kill Palestinians.

What this means, though, Mohammed, I think, is crucial, for us to say, can there be a different approach? And the Hague Group, of about eight countries including Namibia—Namibia has been very strong, with its foreign ministry reminding the world that it was a victim of genocide, of the Nama and Herero, by the Germans, 1904 to 1908—and so the Hague Group is a place where defense of international justice is a fascinating new—January 31—strategy to put different countries together that aren’t in the BRICS, because most of the BRICS won’t support it. I mean, Vladimir Putin has an arrest warrant, just as does Benjamin Netanyahu from the same International Criminal Court. So it’s wonderful to see the Hague Group stand up to defend at least some semblance of the idea that we can do something, internationally.

However, because the African Union itself is so undemocratic and bureaucratized—it’s operating in a country, Ethiopia, that has terrible problems, including cutting off the internet when they have protests—I think we’re going to have to see a rebuilding of these processes of a genuine pan-Africanism from you, the Pan-African youth. And I don’t know if it’s going to fit the same AU model, or you’re going to find some potentials for linking together progressive governments, the most important of course being Senegal, but they’re under lots of pressure.

And the pressures here in southern Africa have made our governments even more brutal, including here in South Africa, where we, about six weeks ago, suffered a major massacre of mine workers called Stilfontein. ‘Zama Zamas’ were the underground mine workers working informally. And the government shut off all the exits and, and over 100 starved to death. That was the sort of, let’s say, the brutality that now comes with even a South African government that can go to the International Court of Justice and say, “Israel is committing a genocide. We should stop that.”

So the contradictions are extreme, and I think it will be up to the youth to be able to call out where there’s hypocrisy from South Africa, and from their own governments, and to get the space, often through protest, often through clear advocacy and lobbying, sometimes through sanctions movements—but it has to come from below and not through some National Endowment for Democracy color revolution. Luckily, the National Endowment for Democracy is no longer a factor—it’s being closed down [1]—but you see the point: that these organic struggles of ordinary people have to start cohering together.

And in a place like South Africa today, that’s happening as we see people from all walks of life demanding that the budget be redone fairly. I hope South Africa can provide the example that we did from about 50 years ago, where the youth rose up in 1975 and especially 1976. And they rose up in Soweto, and they rose up to say to their parents, “Get out of our way; we’re protesting the government.” A thousand were shot dead around June 16, 1976, but that Soweto Uprising was the sort of spark, and it went with the youth of Mozambique and Angola kicking out the Portuguese colonials; it went with the youth of Zimbabwe kicking out the white Rhodesian regime. And that spirit, I think, we can look at again.

The most recent contagion was the so-called North African uprising—the Arab Spring—and in that sense, we saw an exceptionally good moment to get new governments into Tunisia and into Egypt. Unfortunately, with Libya it was just chaos. Unfortunately, in Egypt, the US had a counterrevolution and overthrew a democratically elected Muslim government. And then in Tunisia, they fell back under the thumb of the IMF.

So these are the sorts of bigger problems that require strong ideology, and I recommend to all your listeners and all your wonderful viewers: Franz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Samir Amin—some of the greatest thinkers of the last 50 years—whose lessons about getting caught in a world economy, whether it’s from, you know, Washington and New York and London and Paris and Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels, Tokyo, or getting caught by Johannesburg and Beijing and Shanghai and Moscow, St. Petersburg, and São Paulo and Rio, Brasilia, and Mumbai and Delhi—those new capitals of power in the BRICS, really won’t do us any use unless we can break something much bigger. We need a world economy and world society and world environment that can finally be sustainable, meeting the needs of our people and saving the planet. The youth of Africa are going to have to take up that baton.

Mohammed: Do you think that the AU vision, Agenda 2063, is achievable, and what can you, as well as what can you tell us about the South African, the political tension between us and South Africa in recent times?

Patrick: It’s a great question, because in 2013 the 50-year plan of the AU—Agenda 2063—was managed by a South African who was the chair of the AU Commission, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. And she, I thought, did a good job, but within constraints which were still basically shaped by globalization of the West. And the same was true for another project from South Africa by the then President Thabo Mbeki, where he brought in Olusegun Obasanjo from Nigeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika from Algeria, and I think there was one other from—oh, Abdoulaye Wade from Senegal—but they failed with the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, NEPAD. It was basically, again, sort of a visionary statement but one excessively oriented to globalization—Africa producing more, becoming more productive within the confines of, exporting mostly to the West at that time, and more recently to the BRICS. It just doesn’t work, especially if you continue to suffer unequal ecological exchange.

And that brings us to whether South Africa can break through. I think we have three choices in dealing with the US: number one, just succumb and offer to play golf with Trump, as Ramaphosa does. Number two, stand up alone, which some countries are doing and they’re succeeding—Mexico and Canada are standing up, Europe is beginning to stand up, China is standing up. But really, the third option is: we need to do this collectively. We need Africa to stand up against Donald Trump and not be bribed.

Let me leave it there, because we’ll see if we can get unity in the world against Donald Trump as the first step to a much better world.

Mohammed: This brings us to the end of today’s edition of Unpopular Opinion with Professor Patrick Bond. Thank you very much for being here today. It’s been an absolute honor for us to have you on the segment. And before we take our leave of our guest, I encourage you to please be a supporter of this channel by subscribing, liking, commenting, sharing, as well as recommending this podcast to your friends and family members. Thank you very much, and have a pleasant day.