|
Showing 1 - 11 of
11 matches in All Departments
Issa Shivji has long been one of the most articulate critics of the
destructive effects of neoliberal policies in Africa, and in
particular of the ways in which they have eroded the gains of
independence. In two extensive essays in this book, he shows that
the role of NGOs in Africa cannot be understood without placing
them in their political and historical context. Aid, in which NGOs
play a significant role, is frequently portrayed as a form of
altruism, a charitable act that enables the wealthy to help the
poor. As structural adjustment programmes were imposed across
Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, the international financial
institutions and development agencies began giving money to NGOs
for programmes to minimise the more glaring inequalities
perpetuated by their policies. As a result, NGOs have flourished -
and played an unwitting role in consolidating the neoliberal
hegemony in Africa. If social policy is to be determined by
citizens rather than the donors, argues Shivji, African NGOs must
become catalysts for change rather than the catechists of aid that
they are today. Issa Shivji is one of Africa's most radical and
original thinkers and has written frequently for Fahamu's Pambazuka
News. He is the author of several books, including the seminal
Concept of Human Rights in Africa (1989) and, more recently, Let
the People Speak: Tanzania down the road to neoliberalism (2006).
Food security and asset possession of small producers in developing
countries has been severely undermined over many years. The old
primitive accumulation of capital - by seizing resources from
colonies - was only temporarily halted by independence struggles.
Today the advanced capitalist world, whose large scale agriculture
cannot meet its own consumption needs, angles to control the
superior productive capacity of developing countries for both food
and agrofuels. Monopolistic control of food distribution, increased
prices of foods and farm inputs, and transnational capital's
concessioning of land for food and agrofuel production have created
a new scramble for land. At the same time neoliberal reforms have
increased unemployment, deepened debt, led to land and livestock
losses, reduced per capita food production and decreased
nutritional standards. The dominant response to this agrarian
crisis has been to reinforce the incorporation of the peasantry
into volatile world markets and to extend land alienation,
increasing import dependence. This book shows how the peasantry's
increasingly active resistance has the potential to undermine
political stability in third world countries. Patnaik argues that
generating livelihoods and genuine development for the majority
demands the encouragement of labour-intensive petty production, a
rethinking about which agricultural commodities are produced, the
redistribution of the means of food production and increased social
investment in rural development. Food sovereignty requires policies
that defend the land rights of small producers. Voluntary
co-operation will permit economies of scale, higher productivity
and incomes, and allow the mass of the people to live their lives
with dignity.
Issa Shivji's book, first published in 1990 provided the first
detailed analysis of the fundamental legal foundations of the union
in 1964 between Tanganyika and Zanzibar which led to the birth of
the United Republic of Tanzania. Used by students of law, politics
and the Tanzania union as a basic reference work the book is a
product of wide ranging scholarship and close analysis of legal
texts that constitute the primary sources of the Union-and the
author's long engagement with the morality of constitutional
politics that bear on Zanzibar's status in the Union. Out of print
for over a decade this second expanded edition includes a few minor
revisions, comments and references have been put in square brackets
to distinguish them from the original text.
The neoliberal project promised to correct multiple distortions in
the African postcolonial environment. It pledged to engineer
liberalisation and expand democratic space through competitive
multi-party elections. For a people who had suffered years of
statism, these promises were persuasive. Indeed they accorded this
project a level of legitimacy it otherwise would not have enjoyed.
Several decades down the line, Issa G. Shivji aptly asks Where is
Uhuru? Few people, if any, can testify to the success of the
envisaged reforms. Instead, neoliberalism failed to guarantee a
sustainable basis for freedom, rights, and prosperity. These essays
show that the reform period opened the continent to greater
privation by a more emboldened local political class who, under
pressure from or by acquiescing to foreign imperialist forces,
undermined the struggles for democratic transformation and economic
empowerment. Whether one is examining the rewards of multi-party
politics, the dividends from a new constitutional dispensation, the
processes of land reform, women's rights to property, or the
pan-Africanist project for emancipation, Shivji illustrates how all
these have suffered severe body blows. Shivji not only calls for a
new, Africa-centred line of thinking that is unapologetic of the
continent's right to self-determination, but through these essays
sets out examples of how such thinking should proceed.
The "Washington consensus" which ushered in neo-liberal policies in
Africa is over. It was buried at the G20 meeting in London in early
April, 2009. The world capitalist system is in shambles. The
champions of capitalism in the global North are rewriting the rules
of the game to save it. The crisis creates an opening for the
global South, in particular Africa, to refuse to play the
capitalist-imperialist game, whatever the rules. It is time to
rethink and revisit the development direction and strategies on the
continent. This is the central message of this intensely argued
book. Issa Shivji demonstrates the need to go back to the basics of
radical political economy and ask fundamental questions: who
produces the society's surplus product, who appropriates and
accumulates it and how is this done. What is the character of
accumulation and what is the social agency of change? The book
provides an alternative theoretical framework to help African
researchers and intellectuals to understand their societies better
and contribute towards changing them in the interest of the working
people.
The Pan-Africanist debate is back on the historical agenda. The
stresses and strains in the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar since
its formation some forty years ago are not showing any sign of
abating. Meanwhile, imperialism under new forms and labels
continues to bedevil the continent in ever-aggressive, if subtle,
ways. The political federation of East Africa, which was one of the
main spin-offs of the Pan-Africanism of the nationalist period, is
reappearing on the political stage, albeit in a distorted form of
regional integration. It is in this context that the present study
is situated. Backgrounding the major dramas of the union of
Tanganyika and Zanzibar this book studies the personalities
involved and their politics, and includes an account of the Dodoma
CCM conference that toppled President Jumbe. It is also a detailed
legal analysis of the union incorporating powerful new material.
The ninety essays contained in this book are selected by the author
from his writings published in newspaper columns during the period
1990-2005, a critical time in Tanzania that witnessed the rise and
fall of nationalism, and transition to and consolidation of
neo-liberalism. The essays give an overview of the intellectual
history and traditions in Tanzania, one of the few countries in
Africa which can still boast of political stability and reasonable
openness. The writings reflect the hopes and fears of the
progressive intellectual community, and project a strong sense of
the enduring ideas and values in the period. The author's aims are
to recover the history of the recent past in Tanzania, build a
narrative of where the country is coming from, and provide a
historical understanding of the events and climate of the present.
Hitherto the human rights debate in Africa has concentrated on the
legal and philosophical. The author, Professor of Law at the
University of Dar es Salaam, here moves the debate to the social
and political planes. He attempts to reconceptualise human rights
ideology from the standpoint of the working people in Africa. He
defines the approach as avoiding the pitfalls of the liberal
perspective as being absolutist in viewing human rights as a
central question and the rights struggle as the backbone of
democratic struggles. The author maintains that such a study cannot
be politically neutral or intellectually uncommitted. Both the
critique of dominant discourse and the reconceptualisation are
located within the current social science and jurisprudential
debates.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Disney Drawsome
Ridley's Games
Mixed media product
R460
R115
Discovery Miles 1 150
|