Overview of the African ruling class

February, 2018      Jean Nanga (Congo)
Originally published in French by CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debts): https://www.cadtm.org/Apercu-sur-l-actuelle-classe

Summary

This paper discusses the evolving nature of the ruling class in Africa, focusing on its historical, economic, and social dynamics.

1. Economic Transformation and Capitalism:
   • Africa’s ruling class has transitioned from colonial and post-colonial socio-economic frameworks into a capitalist elite shaped by neoliberal globalization.
   • Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and the rise of indigenous entrepreneurs have redefined economic activity, with notable companies and individuals gaining global recognition.
2. Structural Challenges:
   • The adoption of neoliberal structural adjustments in the 1980s and 1990s deepened class stratifications and led to widespread privatization, benefiting a capitalist minority.
   • Indigenous capitalists often engage in exploitative labour practices and tax avoidance, contributing to economic inequality and limited public services.
3. Social Dynamics:
   • The African bourgeoisie, while contributing to economic growth, has not significantly alleviated poverty or reduced unemployment. Job creation remains insufficient and exploitative.
   • Philanthropy by wealthy individuals attempts to address gaps in public services but often aligns with capitalist interests rather than societal well-being.
4. Cultural and Political Influence:
   • Media, cultural productions like Nollywood, and neo-Pentecostal movements support the dominance of capitalist values and obscure systemic inequalities.
   • The political class frequently overlaps with economic elites, fostering a culture of corruption and impeding equitable development.
5. Pan-Africanism and Class Struggles:
   • Contemporary pan-Africanist discourse often fails to address class antagonisms and the complicity of Africa’s capitalist elites in perpetuating inequalities.
   • True liberation requires solidarity among the oppressed and a shift away from neoliberal frameworks.

The African ruling class has evolved into a capitalist elite deeply entrenched in global neoliberal systems. While economic growth has brought visibility to African businesses, systemic inequalities and labor exploitation persist. Sustainable progress requires dismantling exploitative structures and fostering solidarity across social and economic divides.

Despite the decline in its average GDP growth in recent years (3.4% and 2.2% in 2015 and 2016) compared to what it was during the first years of the decade (around 5%), the economic situation of Africa is, in the 21st century, the subject of a very different discourse, even contrary to that which prevailed during the post-colonial decades of the 20th century in general. Particularly during the decades 1980-1990, which could be characterized as those of the imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment policies, a remedy for the critical indebtedness of Third World States, in this case in Africa.

Not only has the average GDP growth rate in this region of the world been, since the early years of the new century, above the world average, although certainly lower than the growth rates of the economies of China, India and Singapore, it has even shown resilience in the face of the crisis that has hit the traditional centres of the world capitalist economy, to which it has remained very closely linked or quite dependent.

Furthermore, if this GDP growth is mainly explained by foreign direct investment (FDI), attracted by a fairly good return on investment, the visibility acquired during the same period of African companies considered to be performing well, according to the criteria of the capitalist economy, cannot be ignored. African companies, not in the sense of companies established in Africa, branches of foreign companies, but companies belonging to or controlled by Africans, from Mauritius to Morocco via Kenya and Nigeria. Individual or family companies whose performance capitalists understand, is also illustrated by the interest given to them by consulting firms, experts in capitalism, like McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group, as well as by the media coverage of the entry of some of their owners or majority shareholders in the rankings of the world’s largest fortunes published by US magazines, like Forbes.

This is one of the effects, one might say, of neoliberal structural adjustment, of the neoliberalisation of globalisation. Enough to invalidate the diagnosis, the prognosis, on the African bourgeoisie previously stated – based on what was then observable in Latin America – by Frantz Fanon, from the first post-colonial years:

“within this national bourgeoisie we find neither industrialists nor financiers. The national bourgeoisie of underdeveloped countries is not oriented towards production, invention, construction, work. It is entirely channelled towards intermediary activities. Being in the circuit, in the scheme, such seems to be its deep vocation” (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961).

Which – if it were not for the prevailing discourse, since the 1990s, on the “end of ideologies”, the “end of history”, in other words the final victory of capitalism – could have revived the debate, from the 1950s-1960s, or even 1970s, on the question of the existence or not of social classes in Africa, within which also arose, for those who supported their existence, that of the role of the African bourgeoisie in the post-colonial context. To which one of the most publicised African capitalists, the boss of Heirs Holdings and Transcorp, Tony O. Elumelu, seems to respond by attaching the prefix “afri” (identical to “afro”) – considered positive by black African cultural nationalism, the (black) African “diaspora” – to capitalism, thus giving Afri-capitalism, an African practice of capitalism supposedly of a different nature to that dominant in the capitalist tradition: an “inclusive capitalism” rather than an exclusive one, supposed to bring “economic prosperity and social wealth” to all Africans |1|.

This is just an overview of some of the characteristics of this ruling class – characteristics marked by the particularities of each national history, also in its relations with the rest of the world, which will not be presented here – in this context of restructuring of the global capitalist economy, characterized among other things by the emergence of new capitalist powers, non-European/non-Western, mainly China.  I start by briefly recalling the debate on social classes.

On the existence or not of social classes in Africa

In a period that extends mainly from the 1950s to the 1970s, that is, from the eve of the massive accession of the European colonies of Africa to independence to the first two decades of the said independence, African intellectuals and politicians, as well as extra-African Africanists opined and discussed on the existence or not of social classes in Africa. In fact, on the role that the class struggle should or should not play in Africa during the struggle for independence, but especially in the so-called post-colonial Africa, because the existence of social classes is inseparably linked to their struggles.

To stick to a few African political actors, among the main protagonists of this debate, there were, roughly speaking, on the one hand those like Leopold Sédar Senghor, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah who, starting from the knowledge they had of pre-colonial African societies as well as the major divide in colonial society, into colonists and colonized/indigenous peoples, affirmed that the existence of social classes was a reality of European societies, unknown in pre-colonial Africa, more or less transposed by the colonial structuring, but very minor compared to the divide between colonial oppressors and oppressed/exploited indigenous peoples. Despite the existence of social affinities existing under colonization between colonial capital and certain social categories of colonized people, the latter thus had the common interest of freeing themselves from colonial domination and, once independence was acquired, of building the post-colonial nation, in the interest of the entire population, by renewing the supposed African community traditions or traditional African values ​​dominated during the colonial period, by excluding the principle of class struggle, without however wiping the slate clean of the society built by and inherited from colonization, of its social structuring. All the decolonized were supposed to have the same interest in the construction of the post-colonial nation, despite the hierarchical social differentiations inherited from colonial society: all social classes should commune in this “national union”.

This is what Léopold Sédar Senghor, for example, theorized under the name of “African socialism”, which he is supposed to have practiced as President of Senegal. As for Kwame Nkrumah, who preceded him as head of state of Ghana, and was a major figure of Pan-Africanism – a Pan-Africanism also shared by Senghor and many others, with whom he would manage to give birth to the Organization of African Unity (OAU) – he developed, on the same bases of pre-colonial communitarianism, adapted to the post-colonial era, a “philosophy and ideology for decolonization and development” called “consciencism” (Consciencism, 1964) |3|. Up until the second edition of Consciencism (1969), this ideology was called upon to “reconstitute the pre-colonial egalitarian society”.

On the other hand, those who, like Frantz Fanon, engaged in the Algerian war of national liberation, Mehdi Ben Barka, Moroccan third-worldist, Amilcar Cabral leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) – who were also pan-Africanists – maintained that there were, in the colonial and post-colonial periods, indigenous, then national, social classes with divergent interests even though they were not copies of “Western” societies: general non-existence, for example, of an indigenous fraction of the capitalist class during colonization, despite the occasional existence of a few individuals.

For example, for Fanon, in addition to his characterization – inspired, as we have said, by the reality of so-called post-colonial Latin America – of the post-colonial African bourgeoisie (see above) as a comprador (“intermediate”) bourgeoisie, he claimed the revolutionary class in Africa was not the proletariat (urban, relatively privileged, certainly not as much as the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie), but the poor small peasantry. Whereas, according to Ben Barka, there was then in Morocco a large bourgeoisie, non-progressive and linked to “semi-feudalism”, a middle and small bourgeoisie hesitant with regard to the continuation of national liberation, as socialism, a small landless peasantry that would gain from getting closer to the working class, the revolutionary force in this society |4|. Cabral, for his part, spoke, for example, of “neocolonialist domination… allowing the awakening of social dynamics (of conflicts of interest in indigenous social strata or of the class struggle)”, of “pseudo-local bourgeoisie” which “whatever the degree of its nationalism”, given its subservience to imperialism “cannot freely direct the development of the productive forces: in a word, it cannot be a national bourgeoisie” |5|.

However, after the military coup that overthrew Nkrumah – expressing a coalition of local class interests (private entrepreneurs, petty bourgeoisie of senior officers in the Ghanaian army, chieftaincy/kingdom dignitaries, etc.) linked to imperialist interests (Britain, United States of America) – Nkrumah began to reconsider his views on social classes and their struggle |6|, joining Fanon, Ben Barka, Cabral, Samir Amin |7| in stating, for example, in his book, with the evocative title, The Class Struggle in Africa, that “it has been suggested that social classes existing in other parts of the world are unknown in Africa. Nothing could be further from the truth” [8],

African societies of his time being structured into peasantry, proletariat, petty bourgeoisie, national bourgeoisie and traditional authorities, with often divergent interests. Even being antagonists: “Africa is currently the scene of a violent class struggle. We only have to look around us. As everywhere else, it is essentially a struggle between oppressors and oppressed… Africa thus has a central core of bourgeoisie, little different from that of the colonizers and the colonists by the privileged positions that it occupies and which constitutes a selfish, interested, reactionary minority in the midst of the exploited and oppressed masses” [9].

It was no longer a question of opposing only imperialism, as in Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Last Stage of Neocolonialism” – which constitutes with “Consciencism” and “Africa Must Unite” the reference works of a certain pan-Africanism, pan-Africanism without social/class determination – but also the local bourgeoisie, in development. In other words, it was a question of getting out of this pan-Africanism of nostalgia for a mythical pre-colonial Africa, the foundation of the project of the conciliation of social classes. A form of pan-Africanism which has been given a new lease of life, editorially and on the internet, in recent times.

African natives participated in the dynamics of capital well before the post-colonial period, it must always be recalled, taking into account, for example, the mendacious discourse, unless it is ignorant, on the current moment as being that of the “integration of Africa into globalization”, of capital it is implied.

“The Class Struggle in Africa” was not, unfortunately, among the works by Nkrumah reissued by Présence Africaine in the 1990s and 2000s. Could it be because it is often ignored by pan-Africanists, those who continue the tradition of concealing the class struggle between Africans? Because it would not have been sexy or profitable to reissue a work whose last paragraph states that: “The main objective of the revolutionaries of the Black World must be the total liberation and unification of Africa under a socialist pan-African government” [10], specifying that this must be articulated with the triumph of “the international socialist revolution” which “will advance the world towards communism” (p. 108).

While already, from the 1980s, the theme of social classes, of their struggles, was undergoing editorial marginalization in Europe in general, in France in this case (where the publisher was located), consolidated by the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR? A situation from which it still has difficulty emerging, given the quasi-solitude, persistent despite everything, of the neoliberal ideology of the “end of history” which is also prevalent in the reading of current Africa, sometimes coated with a culturalism/racialism indicated, for example, by the racialized affix “afro” or “afri”.

Even if it is clear that today in Africa, there exists objectively, roughly:

• a small independent agricultural peasantry;
• a proletariat, in general, more urban than rural agricultural, living from the sale of its labour force to private and state capital, with an income allowing it to reproduce its labour force and to access, by tightening its belt, certain leisure activities of the consumer society, and to which can be assimilated certain categories of employees both in the public and private sectors;
• small vendors in markets, streets, and people active in small trades or small craft activities, classified in the so-called informal sector, of laundry, shoemaking/repairing, hairdressing, sewing, masonry, carpentry, catering/café, welding, mechanics, etc., with living conditions balancing between the lumpenproletariat and those of the proletariat;
• a petty bourgeoisie (or “middle classes”) made up of small owners of means of production or businesses – some of which are also classified as informal – using mainly family labour or minimally salaried labour, or even apprentices, a large proportion of civil servants and state-owned enterprises, management staff of private companies, members of so-called liberal professions (private doctors, lawyers, notaries, accountants), small owners;
• a capitalist bourgeoisie: business owners using salaried labour in businesses (small, medium, large) in different sectors, from oil exploitation to services, including large-scale commerce, transport, construction, hotels, imports.

It is this last class of old and new rich, a minority in all countries, which is dominant, because the economy, even society, is generally organized according to its interests. In this class, there are not only the representatives of foreign capital, especially Western capital which remains the main one everywhere in Africa, but also indigenous capitalists [11] – the terms “Africapitalism” and its derivative “Africapitalist” have at least the merit of recognizing the existence of this social class – which exercise, in a subordinate way consented to or relatively competitive with foreign capital, a certain influence on political leaders (government, parliament) – some of whom may be members of this social class – and therefore on the existence of hundreds of millions of people living in Africa.

An old tradition in Africa

This participation of the indigenous people of Africa in the dynamics of capital was established well before the post-colonial period, it must always be remembered, taking into account, for example, the mendacious discourse, unless it is ignorant, on the current moment as being that of the “integration of Africa into globalization”, of capital implied.

Broadly speaking, black Africans contributed to the long march of capital not only as slaves in the Americas – at their own expense – but also as entrepreneurs in the capture (from the interior to the coast) of other Africans destined for slavery |12|. Dignitaries from coastal kingdoms, still celebrated today by certain African nationalists, were actors or supervisors, obviously beneficiaries. Subsequently, with the ban on the slave trade in the 19th century, some Africans, including former slaves returning from Brazil, were able to build up fortunes by participating in clandestine circuits of the slave trade.

In some countries of the Gulf of Benin, some families of the current ruling class have their ancestors among these traffickers of the last years of the Atlantic slave trade. Just as, in another configuration, a part of the current Mauritian bourgeoisie, of old French ancestry, descends from the former slave masters of the 18th-19th centuries in the Indian Ocean.

The colonial period (including the protectorates) also, despite practical restrictions, generally produced African capitalists |13|. Thus, among the capitalists to whom Fanon referred, we can include Nigerian traders like El Hadj Alhassan Dantata (1877-1855, founder of Alhassan Dantata & Son’s) |14|, an intermediary of the Niger Company, considered the richest African in the British colonies of West Africa – one of his great-grandsons, Aliko Dangote, is the richest man in Africa today, at the head of a multinational group. Just like the summit of Nigerian women traders of both local fabrics and those of colonial industrial manufacture called African fabrics/loincloths (java, wax): “The most industrious of these women owned one or two trucks |15| » as well as their colleagues in Togo: « In the 1950s, there were at least three categories of resellers.

The first group included those whose turnover was greater than ten million CFA francs [16] – the so-called Nana Benz –, indigenous landowners from (colonial) Kenya. Thus, contrary to certain falsified biographies, presenting them as self-made men/women, certain current figures of this dominant class are heirs of capitalists, petty-bourgeois families or notables of that period.

In the post-colonial period, prior to neoliberalization, there was in several African societies this policy of supporting or creating indigenous capitalists, of indigenization through investment regulation: ceilings set for foreign investors in certain economic sectors, indigenous exclusivity of certain economic sectors, including at the expense of entrepreneurs from other African countries. Whether in Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta (Uhuru’s father), in Zaire under Mobutu, with Zairianization, or indigenization in Nigeria by successive general-presidents [17].

In other words, a new phase, an expansion, of the so-called primitive accumulation of local private capital with the help of the national state, an expression of strong links between the political class and the indigenous members of the socio-economically dominant class. One of the consequences of which was that part of the credits granted by public banks to entrepreneurs, close to the governments or acting as their front men, had not been repaid by the said entrepreneurs, thus contributing, during the 1980s, to bank deficits or bankruptcies. And, to the crisis of these economies, one of the main manifestations of which was the external public debt crisis, which led to neoliberal structural adjustment, this standardized solution dictated to the over-indebted States of Africa, so-called Latin America and Asia by international financial institutions, in line with the (unilateral) Washington Consensus. And which is currently being applied, with obvious social violence, in Greece.

The neoliberalization of globalization: production of a new dominant class in African societies

That there were capitalists, embryos of a national bourgeoisie in most African societies during the first postcolonial period, is undeniable, it nevertheless remains true – with the exception of societies with an old bourgeoisie such as South Africa, Egypt, and Mauritius – that the said dynamism of this new dominant class is above all a consequence of the dictates of international financial institutions, of their imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment on African states, as a solution to their critical indebtedness.

States whose rulers were not in principle opposed to neoliberalization [18]. They wanted it, out of self-interest, but without the factors of popular social protest that it aroused. As for the political opposition, it was generally attached to the definition of democracy circulated by the World Bank and others: democracy = market economy + multiparty system + activism of “civil society”. This is not considered as an expression of divergent interests, while it is also a space for class struggle (employers’ associations and workers’ unions, for example, participate in civil society).

It was necessary, in fact, to privatize strategic public companies, to liberalize markets. To do this more where it was relatively the case before: in Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Tunisia, Zaire, for example. A process that is, of course, unfinished to this day. It is not only foreign investors, the famous “strategic investors”, who have benefited from it. We should not, in fact, identify privatization, liberalization, with a recolonization |19|, because here and there, almost everywhere in Africa, members of the political class, capitalists already established – those of the first postcolonial decade – have either acquired shares in privatized public companies, shares held by the States, or acquired other former public companies, or created new, private ones. Indigenous entrepreneurs, some of whom found themselves in a favourable position, or were sure to be so, during the awarding of contracts, due to the proximity of the political class/governors of the moment, or even past ones, with the dominant social class. A capitalism of connivance [20].

In South Africa, where a capitalist class considered to be quite dynamic has existed since the end of the 19th century, and for whose interests apartheid had been constitutionalized, there was talk of strengthening this class after apartheid, by promoting the development of black capitalists, with Black Economic Empowerment (positive discrimination, in favour of the black petty bourgeoisie in economic/ entrepreneurial matters, for example in the form of acquisition of shares in the most promising economic sectors, such as the mining sector) initiated under the presidency of Nelson Mandela (with the support, or even inspiration, of certain “enlightened” elements of the South African white bourgeoisie).

All this with a certain encouragement from international financial institutions, ensuring that (economic) neoliberalization follows a normal course, becomes effective throughout the world. Pressure is exerted on states by, among other things, access to financing, annual reports produced by the World Bank, “Doing Business” – classifying states into good, average and bad students, in terms of establishing the most favourable conditions for business investments. Amongst which were included tax exemptions, low corporation tax rates (around 28% on average, 15% in Mauritius, 13.6% in Lesotho). Both for indigenous capital and for that coming from elsewhere, preferably without distinction of origin in the neoliberal sense of equality, between the iron pot and the earthen pot.

Thus, today, this indigenous ruling class is active in many sectors (food, insurance, construction and public works, education, finance, real estate, media, pharmaceuticals, extraction of natural resources – mines and hydrocarbons –, transport, telephony, textiles, etc.). Even if “Being in the circuit, in the deal” remains the order of the day, because these are practices inherent to capitalism, we can no longer speak of this class except in terms of “intermediaries” [21].

Even if none of these companies are yet part of the top 500 (worldwide) companies, African companies had, in 2013, according to the AFRICA CEO FORUM, “contributed to nearly 23% of investments on the continent [8% in 2007], are in 2nd position behind investments by Western European companies, […] are also the 2nd source of job creation on the continent” [22]. Their growth and their performances are increasingly celebrated in the press, not only in Africa, by the agencies responsible for the propaganda of neoliberal capitalist growth.

Each African country today has – in addition to chambers of commerce and industry – its employers’ organizations, for the defense of the interests of this class. Certainly, non-native members of the class also participate in them, but they are often led by natives, without, however, this signifying a predominance of native capital over non-native capital. Thus, it is also according to the interests of native capital, in addition to those, more structuring, of international (non-African) capital, that national economic and social policies are organized.

These native members of the dominant class exert pressure on political rulers (ministers, parliamentarians – where these manage to do more than just register bills, profitable figuration – governors, etc.) [23] who, moreover, generally make their passage to power a moment of primitive accumulation – the bribes received, the theft of public money, the self-granting of privileges, markets to their companies or those of their nominees, etc. – of the acquisition of shares [24], or even of the constitution of economic groups. Which creates a strong complicity, connivance, an imbrication between political leaders and economic dominants [25].

Moreover, increasingly, members of this capitalist class are transforming themselves into political actors/actresses. In the last seven years (2004-2011) of Hosni Mubarak’s presidency, the government was characterized by, among other things, the appointment of proven capitalist entrepreneurs to ministries closely linked to their private, individual or family interests: Commerce and Industry, Tourism, Agriculture, Health [26]. Some entrepreneurs have managed to get elected to be head states, like Marc Ravalomanana (the “Malagasy Berlusconi”) in Madagascar, Adama Barrow in Gambia, and Patrice Talon in Benin. One of the latter’s unfortunate competitors, Sébastien Ajavon, is also a capitalist entrepreneur in Benin as well as in France. This type of political rivalry between capitalists is also evident in Kenya between Uhuru Kenyatta (an heir to the capitalist entrepreneurial dynamic of the Kenyattas since the presidency of his father, Jomo) and Raila Odinga.

The South African state risks being led from next year (2018) by one of the richest people in South Africa, its current vice-president Cyril Ramaphosa. In the DRC, businessman Moïse Katumbi was on the list of contenders to succeed Joseph Kabila. Joseph is reputed to have scandalously enriched himself, along with members of his family and political collaborators, by investing in entrepreneurship.

An African transnational capitalism

Africa not only receives foreign direct investment, it is also a point of departure of capital, even if the outflows are lower than the inflows.

Some of the members of this ruling class, not content with investing locally, are at the head of companies present in several African countries. These are, for example, Elsewedy Electric, the Dangote group present, through its cement plants and other activities, in all the sub-regions of Africa – including the use of subcontracting –, the Orascom group of Osni Sawiris and his sons, the Mansour Group, African banks (Attijariwafa Bank, Ecobank, Nedbank, United Bank for Africa, etc.), the investment company Heirs Holdings and Transcorp (mentioned in a note on the previous page) of the advocate of Africapitalism Tony Elumelu, of Econet of the Zimbabwean Strive Masiyiwa. Sixty, even a hundred African multinationals, as a member of their inner circle says [27], who also invest outside their country of origin, in their sub-region, as well as in other sub-regions.

What the African integration process favors, the existence of various sub-regional groupings, some of which serve as a reference for organizations defending the interests of this dominant class. Like the Federation of West African Employers’ Organizations (FOPAO) whose space is the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Union of Central African Employers’ Organizations (UNIPACE) for the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS). Even if, at FOPAO, there were recent complaints about a certain persistence of the “protection of local markets” within ECOWAS.

At the regional level, national employers’ organizations are grouped together in Business Africa (formerly the Employers’ Confederation of Employers, regional section of the International Organization of Employers, IOE). This pan-African employers’ organization has the mission, among other things, of “improving the position of businesses in continental bodies such as the African Union Commission, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the ILO Regional Office for Africa, the African Development Bank and other continental institutions |28|”. This does not require any particular effort given the adherence of these institutions to neoliberalism |29| – let’s say “social liberalism” for the ILO (International Labor Organization) – their belief in the private sector as the “engine of development” in Africa, also in “public-private partnership”, this gadget of neoliberal developers.

Thus, this part of the African employers, that of the African multinationals, is very interested in the economic integration of Africa in the form of a single market, the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA), a project initiated in 2012 by the African Union and which was to be effective in 2017, but is somewhat behind schedule. It is also in order not to prolong this delay that some of these multinationals [30], apparently having the wind in their sails, created the AfroChampions Club (chaired by Aliko Dangote and co-chaired by the former South African Head of State and champion of the African Renaissance, Thabo Mbeki). This part of the African ruling class wants to be, in a certain way, pan-Africanist, a clearly capitalist pan-Africanism: to have a significant weight on the African market, or even acquire a dominant position there. Without, however, limiting itself to this.

Indeed, despite the use of an adaptation for Africa of the definition of a multinational, some African companies have crossed continental borders, by investing in Europe, America, Asia, Oceania. Africa does not only receive foreign direct investment, it is also a starting point, even if the outflows are lower than the inflows. The flow of African direct investment outside Africa, according to the annual reports of UNCTAD on investment in the world, from 2011 to 2016, was in 2011 23 billion US dollars against 66 billion of foreign direct investment received by Africa; 2012: 34 billion against 77 billion received; 2013: almost 38 billion against 74 billion received; 2014: 28 billion against 71 billion received; 2015: 18 billion against 61 billion received; 2016: 18 billion against 59 billion received.

Given the historical relations between the former colonies and their colonial metropolises and the symbolic domination maintained by the latter, the relations between capitalists are today quite established. Business Africa speaks of the “continuation of its collaboration with groups of European and American companies” – by “American” we must understand those of the United States of America and Canada, not those of so-called Latin America.

While we often hear, for example, about Chinese or Indian investments in Africa, we hear much less about African investments in China.

For example, regarding investments in the direction considered unusual (Africa => Europe), “Between 2007 and 2012, during the worst recession in the global economy of Europe, African investments [there] grew sevenfold, reaching 77 billion euros |31|”. In recent years, the acquisition of significant shares in large companies in Portugal by the Angolan billionaire Isabel Dos Santos, that by the Media Globe Networks of the Sawiris family of 60% of the shares of the European television channel Euronews, received considerable media coverage.

The acquisition, among other European companies, of the number two French household appliance manufacturer, FagorBrandt, by the Cevital group of the Algerian billionaire Issad Rebrab [32], received considerable media coverage. Certainly, this is not a reversal of the traditional domination of Western capital (American, European) in Africa, of an “imperialism in reverse” (Charles-Albert Michalet [33]), because the stock of African investments in Europe and the United States seems far from any comparison with that of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, the leading group in stock of investments in Africa.

Moreover, while there is often talk, for example, of Chinese or Indian investments in Africa, we hear much less about African investments in China. While in Johannesburg in 2013, “during a roundtable discussion at the first BRICS Business Council meeting in Johannesburg […] African business leader Tony O. Elumelu, Chairman of Heirs Holdings, called on BRICS business leaders to make room for African companies looking to expand their activities outside the continent in BRICS” [34]. There are nevertheless African investments in these emerging capitalist powers.

Regarding the first of these, “as the African economy has developed and the Chinese market has grown, African companies have invested more actively in China. Mauritius, South Africa, the Seychelles, Nigeria and Tunisia are the main African investors in China. By the end of 2009, accumulated African direct investment in China amounted to $9.93 billion, covering in particular the fields of petrochemicals, tools, electronics, transport and telecommunications [35]. Three years later, a significant increase was noted: “in 2012, Africa had invested a total of $14.2 billion, an increase of 43% compared to 2009 […] In 2012 alone, African direct investment in China […] amounted to nearly $1.4 billion [36]. In 2015, they represented half of Chinese investment in Africa, $15 billion compared to $30 billion – Chinese direct investment in Africa should not be confused with the figures for Afro-Chinese trade relations, Chinese loans [37] and Chinese services in Africa such as infrastructure construction.

In India, there was talk of African investments of the order of “170 million dollars accumulated between 2000 and 2010” [38]. At the end of 2013, South African capital was the most dynamic in co-member companies with the BRICS, with its 36 companies in China compared to 72 Chinese companies in South Africa, 54 in India compared to 115 Indian companies in South Africa, 25 in Brazil and 12 in Russia compared to 4 Brazilian and 12 Russian in South Africa respectively. But, it seems that despite the fairly frequent evocation of South-South relations, of the era of neo-liberal globalization, inter-capitalist relations are not, in fact, very developed, as Business Africa also suggests, which “seeks to establish partnerships with federations of companies from emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil and Russia” [38].

However, without in any way denying the intra-capitalist hierarchy, with its national flags, inherited from history and currently being restructured, with small points scored by certain African companies against certain classic multinationals operating in Africa, the compartmentalization under national flags should be put into perspective, because there is no Chinese Wall between capitals at the time of the neoliberalization of globalization.

There are American, European participations in Chinese, Indian, etc. firms, and reciprocally Chinese, Indian, etc. participations in American, European firms. There are also African participations in European and American companies: African FDI would be quite oriented towards Europe and the United States. Asian holdings, including those of the Gulf countries (located in Western Asia), in African companies: for example, the considered Asian Olam (Singaporean) and Wilmar (Malaysian-Singaporean), world numbers second and first in palm oil production, had taken shares in their Ivorian colleague SIFCA. In Ecobank, known as the “pan-African bank”, Qatar National Bank is the largest shareholder with 23% of shares (followed by the South African bank Nedbank, with 20%). In 2015, the Chinese Industrial and Commercial Bank of China acquired 20% of the South African Standard Bank. The large, and ill-reputed, British bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), (only) owns 0.039% of Dangote Cement shares, less than the 1.4% of the Sovereign Fund Investment Corp of Dubai, while Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment, LLC, is one of three US investors who in 2013bought a billion dollars of shares in Orascom Construction Industries (OCI) of the Sawiris [39] (an investor in telecommunications in North Korea, in partnership with this State – OCI recently announced its process of withdrawal from this country, apparently linked to its current tension with the United States of America). The Zuckerberg Foundation (Facebook) has acquired shares in Andela (Kenya, Nigeria), etc. There is also a development of the partnership between African and Chinese banks. Thus, this part of the African ruling class can be seen as participating in the formation of what some call the “transnational capitalist class” [40], the “transnational and ruling class” at the global level.

A fundamentally different ruling class?

The growth of this class is celebrated not only for the fortunes it generates, a kind of proof of the capacity of Africans to succeed economically like those elsewhere – a consideration reacting to the ideology of the inferior humanity of (negro-) Africans –, to the point of presenting Africa as the “last frontier of capitalism” [41], but also because it is supposed, this time, to put Africa on the path out of underdevelopment. The development of this class is intended to trickle down to the other social classes – beyond the upper slice of the “middle class” – of African societies. “Economic prosperity and social wealth” as the advocate of Africapitalism likes to say.

Members of the said class as well as its ideologues never cease to evoke the job creation which accompanies its supposed rise, as in the quote made above presenting African companies as “the 2nd source of job creation on the continent”. It is neither out of patriotism nor out of humanism that private entrepreneurs create jobs, but for the accumulation of wealth, of capital.

In South Africa, given its importance in economic activity, South African private capital can only be a major employer locally, if not the main private employer. As is the case in Egyptian society with the Orascom group, considered the largest private employer. However, this is a job creation that is proving insufficient, as the Nigerian technocrat, former director at the World Bank, then Minister of Finance of Nigeria, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, had deplored in front of the cream of Nigerian private enterprise: “People in this room: if we don’t put our minds to this problem, that we need to create jobs and not just create wealth, you’ll find that the whole economy may be in danger,” she said [42].

Priority given to enrichment, to accumulation, over job creation, which is natural to capitalist logic, but can be a factor in popular uprisings – given what had just happened in Tunisia and Egypt. Because it is neither out of patriotism nor out of humanism that private entrepreneurs create jobs, but for the accumulation of wealth, of capital.

Owning capital is not enough, for it to produce enrichment it is necessary to exploit the workforce, in industrial production as in construction, even in telecommunications and the financial sector, employees are needed to keep the company alive – while waiting for the very unlikely time of complete robotization –, in commerce too |43|. It is the workers who produce wealth, not the holders of capital alone with their capital (including buildings and machines). An increasingly forgotten fact.

This exploitation of labour, on which this ruling class depends, is currently being carried out within the neoliberal framework established by the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s, including, among other things, the “reform” of labour codes or legislation, at the expense of workers, for the benefit of “investors,” the bosses.

A significant flexibilization of labour prior to and of the same nature as that which has just been consolidated in France by the government of Emmanuel Macron, following that of François Hollande, without, unfortunately, having encountered any real resistance. Worse, the relationships of complicity, corruption, and class identity between private investors and governments, and even the corruption that has become commonplace among union leaders, favour the violation of these legal provisions, which are already to the advantage of the bosses. But, this one does not seem to have enough, as the World Economic Forum in Davos regularly expresses, concerning South Africa, with its supposedly rigid labour legislation – despite the tragedy of Marikana [44].

Those who celebrate these millionaire and billionaire entrepreneurs always forget to say that they are so because they practice, among other things, the overexploitation of their workers and employees. Thus, the collective of workers of the Senegalese factory of the most publicized of this dominant class, had, in a press release explaining their entry into strike, revealed that they received “wages more than 20 days after the end of the month and constantly under fear of not receiving our monthly wages. After five months of work in the factory, we are still not in possession of our contracts despite several regularization procedures with the labour inspectorate. As a result, we do not have any of the contracts regulated by Senegalese law [45], transport allowances, “overtime”, “medical leave”, etc. were not paid.

In addition, there was discrimination between workers, likely to produce some chauvinism: “In this factory where Indian, Chinese and Egyptian expatriates are in the majority and are better treated than experienced nationals, the frustration of the Senegalese is perfectly justified. For example, all expatriates receive their salary no later than the 2nd of each month”. Incidentally, African capitalism has had, in fact, in certain sectors, to resort to expatriates, mainly in management, invoking the lack of local skills necessary in certain countries. This is now being reduced, giving way to “mixed management”. [46]

However, in Mauritius, for example, immigrant workers in the textile industry, from Bangladesh, are rather overexploited than privileged. In other factories of the same African “tycoon”, elsewhere, the situation is far from enviable.

Thus, in Zambia, the situation of its workers has even been considered comparable to that of slaves [47]. Overexploitation therefore contributes to the leadership of African billionaires. This is not exceptional, being rather a rule – in various and varied forms – of capitalism.

The labour share of income, that is, the fraction of national income that goes to workers in the form of wages and benefits, is falling worldwide while that of capital is rising […] capital is concentrated among the richest households.

Thus, jobs have certainly been created, not only insufficiently, but also not being able to be considered “decent” in the sense of the UN International Labour Organization. According to the Director of the ILO Africa Office, Aeneas Chuma, who considers the encouragement, since 1965, of the creation of decent jobs as one of the achievements of the ILO in Africa: “Decent work is productive and properly remunerated work, accompanied by security conditions at the workplace and social protection for the family; work that gives individuals the opportunity to flourish and integrate into society as well as the freedom to express their concerns, to join unions and to take part in decisions that will have consequences on their existence; work that presupposes equality of opportunity and treatment for women and men should be at the heart of all development strategies. [48]

Certainly, taking such a definition literally, decent work is historically a very rare commodity in private companies, at the global level. Apart from any problematization of “productive work”, decency and fulfilment in employment, moreover in private companies, Africa was until recently at the forefront of non-decent and vulnerable jobs in the world – some states even consider it useless to have statistics on the subject, the social situation of the populations not being one of their priority concerns.

The situation can only get worse with the advance of neoliberalism, even though in the pages of the IMF journal, Finance & Development, it is acknowledged, better late than never, but without explaining it in a consistent manner, that “the share of labor in income, namely the fraction of national income that goes to workers in the form of wages and benefits, is falling everywhere in the world while that of capital is increasing […] capital is concentrated among the richest households”. [49]

The phenomenon of working poor is generally growing. Thus, while workers in extreme poverty in Africa are tending to decrease very slightly from 2016 to 2017, from 29.3% (125.3 million) to 28.2% (124.1 million), the trend is towards an increase in the category of workers in moderate poverty, from 28.3% (121.2 million) to 28.7% (126.4 million) |50|. This is roughly two thirds of workers in Africa who are working poor. The situation in sub-Saharan Africa is much worse than in North Africa.

Thus, struggles are developing in Africa for a reduction in exploitation. According to the 2017 edition of the African Economic Outlook (pp. 144-145), “more than 3,600 civil protests motivated by economic and political considerations were recorded […] between 2011 and 2016 […] The motivations underlying the protests have been collected and analysed in detail: between 2014 and 2016, approximately 33% of these events were motivated by employment issues (wages, working conditions and unemployment)”, placing them “at the top of the protest factors”. Certainly, demands for wage increases also concern the public/state sector, but they are more significant in the private sector in both the 2011-2013 period and the 2014-2016 period. There is no indication that these are only workers in non-African companies or multinationals.

Apart from a tiny minority of so-called “decent” jobs for the petty bourgeoisie of management – ​​celebrated by the speech on the “boom of the middle classes in Africa” –, the growth of indigenous capitalism has proven to be a failure in terms of jobs, as the then Nigerian Minister Okonjo-Iweala had noted when speaking of the danger that this growth, enriching a minority without creating jobs, posed to the entire economy – an awareness of the possible consequences of the protests mentioned above, in the aftermath of the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco – and Business Africa also seemed to be aware of them. Concerning which, the social dimension is not often emphasized, especially the strikes.

This one – in company with the OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health) and the ILO, with among other participants, in addition to almost twenty national employers’ associations, the FOPAO (Federation of West African Employers’ Organisations), the African Regional Organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation and the Organisation of African Trade Union Unity – organised in December 2015, in Casablanca, a Summit of Social Partners for Employment in Africa. At the end of which a White Paper was produced which, for example, called on the “social partners” – employers, workers’ unions – to have a “spirit of responsibility on both sides to act against the scourge that is the absence of net creation of decent jobs in Africa”.[51]

It seems that the concern expressed for “employment and employability”, the establishment of a “constructive dialogue” based on, among other things, “official and transparent accounts” in the “Casablanca Declaration II for Employment and Employability in Africa” ​​is unlikely to materialize. Since the recommendations are not binding, each company is guided more by the search for profit, as much profit as possible, than by the achievement of a vague “societal project for African renaissance by 2063”, the youth and women of Africa, who are supposed to be of particular concern to the organizers of this summit, will probably have to wait a very long time.

At a time when a good part of African capital, encouraged by the discourse of both UN agencies (UNCTAD, UNDP, ILO) and “pan-African” [52] /international financial institutions, is rather concerned by an “integration of global value chains”.

Ironically, this summit, which was supposed to bring about “a genuine pragmatic program of the type “Marshall Plan for Employment and Employability”, was held at the time when the ILO’s agenda for decent work in Africa (2007-2015) was coming to an end, to which no reference is made in the published documents. There will undoubtedly be other meetings on decent work in Africa, with the aftermath usually reserved for international meetings and recommendations or resolutions relating to the social progress of the wretched of the earth, to ecological problems.

These African capitalists have learned well from the lords of global capitalism, from the international bureaucracy, that displaying good intentions on the international stage in these matters – by spending quite large sums for the organization of participation in this kind of illusionary events – is much more important than trying to undertake to realize them. How can we develop the creation of decent jobs, if the flexibility of work, in other words the low cost of labour, is one of the criteria for attracting investments? Should we not reform, in the other direction, the labour codes/legislation reformed in a socially regressive way (for workers) by neoliberal structural adjustment, rather than “respect for and application of the labour code” (neoliberalized) recommended by the Casablanca Declaration II? In other words, that African employers’ organizations accept the principle of a reduction in their share in the wealth produced, of a supposed good distribution between capital and labour.

A kind of restoration of what was in force during the “Thirty Glorious Years” in certain developed capitalist societies, mainly those of northern Europe. What would be decried today as “socialism”, even without social appropriation of large companies, of the large means of production. In fact, the “inclusive capitalism” that certain good capitalist souls, like the Afri-capitalists, keep harping on about. Would this be possible without the establishment by workers of other power relations, both locally and globally, than the current ones, of support for neoliberalism by the union bureaucracies rightly called “social partners” of the employers?

At the limit, some members of the said class, imitating their predecessors elsewhere – mainly the US foundations, initially associated with the names of the “robber barons” of the early 20th century (Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.) – or even the wives of African heads of state, express their sensitivity to the situation of the wretched of the earth by creating philanthropic foundations. This is the case, from the Tony Elumelu Foundation to the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development, via the Khayelitsha Motsepe Foundation, the Rose of Sharon Foundation of Folorunsho Alajika (Nigerian billionaire), the Mansour Foundation for Development. South African Patrice Motsepe invested half of his fortune, mainly from mining, in Black Economic Empowerment, the neoliberal substitute for the principle of the Freedom Charter – which guided the struggle of the hegemonic current of the anti-apartheid movement, identified with the ANC, but was ultimately thrown into the trash by the ANC and its allies who had reached the threshold of power – according to which “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and Monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole; All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the well-being of the people”. Motsepe’s fortune, like the existence of the poor families he assists, are products of the choice of neoliberalism by Nelson Mandela’s ANC. Just like the situation in Nigeria, which involves the partner foundations of Dangote and Bill Gates, is the consequence of the Nigerian “crony capitalism” without which Dangote would not be what he is today, of private appropriation of public wealth that seriously affects the social sectors (health, education, employment, etc.), produces massive poverty, aggravated by the neoliberal structural adjustment served by international financial institutions as a solution to the crisis of Nigerian dependent capitalism. The generosity of Dangote and Bill Gates is manifested in sectors that interest them as investors: the agri-food sector where one is a shareholder in the seed company Monsanto, very active in the campaign for the use of GMO seeds in Africa and the other a food industrialist; health where the Gates Foundation, a shareholder in the pharmaceutical industry, has been infiltrating the WHO to adapt to neoliberalism and Dangote has chosen to get involved by financing (1.5 million US dollars) the birth of the African Coalition of Health Businesses (ABC Health) whose spirit is quite well defined by one of its leaders: “For the co-chairman of its board of directors, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, the project of an African coalition of businesses on health is a way of meeting the related challenges facing the company: “together, we have the opportunity to demonstrate how investing in health and creating healthier populations can help companies maximize shareholder value, accelerate economic growth, and make entering new markets more profitable |53|. As we have already noted above, the end goal is not the well-being of humans; they are only interesting as means to serve growth and markets.

Generally speaking, this philanthropic generosity, which certainly contributes to saving human lives and providing access to education, is a substitute for the social failure of public authorities produced by dependent capitalism, by collusion, and the neoliberal diktat of the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank, IMF) and other donors. A failure whose consequences would have been relatively lessened, if only – ignoring the thieving reflexes of governments – large companies did not practice, almost systematically, tax fraud, evasion and optimization (reduction to a minimum), despite a “share of direct taxes in GDP which, currently, averages 6% in Africa, compared to 22% in developed countries” (African Economic Outlook 2017, p. 74), the general trend in Africa being nevertheless towards regressive taxation. But companies seem to want to generalise the reality of tax havens in countries like Lesotho, Namibia, Mauritius and Tunisia to the whole of Africa.

The Ghanaian state claims to lose the equivalent of 50% of its budget to tax fraud and evasion. For its part, according to the IMF, quoted by Oxfam, “Nigeria owes its role to abusive corporate tax practices, including fraud relating to royalties from the extractive industry and other forms of illicit activity, for representing the largest share of financial flows from Africa (30.5%), a share that corresponds to 12% of its GDP |54|”.

However, it is not a sport reserved for transnationals of extra-African origin. African companies, whose leaders are constantly celebrated in the economic press, by think tanks, and consulting firms, are also often practitioners.

Struggles are growing in Africa for a reduction in exploitation. According to the 2017 edition of the African Economic Outlook, “more than 3,600 civil protests motivated by economic and political considerations were recorded […] between 2011 and 2016”

Thus, in 2009, the man who was then considered Nigeria’s second richest man, Mike Adenuga (active in mobile telephony, hydrocarbons, etc.) had “been convicted of not paying $610 million in taxes”. [55]

At the same time as enrichment without sufficient job creation, the neoliberal technocrat, then Minister of Finance of Nigeria, Okonjo-Iwela also complained about the tax situation: “the minister said, noting that “75 percent of registered businesses do not pay taxes”. [56] Four years later, almost nothing has changed, according to the National Economic Council of Nigeria which, in March 2017, had “accused wealthy individuals and multinationals present in the country of tax evasion” for having set up for several years “fraudulent mechanisms, including tax havens, in order to evade taxes”. [57]

In other words, a clear shortfall for the public treasury, a factor that aggravates the inability of the public authorities to finance public health and education in any viable way. Nigeria is at the back of the pack when it comes to financing public health: it “spends less than 1% of [its] GDP on health. Health expenditure remains below 15% of the public expenditure threshold prescribed under the 2001 Abuja Agreement |58|”, signed by African states.

This tax evasion is in fact a refusal by members of the ruling class, driven by the fever of accumulation and consumerism, to contribute to the common (national) pot. A class contempt that, unfortunately, is not unique to Nigeria. In its report cited above, Oxfam states that “African elites organize larger capital outflows, relative to GDP, than their counterparts in the rest of the world”. [59]

A situation that is fostered by the connivance of economic entrepreneurs with political authorities [60] who, themselves, as entrepreneurs, are usually unaware of their tax obligations, living in a contradiction between their status as political rulers and economic entrepreneurs. Thus, with each revelation on tax havens (Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, etc.), the names of both certain African capitalists and their class cronies, the politicians, appear.

Certainly, the question of social inequalities in Africa cannot have as its main explanatory key the problem of the collection of (direct) taxes by African States. But if already this African dominant class did not also practice tax delinquency, in its various forms, and provided that the rulers stopped stealing, embezzling public money [61] – a factor of external public debt, which has become critical again, for example, in Central Africa, in the States of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), users of the CFA Franc –, the action of philanthropic foundations, their supposed generosity would not claim to replace certain duties of the public authorities.

These acts of generosity, almost always put on show, without making available to the public the elements that could allow understanding the process, contribute, moreover, to the propaganda of the dominant economic system: it is on the success of the private    sector, the existence of a class of rich people or the enrichment of a few individuals that the resolution of certain serious social problems depends. With the “missionary” racial dimension that the charitable actions of a Bill Gates or a Madonna can have [62]. While with the growth of the average African GDP for a decade, this increase in African millionaires and billionaires, social inequalities in Africa continue to widen, much more than elsewhere.

Among the nineteen most unequal societies in the world, ten are African, including South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Rwanda, whose economic indicators are usually well appreciated in capitalist classifications.

Among the nineteen most unequal societies in the world, ten are African, including South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Rwanda whose economic indicators are usually well appreciated in capitalist classifications. [63] Nigeria [64] and Egypt [65] of millionaires and billionaires are also very unequal. As everywhere else in neoliberal capitalism, in Africa too the rich are becoming richer and the poor are poorer. Concretely, nothing makes the current growth of African capitalism deviate from this rule of normal capitalism, despite the food chatter of a certain press on “Africapitalism”, the chatter on “African socialism” having gone out of fashion.

Domination, culture, pan-Africanism

The domination of this African part of capitalism in Africa benefits from the favor of almost the entire African press, from its fervour for capitalism in general. From the doyenne of the pan-African press Jeune Afrique to African Business, including African Manager, Les Afriques, Forbes Africa, it is the celebration of African economic growth, of these successful African companies, and of their owners. French newspapers have also joined in, with editions devoted to Africa, such as La Tribune (La Tribune Afrique), Le Point (Le Point Afrique). African newspapers, even those published in Geneva or Paris, participate in this dynamic, even when the influence of African companies on the media is not generally comparable to what happens in France, for example [66].

The Jeune Afrique Group, as a company, is the initiator of the Africa CEO Forum, this great mass of African capitalism with the participation of non-African capitalists operating or not in Africa [67]. Its long experience allows it to avoid expressing in its publications values ​​other than those of capitalism or which are neither incompatible with it, nor fundamentally critical. This is valid both for the media of the South African group Naspers (of the billionaire Koos Bekker) and for those of the Senegalese Groupe Futur Media (of the very rich singer Youssou Ndour).

The creation, in 2016, by Media Globe Networks of the Sawiris family of the pan-African television channel Africanews, temporarily based in Pointe-Noire (Congo Brazzaville) – following its acquisition of the majority (60%) of shares in Euronews (2015), followed a year later by the dismissal of around thirty employees – is called, by its broadcasting in English/French in 33 African countries (none in North Africa), to be a powerful vector of the bourgeois vision of the contemporary world, its program being in no way organized for an emancipatory awareness of viewers.

As is the case almost everywhere, the dissemination of images of the world, from sports competitions to the state of the markets, through usually superficial information – not without the presentation of a few facts, generally decontextualized and without history, which can arouse temporary indignation –, interviews with heads of state (generally thieves and/or criminals concerning human rights), technological innovations, kitsch/mind-numbing culture. Enough to comfort viewers of the dominant class, or even those of the so-called upper middle classes, often waiting for social promotion, and to arouse in the working classes desires for integration into the “bourgeois ways of life”. It is not enough to call oneself an alter-globalist, anti-neoliberal, feminist or anti-capitalist, to escape this influence. Without however leading to a solitary withdrawal from society, critical consciousness should also concern one’s own daily relationship with the corrupting delights of capital, with its structuring images of the imagination. Especially in our African societies which are often devoid of spaces for alternative (radical) cultures to the system.

The values ​​of this dominant class, their effects of diverting critical awareness also pass, for example, through African film production, an object of popular consumption. Like the Nigerian video production called Nollywood – considered as “the biggest source of employment after agriculture” [68] in this country – quite present on sub-Saharan African markets and which, as the Nigerian playwright Femi Osofisan says, “In fact, this is the real criticism of Nollywood, that they have refused to engage social problems for rational perspective. It’s all about mystery, miracle and so on. That’s all and that’s a pity” [69]. As a result, it is not surprising that these films, like those of the same ilk produced in other African countries (the neighbouring film industry, in Ghana, is called Ghollywood) are on the program of certain television channels broadcast in Africa.

African heads of state are interested in it, according to their then Nigerian colleague, Goodluck Jonathan: “every time I travel abroad, many colleagues ask me about Nollywood” [70]. It is not uncommon to hear mystical explanations for the victory of a candidate in a given election (from the presidential to the municipal), the appointment to a given leadership position, the unwavering nature of a financially predatory and particularly repressive clique in power or the business success of a given rich person.

Thus, in certain African palaces and governments, or even linked to each other, a syncretic Freemasonry prevails. Freemasonry being popularly assimilated to a kind of witchcraft with its bewitchments and human sacrifices to protect oneself or succeed in business as shown in Nollywood films. It is therefore not surprising that we find in this African ruling class neo-Pentecostal pastors or neo-evangelists who are exorcists, blessings and who are at the same time millionaire entrepreneurs. Their influence in African societies with a large Christian population is much worse today than when Nkrumah denounced “evangelism” as being “perhaps one of the most insidious methods employed by neo-colonialism” (Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism).

The issue of social inequalities is reduced to the individual level. Escaping poverty is an individual issue, of individual faith, material or pecuniary enrichment being a divine blessing, according to the current of the Church of Prosperity. Collective organization to fight against social inequalities, social injustices, is thus out of the question. Even though it appears that the dynamics of conversions, more massive from the 1980s-1990s, is linked to the social crisis, to the uncertainties of the future, to the fragility of certain positions in societies characterized elsewhere by corseted subjectivities – in need of more autonomous expression – and are affected by the advertising of consumerism, illustrated by the ostentation of material wealth by certain pastors. The American magazine Forbes also has its list of millionaire African evangelist pastors.

Black Rhino is the African branch of the world’s leading investment fund Blackstone, a “vulture fund”

The same distress is a factor in increasing devotion among Muslims, whose media seem to be interested only in the tiny minority that turns to jihadist armed violence, from Somalia to Tunisia via Nigeria. While in general, Muslim religious authorities, some of whom also belong to the ruling class, in addition to being opinion leaders, are not, obviously, in favour of a critique of capitalism, beyond that of some of its morals, considered as falling within the supposed Western culture rather than the cultural dynamics of capital or the power of money – which they cannot criticize as such, given the historical links between Islam and commerce. Amalgamating these morals with those of the struggles for human emancipation in general, of women in particular. This meeting of religion and capital is embodied quite well by Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the current Emir of Kano, former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and current chairman of the board of directors of Black Rhino, the African branch of the world’s leading investment fund Blackstone, a “vulture fund” [71]. The same can be said of the “traditional” chiefs/kings and queens, some of whom are (biologically) descended from the slave trade capture entrepreneurs mentioned at the beginning.

Without considering them as members of this dominant class, but who behave as if they are allied with them, there are also the proponents of a pan-Africanist discourse, quite petty-bourgeois, the one already mentioned above. This is very resounding at the moment, which serves this class by the fact, while impressionistically denouncing “Western” or imperialist domination, of obscuring the divergence, the antagonism of the interests of this class with those of the popular classes (proletariat, small peasantry, precarious layers of the informal sector) [72]. Its role in the reproduction of injustices and social inequalities in Africa.

As if it were not already obvious enough that this African part of the ruling class in Africa, despite its subordination becoming relative to the structuring of the world economy organized by the traditional centre of the world capitalist economy, is, through its practices in the jungle of competition, in no way the bearer of even a “capitalism with a human face” as has been said of the capitalism of the societies of Northern Europe. That the affix “afri” attached to “capitalism”, the Afri-capitalism in which young people are being trained today by the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Programme [73], will not change the nature of capitalism, made of violence towards nature, towards humans – the exploited workforce, the dispossessed –, or even between capitalists (in competition) – with obviously harmful repercussions on employees – as many African companies will inexorably suffer, due to the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) and the Continental Free Trade Area.

For example, the fifth edition of the Africa CEO Forum, which claimed to “Reinvent an African Business Model”, in other words Afri-capitalism, ultimately only projected commonplaces of the neoliberal discourse on growth [74]: accentuate the entrepreneurial use of information and communication technologies (which does not displease Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, already campaigning in Africa on this subject), energy production and electrification (Barack Obama and Tony Elumelu had been friends on this subject), “increased investments in Agri-business” (the head of the Ivorian employers’ association, an agro-businessman, asked for 0% tax on “fertilizers, seeds, machines”, thus being much more than in phase with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) financed by USAID, its British equivalent, the Department for International Development (DFID), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – shareholder of the transnational world champion of genetically modified seeds -, the Rockefeller Foundation), subordinating school education to the needs of businesses (the “training-employment adequacy” demanded by Capital from States), extractivism.

It is neither from African capitalism, nor from that of new powers of the South, nor from the dominant transnationals of extra-African origin, that we can expect the emancipation of African peoples from domination, from various oppressions.

Regarding this, according to the journalists of the group that initiated the said Forum: “if proof were needed that extractive industries retain, despite the blow suffered since 2014, a strong power of attraction on governments and investors, the panel devoted to this sector would have convinced the most sceptical observer”, a government official from Rwanda (well rated in recent years by Doing Business, for his reforms in favour of private investment), having affirmed that “it is important to prepare the insertion of African companies in the energy and mining value chain by improving the training of men and transparency”.

As can be seen, including by the reference made to “the dog’s blow” (fall in the prices of hydrocarbons and other raw materials on the world market and its consequences for producers) by the journalists of Jeune Afrique, this African reinvention of capitalism royally ignores what growth has done to non-human and human nature, the serious risks that its continuation poses.

Even if, “Kodeidja Diallo, director of operations with the private sector of the African Development Bank (AfDB)” while “ensuring that her institution will support the hoped-for recovery with its financing and advice” deemed it useful to add that this will be “in such a way that neither the populations nor the environment are left behind by wells, drilling and refining or enrichment plants”, it is only a zest of social and ecological concern, which has become ritual for international institutions, on a paradigm of ecocidal growth and an accentuated reproduction of social inequalities. A lie intended for the suckers, given the practices actually supported by this institution and others of the same ilk, including United Nations agencies. Given its concrete dynamics, one can only say of this African capitalism that it is “flatly, stupidly, cynically bourgeois” (Frantz Fanon).

It is neither from African capitalism, nor from that of new powers of the South, called emerging, nor from transnational corporations of extra-African origin, dominant, that we can expect the emancipation of African peoples from domination, from various oppressions. But from the struggles currently being waged for a reduction in exploitation and oppressions articulated with projects to exit capitalism, socially harmful, ecocidal and reproductive of old oppressions. Thus, the pan-African character of certain African companies and the presence of transnational corporations of extra-African origin are an opportunity to seize for the construction of solidarity, of common struggles of their exploited in Africa, and even elsewhere too.

Jean Nanga is a Congolese socialist and an International Viewpoint correspondent for Africa. For some of his other articles see: https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?auteur74

Notes:

|1| Tony O. Elumelu, Africapitalism. The Path to Economic Prosperity and Social Wealth, The Tony Elumelu Foundation, http://www.tonyelumelufoundation.org/ .

|2| Morocco, whose economy is considered one of the most dynamic in Africa, is not mentioned in this presentation because it is the subject of a presentation, illustration, by Omar Aziki: “Morocco: springboard for the neocolonial conquests of Africa”, November 17, 2017, http://www.cadtm.org/Maroc-tremplin-pour-les-conquetes .

|3| He defines it as follows: “Conscientism is the whole, in intellectual terms, of the organization of forces that will allow African society to assimilate the Western, Muslim and Euro-Christian elements present in Africa and to transform them in such a way that they fit into the African personality. The latter defines itself by the whole of the humanist principles on which traditional African society is based” (p. 98).

|4| Mehdi Ben Barka, “Revolutionary Option in Morocco” (1965), in Mehdi Ben Barka. (Collection of texts introduced by Bechir Ben Barka), Geneva, CETIM, 2013, (p. 66-88), p. 78 for classes.

|5| Amilcar Cabral, “Objective Foundations of National Liberation and Social Structure” (Havana, 1966), in Cabral, Unity and Struggle, Paris, Maspero, (p. 148-170), p. 161 for the quote.

|6| For a summary of Nkrumah’s non-linear evolution on the subject, for example between the first edition of Le Consciencisme (1964) and the second (1969/1970), cf. the pages devoted to him by Paulin J. Hountondji in Sur la “philosophie africaine”, Paris, Maspero, 1976, pp. 153-179.

|7| Author in the 1960s of: The development of capitalism in Ivory Coast, Paris, Minuit, 1967; “The development of capitalism in black Africa” ​​Man and society, international journal of sociological research and syntheses, no. 6, 1967, pp. 107-119; “The Senegalese business bourgeoisie”, Man and society, no. 12, 1969, pp. 29-41.

|8| Kwame Nkrumah, The Class Struggle in Africa, Paris, Présence Africaine, 1972 [London, Panaf Books Ltd, 1970; translated from English by Marie-Aïda Bah-Diop], pp. 10 and 13. In a text prior to The Class Struggle in Africa, Nkrumah had expressed an awareness of the non-idyllic pre-colonial relations between Africans: “Today, the phrase “African socialism” seems to espouse the view that the traditional African society was a classless society imbued with the spirit of humanism and to express a nostalgia for that spirit. Such a conception of socialism makes a fetish of the communal African society. But an idyllic, African classless society (in which there were no rich and no poor) enjoying a drugged serenity is certainly an easy simplification; there is no historical or even anthropological evidence for any such society.” I am afraid the realities of African society were somewhat more sordid. All available evidence from the history of Africa up to the eve of the European colonization, shows that African society was neither classless nor void of a social hierarchy. Feudalism existed in some parts of Africa before colonization; and feudalism involves a deep and exploitative social stratification, founded on the ownership of land. It must also be noted that slavery existed in Africa before European colonization, although the earlier European contact gave slavery in Africa some of its most vicious characteristics. The truth remains, however, that before colonization, which became widespread in Africa only in the nineteenth century, Africans were prepared to sell, often for no more than thirty pieces of silver, fellow tribesmen and even members of the same “extended family” and clan”, K. Nkrumah, “African Socialism revisited” (1967), Paper read at the Africa Seminar held in Cairo at the invitation of the two organs At-Talia and Problems of Peace and Socialism, https://www.marxists.org/subject/af… .

|9| Ibid., p. 13.

|10| We have chosen not to discuss here the traditional confusion between pan-Africanism and pan-Negrism which, by integrating Black people from everywhere – with the exception of the natives of the Oceanian world – on a racial basis, amounts, implicitly, to making debatable the Africanness of the non-black populations of Africa, present, beyond North Africa, in all the other sub-regions of Africa (including islands, obviously).

|11| The African Development Bank’s 2011 study on the “middle classes” (Mthuli Ncube, Charles Leyeka Lufumpa, Désiré Vencatachellum, The Middle of the Pyramid: Dynamics of the Middle Class in Africa, pp. 3-4; www.afdb.org ) spoke of a “rich class” constituting almost 5% of the population. The Africa 2016 Wealth Report speaks of 165,000 millionaires in Africa, holding US$860 billion.

|12| Tidiane Diakité, The slave trade and its African actors from the 15th to the 19th century, Paris, Berg International Éditeurs, 2008.

|13| The situation of countries like Egypt (formally independent in 1922/1936), of settlement colonies like South Africa, Mauritius is very different from that of the others.

|14| He had been co-opted by the colonial Niger Company as one of the native traders buying peanuts for it from native producers.

|15| Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Les Africaines. History of Sub-Saharan African Women from the 19th to the 20th Century, Paris, La Découverte, 2013 [Desjonquères, 1994], p. 162.

|16| C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, idem, p. 166.

|17| In Egypt, after the Suez Crisis (1956), the Nasser regime instead proceeded with a state nationalization of private companies, including those of the local bourgeoisie. Thus, the entrepreneur Osni Sawiris went into exile in Libya, only returning to Egypt under the Sadat regime, which restored economic liberalism in the 1970s.

|18| The State of Botswana has proceeded with the neoliberalization of its economy, at the same time as other African economies, but without going through the critical indebtedness which characterized the latter and which made them submit to the diktat of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

|19| In the African colonies, generally speaking, there was no question of encouraging the constitution of an indigenous fraction of the capitalist class.

|20| See, for example, the very brief presentation of the Egyptian case by Samir Amin, in “Liberal capitalism, crony capitalism and lumpen-development: What immediate responses?”, Pambazuka News, November 19, 2012, http://pambazuka.org/fr/category/fe… .

|21| Of course, there are still intermediaries, but some combine the activities of intermediaries with other so-called “productive” activities. For example, the Egyptian Mansour family – which includes the seventh richest person in Africa, Mohamed Mansour – also made its fortune as an authorized distributor of General Motors, Caterpillar, Phillip Morris, Michelin, etc., in several countries in the sub-region. Among the activities of the Algerian Issad Rebrah (the richest in Algeria, owner of the multi-sector Cevital), there is also the sale of cars by the Korean Hyundai. The Maghreb and Middle East Investors Group (GIMMO) of the Algerian Djilali Mehri includes Pepsi Cola Algeria. The capitalist and leader of the South African ANC, former union leader, Cyril Ramaphosa is also a relay for Coca Cola and McDo in South Africa.

|22| AFRICA CEO FORUM (co-organized by the Jeune Afrique group, the Swiss Rainbow Unlimited and the African Development Bank, which has just been joined by the International Finance Corporation belonging to the World Bank Group), Business, the engine of African growth. Building a strong Africa through the private sector, 2014, p. 22, available on www.theafricaceoforum.com . However, the two leading African companies are state-owned enterprises, the Algerian Sonatrach (National Company for Research, Production, Transport, Transformation, and Marketing of Hydrocarbons), a transnational, because it is also active in about ten countries, in Africa, America and Europe, and the Angolan Sonangol (Angolan National Hydrocarbons Company), also active in Africa, America, Asia, Europe.

|23| For example: “No sooner had Peter Anyang Nyongo, a close associate of opposition leader Raila Odinga, been elected governor of Kisumu in August than he had to face pressure from investors in his county. They gave him an ultimatum: either he renounces his support for Odinga in his contestation of the presidential election result, or they divest from the county.”, “Kisumu between Odinga’s hammer and investors’ anvil”, La Lettre de l’Océan indien, August 25, 2017, p. 2.

|24| For example, in the context of privatization, “In 2004, economic elites founded a company, Transnational Corporation (Transcorp), of which the then president, Olusegun Obasanjo, himself was a shareholder, to acquire the former public companies. Olusegun Obasanjo is said to have acquired between 200 and 600 million shares of Transcorp. In 2005, it was launched from the presidential residence. Obasanjo awarded it four oil exploration blocks”, Olabisi Shoaga, Corporate Social Responsibility in Nigeria since the Ogoni Crisis: From Reality to Discourse, PhD thesis in Political Science, University of Bordeaux, 2014, p. 77; https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/te… . As head of the Nigerian federal state, Obasanjo had accepted, from the governor of a federated state, the allocation, to the great displeasure of the local population, of a (private) property of 10,000 hectares of forest previously intended for conservation. He had subsequently sold it to the world’s number 1 palm oil company, Wilmar International, whose main shareholders are Malaysian billionaires Robert Kuok, Singaporean Martua Sitorus and the US-based transnational Archer Daniel Midlands (ADM). A company with a bad reputation (see, for example, Amnesty International, Palm oil scandal. Major brands profit from the exploitation of workers, November 2016, www.amnesty.org/fr .

|25| To stay in Nigeria – the society producing the most African millionaires and billionaires –, the same researcher speaks of certain “economic elites” who “also formed a fundraising committee under the name of Corporate Nigeria during the last presidential election in 2011, despite the law that prohibits companies from contributing to political campaigns”, among which are figures from the Forbes ranking: Aliko Dangote, Femi Otedela, Mike Adenuga, Tony Elumelu, (Shoaga, idem, p. 95). Most of the members of the said committee are said to have purchased public companies during the privatization program. It took four days of general strike to cancel the acquisition of two state refineries by Dangote, as an end-of-term gift from President Olusegun Obasanjo, a proven act of (private) accumulation by dispossession (of state or public property), a characteristic of neoliberalization.

|26| Amr Adly, “Too Big to Fail: Egypt’s Large Enterprises After the 2011 Uprising”, Carnegie Middle East Center, March 02, 2017, http://carnegie-mec.org/2017/03/027… .

|27| “We define a multinational as a company headquartered in Africa and operating in at least three other African countries outside its domestic headquarters. Of course, this is a simplistic definition by global standards […] The largest African multinationals – those with annual sales of more than $1 billion – number about 60 and have a combined gross revenue of $200 billion. If you lower the threshold by $1 billion, there are more than 100 African companies with a regional footprint; and they are the main drivers of the recent surge in intra-African investments”, “African multinationals are contributing in many ways to the transformation of their continent” (Michael Kottoh (CEO of the consulting firm Konfidants and of the strategy of the AfroChampions Initiative), interviewed by La Tribune Afrique, La Tribune Afrique, October 27, 2017, https://afrique.latribune.fr/entrep.. .). They number 700 when setting the threshold at 500 million US dollars (African Economic Outlook 2017).

|28| Extract from the Business Africa presentation on the IOE website ( http://www.ioe-emp.org/ ).

|29| The UNDP adheres to the religion of growth with the African Development Bank and the OECD, considering – after briefly mentioning (in 20 lines) human development as an “end in itself” – that “as this chapter will show, human development is more than social emancipation – it is also an inductor of growth”, “human development is an engine of growth”, “human development is a means of accelerating economic diversification and value chains”, speaking of the “common strategic vision of Africa for human development to foster entrepreneurship” (African Development Bank Group, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, United Nations Development Programme, African Economic Outlook 2017, Special Theme: Entrepreneurship and Industrialization, 2017, pp. 110, 111 and 130), in other words the end goal is not “human development”, but growth, the reproduction of capital.

|30| According to Michael Kottoh (op. cit.), there are currently twenty companies. Among other reasons for the lack of enthusiasm shown within African multinational employers, there seem to be the consequences of free trade agreements between certain African states with the European Union (such as the Economic Partnership Agreements, the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement being negotiated between Tunisia and the EU), the United States. Some African companies risk suffering from competition from goods and services coming from the United States, the EU, etc. Competition does not have the same reality in the different sectors. Already, companies, within ECOWAS for example, are not able to withstand competition from products, investments, coming from another member country of this sub-regional grouping.

|31| PANA, “EU denies losing African trade, investment battle,” March 31, 2014 , http://www.panapress.com/-EU-denies-losing-African-trade-and-investment-battle

|32| Dangote has announced major investments in Europe and the United States over the next few years.

|33| Cited by Pierre Dockès, “Globalization and “imperialism in reverse””, in Globalization, the supreme stage of capitalism? In homage to Charles-Albert Michalet, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013, http://books.openedition.org/pupo/2740 .

|34| “Elumelu calls on African entrepreneurs to do business with BRICS,” African Press Organization (APO), August 27, 2013, https://www.financialafrik.com/2013… .

|35| Xinhua, “White Paper: New Characteristics of China-Africa Investment,” People’s Daily Online, December 23, 2010, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/Ec… . His presentation states that he is also “an advisor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Private Capital Group for Africa.”

|36| Bo Li, “Africa also invests in China”, Africa Renewal, August 2015, p. 30.

|37| Regarding loans, they are not limited to states, because Dangote obtained a Chinese loan of 2 billion US dollars in 2016, cf. Bandiare Ndoye, “Nigeria: Dangote benefits from a loan of 2 billion dollars from the Bank of China”, Financial Afrik, April 13, 2016, https://www.financialafrik.com/2016… . An interesting loan for Chinese capital, because in addition to the creditor bank, the construction of new cement plants justifying this loan was entrusted to the Chinese company Sinoma International Engineering Co, with which Dangote had signed the previous year “contracts with a total value of 4.34 billion dollars […] for the construction of new factories in eight countries in Africa and Asia”, Agence Ecofin, “Dangote will sign for 4.34 billion $ with the Chinese Sinoma to build factories in Africa”, August 26, 2015, Sinoma which was already the subcontractor for its cement plant in Zambia (2012-2013).

|38| ChinaIndia/Ma Padioleau, “Africa, a priority for India”, www.chineinde.info/blog/afri… .

|39| Mfonobong Nsehe, “Bill Gates And Other US Investors Buy $1 Biillion Stake In Egyptian Construction Firm,” Forbes, January 19, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mfonob… .

|40| Leslie Sklair, “The Transnational Capitalist Class and the Discourse of Globalization,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2000, https://www.globalpolicy.org/global.. . See also, for example, Giulio Azzolini (translated from Italian by Livio Boni, Raffaela Cucciniello), “On the New Capitalist Class, Transnational and Dominant?”, Actuel Marx, 2016/2, No. 60, pp. 28-42, http://www.cairn.info/revue-actuel-… .

|41| A formula that can be found in both the Africapitalist Tony O. Elumelu and the Afropolitan Achille Mbembe (see, for example, Achille Mbembe (comments collected by Christophe Ayad, Cyril Bensimon, Christophe Châtelot and Serge Michel), “Come to Africa, come to our country!”, Le Monde, special edition: Afrique l’envol, (p. 6-11), p. 10 for the expression.

|42| AFP, “Economic growth not meeting needs of poor, says Okonjo-Iweala”, Vanguard, December 9, 2013, http://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/12/.. .

|43| This is the case with the Nana Benz, as Comi Toulabor writes concerning the structuring of their trade, “at the base of the silver pyramid is a swarm of small itinerant resellers […], product of the phenomenon of the massive female rural exodus […] as well as in the child trafficking that affects the Gulf of Guinea. Often paid peanuts, and living in conditions of “subhuman” precariousness, they form the lumpenproletariat, the hideous face of this informal economy of which literature often retains only the noble and glorified side. The entire profession employs a workforce that can be estimated at between two and four thousand people, the upper fringes of which form the comprador bourgeoisie which knows how to reproduce itself remarkably well by passing the baton between mothers and daughters”, Comi Toulabor, “Les Nana Benz de Lomé” Mutations d’une bourgeoisie comprador, entre choc et décadence”, Afrique contemporaine, 2012/4, (p. 69-80), p. 72 for the quote.

|44| The miners demanded higher pay than was then the case, in other words less (over-)exploitation of their labour force.

|45| Press release from the Dangote cement works workers’ collective, “Alioune Ndiaye of 2Stv got wet”, leuksenegal.com, April 17, 2015, http://www.leuksenegal.com/ .

|46| Christophe Le Bec and Stéphane Ballong, “Strategy: how African companies are gaining strength in the face of multinationals”, Jeune Afrique, January 11, 2016, http://www.jeuneafrique.com/mag/289… .

|47| “Dangote workers being treated like slaves”, Zambian Watchdog, January 25, 2016, https://www.zambiawatchdog.com/dang… .

|48| Aeneas Chuma (interview by Franck Kuwonu), “Africa: growth without jobs”, Africa Renewal, April 2015, (pp. 26-27), p. 26 for the quote, available at: www.un.org/africarenewal/fr .

|49| Maria Jovanovic, “Work is losing momentum”, Finance & Development, September 2015, (pp. 34-35), p. 35 for the quote.

|50| International Labor Office, World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2017, Geneva, 2017, p. 15-19.

|51| International Organization of Employers, Business Africa and International Labour Organization, White Paper of the Summit of Social Partners for Employment in Africa, Casablanca, December 15, 2015, p. 13, www.ioe-emp.org .

|52| Of the 78 shareholder states of the African Development Bank, 25 are non-African and among these, only Germany, Canada, the United States, France and Japan hold 25% of the capital of this so-called pan-African institution.

|53| Quoted by Ristel Tchounand, “Dangote Foundation: $1.5 million for the creation of the African Coalition of Health Enterprises (ABCHealth)”, La Tribune Afrique, September 20, 2017,

|54| Oxfam, Let’s Talk Money: Africa Invited to the G7, June 2015, p. 4, www.oxfam.org .

|55| Shoaga, op. cit., footnote 371, p. 98. He then went into exile in London, under the presidency of Musa Yar Adua (2007-2010) who eventually pardoned him, allowing his return home. In 2016, the federal tax authorities sealed the offices of his mobile phone company, the second largest in Nigeria, for non-payment of VAT estimated at 24.3 billion naira (67 million US dollars). Nicholas Ibekwe, “Adenuga’s Mountain of Debt: Several firms, AMCON chased billionaire for unpaid bills”, Premium Times, June 27, 2016, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news… .

|56| AFP, “Economic growth not meeting needs of poor, says Okonjo-Iweala”, Vanguard, December 9, 2013, http://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/12/.. .

|57| La Tribune Afrique, “Nigeria: multinationals and wealthy individuals accused of tax evasion”, March 17, 2017, https://afrique.latribune.fr/econom… . Names were not given on this occasion, but less than a year earlier the Panama Papers had revealed names, including that of Dangote, of users of tax havens, through shell companies: “Premium Times was able to uncover several Nigerian business players associated with shell companies”, Joshua Olufemi, Emmanuel Mayah, “Web of intrigue: Panama Papers reveal shell companies linked to Africa’s richest man Dangote”, Mail & Guardian, April 15, 2016, http://mgafrica.com/article/2016-04… .

|58| African Economic Outlook 2017, p. 114.

|59| Oxfam, op. cit., p. 3. Behind the expression “capital flight” there may be an economic-social horizon…

|60| To stay in Nigeria – the African society producing the most millionaires and billionaires – the same researcher speaks of certain “economic elites” who “also formed a fundraising committee under the name of Corporate Nigeria during the last presidential election in 2011, despite the law that prohibits companies from contributing to political campaigns”, among which are figures from the Forbes ranking: Aliko Dangote, Femi Otedela, Mike Adenuga, Tony Elumelu, (Shoaga, idem, p. 95). In Egypt, under the post-Mubarak regime of Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian tax authorities had considered the Orascom group liable, for tax evasion, for a billion dollars, which it had paid. It had already been the subject, a few years earlier in Algeria, of a tax adjustment (for five years) of nearly a billion US dollars.

|61| The states of Kenya, Swaziland and Tanzania have been able to collect more taxes in recent times, but there is no indication yet that there have been positive effects in terms of social policy in favour of the working classes.

|62| In Malawi – one of the poorest societies in Africa, mainly dependent on the production and export of tobacco – while the social situation of the working classes worsened, leaders embezzled public money, a tradition (Nick Wright, “Who’ll remember Cashgate?”, African Arguments, September 3, 2015, http://africanarguments.org/2015/09.. .), the philanthropic action (construction of classrooms and donations of beds to the main hospital) of Raising Malawi, the foundation of the American singer Madonna, was publicized.

|63| Ayodele Odusola, Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Haroon Bhorat and Pedro Conceição (eds.), Income Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa. Diverging Trends, Determinants and Consequences. Overview, New York United Nations Development Programme Regional Office for Africa, 2017, p. 3.

|64| Oxfam, Inequality in Nigeria. Exploring the Drivers, May 2017, www.oxfam.org .

|65| Maram Mazen, “Egypt: the rich barricade themselves, inequalities increase”, La Voix du Nord, June 17, 2017, http://www.lavoixdunord.fr/179413/a… .

|66| “90% of the national dailies sold each day belong to 10 oligarchs! According to Basta!’s calculations, the same people own television and radio stations that account for 55% and 40% of audience shares respectively,” Agnès Rousseaux, “The delirious power of influence of ten billionaires who own the French press,” Basta!, April 5, 2017, http://www.bastamag.net/Le-pouvoir-… . The weekly Le Point, which began publishing Le Point Afrique, belongs to the seventh richest person in France, François Pinault. As for the daily Le Monde, its co-owner (out of three) is the eleventh richest person in France, Xavier Niel. Le Monde Afrique, which it publishes, is supported by the French Development Agency, the World Bank, the (Bill) Gates Foundation, and the Open Society Initiative for West Africa of billionaire financier George Soros.

|67| This forum seems to have eclipsed the Forbes Africa/Afrique forum organized by the eponymous magazine from 2012 in Brazzaville, under the high patronage of the Head of State, and which stopped in 2015, after four editions. Could this be related to the tense situation that prevailed during the campaign for/against the constitutional revision?

|68| Rebecca Moudio, “Nigerian Cinema: A Potential Goldmine?”, Africa Renewal, May 2013, (pp. 24-25), p. 24 for the quote.

|69| Femi Osofisan (interviewed by Yinka Fabowale), “Nollywood has good actors, but… – Femi Osofisan”, Nigerian Films, May 20, 2010, http://www.nigeriafilms.com/news/76… . Which he also explains as follows: “Nollywood is sponsored mainly by spare part dealers, they are the ones who finance it and they are not interested in the serious stuff for understandable reasons. They are simply business people and they want to make their money back as quickly as possible. They are not interested in those hugher considerations of culture and anything. So, it’s like fast foods, they just want to put films there and make their money the following day. So because of that they are not interested in serious stuff and I can’t blame them because it’s a law of business”

|70| Quoted by Rebecca Moudio, op. cit., p. 25.

|71| See, for example, Fátima Martín, “In Spain, vulture funds are devouring housing, bread and electricity,” in CADTM, Other Voices of the Planet: Vulture Funds. The Wings of Devastation, 4th quarter 2017, pp. 61-63; Éric Toussaint, “Vulture funds” thrive on poverty by speculating on individual debt,” Basta!, December 8, 2017, https://www.bastamag.net/Les-fonds-… .

|72| The observation made by Caribbean Pan-Africanist activist Walter Rodney remains highly relevant: “The obscuring of the notion of class in post-independence Africa has made Pan-Africanism a harmless slogan for imperialism, so much so that African chauvinists and reactionaries have claimed it as their own,” W. Rodney, “Pan-Africanism and Class Struggle,” Période, June 12, 2017, (Text written in 1974 and first published in 1975 in “Pan-Africanism: Struggle against Neo-colonialism and Imperialism – Documents of the Sixth Pan-African Congress, Horace Campbell, ed. Afro-Carib Publications, Toronto, 1975, 18-41,” translated from English by Leïla Khoulalene, from the version transcribed by Susan Campbell, and made available on the marxists.org website: https://www.marxists.org/subject/af.. .). Today, it is not only the petty bourgeoisie that speaks in the name of Africa, there is also this African capitalist class in whose service it has also placed itself since its rise – to which the petty bourgeoisie has also contributed as a post-independence ruling class.

|73| According to the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) “The program consists of a commitment of USD 10 million [United States dollars] over 10 years [i.e. 100 million] by the TEF to identify, train, mentor and finance 10,000 African entrepreneurs by 2024” who will create 1 million jobs. 3,000 young entrepreneurs from 54 African countries were trained from 2015 to 2017.

|74| Source: articles published on the said Forum by the pro-African capitalism press, mainly that of Alain Faujas and Stéphane Ballong: “Africa CEO Forum: in search of a new model for Africa”, Jeune Afrique, March 28, 2017, http://www.jeuneafrique.com/mag/421.. . and that published by the AfDB: “5th edition of the Africa CEO Forum in Geneva: Reinventing the African Business Model”, March 20, 2017, https://www.afdb.org/fr/news-and-ev… .