Madaraka: The Poor Shall Inherit the Earth, Including Its Natural Resources

Madaraka

The Poor Shall Inherit the Earth, Including Its Natural Resources

Wanyee Ahmed Kinuthia

Copyright © 2014 Wanyee Ahmed Kinuthia

Smashwords Edition

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Part 1: Author's Master's Thesis - University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Canada)

Title - Accumulation by Dispossession by the Global Extractive Industry: The Case of Canada

Abstract

Introduction

Chapter 1: Accumulation by Dispossession and the Global Extractive Industry

Primitive Accumulation and Global Capitalism

Primitive Accumulation via the Washington Consensus

The Corporate Extractive Industry

Economic Globalization and the Primacy of Natural Resources

Conclusions

Chapter 2: A History of the Canadian Extractive Industry

A Staple Economy

The Plunder of Atlantic Canada

Nickel-Mining in the Sudbury Basin

Primitive Accumulation via the Free Entry System

Canadian Government Assistance and Regulations in the Extractive Sector

The Rise of Canadian "Juniors

Conclusions

Chapter 3: The Weakness of Current Regulations and the Need for FPIC

The Limitations of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR

No Consensus in Canada

The World Bank's Extractive Industries Review

The Need for Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC

Cases Illustrating the Need for FPIC

Conclusions

Chapter 4: Challenges to Implementing FPIC

The Free Entry System

Consultation versus "Consent

Local Interests and the FPIC process

Conclusions

Chapter 5: Conclusions

Part II: Accumulation by Dispossession in Africa

Africa and the Contemporary Relevance of Dependency Theory

Perpetuating Africa's Dependency

Re-colonizing Africa via the Debt Burden

Conclusions

Part III: Securitizing Accumulation by Dispossession via the War on Terror

The Post-9/11 Securitization of Neoliberal Economic/Corporate Globalization

Conclusions

Part IV: De-securitizing Accumulation by Dispossession: Debunking the War on Terror

Critiquing The 9/11 Commission Report

The Lack of Evidence

State Terrorism

False-Flag Terrorism

Final Conclusions

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

About the Author

End Notes

Introduction

Madaraka is the Swahili word for self determination. Article 2 of the United Nations 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples states: all peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

I had mixed feelings from the moment I first learned about a Canadian mining company acquiring titanium reserves in my native country of Kenya. My optimism was based on Kenya's new reputation as having the world's largest unexploited reserves of one of the most strategic metals of the twenty-first century.[1] However, I was pessimistic because of the resource curse - according to studies conducted by the World Bank, local economies do not appear to have benefitted from large-scale mining through sustained economic growth and improved services and that often local people feel no perceptible benefit from the resources extracted from 'their' land.[2] In fact, the large-scale exploitation of natural resources often leaves affected communities poorer.[3]

Furthermore, Canada is both the epicentre and the undisputed powerhouse of the global extractive industry. More than sixty per cent of the world's mining corporations are based in Canada, which also provides more money to the global extractive industry, than any other country in the world. Over eighty per cent of public financing for the industry was raised through the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) in 2006.[4] In addition, the plunder of natural resources by the global extractive industry is facilitated through the free entry or free mining principle, which is the dominant means of granting mineral tenures in Canada today. The free entry system gives mining corporations the right of entry on virtually all lands without consulting affected landowners.[5]

The operations of the World Bank, which is the world's largest development lender, are also underpinned by the free entry philosophy.[6] The reality of this struck closer to home about three years ago, when my grandmother's land rights were blatantly violated in a project involving the World Bank and the Government of Kenya.[7] To make matters worse, this was done using fraudulent means[8] and in direct contravention of the World Bank's Safeguard Policies. In spite of the court injunction that she obtained through the High Court of Kenya, as well as appealing directly to the World Bank,[9] the project proceeded without my grandmother's consent or any reasonable compensation.[10]

The conditions of economic development and democracy have been profoundly and adversely affected by economic globalization, particularly due to the tremendous increase in the power of corporations relative to that of communities and labour.[11] A report from the Institute of Policy Studies revealed that fifty-one of the top one hundred economic units in the world are corporations, not countries, while the world's top two hundred corporations account for almost a quarter of the total measured economic activity of the entire world.[12] Hence, economic globalization may be more appropriately referred to as corporate globalization.[13]

Corporate globalization poses a serious threat to society, because corporations are generally structured to remain free of any legal responsibility to operate in moral, humane, or any other ways that are beneficial to communities, workers, or the environment.[14] According to the U.N Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, John Ruggie, such effective impunity arises from the governance gap - or enforcement vacuum[15] - which he crucially defines as a lack of sanctioning and reparation.[16] Ruggie states that a key part of the problem is the legal framework that regulates the activities of corporations, whereby parent companies and their subsidiaries are considered to be distinct legal entities, generally rendering the former not liable for wrongs committed by the latter.[17]

In addition, corporations are institutions that are based on three main principles: the absolute need to make profits; the need to grow continuously and expand in terms of territory and functionality; and their need to remain as unrestricted as possible in their operations.[18] Corporations not only exist exclusively to maximize returns to their shareholders,[19] they are in fact designed to extract and concentrate this wealth into the hands of a few.[20] Consequently, the most significant impact of corporate globalization has been excessive inequality worldwide. According to a 2006 United Nations report, the richest one per cent of the world's adults - who also lived in North America - owned forty per cent of global wealth, and the richest ten per cent of the world's adults owned more than eighty-five per cent of global wealth. In contrast, the bottom half of the world's adult population barely owned one per cent of global wealth.[21] Even within the industrialized countries, the rich-poor gap continues to grow - for example, the United States is the world's richest country, yet it has the widest gap between the rich and the poor.[22] Moreover, according to the U.S.'s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), economic/corporate globalization will create an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today.[23]

Corporate globalization depends on the Earth's resources for its very existence, thus opening up the natural resource market to satisfy increased volumes of global trade, transport, communication, and the increasing affluence that it creates.[24] The entire structure of modern civilization is derived from or depends on the use of natural resources. These resources include land, water, minerals, fossil fuels, forests, marine resources, and biological resources. Without them, we would have no skyscrapers, no planes, no ships, no cars, no bridges, no weapons, no electronics, no consumer products, no central heating, no air-conditioning and none of the provisions of running water and sewage disposal that we take for granted.[25]

Although mining companies have been the subject of conflict and controversy since the early years of the twentieth century, the industry's latest growth phase, marked by unprecedented and unregulated geographical expansion as well as the intensification of resource exploitation, raises new issues.[26] Following the Washington Consensus - a gathering of political and social elites in Washington D.C. during the 1990s, in order to promote market-based rather than state-managed development strategies - the laws of developing countries have been designed to facilitate the large-scale exploitation of natural resources by mining corporations.[27] Generally, these corporations either purchase land or collaborate with local allies in host (often developing) countries, so as to forcefully displace people from their lands, in order to access the natural resources in their territories, primarily for export to developed countries.[28] Thus, large-scale resource extraction often ruins traditional means of livelihood and natural environments, leaving behind formerly sustainable societies and local economies dependent on foreign corporations and external markets.[29]

Furthermore, since economic/corporate globalization is solely based on the principle of economic growth, corporations must constantly produce and sell products, as well as continually prowl the marketplace in search of profits, in order to achieve continual growth.[30] However, one feature of resource extraction is that all reserves are inevitably depleted over time, as their output declines. Extractive companies must therefore continually discover or acquire new reserves in order to sustain a fairly stable output during the course of their operations.[31] As resource extraction intensifies, the total available supply of many key materials will also diminish, leading to a corresponding increase in prices and increased conflict over critical resources such as oil, uranium, and certain rare earth metals.[32] Resistance is then framed as a security threat that can potentially interrupt access to strategic resources. This argument in turn informs the penchant to dismiss those who mount such resistance as terrorists.[33] Michael Watts argues that primitive accumulation and militarism have been coupled to the War on Terror,[34] which has provided the context for labelling the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) a terrorist organization with possible links to other international terrorist organizations targeting Western…interests.[35] This has also been the case with Niger's indigenous Tuareg and the fabrication of a Sahara-Sahelian front in the U.S-led War on Terror.[36]

Pursuant to the above, mainstream policy, media, and academic circles tend to understand terrorism exclusively as the targeting of citizens or interests of liberal democratic states mostly situated in the North, by extremist groups that are supported or controlled by rogue states or elements, generally located in the South. The reality is that state terrorism leads to far more deaths than non-state terrorism. In the twentieth century alone, approximately 170-200 million civilian deaths resulted from state-instigated mass murder, forcible starvations, and genocide. However, there is much less public awareness about the terror that is perpetrated by countries, especially liberal democratic ones. More specifically, very little has been done to investigate the functions that state terrorism presently serves within the wider foreign policy context in relation to the objectives of Northern countries and to developments in the global system.[37]

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman concluded this during the Cold War, arguing that the use of terror by the U.S. was intended to protect the interests of capitalist elites.[38] During the Cold War, the U.S. succeeded in organising a neo-colonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite.[39] Although there has been a significant increase in works on terrorism since 9/11, the use of state terrorism by Northern countries is still mostly absent from studies on international relations (IR), particularly in the sub-field of terrorism studies, and other disciplines in the social sciences including criminology, sociology, and anthropology.[40] Most discourse on terrorism continues to ignore state terrorism, particularly state terrorism by Northern countries, with most journalists, politicians, and academics only focusing on state terrorism by non-democratic authoritarian regimes or rogue states.[41] Consequently, by ignoring state terrorism, the dominant discourse on terrorism legitimizes the harmful foreign policy practices of Northern countries.[42]

Over the last two centuries, state terrorism has been used by Northern countries as a tool of foreign policy to open up the South for exploitation by Northern elites. More specifically, Northern countries have continued to use state terrorism in order to drive their foreign policy objectives of securing access and control over resources and markets in the South, in the pursuit of profit. It was used by European colonial governments in their efforts to suppress national liberation struggles, by American imperialists during the Cold War to overcome political upheavals that endangered elite interests, and by the United States and its allies from the post-Cold War period to the present War on Terror. Northern countries seek to maintain their power through economic, political, military, and ideological means - a process that is presently driven by the United States.[43] As one American writer eloquently explains: no national business class has been more centrally involved in, and benefited more from, corporate globalization than that of the United States, which comprises 6 percent of the world's population but controls more than a third of the world's resources.[44]

Moreover, Africa, more than any other part of the world, is increasingly discussed in security terms, under the pretext that the continent's so-called 'ungoverned spaces' will provide safe havens for terrorists intent on destroying Western civilization.[45] Put another way, Africa's so-called weak and fragile states are perceived as dangerous and 'ungoverned spaces' threatening the welfare and survival of the more ordered parts of the world.[46] This increased concern with global security has significantly changed the policies of most donor states towards Africa, resulting in the re-alignment of security and development policies, and…an unashamed acknowledgement by donors that aid must serve their national security interest.[47] A prime example of this is the U.S.'s National Security Strategy (NSS), which is the driving force behind U.S. foreign economic policy.[48] The United Kingdom uses the same approach with respect to its foreign policy on development: its Department for International Development (DFID) states that development and security goals can be pursued in a mutually reinforcing way.[49] Another articulation of this security/development nexus can be seen in the World Bank's 2011 World Development Report on Conflict, Security, and Development, which highlights the frequent violence in fragile states whose territories can become breeding grounds for far-reaching networks of violent radicals and organized crime.[50] Thus, Africa's poverty and conflicts are not simply considered as problems associated with development, but rather as threats to the stability and prosperity of Northern countries.[51]

Subsequently, there has been a proliferation in the number of security and military assistance initiatives on the African continent, with the most extensive and controversial of these being the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), established in December 2006 by President George W. Bush.[52] Under the leadership of his successor, President Barack Obama, the U.S. has increased its militarized policies towards Africa[53] and the continent appears to be regaining its strategic and geopolitical importance, while serving as a key battleground in the U.S-led War on Terror.[54] According to its mission statement, the Africa Command protects and defends the national security interests of the United States by strengthening the defense capabilities of African states and regional organisations and, when directed, conducts military operations, in order to deter and defeat transnational threats and to provide a security environment conducive to good governance and development.[55] Over the years, AFRICOM's budget and activities have expanded extensively, including the following initiatives: the Combined Joint Task Force in East Africa - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA); the Partnership for Regional East African Counter-Terrorism (PREACT); the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI), formerly known as the Pan-Sahel Initiative, which now includes nine countries (Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Chad, Morocco, and Tunisia); and the Africa Partnership Station, which focuses on increasing naval security in the Gulf of Guinea.[56]

However, according to Deepak Lal, a former advisor to both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the U.S-led War on Terror can be seen as merely an extension of defending the capitalist market[57] This extensive military campaign has been used to securitize U.S. foreign economic policy/corporate globalization in Africa (and elsewhere), which has primarily served to secure U.S., and increasingly European, economic interests.[58] As defined, securitization refers to the process of taking an issue, in this case U.S. foreign economic policy, beyond the traditional rules of the game and framing it as either a special kind of politics or as above politics.[59] Following the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001 (9/11), the U.S. has securitized its foreign economic policy via the NSS, and has thereby intensified its efforts to spread corporate globalization worldwide, while justifying this as an integral part of its War on Terror.

The objective of this book is to go beyond the simplistic explanations that are routinely provided regarding the failure of corporate globalization, and to draw attention to the political economy of this exploitative system, in order to effectively address it.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part is comprised of the author's Master's thesis, which is accessible online through the University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Canada), as well as Library and Archives Canada. This section serves as the foundation of the book by providing a critique of the political economy of corporate globalization, as seen through the lens of the exploitative global corporate extractive industry, which is marked by increasing inequality, oppression, and the exploitation of both people and the natural environment, exclusively for the pursuit of profit.

The second part of the book focuses on Africa, and provides an overview of the impact of corporate globalization on the continent. The African experience also demonstrates the contemporary relevance of dependency theory, and how the continent's dependence on export-led growth is enforced via Africa's illegitimate debt burden.[60] This explains why African states have been unable to diversify from their dependence on natural resources and chart independent economic paths.[61]

The third part of the book discusses the securitization of U.S. foreign economic policy/corporate globalization via the U.S-led War on Terror, and explores a number of initiatives along the security/development nexus. These include the U.S.'s National Security Strategy (NSS) and the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). This section also discusses the subject of fragile/failed states and explains the basic rationale behind U.S. foreign economic policy: that fragile/failed states need to embrace neoliberal economic/corporate globalization through market-led policies, in order to overcome poverty and cease being threats to the more ordered parts of the world.

The final part