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Counterpunch May 10, 2011
The Latest Fibs From World Financiers
Are African Lions Really Roaring?
By PATRICK BOND
Apparently, “one in three Africans is middle class” and as a
result, Africa is ready for “take off”, according to African
Development Bank chief economist Mthuli Ncube last week at the
World Economic Forum-Africa summit in Cape Town. “Hey you know
what, the world please wake up, this is a phenomenon in Africa
that we've not spent a lot of time thinking about.”
Ncube defines middle class as those who spend between $2-20/day, a
group that includes a vast number of people considered extremely
poor by any reasonable definition, given the higher prices of most
consumer durables in African cities. The number of people spending
between just $2 and $4/day constitutes a fifth of all Sub-Saharan
Africans, even Ncube admits, while the range from $4 to $20/day
amounts to 13%, with 5% spending more than $20/day.
Below the $2/day level, 61% of Africans are mired in deep poverty,
a stunning reflection of ongoing underdevelopment due to
imperialism, the Resource Curse and nefarious African elites.
It’s just as Walter Rodney explained in his book How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa nearly four decades ago: “the operation of
the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African
economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it
impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent.
Secondly, one has to deal with those who manipulate the system and
those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said
system.”
Playing both roles, the likes of Ncube have not changed their
neoliberal tunes, they simply hold up a small sliver of
(desperately entrepreneurial) Africans engaged in petty commodity
exchange as the hope for the future.
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/bond05102011.html
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