Capitalist crises and unstable global and national orders?

Abstract

Celebrated on 25 May each year on the continent and by African diasporas worldwide to mark the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963, Africa Day is of symbolic and practical value. It is, as the intergovernmental International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property puts it, an occasion for ‘Celebrations, Reflections and Concrete Actions’ (ICCROM 2022); a day, then, ‘to reflect on the progress Africa has made as a continent, in the face of the many challenges that a global environment brings [and] to recognise the successes of the continent and its cultural and economic potential’ (Africa.com 2021). This year, which also marks the 20th anniversary of the OAU’s transformation into the African Union (AU) in July 2002, has seen Africa Day celebrations during the AU’s Year of Nutrition taking place in the context of a heightened instability in the global order, characterised by the interlinked crises of Covid-19, the cost of living and the Russia–Ukraine war (Dua 2022). Globally, disruptions to food, fuel, energy and mineral supply chains caused or exacerbated by the war are ‘eroding standards of living and aggravating macroeconomic imbalances’ which were beginning to show slight signs of recovery in the wake of Covid-19 (Selassie and Kovacs 2022). Moreover, as the International Monetary Foundation (IMF)’s most recent Regional Economic Outlook for Africa acknowledges, states and governments have little room for manoeuvre in responding to what the IMF describes as a new and exogenous shock (IMF 2022), and which its managing director recognises as involving ‘this food crisis com[ing] on top of a debt crisis’ (cited in Roberts 2022). The cost-of-living crisis in particular is exacerbating continental food insecurity and malnutrition, in addition to fuelling goods and services inflation, with the most vulnerable economies, households and individuals experiencing the greatest privations across the continent (Akinwotu 2022a; Babalola 2022; BBC 2022a). Indeed, a combination of Covid, conflict and the climate emergency had already precipitated acute hunger in some of the world’s poorest countries, even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its impact on food, fuel and fertiliser prices (Davies 2022a), which has increased the likelihood of some of the worst-hit parts of eastern and southern Africa, among others, being pushed into famine in the absence of appropriate and effective global and local intervention (The Guardian 2022a; Davies 2022b). And yet, recent Oxfam analysis of IMF Covid-19 loan conditionalities has shown the IMF systematically encouraging countries to plan to (re-)impose austerity as soon as the Coronavirus pandemic subsided (Tamale 2021), although the Fund’s director of its African Department has responded by highlighting, as evidence of good faith and commitment to the continent’s long-term fiscal health, IMF provision of initial funding which helped countries to create the ‘fiscal space’ requiring protection in the wake of economic recovery (AllAfrica 2022). But the IMF also stands accused of adopting ‘double standards’ in its approach to crisis mitigation and management – with Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva reportedly ‘urg[ing] Europe not to endanger its economic recovery with “the suffocating force of austerity”’ (Oxfam 2022a), even as her institution doubles down in its support