Yes, you're right on both counts. The $18 bn is the stock of what the country as a whole (not just the government) owed foreign creditors at the end of 1993 when we went to a transitional government (the state contractually covered the $14 bn or so in borrowings by firms). Trying to get a sense of the credit flows over, say, the last 150 years (the major int'l creditors became active in SA around 1850) or even just since 1948 is too hard.
The superprofit repatriations by TNCs are now being looked into, particularly in relation to the Swiss and German firms. There are excellent researchers in those countries, but US and British comrades (and French and Japanese and Dutch) are yet to join this leg of the work.
> The involvement of the churches in this campaign is a good sign. They are
> now experienced in debt cancellation work, and regularly getting capitalist
> leaders to debate cancelling the debts of the poorest countries. But there
> is a considerable danger of reformism here and accepting some of the
> assumptions of the world capitalist system.
True enough. The entire "Jubilee" call for a write-off every 50 years somewhat stretches political-economic logic. Leviticus apparently has some general language about restoring ecological balance as well. I think many of the best comrades involved in Jubilee -- see, e.g., Alternative Information and Development Centre at http:\\www.aidc.org.za -- are using it to raise global economic justice issues more broadly. The better church people, in SA at least, are on board the overall critique of the Washington Consensus, if that helps. And many are now getting attuned to the clamour here for a post-post-Washington Consensus (the Ben Fine critique of Stiglitz, for instance, is circulating), and indeed finally the trade unions and Communist Party are willing to call the crisis a capitalist crisis as I pointed out earlier this month.
So the sense of sea-changing rhetoric continues. But you're right that the overall tendency is to allow the ruling crew to adjust marginally to rhetorical fads while keeping the basic structures of corporate and financial rule intact. In the past three weeks, our state elites have allowed Anglo American Corporation to announce an off-shore listing and move of their headquarters to London, and also allowed our largest local bank to move 50 million quid offshore (also to their London subsidiary) to cover more than a hundred million dollars in Russian loans that went poof.
> If that system is globally responding to the world crisis by printing
> money, by lowering interest rates, and easing credit in the capitalist
> countries, ie a little "Keynsian" (sorry Doug) deficit spending, why cannot
> the IMF print special drawing rights to cancel the apartheid debt along
> with that of the poorest nations? If this gets the economy moving it is
> less likely to be inflationary than some other types of deficit spending.
Or why can't they sell their gold? One reason is that Trevor Manuel, our Finance Minister, somehow cobbled together enough opposition (because it would screw up our Johannesburg regional economy quite royally) to prevent further discussion about this amongst important Southern states when it was beginning to achieve momentum last year.
Actually, if a loose money response and competitive devaluations get going a bit more energetically, perhaps we'd see gold make a comeback as store-of-value. SA could, as in the 1930s, again earn its nickname "the prosperous undertaker in the plague."
> A 100 billion $ reconstruction budget for the region as a whole could
> provide a pool for bids for progressive development focussed on housing and
> other types of local employment.
Right. We still have that "Reconstruction and Development Programme" -- designed by the Mass Democratic Movement, adopted in 1994 as the ANC campaign platform -- whose basic needs targets are not close to being met. We're also careful to stress that the region does not need new foreign (hard-currency) loans, but has to use own resources better.
More of this debate should get into global circuits as the May 1999 election approaches. There'll be some active campaigning around int'l banks beginning in late January, probably with Swiss/German targets taking shape then. In April the Johannesburg activists will also be hosting a South-South Jubilee gathering, just after the big conference of Focus on the Global South (Walden Bello's group) in Bangkok, regarding (non-reformist) left strategies in relation to the international financial system "architecture". (Louis, relax, you're not invited, comrade.)
Am off to a big conference on debt in Maputo on Friday, where the Mozambicans have also launched a Jubilee campaign. If anyone's interested I could post you separately two superb papers by the left journalist Joe Hanlon, on why the Mozambique version of the Highly-Indebted Poor Countries debt relief initiative (the pilot project) is a crock.
Yours, P. *************************************************** Patrick Bond 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 Johannesburg, South Africa phone: (2711) 614-8088 email: pbond at wn.apc.org office: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050 phone (o): (2711)488-5917; fax: (2711) 484-2729 email (o): bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za