Oh no Wojtek, the Bretton Woods Institutions are the brains and policemen of the global neoliberal system, or so it often seems in Africa, even 'powerful' South Africa.
Some crimes witnessed here over the past 15 years or so:
• IMF advice to the apartheid regime in 1991 to impose the regressive Value Added Tax, in opposition to which 3,5 million people went on a two-day stayaway; • an $850 million IMF loan to South Africa in December 1993 which carried conditions of wage restraint and cuts in the budget deficit, which in turn hampered the transition to democracy; • World Bank promotion of ‘market-oriented’ land reform in 1993-94, which established such onerous conditions (similar to the failed Zimbabwe policy) that instead of 30% land redistribution as mandated in the ANC's campaign platform, less than 1% of good land was redistributed; • the Bank’s endorsement of bank-centred housing policy in August 1994, with recommendations for smaller housing subsidies; • Bank design of South African infrastructure policy in November 1994, which provided the rural and urban poor with only pit latrines, no electricity connections, inadequate roads, and communal taps instead of house or yard taps; • the Bank’s insistence that corrupt Lesotho Highlands Development Authority boss Masupha Sole stay in his job in December 1994 (six years after he began taking bribes from international construction companies), in a threatening letter to the Lesotho government; • the Bank’s promotion of water cut-offs for those unable to afford payments, opposition to a free ‘lifeline’ water supply, and recommendations against irrigation subsidies for black South Africans in October 1995, within a government water-pricing policy in which the Bank claimed (in its 1999 Country Assistance Review) it played an ‘instrumental’ role; • the Bank’s conservative role in the Lund Commission in 1996, which recommended a 44% cut in the monthly grant to impoverished, dependent children from R135 per month to R75; • the Bank’s participation in the failed Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy in June 1996, through contributing both two staff economists and its economic model; • the Bank and IMF’s consistent message to South African workers that their wages are too high, and that unemployment can only be cured through ‘labour flexibility’; • the Bank’s role in the Johannesburg privatisation exercise known as Egoli 2002, including research support and encouragement of municipal privatisation; • the Bank’s repeated commitments to invest, through its subsidiary the International Finance Corporation, in privatised infrastructure, housing securities for high-income families, for-profit ‘managed healthcare’ schemes, and the now-bankrupt, US-owned Dominos Pizza franchise; • the consistent failure of Bank and IMF ‘structural adjustment programmes’ in Southern Africa since the 1980s; and • the stubborn refusal by the Bank and IMF to cancel debt owed by our impoverished neighbours since the mid-1990s, except in tiny amounts and with brutal conditionality provisions.
(More in *Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance*, 2003, Zed Books - available if you want offlist at pbond at mail.ngo.za)
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