The International Monetary Fund (IMF) ‘debt-equity’ swap scheme, muscled into Nigeria in 1988, spawned a deadly seed that is today testimony to the ties that bind private sector wealth and state power in Africa. On 15 April 1988, The New York Times carried a photograph of a Nigerian street vendor gazing blankly through the wooden crate of a makeshift stand in the capital, Lagos, that sat incongruously alongside the banner headline, ‘Nigeria Opens its Economy’. The New York Times, through the late 1980s, was on an irrepressible crusade against economic nationalism and its Keynesian underpinnings, drawn from the post-Depression statist…
Malcolm Ray
Malcolm Ray
Malcolm Ray is a research consultant and author of two scholarly books, titled Free Fall: Why South African Universities are in a Race against Time and The Tyranny of Growth: Why Capitalism has Triumphed in the West and Failed in Africa. Malcolm’s subject speciality is economic history. His writing deals directly with themes of power hierarchies, race and gender discrimination, and class inequality. His current work focuses on the shifting dynamics of urban livelihoods, economic growth and power relations that allow for the development of theorisations of the economy and polity more relevant to post-colonial contexts. Malcolm began his career as an anti-apartheid activist during the 1980s and early 90s. He practised journalism for more than a decade before becoming a financial magazine editor in the early 2000s. He was a Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg and editor of four premier South African and pan-African business and finance magazines.
First, it was a generation lost to countries abroad. Now the ongoing exodus of affluent white families from Johannesburg to Cape Town has drawn new, unprecedented spatial and political battle lines at local government level that mirror apartheid in all but name. Summer comes to Johannesburg in October. In the early evenings, storm clouds, dark and gravid, crackle and burst in heavy downpours that water the rivers and parched trees, which give the city’s well-heeled suburbs their eerie beauty. By late October 2023, water was desperately needed for something else, quite new, not only to lubricate the naked, dry landscape…
First, it was subsidised farming in the US and Europe and food dumping that pushed up prices and reduced food security. Now it’s a global food supply shortage that has tipped the scales in Africa and sparked an investment bonanza. The big question is: at what cost to food security? In early summer, the sun is a flaming ball through the windscreen, while outside, silhouettes of people carrying fruit and vegetables file by. Here, dense green forests and grasslands carpet the hills and valleys. It is the middle of June 2006, and I am driving to see the farm manager…
I first encountered Tisa Mothae in 2006 in a bustling part of Bree Street, Johannesburg, where homeless squatters and informal street traders had taken refuge. He started a small, informal clothing business after losing his job in a clothing factory in the aftermath of the 1998 Asian market crash, subcontracting to his former employer below factory gate prices. Then, in 2012, he and others were evicted from the building they occupied and relocated by city authorities to a shadeless part of Alexandra (a Johannesburg township that abuts the affluent suburb of Sandton) that is barren in the dry season and…
During testimony in September 2014 by the British mining multinational Lonmin Plc to the Marikana Commission of Inquiry into the events that led to the August 2012 shooting of mineworkers, commission evidence leader Matthew Chaskalson cross-examined Lonmin Director Mohamed Seedat about why Lonmin Management Services (LMS) had been charging Lonmin Plc’s South African operating subsidiaries, Eastern Platinum Ltd (EPL) and Western Platinum Limited (WPL), management fees since 1999. Seedat, a vocal defendant of Lonmin, responded positively, and not without trepidation, when he stated: “You couldn’t do a transaction between LMS and Lonmin Plc; they are the same entity.” Notwithstanding LMS’s…
