 Why is Pan-Africanism in its African Union form being denounced as neoliberal? This news doc explores that question. A symposium honoring an eminent economist, the late Samir Amin, recently took place in Senegal. Professor Amin's approach to development as an economist of the people came into sharp contrast with that of the current approach of the African Union. Notably, AU plans to create an African Monetary Union and an African Central Bank. This news doc presents clips of that symposium as Riyaz Tayyab presents his views on all this. Riyaz Tayyab is a researcher at Siatini, South Africa. I would like to say that we lost Samir Amin at a time when Pan-Africanism in its African Union form is neoliberal. The African Union Commission plans for finance are basically neoliberal. The plan for the Africa Monetary Union to be established by 2045, that is a single currency with a central bank and regional banks, will basically reduce African policy space. This is the space we have to pursue policies that are supportive of development from three options in times of crisis to only one. So the three options would be, if a country has a financial crisis, you can devalue your currency, you can have a deflation, or you can impose direct controls, that is capital controls, tariff controls, or non-tariff barrier controls. The African Union along with the Association of African Central Bankers wants to make those three options into one. Now let's just put this into some context. When Greece had its financial crisis, the solution from the Troika, the IMF, the EU, although that bunch of brilliant intellectually yet idiots. Intellectually yet idiot is a term coined by Nassim Taleb, that means the technocrats know what they're doing, and they pretend to know what they're doing, yet their models don't work, so that's the definition of idiocy. So intellectually yet idiot. And it's very important because we have to understand that the African Union Commission is actually doing, two options and leaving us with one. Let's look at Greece. When the Nazis occupied Greece in World War II, they did not achieve a drop in GDP to the level that the Troika achieved in Greece. The Troika achieved a 50% decrease in Greece's GDP. And this is the Pan-European project. A neoliberal project run out of Frankfurt and the Bundestag. And that's what it's about. So what we are faced with is a neoliberal African Union Commission funded by the Association of African Central Bankers who in the constitution for the establishment of the African Monetary Union want an African Monetary Institute that can take money from anyone whose budget will be unaccountable to the people of Africa or to the parliaments that are represented in the African Union. This is very, very serious. Basically what we are talking about here is the entire continent, if I made a metaphor or a simile, is the entire African continent is being turned into a mortgage backed security so that all the debts can be pulled so that we can pay back our debt with everyone converting their natural resources to meet the compounding interest of the debts taken in the past. We are a big CDO. And we know what these mortgage backed securities do. I did in 2007. So I want to link it to the idea of Samir Amin and the particular ideas that I would like to link to are basically the link between sovereignty and auto-centered development as well as the concept of de-linking and put it in the context of financialization. Samir Amin was very clear we need auto-centered development which basically means national accumulation. It means structural change from a primary commodity's economy into a manufacturing economy. And the most important is that we finance our development through local resources. The Africa Union stands against that. So this new pan-Africanism needs to be attacked with the same vigor as our forefathers and mothers did. So why auto-centered development is because even a bourgeois economist like Keynes would say let finance be national because you cannot have resources from outside developing you because it creates instability. It's the classical transfer problem. How do you get hard currency to pay for your necessary imports? Now, when we look at this we have to take auto-centered development is for structural change and I'm mentioning this because there were some rather fuzzy interpretations of Amin's work at this meeting and I'm not tolerant of that because I'm here for our intellectual theorist. So he is not interested in industries. Amin was talking about an industrial system, the difference between that industries is basically you're in the global value chains and you're outsourcing production. Amin's definition of an industrial system is that outputs from one industry are inputs to the next. So a position of most of our African countries supporting foreign direct investment and linking into global value chains is necessarily unstable. And if you want a modern example of this just look at China and how it developed. It moved up the value chain and started in certain positions but now it has an industrial system which is the definition of structural change according to Amin. We cannot take a view that production and accumulation can be on a global scale. We have to focus on the national scale. Because Amin analyzed flows he came to the conclusion of de-linking and one needs maybe some nuance in this is basically that we want selective de-linking that we cannot just become autarchic. So it's selective de-linking in an age of financialization. Now let me come to the point around the single currency. We will lose two options out of three if we pursue the Africa Monetary Union. The CFA zone is in a different situation because they haven't achieved even nominal monetary sovereignty because of their relationship with France. I'm not an expert in this but there are three positions in West Africa that I've read and there are people like in Dongo who are more expert at this and who can address it. The one would be extend and pretend. Let's take the CFA as it is and let more countries join it. The other position is let's take a tactical approach and get parts of CFA under our control and then get full monetary sovereignty. And the third position is Amin's position. A monetary union at this level of development is disastrous. It's disastrous because the CFA has shown us that per capita incomes now are lower than at the start of the union. And a national currency gives you the full three options of direct controls, devaluation and deflation. Amin is about maximizing our policy options whereas the AU and the central bankers want to minimize our policy options. And I think we need to push the Amin option however we need to have a tactical as well as a strategic position on this. The enemy is within and without. This is a problem. The nice thing about the Africa Union Commission and the African Central Bank position is that they make the IMF and the World Bank look good. Africans are doing this but there's a difference in this. We do it with the IMF, once we pay up we can get out. But how are we going to move Senegal out of Africa if you're part of the African Monetary Union? The situation is very, very desperate. They want convergence criteria that will make structural change impossible. And they have continental legitimacy. The new pan-Africanism is neoliberal. Let's talk about the North-South thing. We specialize in activities that are known as diminishing return activities. That is mining and agriculture. At a certain point, a needed input or resource is no longer available at the same quality or price. So if you start mining gold, it's wonderful when it's 10 metres under the ground. When you're 4 kilometres under the ground, you keep putting more capital to stand still and your ROI goes down, that is diminishing returns. Increasing returns are what the Chinese specialize in. They said we are not developing mining or agriculture. We're going to increase returns as you expand production. Costs go down. African countries are locked into specialization into diminishing returns. You exchange products whose cost goes up as you specialize for products that go down for manufactured goods. This is untenable. This is absolutely untenable. What we expect from the EU is concordance with Amin's positions as well as what's the point of being united if you can't stand up and say we are African, we are exceptional, we host the most number of LTCs and we want exceptions in the World Bank or IMF agreements and WTO. If you're getting together and just parting in Addis, it's not good enough. We want African exceptionalism because we are poor and we are poor because we have been made poor. Sameer Amin is more relevant than ever. May he rest in peace, may the Christians, may the Muslims, may the Buddhists, may the Hindus, all of us, the animists, claim Sameer Amin for ourselves. We have to leave it there. Thank you for your interest in this segment of GPE News Dogs, coming to you from Geneva, Switzerland.