Killing a revolution
Peace without Profit: How the IMF blocks rebuilding in Mozambique
By Joseph Hanlon
Published by Irish Mozambique Solidarity and The International
African Institute in association with James Curry (Oxford).
Heinemann
Price: £9.95 stg. Paper.
In this book we are introduced to a world where economic
independence is completely gone, where shop windows are stocked
full of luxury goods with nobody to buy them, where poverty has
reached enormous proportions, where in 1988 half of the urban and
two-thirds of the rural population were ``absolutely poor'', and
where the situation has worsened since. It is a world where only
42% of children aged 7-14 attend school, and where 22% of
children aged 7-9 are already working.
There are far more export-import companies than there are
companies actually producing goods. Corruption is everywhere
because people at the bottom do not get paid enough to feed their
families, and at the top officials and members of the ruling
circles have become tools of a vast industry where they act as
go-betweens for companies and international bodies of one sort or
another. In the meantime Mozambique's agriculture, on which any
real development would be dependent, has been placed in hock to
repay loans which are not going towards the benefit of the
country or its people, but rather to inflate the lifestyles of a
new wealthy elite who buy luxury goods, build big houses and
drive expensive cars.
Over this chaos preside the IMF and World Bank (and behind them
the US and Western powers) whose policies as far as Mozambique is
concerned, consist of reducing domestic credit in terms of bank
lending and government spending. Such deflationary measures mean
that the economy can only contract and not expand. Meanwhile, in
this atmosphere an important road programme sees key roads
remaining closed and open roads deteriorating faster then they
can be rebuilt.
At the same time the gap between rich and poor is increasing. As
the author comments: ``It is not accidental that IMF policies are
widening wealth differentials... (The) new rich will buy Western
goods and play a role in administering the recolonisation being
imposed by the IMF.'' This book gives a good insight into the
dismemberment of a revolution.
By Peter Moore
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