Professor Brian Ganson
The International Day of Non-Violence invites us to reflect on how in the South African and African contexts our economies remain deeply entangled in conflict and violence — and what we all can do to reshape them for peace positive development.
On October 2 each year, the United Nations invites us all to recognise the International Day of Non-Violence, intending to help “to secure a culture of peace, tolerance, understanding and non-violence”.
This builds from the “sacred right to peace” enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace.
For those of us who move in the business and development spheres in Africa, reflection on this day might lead us to admit that our economies and the role of the private sector within them are far from non-violent.
In some places private sector development is the focal point for violent conflict.
This can take the more blatant form of the mercenary services-for-mineral concession agreements perfected by the UK-based Executive Outcomes in the 1990s and now re-emerging across Africa.
It also occurs when violence is a means of implementing business development in the face of local opposition, as when the Ugandan government conducted a campaign of terror —using flamethrowers on occupied houses and chasing children to their deaths by drowning — to remove people from their land for New Forests Company, funded by the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC).
In many other contexts, private sector actors and initiatives are well documented contributors to the dynamics of conflict and violence.
The distribution of costs, risks, and benefits from business activity can exacerbate societal tensions: between the capital and more provincial areas, between ethically or politically identified groups, between those in the formal and in the informal economies, or between the beneficiaries and victims of globalisation.
How we shape the economy can thus further entrench winners and losers in economic and political competition, increasing grievances or marginalisation and thus prolonging or exacerbated violent conflict.
Even more common are the everyday barriers to human dignity and development put in place by our laws and policies.
The minimum wage in South Africa is estimated to be less than a third of what is required for a worker to meet basic family needs and put aside a small cushion against disaster.
In Cape Town townships, small business owners experience the city administration as working to suppress and control them rather than uplift and enable them, while young people experience the government as the primary instigator of violence.
These forms of structural violence —in which there is no single bad actor but rather violence is part of the social and political fabric — in turn normalise violence, and together with the humiliation and desperation they engender, contribute to other violent plagues as diverse as gangsterism and domestic violence.
These outcomes are the rule, not the exception, of how we pursue business in Africa, particularly at scale.
For example, the average project financed by the IFC will result in an incremental seven armed conflict events in the year following the project start.
Similarly, commercial-scale solar projects in fragile and conflict-affected places have also been found to, on average, increase death from violent conflict.
On the whole, any peace benefits of large-scale business investment in conflict-prone places — the unfortunate reality of most of Africa today — remain largely ideological, aspirational, or anecdotal. Their negative conflict and human rights impacts are broadly and grimly evidence-based.
As the World Bank and other international institutions concentrating on “de-risking” projects for large corporations (but not for affected communities) — and the African Development Bank celebrates as “deal of the year” a gas project in Mozambique that as a flashpoint for conflict has contributed to more thn 3 000 deaths and a million people displaced — the trajectory of business, violent conflict, and human rights abuses can therefore be predicted to trend further downward across the continent.
Yet and still, we can imagine the non-violent economy. The evidence is increasingly overwhelming.
Peaceful economies emerge where the needs of the poor and vulnerable are put first; where opportunity is grown for the many in the informal sector; and where the question with respect to big business is not what society can do for it, but rather what it can do to be a hub for others’ economic success and resilience.
Furthermore, it emerges not through backroom dealings between business, finance, and governments, but rather through inclusive and accountable processes that give voice and agency to those most affected by the economic and business decisions we make.
Such approaches are straightforward, but they are not easy. They will require many of us — particularly those who move in elite circles — both to question our assumptions about the role of business in society, and to check our privilege with respect to the wages we pay, the business deals we enter into, and the returns on investment we demand.
So, on this the International Day of Non-Violence, let us reflect on whether we have the courage and compassion to do so.
Professor Brian Ganson heads the Centre on Conflict & Collaboration at Stellenbosch Business School where he leads an international consortium investigating peace-positive private sector development in Africa.
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