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Across the African continent, the advance of foreign imperial capital brings hardship and suffering wherever it spreads. Austerity plans and privatization schemes pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are throwing the poor, the disadvantaged, and the public service employees who serve them into the depths of poverty. Skyrocketing profits are subsidized by the suffering of millions.
Capitalist firms infect the African continent like a virus. They leech money and resources from national economies in exchange for a paltry recompense — most of which is divided among the national bourgeois allies of capital. IMF reports are riddled with references to the necessity of so-called “reforms” that promise to resolve the contradictions caused by imperial capital. The IMF requires peripheral countries to prioritize debt servicing at the expense of the well-being of the country’s own citizens.
Education in Decline
As profits for transnational corporations continue to climb, the lives of those who toil and suffer to make those profits possible worsen. A survey of public service employees in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, and Nigeria undertaken by the non-governmental organization ActionAid paints a grim picture. Of all teachers surveyed, 95% said they did not receive sufficient funds from their governments and 73% said they had paid for classroom supplies out of their own pockets. One-hundred percent of Kenyan teachers surveyed reported paying for classroom supplies out of their salaries. The effect of budget constraints on morale have been notable — 42% of the teachers surveyed said they were considering a career change.
As public spending has declined, the percentage of national GDP spent on debt servicing has remained unconscionably high. As the survey above illustrates, in 2024, Nigeria spent 20% of its national income on debt and interest payments, while only 4% was spent on education. Healthcare spending was also a meager 4%. Fully one-quarter of Malawi’s national income went towards loan repayments in the same timeframe, while Kenya dedicated 29% of its GDP to debt servicing, compared to 18% spent on education. Malawi did not report figures for education spending.
Healthcare Costs Go Up, Salaries Go Down
The healthcare sector has not fared any better. Government cuts on public health programs have affected wide swaths of the population of the six countries. “Services that were provided for free before, now we pay for them,” says a Malawian person interviewed by ActionAid. “For example, if an older person has a fracture, she/he pays MK 25,000 (USD $14) to get the service in a government clinic.” The minimum wage in Malawi is roughly USD $50 per month. Many people in Malawi have had to take out personal loans or reduce spending on food to pay for healthcare and transportation to faraway clinics and hospitals.
In Kenya, Linda Mama, a government program that helps new mothers with neonatal care, had half its budget cut in 2024. “We shall be covering the indigent pregnant,” said Dr. Elizabeth Wangia, Director of Health Financing for the Ministry of Health in Kenya. Wangia stated that means testing will be implemented to determine the eligibility of pregnant women to benefit from the program.
Austerity and Its Facilitators
These policies of austerity are not coincidental, but are the brutal expression of “fiscal responsibility” and other liberal economic principles imposed upon other countries by the IMF. An article in African Business magazine stated that the IMF “recommended a change in direction from growth driven by public investment to one in which the private sectors are the engines of growth.” This translates directly to a prioritization of foreign capital at the expense of public spending on the welfare of the citizenry, as can be seen in healthcare cuts in Greece imposed as part of austerity measures implemented after the country’s financial struggles following the 2008 crisis.
Blame for the negative consequences of those policies are placed on the national bourgeoisie, who obediently debase themselves by stepping into their role as ready-made scapegoats for the failings of international capital. In doing so, they are paradoxically allowed to maintain their position in the national ruling classes. While angry invectives and corruption prosecutions are frequent occurrences in peripheral countries, they very rarely result in permanent expulsion from power structures for the guilty parties.
The Lie of Capitalist “Progress”
Austerity programs demanded by the IMF have led to terrible decreases in the quality of life across the so-called “developing” world, even when compared to recent years. Every country surveyed by ActionAid reported a sharp decrease in the availability of medicines. An interviewee from Ethiopia said a 10x increase in the cost of antimalarial medicine sold in private health centers has led to a malaria epidemic in her region. Salaries of public healthcare workers have also decreased, with 87% of healthcare workers surveyed saying they struggled to pay bills, and 63% reporting difficulty paying the rent. 67% percent admitted to buying fewer groceries.
Who fills the empty spaces left when public funds retreat? Who pays the price when the fees demanded by foreign capital are unaffordable? Communities shoulder the burden of caring for those who are too ill to travel or who do not have access to funds necessary to pay for a stay in the hospital. Caring for the sick brings in no salary, but is vitally necessary. Thus the economic power of the exploited diminishes further. As international capital grows fat and bloated off the subsidy of labor granted to them by the workers of the world, the “essential work that is reproducing the human workforce” is done without recompense.
As African governments rush to mollify the IMF with ever-increasing privatization initiatives, imperial capital has profited enormously. German health insurer Allianz, one of the largest health insurance providers in Kenya, announced “another set of record financial results” in 2024 and promised “higher capital-efficient growth in the quarters and years ahead.” Meanwhile, rural Kenyans struggle with trips of up to 30 kilometers to reach a health center and pregnant women throughout Kenya without the means to pay hospital fees give birth at home.
The Credit Trap
International credit rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor tag peripheral countries with high-risk labels that justify exorbitantly high interest rates on any funds loaned. Imperial countries are assessed as low-risk, and thus have access to cheap credit whenever required. A convoluted system of surcharges ensures that full repayment of any loans by a peripheral country remains, for the most part, a practical impossibility. Any requests by peripheral countries for restructuring or an increase in credit are met with demands by the IMF for structural changes to keep the way clear for the flood of capitalist exploitation.
The United States-led world order has greatly improved upon the crude financial manipulations employed by the French and British colonialists in the 19th century. Debt as a method of extraction has been refined with ruthless efficiency. When debt combines with resource extraction and exportation of capital, the result is utter domination — aided by the sniveling national bourgeois who grovel before their capitalist lords, hoping to be knighted into the imperial ruling class and hating themselves for being born outside of it.
The sum total of imperial promises of jobs and security, of decolonization, of a true partnership among nations, of progress and a gleaming future, is a hollow shell — a great mirage. National economies stagnate, national governments refuse to provide even the minimum for their citizens to live with dignity, and survival itself has become a privilege available only to those with the money to pay for it. Evidence of the failures of capitalism grows more abundant by the day, as even the promises themselves have evaporated, replaced by tough talk of austerity and belt-tightening.
The Deception of Reformist “Solutions”
Groups like ActionAid are incapable of providing a coherent solution to the contradictions of imperial capitalism. Funded by the very states that perpetuate the injustices they investigate, willful avoidance of anything approaching a coherent critical structural analysis is a prerequisite for their existence. While the work done by NGOs and other social action organizations can have material value, they will never recommend a course of action that will lead to the destruction of the political economic system responsible for their very existence.
ActionAid closes the report cited in this article with a bizarre call-to-action that recommends a vague restructuring of the IMF’s global role overseen by the United Nations. This is followed by a list of demands made by the institutions of various countries with the supposed goal of encouraging the capitalists that make up the national ruling classes to act against their interests and prioritize public wellbeing over private sector profit. The IMF itself, in head-splittingly circular logic, proclaims private capital to be the salvation for private capital’s own shortcomings.
The only way to break the oppressive power of imperial states is to break the imperial states themselves. Power must be seized from the exploiting classes by the exploited masses, and every apparatus of oppression must be destroyed, including supra-national entities like the IMF and the bootlicking parasite ruling classes in the periphery that work hand-in-glove with capital to scrap their own countries for parts.
Every promise a capitalist makes will be broken. It is impossible to come to an arrangement with a leech. Capitalism is war, and billions of people around the world are fighting its battles. There is no agreement, no report, no legal document or procedure or set of rules or guidelines that will resolve the brutal contradictions of capitalism in favor of the suffering. The haughty lords of capital only have their position because the work of millions has lifted them to the heights they enjoy. If the capitalist class can be lifted up, it can be toppled, and if the people can organize and fight for a flag or a salary, we can do the same for our future.
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