For 20 years Vincent Miclet had operated under the radar. Is a Plutocratic America in Terminal Decline?
Some scopes require slashes (/) at the end and others don’t: please use the above strings. It is wise, for example, to be attuned to the importance of ruptural breaks—the likelihood that we will ever get to a mass party simply through a molecular accretion of our ranks is slim. New ones have of course cropped up, and a tide of less organised community protests has continued unabated across the country. A consumer of foreign news outlets, Tanzanians also resorted to BBC, Deutsche Welle (Sauti ya Ujerumani) and VOA, to stay informed on their country’s politics. Three ways to create your email notifications: Do not hesitate to create your own notifications according to your interests : better criteria narrows down the results. Your support helps protect The Elephant's independence and it means we can continue keeping the democratic space free, open and robust. But the many elements of the broader conjuncture which produced it, and which seemed to augur a new direction for socialist politics, persist. IBM now has more workers in India than in the US. I was not part of what followed. According to Liberation, Micletowes his business success to a combination of showy connections and bribery (inFrench: “Bling Bling et Bakchichs”). According to Liberation, “It was the Corsican connection that led Miclet directly to Angola, where a general close to the president opened the doors to juicy business deals supplying contracts.”. Price-gouging by pharmaceutical companies means that the drug is ten times cheaper in Canada than it is in America.). Having taken so much of the pie over the past couple of decades, it appears Vincent may have bitten off more than he could chew. Contrast its subsequent marginalisation with the early trajectory with the Economic Freedom Fighters (now South Africa’s third-largest party), which leveraged the electoral know-how of its ex-ANCYL cadre and Malema’s media savvy to run an enormously successful first campaign. Just like Magufuli, it seems Mkapa’s “true colours” were revealed only after his mentor’s death the previous year on October 14, 1999. The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future. “I must emphasise that I did not see either of the Generals (Kopelipa and Dino) involved in the negotiations. How, when pharmaceutical and health product industries have spent a total of US$4.7 billion on lobbying the federal government, US$877 million on state candidates and committees, and US$414 million in the 20 years to 2018? He dished out money and favours to select supporters. Candidates however, campaign in poetry; rulers, on the other hand, govern in prose. He says he negotiated directly with Kassim Tajideen’s lawyer, Rui Ferreira, for the buy-out. The shock election of President Donald Trump in 2016 can be seen as a response to the deleterious effects of corporate hegemony on the American political and economic life. It was thanks to his French-African connections that Micletexpanded his business interests across Africa, launching him to number 180 onFrance’s rich list. The citing of both examples here is to emphasise that America in 2000 and 2020 could not claim a moral compass to the Tanzania government’s excesses in its elections. In it, he says negotiations [to acquire the Arosfran Group] began in April 2011 and were chaired by “Mr Rui Ferreira, in the presence of the interested parties”. After all—the notion that struggle develops consciousness is not a false, what movementists get wrong is overstating the extent to which it does so organically. Ordinary Tanzanians initially saw him as their saviour in the fight against institutionalised state corruption. I return to the beginning – this article is written colossally log-in-eye. Despite setbacks and defeats, Panitch and Gindin’s indispensable analysis of these events in The Socialist Challenge Today, casts them in an unambiguously positive light. Far better for us to confront the dangers of succumbing to a narrow electoralism than the near certitude of permanent marginalisation should we choose to abstain from mainstream politics altogether. Mkapa’s use of unmitigated force by Jeshi la Polisi (Tanzania has a police force, as opposed to a police service) and Field Force Unit (FFU), a paramilitary outfit much like Kenya’s dreaded General Service Unit (GSU) was unprecedented in Tanzanian politics. One is how narrow the margins of victory were. The genius of the Trump campaign was its ability to identify these pain points; to incorrectly but convincingly blame foreigners – locally (immigrants) and abroad (China) – for what were and continue to be the excesses of the plutocracy; to identify the existence of a swamp in Washington and characterise Hillary Clinton as the personification of these ills; and to ride that wave all the way to the White House. Over the last decade, the Left in a number of Western countries has undergone a historic transition from “protest to politics,” to borrow the words of the late Canadian Marxist Leo Panitch and his frequent co-author Sam Gindin. But he never advocated state violence, instead, he sued for dialogue and persuasion. By continuing your visit to this site, you accept the use of cookies allowing us to adapt and enhance your experience. The variant of movementism which took hold here, and which has revived in the aftermath of the NUMSA moment, was not really this more extreme kind, which denies the ultimate need for a party. Nyerere’s CCM may have operated in the one-party era during the cold war, but many Tanzanians of the post-independent generation remember those days with nostalgia. Their location within the domain of mainstream politics provided both visibility but also a kind of credibility—they promised to take over the institutions in front of us, rather than replace them with ones we can’t see and can’t yet imagine. EHPAD OCCASIONS. Another of President Dos Santos’s close associates, General Leopoldino Fragoso do Nascimento “Dino”, obtained a personal loan of $150 million to this end from the Angolan Investment Bank (Banco Angolano de Investimento, BAI). Of course this was a strategic orientation that was largely foisted on us by circumstance. Yet, even as the presidency bounces from party to party, a president from one party will bomb Iraq; the next president, from the other party, will campaign on the platform that he never voted to go to war in Iraq, only to subsequently bomb Libya. Vincent Miclet bling-bling et bakchichs Intermédiaire «dandy» qui a fait fortune en Afrique, cette connaissance d’Alexandre Benalla fréquente les hautes sphères de l’Etat. Magufuli was re-elected on October 28, 2020 in one of the most controversial post-Nyerere’s Tanzania elections with a whopping 84 percent. My understanding, from the constitutional and legal point of view, was that the Angolan State could not directly intervene and confiscate [the business] as we have no law providing for confiscation of assets unless there has been a guilty verdict in a court of law.”, “At the same time”, said Feijó, “we had to be cognisant of the fact that the Arosfran Group was the main operator in the import and sale of the vast majority of foodstuffs, in particular what we refer to as the ‘essential basket of goods’, and that any action taken against Arosfran could have a grave impact on the inflation rate which we were at pains to control.”. Some might go so far as to say that the world’s most affluent democracy has once again proved that government of the people, by the people, for the people is alive and well. The iPhone, signature product of America’s second largest company by market valuation (Apple), is assembled in Shenzhen. Indeed, by the time he won the nomination, Joe Biden had already said he would veto a Medicare for All bill if it landed on his desk (a colossal if, it must be said), proposing a public option instead. The inference was clear: opulence and decadence combined in a single name. For these reasons, it was believed that the best solution would be to find a private Angolan-owned company to acquire the real estate and assets of the commercial companies in the Arosfran Group. “Both parties accepted that this was a ‘good offices mission’ and welcomed it. According to the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, just 43,000 individual tax filers covered by one of the Act’s provisions would see their tax liability fall by a combined US$70.3 billion in 2020 (or about US$1.7 million each). The corporations that stump up the money to fund electoral campaigns benefit from providing privatised solutions to the problems Americans face. (He is banned from returning to Angola for a period of 20 years.). As for the other part of the BAI loan ($50 million), well, it simply vanished. Marques de Morais, Angola’s leading anti-corruption advocate, is winner of the Allard Law School 2015 Prize for International Integrity and the Transparency International Integrity Prize. Nor did President Obama succeed in extricating himself from American warmongering abroad: in a particularly sad and tragic episode he helped end the Libya Gaddaffi had created. Need help?Please contact customer service. All what the Tanzania Communication Authority needed was a nod from Magufuli. par Renaud Lecadre He told fellow Tanzanians msinijaribu mimi ni jiwe (don’t try me, I’m as tough as a rock), meaning he prided himself in being tough-headed. He wasn’t lying; his pre-eminence in the import sector came about because the Angolan élite needed a straw man when they ousted the previous “king of imports”, the Lebanese businessman, Kassim Tajideen. In Le Monde, Vincent Miclet alleged he was the victim of a cabal of corrupt Angolan generals. From Angola to America. President Joe Biden alone raised US$1.6 billion. Instead, they tend to reproduce the atomisation of liberal democracy, and to fortify the myth that progress is possible within it. The regrettable truth is that the US is not a democracy. The trial of 15 Angolan presidential guards, accused in connection with a petition in which they demanded better salaries and working conditions, has drawn attention to a web of corrupt practices in which military officers set up private business with state funds as their capital, and using soldiers as their labourers. In these circumstances, said Rui Ferreira, “I agreed. The process made no reference to any compensation or payment to the outgoing “partners”. But the contention that movement building alone is the best way to prepare for such a rupture fails to take seriously the inherent weaknesses of social movements. For example, these corporations have been allowed to outsource American manufacturing jobs to China and other nations. When Le Monde profiled the African-born businessman Vincent Miclet in November 2018, it called him the “Gatsby” of Francophone Africa. Bush won with a razor thin win vote. Why Vincent Miclet? It seems fair to say that the arrangement between Miclet’s companies and the Angolan Defence Ministry were not entirely above board. Social strains look set to keep accumulating. Magufuli was then primed to run against Edward Lowassa, a CCM stalwart, who had bolted to Chama Cha Democrasia na Maendeleo (CHADEMA), after not clinching the CCM ticket, in which he was touted as one of the hot favourites. ... Vincent Miclet, virtual man of oil Dragged back into the public eye as a result of his ties with former Macron aide Alexandre Benalla (IOL 814), [...] Africa Intelligence 15/11/2016. As a result, money will continue to win out: it will continue to select which issues are on the ballot, and it will continue to choose which candidates win. But decades of compromise had bred a form of politics that had become completely unmoored from the guiding thread of class antagonism. In the popular imagination, “Let them eat cake” and Marie Antoinette’s extravagant dresses once stoked the flames of revolution in France. America’s long decline, therefore, is likely to continue. Has the American mega-corporation been censured by the political class for these excesses? It was nothing more than an unpaid ‘good offices mission’ required of me by my country’s government in the national interest,” he explained. It was Nyerere who held Mkapa’s hand in 1995, after influencing his nomination by CCM, and single-handedly campaigned for him throughout the country. “All I know is that, from a business point of view, there was a decision to set up an Angolan commercial company and use that for the subsequent acquisition of the Arosfran Group”, explained Feijó. Mkapa was a protégé of the founding father Julius Kambarage Nyerere. Feijó and Kopelipa came up with a scheme to create a new company that they named Nova Distribuidora Alimentar e Diversos, Lda (NDAD), which aimed to buy out the entire assets of the Arosfran Group in Angola (including 170 warehouses) for $150 million. He’s currently a tenured Professor of Law at Agostinho Neto University. On February 25, 2015, measures were put in place to rescind the 80 per cent stock quota allocated in the name of Vincent Miclet and the 20 per cent quota in the name of Adélia El-Bichuti and re-allocate them instead to Paulo César Rocha Rasgado (80 per cent) and Samora Borges Sebastião Albino (20 per cent) both of whom were frontmen for General Dino. Of course for the “official” left which NUMSA represented there had never been any turn away from politics as such. As President Joe Biden begins to get comfortable in the White House, there are those who might say that America, under a democratic system of government, has once again allowed the voice of her people to be heard, and that they have elected a new leader into office. “In Tanzania, CCM ni tasisi,” a local journalist reiterated to me. The well-connected consultant and former prime minister has a network throughout the region. America was suffering economically. Donc en 2021, la valeur nette de Vincent Miclet fortune estimée à environ 350 millions de dollars. It’s likely that there is no winning formula for transforming single issue mobilisations into lasting, mass organisations without NGOifying them. Are Kenyan Conservancies a Trojan Horse for Land Grabs? The simple reason for that, is that there is no existing social force capable of challenging state power while remaining entirely outside its institutions, nor does one show any prospect of coming into being in any foreseeable horison. “The party was more democratic and free, unlike today,” said a former CCM mkereketwa (party diehard). ), Feijó confirmed to Maka Angola that the expulsion of Tajideen and the compulsory purchase of the Arosfran Group were the result of a United Nations subpoena received by the Foreign Ministry of Angola regarding Tajideen’s links to Hezbollah. In his written reply to Angodis, dated July 18, Lieutenant-General Francisco Firmino Jacinto (Director of the National Directorate for Administration and Finance at the Defence Ministry) begins by explaining the [erroneous] transfers as having been a “budgetary manoeuvre…to avoid their having to withdraw this amount from the Finance Ministry”. A pioneer on the web since 1996, Africa Intelligence is the leading news site on Africa for professionals.