Innocuous political risk: Environmentalism that kills Black Economic Power (Part 3/3)
Poverty-stricken Africans to Poverty-stricken Africans that face the brunt of climate. The case for France, Sweden and Denmark to drop their push to kill circular Black businesses across Africa
CALL TO ACTION: JOIN THE IE COLLECTIVE MAILING LIST FOR NEW ANTI-RACISM IN 2025: https://forms.gle/KzrTRts49xbKwXas8
Follow us on socials
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iecollectiveuk/
Join our LinkedIn community: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13088200/
Introduction
Innocuous political risk that kills the Black business environment exists in following form:
Elite-driven advocacy without local mandates
Technocratic decision-making in informal economies and marginalised communities
Elite global activism disconnects with local realities
Unintended policy consequences that exacerbate poverty and systemic inequalities
Critical summary - Black history challenge of reclaiming the environmental narrative
Reclaiming narratives starts with Dead-aid models
Are the Environmental charities positioning themselves to take development finance and aid?
Original beneficiary description: Poverty-stricken Africans
New beneficiary description: Poverty-stricken Africans that face the brunt of climate change
Silent winners of funding: Organisations that can propose the “best” solutions for the beneficiaries.
Who is well positioned to take funding?
White-dominant NGOs aka the ‘“saviour” - who disproportionately benefits from access to high quality climate change education, the ability to write bids for large scale investment and funding, who hold formally recognised power and who run and have more access development finance and climate governance institutions
The meaning for our collective economic value - continued use and complexity of binary oppositions
The use of the English language tends to categorise and label to maintain a monopoly on describing phenomena for the purposes of uneven development to keep resources within White dominant structures of power.
Binary oppositions as a literary device that create conflicts and inequality between groups through introducing sharp contrasts. It’s critical to understand the work of these constracts. This devise drives narratives forward.
Examples of binary oppositions that creates hierarchies:
Binary Oppositions: white/black, civilised/uncivilised, clean/dirty, rich/poor, on/off, left/right
The emergent (complex) beneficiary description binary opposition in the 3-part series:
The saviour now understands the impacts of colonialism and its relevance to climate change/Poverty-stricken Africans that face the brunt of climate change that can teach the impacts of colonialism.
This remains a dynamic relationship that drives systemic inequality through the existence of the binary opposition which sets the stage of which group gets access to large-scale funding and which group does not. The end of racial inequality is non-existence of the binary opposition, not its increased complexity. In other words, i should not be able to find it at all through narratives that move towards partnership and equal standing and access to resources and opportunities.
Critical questions to ask: What does this emerging narrative mean for our collective economic value moving forward?
As long as we are never strongly positioned as communities that have the intelligence to solve our problems as an organising logic, regardless of the evolution away from scientific racism, we will always experience economic inequality as we will not experience the economic dividends of being perceived as communities of innovation hubs nor problem solvers.
We need metrics and descriptions of economic phenomenon that captures the economic dividends of narratives to translate the valuation and financial and non-financial dividends of narratives on global majority economies.
The original intent of Master’s study: Addressing the limitations previous study into environmental policy through a focus on the potential of indigenous governance and new partnership models
Video 1:
When I wrote my scholarship application to the University of Bristol’s Global Development and Environmental programme. Here’s what I wrote my shortcomings in writing my undergraduate dissertation on Canada’s National Climate Change Policy:
“Upon further reading after I graduated, I regret not doing enough to center first nation people and the understanding of Canada as a settler colonial state in my analysis. One reason for this, I studied in Canada for 4 months in my final year, and completed a module in Canadian Federalism. Despite the land acknowledgments that sometimes happened before a class or event, academic interventions in our thinking about Canada as a state were not articulated and studied in my classes. From this experience, it is clear I have a strong ability to pursue research as I received a first in the dissertation. But I am motivated to go back to redress an issue with my past limitation in my research for the purposes of understanding the possibilities of post-hegemonic global south and indigenous governance and capacity building.”
To be clear, my undergraduate dissertation I did acknowledge the absence of a study into indigenous governance in environmental policy, but the constraints of the study was the focus on the national politics of environmental governance. This focus meant choosing to focus on Quebec as an official partner, this necessitated the exclusion of indigenous voice because indigenous people are “unofficial” stakeholders in the Canadian federation. In my undergraduate dissertation, I wrote:
“Both First Nations and French Canadians in Quebec have exerted a need for self-government. What is not heavily emphasised is how First Nation partners are disadvantaged in these forums due territories not being official partners of the Canadian state. How does asymmetric power relations affect intergovernmental relations? It has been suggested that the existing federal system must be “decolonised” to establish a new partnership with First Nations by Kiera Lander.
Elite capture and new iterations of corruption
In remember also reading Olufemi O. Taiwo’s book “Elite Capture: How the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else)”. My past two articles are not calling out something new, it’s calling something very old. For my undergrad, I studied Political Science at the University of Essex, UK and Western University, Canada. This is the study of risk and vulnerabilities in the ways people advocating for change can potentially produce risk for wider corrupt practices. As a life-long politics student and descendant of colonial and post-colonial Nigeria, someone of Indigenous Bini origin, Africa’s problem with corruption and corrupt leadership continues to plague our community and our lives, even in the diaspora. A significant problem is the systemic failure of producing leaderships that has the political will and abilities to bring forth wide-scale change that benefits the masses and not just small groups of beneficiaries. In other words, the production of high-impact leadership and subsequent structures that strengthen the collective capacities beyond the constraints of modern, narrow political ideologies.
So what makes something corrupt? I am arguing corruption is not calculated evil but the foundations of it can be innocuous and non-financial, the core of it is how people leverage change for a circle of their friends with similar identities and interests to them but not much beyond that. In the case my work, even advocate for the loss of access to income for millions of people. Identity politics has become a new mechanism for new forms of the same old corruption through reinforcing hierarchies of priorities and a focus on ever narrower interests. Representing community means even representing the interests of those that challenge your most strongly held opinions as well. The collective over the individual and their like-minded friends.
Video 2:
Unequal distribution of environmental education
Environmental education that supports understanding of local environmental justice issues has not been equitably distributed across the world. A few educated people of African descent educated oriented on identity politics does not represent the majority of Africans. Seemingly, this can be enough for organisations to create the illusion of a multi-racial mandate for their work. But just like the colonial era, it only takes a few advocates to strike a deal for White-led organisations and companies for disconnected ideological rent-seeking activities to occur in our communities. The environmental crisis is real and material for our community, therefore it is important that our communities understands these issues properly through increasing access to high, culturally and locally-relevant quality education. We need robust education systems that educates us on 21st century issues and equip us to deal with the challenges. Additionally, we need the rapid expansion of local capacity to meet 21st century challenges, not charities and activists meddling in informal economies and offering external sourced, disconnected “solutions” and creating the conditions for Western powers to destroy entire sectors with the stroke of an elitist bureaucrats pen. All whilst our communities remain under-educated and deskilled when it comes to dealing with huge 21st century risks and challenges.
The innocuous corruption I am talking about is DEI-like initiatives builds justifications for individuals and organisations to advocate for large scale changes create the conditions for disinvestment on the point of environmental justice. This can negatively affects millions of people’s livelihoods, plunging them into extreme poverty in communities just for the sake of their own careers in the advocacy world.
Meanwhile, our communities for the most part remain under-engaged in environmental education, environmental careers and environmental politics. This is the absence of a mandate to advocate, therefore the focus should be the building the mandate to advocate. There remains limited procedures for community consultation, and wide-scale education programmes so people are informed on the environmental issues of concern and are able to pursue environmental careers or incorporate these issues into their existing careers. No matter how well-meaning and altruistic power looks, undemocratic power needs to be challenged.
The injustice of the media around Kantamanto market
Let’s dumb this down to what this really is.
EU is full of educated, civilised people that has the human capacity to lead on the circular economy in fashion and those poor Africans… well they are not “us”. Therefore, now the EU is ready to move towards the circular economy, now there is a textile waste issue we should all be paying attention to. Africans clearly cannot manage the environmental crisis, we have to save them and strongly intervene. Even though, the Africans have been building their circular economy for decades but who wants to learn Twi, Swahili or whatever the hell to learn how it all actually works.
Kantamanto Market and the social justice-led media around it, driven by anti-fast fashion advocates is potentially a case of innocuous corruption, as now there is evidence that advocacy for a ban does not have a mandate in Ghana, yet France, Sweden, and Denmark proposed what is a ban or very close to a ban to the EU. This is the continual issue of African states being undermined post-independence. My research shows clear signs that market traders wish to protect this industry. The Or Foundation has also came out and said that Kantamanto does not a support a ban on its trade with Europe (although the post is no longer up on instagram). Ghana’s Used Clothes Dealers Association is outright protecting this industry. Second-fashion traders are more broadly fighting against this environmental policy.
“We are talking about 2 million people employed in this trade, and 6.5 million households depending on this trade in Kenya alone,” said Teresia Wairimu Njenga, chair of the Mitumba Association - One man’s trash: EU pitch to tackle textile pollution riles second-hand sellers, POLITICO
“The reason we are being so vocal is because these people are trying to bring in new protocols when we have already been doing this for 40 years and have already developed our own,” Continued Njenga from the Mitumba Association.
Advocacy for informal markets, such as in Kantamanto market, means working with and for the people working within them. When your advocacy goes against the people, and elitist mechanisms are used to advance a position that is oppositional to the people, it lays the foundation for further corrupt behaviour.
Advocacy requires responsibility and accountability to key stakeholders. The essence of corruption is political behaviour or behaviour that has political consequences that negatively impacts key stakeholders for personal gain. What is personal gain? Personal gain can be fulfilment of your own beliefs. In this case, the fulfilment of one’s own beliefs at the expense of direct interests of key marginalised stakeholders that does not have currently to immediately challenge and protect their interests. It is not fair playing ground.
My research was collaboration between my own expertise as researcher and the people on the ground. I am bound by what the traders made clear are their interests, which is for Kantamanto market to stay. It will make me an exploitative actor to advocate for an agenda that encourages disinvestment instead. The potential space for Indigenous economic structures and governance to have a voice in the global fashion trade would collapse. The people in Kantamanto do not currently have a strong political voice to advocate for the interests in more immediate ways. It is important that when working with Ghana on environmental justice issues, proper channels are used to respect Ghana as an independent country. Which means speak to Ghana’s Used Clothing Dealers Association as well when reporting on Kantamanto market, and speak to the community leaders within Kantamanto.
So the work continues on “understanding the possibilities of post-hegemonic global south and indigenous governance and capacity building.”
Conclusion - untapped leadership in circular, sustainable innovation.
My practise is not about judging the voice and perception of those who lack a political voice in order to concede ground to those who are already able to speak and giving opportunities to speak within environmental space. This is about legitimising the voices of marginalised in informal sector through Participatory Action Research to build the indigenous political voice within informal economies. The research was not done to neatly slot into the anti-fast fashion activism nor social justice activism more broadly. Going off the actual research, it was made to disrupt the trend of disinvestment into the market and lay the conditions for the expansion of internal capacities of Kantamanto market as an emerging circular economy space and also what representing the informal, indigenous voice could look like when the structures are lacking due to limited political power. Meaningful value addition into the economy is possible through acceptance of and investment into the existing circular innovations across Africa. This is many African countries untapped competitive advantage in the global economy and chance to be leaders in circular, sustainable innovation.
Let us learn to recognise and take heed when the marginalised are meeting their own development needs, and ask how we can support and create with them, this way the recognition of environmental risks is bottom-up and the existing solutions are recognised and innovative practise can be created through additional support, when permission to work with communities is granted. Development is not overriding indigenous structures, and undermining their economies, but real growth and development looks like increasing the recognition of independence, facilitating peace and supporting Ghana and post-colonial and indigenous in their journeys.
Video 3:
Mitigating Innocuous Political Risk - Protecting indigenous economic sector growth
To address this new form of risk, we must rethink how political and economic decisions are made, particularly in contexts where the voices of marginalised communities are often overlooked. Here are some strategies:
Inclusive Policy Design
Policymakers and advocates must adopt a participatory approach, ensuring that the voices of those most affected by proposed changes are heard and respected.Contextualised Risk Assessment
Traditional risk assessments often fail to capture the nuanced impacts of policies on informal and marginalised communities. Incorporating localised data and perspectives into these assessments can help mitigate risks.Building Local Capacity
Strengthening local governance and community advocacy can empower marginalised groups to engage with and influence decision-making processes, build their own organisations, institutions and companies to reduce their vulnerability to external agendas antithetical to high impact development.Local Technology for Early Detection
Leveraging technology to monitor early signs of disconnect or opposition can help detect innocuous political risks before they escalate. For instance, tools that track sentiment in local communities of extractive practises to provide early warnings of brewing discontent and address local concerns.