Organizations representing external interests were able successfully to
contain the range of policy and ideological choices open to governments
within limits acceptable to themselves (Berman, 1974, p. 7). Multinationals
can inhibit development planning by limiting the government’s tax raising
capacity through transfer pricing and the movement of production from one
country to another (Sutcliffe, 1972, p. 188; Hymer, 1982). Foreign owners
and managers of foreign capital received special advantages. In francophone
Africa, for example, ‘la presence française’ meant the complete penetration
of public life by such interests and their pressure groups. In Kenya, European
organizations representing the agriculture-based industries exerted great
influence on policy-making because of dependence for competitiveness on
European involvement. In the 1960s the foreign owners of the greater part of
non-agricultural capital were also represented locally by ‘a substantial
bureaucracy employed by the branches of foreign firms ... mainly them-
selves foreigners’, although increasingly including Kenyan Africans. As this
ownership spread, so the political power of foreign capital increased (though
in the interest of nationalist economic ideology and rhetoric it had to be
ritually humiliated: Leys, 1975, p. 174).
In Senegal and the Ivory Coast the influence of French interests on gov-
ernment boards, chambers of commerce and informal meetings of business-
men exceeded the power of parliaments, cabinets and political parties
(Bretton, 1973, pp. 204–8). After independence in the Ivory Coast French
private interests were dominant in the commodities which formed the basis
of the economy (coffee, cocoa and cotton). Manufacturing and processing
were mainly in foreign hands, and governments had to obtain the approval
of big foreign firms with the equipment, trade outlets, capital, and skills for
groundnut shelling, cotton ginning and cocoa cleaning before formulating
any policies towards indigenous producers.
Nkrumah understood well the ‘rights’ and privileges that could be
demanded by foreign interests as a result of their economic power: land con-
cessions, prospecting rights, exemptions from customs duties and taxes, and
privileges in the cultural sphere: ‘that Western information services be exclu-
sive; and that those from socialist countries be excluded’. So, for example,
agreements for economic co-operation offered by the USA often included
the demand that the the United States Information Agency (‘a top intelli-
gence arm of the US imperialists’) be granted preferential rights to dissemi-
nate information (Nkrumah, 1965, pp. 246–50). Cultural neo-colonialism
also rested on the dependence of newly independent states on Western ideas
and methods in education, administration and the professions (Berman,
1974, pp. 7–8). The top executives of the subsidiaries of multinationals, the
80 Understanding Third World Politics