The historical necessity to disengage from capital-led globalisation Africa has little chance of developing as long as it is integrated within the present system of capitalist accumulation. Whatever "growth" results from integration into the system is skewed; it is, to use Samir Amin’s apt phrase, "maldevelopment". Hence Africa’s only option is to delink from the system as
it is presently constituted.

This delinking strategy is as valid today as it was when Samir Amin first wrote about it in the early 1970s.
Africa needs to delink from the global system not only because there is little prospect within it for genuine development but also because staying within the system exposes Africa to the recurrent crises of the capitalist system. The
system has become highly volatile. It is now dominated by speculative capital that is not productive. One of the best practitioners of speculation, George Soros, admits that the system is untenable. It is hazardous. It exposes
peoples and nations to the whims of the speculative market. Soros should know, for his own actions (among those of others) put Thailand into a major crisis in August 1997, a crisis that almost spinned out of control and engulfed much of East Asia, a crisis from which Thailand, Indonesia and Korea are still suffering.

It is in the nature of speculative capital to create a false sense of development and of security. Argentina, at one time one of the richest countries in the third world, liberalised itself, almost in text-book fashion, following the precepts of
the World Bank and the IMF. During the 1990s it abolished trade barriers, opened its capital markets to international money and sold everything (from banks to ports) to foreign investors. Yet in December 2001, Argentina defaulted on $155 billion of debt and collapsed ignominiously into political and economic chaos. Argentina is the graveyard of the neo-liberal model of
"development".

So there are at least two very good reasons for Southern Africa to disengage from the present system of capital-led globalisation. One is to gradually withdraw the region from an extremely volatile system of speculative capitalism and save itself from the fate of an Argentina-type of collapse. And the second is to organise a breathing space for itself and a time to consolidate its own vision and future. However, the disengagement cannot be done hastily
or haphazardly. It has to be carefully planned and phased.

Ss long as Africa remains tied to the imperatives of capital-led globalisation, rerforming a certain historically embedded role within the global system, there is no possibility for the persistent poverty problem to be addressed, let alone solved. Capitalism’s global expansion exists to solve its own problems, not thatof the poor of Africa. The disengagement is therefore a historical necessity.