SOUTH AFRICA: Two Trevors do the forums

BY PATRICK BOND

“Africa didn't really shine here”, South Africa's finance minister Trevor Manuel told a press conference in snowy Davos, Switzerland during the World Economic Forum in late January. “There is a complete dearth of panels on Africa.”

Nevertheless, in any five-star hotel gathering of powerbrokers, back-slapping is crucial, no matter how artificial the camaraderie. Here is how former Johannesburg Star newspaper editor Peter Sullivan witlessly described the Davos experience for Sunday Independent readers:

“The SA contingent worked hard to get investment but partied equally hard: a real 'jol' [party] was had by all with great jiving from [African National Congress government ministers] Kader Asmal, Trevor Manuel and Alec Irwin [sic], while [South African business tycoon] Bertie Lubner and his wife boogied the night away. We also drank a few bottles of KWV's best red [too many, apparently, to spell trade minister Erwin's name correctly].”

Sullivan regaled with stories of meeting “the beautiful Queen Rania of Jordan”, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. But as one shrewd journalist reported on January 28, “Among the many snubs Africa received here was the decision by former US president Bill Clinton to cancel his presence at a press conference on Africa today to discuss the New Partnership for Africa's Development [NEPAD]. Forum officials said Clinton did not give reasons for not attending.”

The ingratitude! Especially since Mbeki's NEPAD was drawn up in collaboration with the neoliberal globalisers. NEPAD's main strategies include:

• privatisation, especially of infrastructure such as water, electricity, telecommunications and transport;

• a greater insertion of Africa into the world economy, which will worsen fast-declining terms of trade, given that African countries produce so many cash crops and minerals whose global markets are glutted;

• ensure that multi-party elections are held, typically, between variants of pro-neoliberal parties, and cannot substitute for the genuine democracy required to restore legitimacy to so many failed neocolonial African states; and

• confirm South Africa's self-mandate for “peace-keeping” the continent on behalf of the Western imperialist power.

Over the previous 18 months, Mbeki, Manuel and trade minister Erwin either hosted, chaired or played a crucial backroom role in the capitalist globalisers' equivalent of a hunting safari in Africa — mainly for the benefit of the Davos club:

• at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, Mbeki shot down NGOs and African leaders who argued in favour of reparations for slavery, colonialism and apartheid;

• 10 weeks later at the World Trade Organisation's Doha ministerial summit, Erwin split with the African continent's delegation of trade ministers, in the process promoting multinational corporate interests;

• at the UN's financing for development conference in Monterrey, Mexico last March, Manuel was summit co-chair and endorsed the World Bank and IMF “Washington consensus”, relegating debt relief to the status of a dead duck;

• a few months later, at the Kananaskis, Canada summit of the G8 powers, a groveling Mbeki departed with a handful of peanuts for his hungry and now badly wounded white elephant, NEPAD — and yet, against all evidence to the contrary, declared that the meeting “signifies the end of the epoch of colonialism and neo-colonialism”; and

• at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg last August, Mbeki undermined standard UN democratic procedure, advanced the privatisation of nature and did virtually nothing to genuinely address the plight of the world's majority.

A little sympathy for Pretoria from the world's ruling class would surely have been in order — even if just the face-saving sort, for the cameras, as is normally the case.

Porto Alegre

But let's leave the grey, monied set in favour of a hot, sunny, colourful place crowded with ordinary grassroots activists who took the world's problems rather more seriously in the same week as the Davos shindig.

In Porto Alegre, Brazil, the World Social Forum (WSF) attracted 100,000 left-wing delegates from across the globe, who insisted: “Another world is possible!”

Here at least, South Africa — especially Soweto campaigners against privatisation and for free electricity, water, medicines, education and housing — shone as brightly as a house reconnected late at night thanks to Operation Khanyisa [a grassroots guerilla campaign that reconnects families whose electricity has been cut off].

Several times in Porto Alegre, I witnessed the passion with which former Soweto city councillor Trevor Ngwane addressed the crowds. Ngwane was expelled from the ANC after opposing privatisation; he now chairs the militant Anti-Privatisation Forum in Johanesburg. Ngwane discussed the struggle for basic human rights in South Africa, reported on the continent-wide organising being undertaken by the one-year-old Africa Social Forum and his declaration that the World Bank must now be defunded and decommissioned was widely applauded.

“Weakening the power of Washington is our main challenge”, Ngwane announced, “especially now that Bush is in heat after Middle Eastern oil, and because the International Monetary Fund and World Bank show they will not reform.”

The WSF has spawned a variety of localised social forums of labour, women, environmentalists, community militants, church activists and youth. In conjunction with the African Social Forum, which met in December in Addis Ababa, Ngwane has been mandated to help get a Southern African Social Forum off the ground.

Crucial for a coming generation of bottom-up social forums, Canadian author Naomi Klein wrote recently, is the chance to replant Porto Alegre's most radical seeds: “The ideas flying around included neighbourhood councils, participatory budgets, stronger city governments, land reform and co-operative farming — a vision of politicised communities that could be networked internationally to resist further assaults from the IMF, the World Bank and World Trade Organisation.”

Two Trevors clash

Icy Davos and friendly Porto Alegre will clash again — as the world's elites marginalise Africa through intensified capitalist globalisation and as social forums break out across Africa, uniting to demand, as Asian intellectual Walden Bello puts it, economic “deglobalisation”. Which forum philosophy will prevail?

On two previous occasions, South Africa's famous “two Trevors” — Manuel and Ngwane — have seen their respective teams square off. During an April 2000 clash in Washington (documented in the brilliant documentary Two Trevors go to Washington), Manuel chaired the World Bank board of governors for two days while Ngwane taught 30,000 protesters outside how to toyi-toyi.

Last August, when Manuel was negotiating some meaningless treaty or other at the ritzy Sandton Convention Centre during the WSSD, Ngwane and more than 20,000 demonstrators marched from the nearby Alexandra township to demand that the elites pack up and end their charade.

With the world's environmental and development crises worsening ever more rapidly, lubricated by petro-warrior George Bush, can any conclusion be reached about the latest confrontation? Perhaps only this: one Trevor was cold and lonely among his rich and powerful “friends”; the other Trevor was flush with the warmth of solidarity, basking in the resurgence of a humanistic but uncompromising international left.

[Patrick Bond teaches at Wits University and is the author of Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development and Social Protest, published by University of Natal Press.]

From Green Left Weekly, February 19, 2003.
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