Referendums are the indulgence of governments who are confident that they will not loose. Such was the July referendum in Uganda, writes Ronald Elly Wanda, who says that the vote served as notice of President Yoweri Museveni’s candidacy for the impending 2006 elections. Wanda expresses concern at the undemocratic nature of Ugandan politics.

Since the dawn of political thought the question “who should rule?” has been a recurrent issue of argument and debate. More recently in East Africa, the referendum held on 28th of July in Uganda rekindles this interest. In the referendum the Ugandan electorate were asked to choose whether the state adopts a multiparty political system or continues with the existing mono (movement) arrangement. The result, as expected by the government was an overwhelming yes. According to the Electoral Commission chairman Dr Badru Kiggundu, 92.5% balloted yes whilst only 7.5% objected to altering the system. Understandably, without more ado, the opposition camp fittingly cited that the outcome was partly due to the fact that a large number of the 8.5 million electors stayed away from the 17000 polling stations.

As far as referendums are concerned, it is fair to say that governments tend to utilize them only when they are confident that they are in a strong position to win them. For instance in Britain, Tony Blair indefinitely postponed a planed referendum on the EU constitution, fearing defeat after it was clear that the French and Dutch nationals had rejected it. Five years ago Museveni, unlike Blair, knew that he would win when he petitioned Ugandans with the first referendum. As expected voters at that time again “overwhelmingly” rejected multi-party politics in favour of continuing with the President’s "no-party" system, the electoral commission then reported that 91% of voters favoured retaining the National Resistance Movement as the country's political system.

The purposes of the referendum for movementism in 2000 were as much the same as the now concluded referendum on multipartism. Only the ranks have been changed and the referendum question reversed. Thus they were a mere quantitative and not qualitative exercise; their real intentions designed to systematically marketise the “Kisanja project” (Museveni’s third term campaign) in time for the March 2006 presidential elections. Although the National Resistance Movement-Organisation (NRM-O) government would have Ugandans believe that the referendums were a result of yielding democracy, the reality is that external factors played a far more significant role. Furthermore, neither referendum had anything to do with enhancing the democratic franchise, in spite of the fact that the methodology employed (referendum) and the apparatus used (ballot vote) replicated a commotion in a liberal democratic system.

Democracy

Today only a few people in Uganda would admit to thinking that democracy is a bad thing. Nonetheless, the emergence of more than one recognised political grouping and the appearance of multi-party politics, as is the case now in Uganda, is not necessarily the same as democracy. There is thus a hazardous tendency to call a system ‘democratic’ simply because the incumbent government (in this case, NRM-O) says that it is.

A quick perusal of the history of democracy illustrates that it is a procedure that takes time. It also took time for a mature liberal democratic state such as England to realise democracy’s fruition. During the 17th century prior to the so called first democratic revolution, elite groups in England, regarded democracy as a threat to be overcome, and not a prospect to be encouraged. Indeed not so long ago in the 1940s the unrepentant imperialist Sir Winston Churchill when about to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire went on to confess that: “democracy was the least efficient form of government but that every other form was worse”.

In Uganda, as has been the case in almost all corners of Sub Sahara Africa, the process of democratisation has been unfairly pushed by international financial institutions (IMF, WB, WTO as well as the donor community) in order to fulfil their own agenda of “opening up Africa” to the global economy.

The result is best summed up by a key Nigerian political scientist Professor Claude Oke in 1993 when he said: “What is being fostered in Africa is a version of liberal democracy reduced to the crude simplicity of multiparty elections. This type of democracy in the least emancipatory especially in African conditions because it offers people rights they cannot exercise, voting that never amounts to choosing, freedom which is patently spurious, and political equality which disguises highly unequal power relations.” This is exactly what President Museveni is doing by reengineering the constitution to permit his third term candidacy and secondly by holding a meaningless referendum.

In order for democracy to be realised in Uganda, it must firstly be allowed to naturally evolve and secondly the law must be respected by all (including the President himself) as it is a key essential aspiration for democratic ideals. Decisions ought to be taken by the people. This means that:
- The mass of the people should have some say in what they are going to be, and not just told what they are as the July referendum did;
- This say should be genuinely theirs and also not manipulated by propaganda, misinformation and irrational fears; and that
- It should to some extent reflect their considered opinion and aspirations, as against ill informed and knee-jerk prejudice. Democracy being an evolutionary process, a democratic political culture ought to be encouraged and militarism discouraged.

Political culture

In Uganda since political independence in 1962 one finds that domestic socio-economic and political problems have been responsible in attracting military elements into usurping national political power. Indeed in the country’s last coup de tat in January of 1986, the incumbent president was seen as a political saviour whose NRM machination delivered Ugandans from a corrupt, and inept Dr Milton Obote’s UPC (Uganda People’s Congress) government. Resultantly, militarism has and continues to play a significant role in Uganda’s post –independence political culture. For instance the defence budget was $44m in 1991. It went up to $88m in 1996 and rose again to $155m in 2003. It was estimated at between $193 to $203m last year alone. According to tangible sources the cost of defence amounted to around 23% of the public administration to 20-23% of total expenditure. This is money that should have been better spent elsewhere, eradicating poverty and providing education and other rural developments.

Constitutionalism

Thus the process of democratisation in Uganda will continue being severely hindered unless the political culture of militarism is dismantled and the rule of law respected. NRM-O’s deliberate incapacitation of Article 105(2) of the 1995 Uganda constitution - that limits presidential terms to a maximum two five years, thus precluding Mr Museveni (who has been a continuous tenant of Nakasero State House since 1986) from contesting the March 2006 general elections - should serve as an indication of the President’s candidacy for the impending 2006 elections.

The Musevenisation of the Ugandan constitution should be condemned by all not only because it is undemocratic but also on the grounds that it is insincere. The long-term ramifications for Ugandans are that any future president might use this same clause to personalise constitutions to suit their individual needs- at the expense of the Ugandan mwanainchi (citizen). This is selfish and dangerous for it is the law that defines our responsibilities to the state and vice versa. Therefore it is also the law that provides for and defines the good of society. By contrast, the democratic justification of political power is essentially legalistic, being based on the legal idea of a contract.

Mr Museveni and his strategists have revised the terms of the contract (constitution) in the absence of the Uganda electorate, subsequently infringing the state/citizen contract. President Museveni’s has to a degree served Ugandans well but his quest for an extension is undemocratic and as such the preservation of the status quo sadly means that inhabitants of the “Pearl of Africa” may sadly never experience the pleasure of seeing an incumbent relinquishing political office voluntarily, thus rendering a coup inevitable.

* Ronald Elly Wanda is a political scientist based in London, United Kingdom.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

In September, while the World Bank and International Monetary Fund prepared for meetings in Washington, 500 people marched in Maseru, Lesotho to protest the effect of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) on their livelihoods. One of the World Bank’s biggest projects in Africa, the LHWP pipes scarce water to South Africa and has been touted as a major development boost for the tiny mountain kingdom. But while South Africa benefits from the water, the project has been dogged by controversy, including the displacement of thousands of people. Now there is the possibility that new phases of the dam development could cause further hardship. Pambazuka News interviewed Jacob Lenka of the Lesotho NGO Transformation Resource Centre, which works with affected communities to enable them to express their needs and monitors the resettlement process.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: What exactly is the plight of those people who have been displaced by the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP)? How many people are involved?

JACOB LENKA: The plight of the Lesotho communities affected by LHWP is that they were not sufficiently consulted when the Project began. Of critical importance is that the communities were not compensated with land for land, they only received cash compensation. These communities are used to production from the soil. They were not again told about their rights vis-a-vis the Project; their right to water and development. The phase 1A has affected about 27,000 people while phase1B has displaced about 370 households, excluding those other people who have been affected in different ways than by displacement.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: Apparently part of the development treaty was that people displaced by the project should be taken care of and that "the standard of living of all people affected by the implementation of Phase 1B should not be compromised and where possible improved'”. Why hasn't this been met? Who is responsible for the failure?

JACOB LENKA: Yes, the following articles within the Treaty talk about the improved standard of life for the affected: article 7(para.18); article 15 and LHDA order of 1986, section 44(2). Yes, the communities have been compensated for the property lost to the project, but as said above compensation was not sufficient. The have not been compensated with land, and they do not have rights to water and development, at least, these communities have not been made aware of these rights. After resettlement they can no longer send their children to school; they cannot feed and send their children to clinics; they were able to do these things before resettlement. This is real poverty and disempowerment. They also have not been trained and provided with sustainable training that would help them beyond compensation. The compensation that comes to them often comes late.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: What is public sentiment in Lesotho about the LHWP? How do people feel about water being sold to South Africa while they suffer from drought and food shortages? And what is the level of awareness about those who have been displaced and their plight?

JACOB LENKA: Many people here are farmers. They will certainly want to have water for food production as well as water for drinking. Studies show that Lesotho will be water stressed in the next 25 years. Communities want water for irrigation. They want phase 2 to include component of development through water on the Lesotho side.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: More dams are going to be built as part of the project. What is the anticipated effect of any new dams on resident communities?

JACOB LENKA: The level of awareness amongst the affected communities is high. They have already formed their own civic organization; it is called Survivors of Lesotho Dams (SOLD). However, this level of consciousness does not translate into stoppage of the building of more them in Lesotho. The advice of the communities already affected to those who would be affected by phase 2 is that the latter should demand all compensation and resettlement packages before work starts, because once the work has started, the many promises are lost; the authorities often renege on these promises.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: What lessons does the Lesotho Highlands Water Project hold for the rest of Africa?

JACOB LENKA: TRC is working on a booklet with partners. The booklet will reflect the experiences of TRC field workers as they were monitoring the Project. These experiences will be lessons for affected communities world-wide, the dam financiers and the NGOs. One lesson that Lesotho has stolen the show about is the prosecution of international companies that were involved in corruption in the Lesotho dams. Perhaps this will be a lesson for Africa in terms of what a small state can do to the giants.

* Interview conducted by email. Please send comments to [email protected]

Carole Chehade explores genocide - “the crime that has no name" - in the DRC and what it means for our common global humanity. The reason why the suffering in the DRC has been ignored, she writes, is because it “takes more African genocides to equal one atrocity visited on a non-African nation”. Genocide in the DRC then is a result of the world’s corruption, greed and bigotry, which unless dealt with will destroy humanity.

If numbers really drove the genocide ratings, then one would think 3.4 million dead and 2.25 million displaced would be numbers that shouldn’t be ignored. Instead, the conflict in the DRC is viewed as another “tribal” clash in Africa, rather than what it really is: an international battle with many governments and multi-national companies contributing heavily to genocide, without ever getting their own fingerprints on the crime scene.

The area that is experiencing the most conflict is in the Kivu province, located on the Eastern side of the country. Like many African nations, the DRC is an ethnically rich and diverse melting pot. This ethnic diversity is not the primary reason for the war, simply because ethnic and racial conflict has never been powerful enough alone to drive genocide. The genocide in the DRC has roots in corrupt domestic and international leaders, greedy business interests, the DRC’s rich natural resources, conflict in neighboring countries and the artificial nip and tuck of colonialism.

The DRC’s history is largely shaped by genocidal forces. The precursor to the current genocide in the DRC is trumped by an even bigger one spread by Belgium’s King Leopold II. Leopold’s murderous reign wiped out over half the population of what was ironically known as the Congo Free State. Like most oppressors, Leopold fabricated the positive reputation of being dubbed the King Builder because he constructed so many buildings in Belgium. The bigger the genocide, the wealthier the nation becomes that perpetuated the transgression from the shadows. The Belgians eventually left, relinquishing their political rights to the people whose bones were sucked to the marrow by the vacuumed mouth of colonialism.

When the DRC gained independence in 1960, the west competed against the Soviets to shape the DRC into western political ideals. The US helped overthrow Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960 because they feared he’d align himself with the Soviets. Instead, they backed Mobuto Sese Seko who helped CIA operatives dispose of Lumumba. When the Cold War ended, the west left many African nations, whose loyalties they bought for their own ends, with leaders who sold out their countries in exchange for perceived rewards.

During Mobutu’s era, anti-government alliances spread through the Kivu province. With growing anti-government rebellion, an influx of Rwandan refugees came into the DRC whom, in turn, were followed by hunters who were fresh from the Rwandan genocide. These hunters were known as the Hutus, who quickly created their own militia, known as the Interahamwe.

The DRC also had animosity against another Tutsi population, known as the Banyamulenge, who immigrated into the DRC hundreds of years ago. The Banyamulenge have a reputation as being successful citizens of the DRC who supported Mobutu. Because the Banyamulenge were a wealthy enclave, Mobutu returned the support but later relinquished the citizenship of all of the Banyamulenge, leaving them without protection. Mobutu’s shifting loyalties also drove him to openly support the Rwandan Hutus during the height of their extermination of Tutsis.

The brutal Mobuto regime outgrew the control of its American sponsors and, as a result, Mobuto was overthrown and replaced by Laurent Kabila in 1997. The honeymoon between Kabila and the US was short lived as the DRC fell deeper into the brewing conflict that exploded into a civil war that has cost millions of lives. Kabila quickly learned the limits of playing too many sides when he was assassinated in 2001. After the assassination, he was replaced by his son Joseph Kabila.

The unnatural deaths of the Congolese are inadvertently made possible by natural resources such as coltan. It is not oil that makes the DRC wealthy, but its diverse reserves which include a resource we use everyday in our technology-based society. Upon processing, coltan becomes a material which stores electrical charge. This hard to find commodity is found in the eastern region, which is coincidentally the heart of the conflict. Ironically we use coltan to help drive our information age, yet are clueless as to what human sacrifices help us get that information. This means the computers and cell phones we use are powered by the blood of genocide.

Incidents of rape in the DRC are amongst the most grotesque in the world. One of the most disturbing cases, which I have ever heard of, was the forcing of young men to rape their own mothers. The psychological chain of events that follows something this horrendous damages the sanctity of family, which in turn destroys a nation. I can enumerate even more brutalities, but are we so numb that the only way we feel for the victims of genocide is if they stand naked on the auction blocks of the world desperately trying to convince us of which atrocity is gory enough for us to finally act? The sophisticated wealthy class of internationals would be horrified if their wives, mothers and daughters were visited by armies of men waiting to rip apart the womb of one of their women.

The DRC’s genocide is a prime example of how many players it takes for a crime against humanity to occur. Wealthy businessmen from all corners of the world have all taken their turn in raping the voluptuous natural resources of the DRC until genocide screams out that there is nothing more left to ravage.

Although some of the world’s worst events are visiting the African continent with a vengeance, let us not conceit ourselves into allowing our subconscious racism to equate barbaric acts of genocide with African nations. My concern is not to argue whether Africans are more or less incorruptible; my argument is more concerned with where we, as a world community, place our concern.

Exterminating Africans has been the status quo for centuries. All African countries combined still are not enough to compete for world attention as one nation is in the Gulf. The US Constitution once called African Americans 3/5 of a person. Evidentially, that belief was never removed from our human constitution because it takes more African genocides to equal one atrocity visited on a non-African nation.

If we are to judge the worldwide exploitation by the powerful, then sadly the DRC is a logical result of our world’s corruption, greed, and bigotry, which blatantly takes without replacing. As a result, the most discriminated people on earth are reminding us that cause and effect is paid by those who have nothing to give but their lives.

Before the term genocide was coined in 1944 by scholar Raphael Lemkin, the Holocaust was recognized as "a crime that has no name." Part of the challenge of being able to do battle against any enemy is to call it forth by name. After the Holocaust, the world community rallied around the phrase, “Never again.” Yet “never again” has happened again and again.

Because genocide’s aim is to kill humanity, even the perpetuator will die. The seamless border of genocide means that this African World War will touch us across oceans and continents. Our interconnectedness means that since Africa was the cradle of humanity, then it will also become the death of humanity if we do not rise in its defense, which really means in our defense.

* Carol Chehade is a writer and filmmaker who runs a non-profit organization. She can be reached at www.onenewearth.com

* Please send comments to [email protected]

In 1991, the Somaliland region decided to unilaterally secede from its parent country Somalia after that country disintegrated into a stateless state ruled by competing warlords and their armies. Since then Somaliland, in the north-west, has held three elections, the latest being on September 29, when 800,000 of Somaliland's estimated 3.5-million people went to the polls. The international community has refused Somaliland's quest for recognition up until now. Election observer Peter Hurst asks if a clearly demonstrated desire for democracy will change the attitude of the international community.

The first notable feature of Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital, is the vast number of blue plastic bags littering the fields outside the airport. They are the by-product of the Somalis’ pastime of chewing qat, a mild stimulant plant. Roadside vendors sell bunches for $1.50 a bag and customers then discard the packaging. It is one of the smaller problems Somaliland has to deal with on its way to becoming a functioning state.

The drive into Hargeisa town centre reveals slightly larger ones. The three sets of traffic lights, looking out of place beside the ragged roads, don’t work even in the long afternoon rush hour, as there is no electricity.

Somaliland, an autonomous region to the north of Somalia, proclaimed itself independent in 1991 after three years of civil war to the south had resulted in the collapse of any functioning state. It has since built institutions and tried to deal with crime and unemployment – all without regressing into dictatorship or anarchy.

Somaliland can now claim to have another feature of a functioning and democratic state, in sharp contrast to Somalia’s capital Mogadishu: on 29 September 2005 it held parliamentary elections, the first in Somalia since before the 1969 coup that brought the dictator Siad Barre to power. Around 800,000 voters went to the country’s 985 polling stations to elect 82 members of parliament from the 246 candidates on offer. It was the culmination of a gradual process: after a 2001 constitutional referendum, 2002 municipal elections, a 2003 presidential election, Somaliland will now have a legislature to balance the leadership of the president, Dahir Riyale Kahin.

There is a two-week delay between the vote and the announcement of the results. The outcome could be a surprise. The president’s Democratic United National Party (Udub) is facing a serious challenge from its main rival KULMIYE. If KULMIYE (Solidarity) fails to win outright, it may form a majority coalition with the Justice & Welfare Party (Ucid). The first reported results, based on a counting of 105 ballot-boxes in Hargeisa, indicate its likelihood: KULMIYE won 40.71% of the votes, Ucid 29%, and Udub 30.25%. An opposition coalition would make Somaliland one of the few African countries where representatives of different parties lead the executive and legislature.

At the same time, all parties are new to the political field and the differences between them are not readily apparent. Most Somalilanders who are asked say they will vote for the president’s party to ensure stability, or for a particular candidate because of clan allegiance. No one mentions policies.

The world’s blind eye

Somaliland’s limited resources are evident in the election’s rudimentary facilities. It is equally striking - although the point is contested by analysts alleging a “rigged” election -that poverty has not destroyed quality of engagement. The main anomaly has been the lack of a voter registering. Somaliland’s investment in its institutions of state has not stretched to a census, any form of citizen registration, or the issuing of passports.

One result is that a Somalilander can vote in any polling station in the country, whether or not he or she lives in or has visited the area. The consequences include a large incidence of attempted multiple voting, though the citizens whose previously inked finger shows up under the ultra-violet light monitor do not look too upset. The good spirits extend to the many disappointed underage voters (wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the logos 2 Pac, 50 Cents and Falluja) who are turned away from polling-places.

In the region of Odweyne, to the east of Hargeisa, ballots and electoral material were not distributed until early evening on the day before the election. Soon after, heavy rain turned the dirt road to mud and left election officials stuck. In some case, material did not reach its destination until election day itself, restricting the time available for voting.

Another major issue has been the lack of a secret ballot. High levels of illiteracy have meant that many voters cannot read the ballot-paper and are not confident using pens to mark their “X”. Their only option is to announce their choice to the local chairperson, who marks the paper, folds it up and hands it to the voter to place in the ballot-box.

Despite these problems, the overriding impression to this observer was that Somaliland’s electoral process has been transparent, with little fraudulent intent, and full of a great enthusiasm for democracy. In an Odweyne polling-station, the first person in the queue was a 70-year-old man who had walked to the station by foot and had been waiting outside since 7pm the previous evening. Everywhere the queues were long and the voters appeared happy.

The problems surrounding the election must be seen in light of the fact that Somaliland has not received anything like the financial or logistical support given to the elections in Afghanistan or Iraq; neither does it have the same levels of disruption through violence. The international community has been of little help in Somaliland’s reconstruction: it still denies Somaliland international recognition, and instead supports a peace process for Somalia which has survived repeated setbacks but is yet to achieve definitive results.

True, the US issued a statement welcoming the election and praising its conduct, and the possibility of some recognition of Somaliland’s existence and integrity cannot be discounted. But it would take only a small fraction of the money invested in Afghanistan and Iraq to improve Somaliland’s democratic record. This small east African land has, after all, succeeded through its own efforts in cultivating the very democratic spirit that the US and its partners have struggled to induce in the Middle East. Will they now pay attention to Somaliland?

* This article first appeared on the web site of http://www.opendemocracy.net, which aims to pioneer a new type of independent media based on exchange and participation. Peter Hurst works as a public policy researcher in London. He was monitoring the elections in Somaliland with the Catholic Institute of International Relations (CIIR) and has previously monitored elections with the OSCE in the Balkans and Eurasia. The election monitoring team was facilitated jointly by Dr Steve Kibble and Dr Adan Abokor of CIIR.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

The ratification of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa is simply the first step in the right direction for African countries. Its domestication comes next, and will be a long and laborious task for governments and the many organizations that will assist them in this undertaking. Many strategies have been suggested as potential approaches to the domestication of the Protocol. Anne Atieno Amada advocates for negotiation to be implemented in the process.

As Deputy Executive Director of Kenya’s Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDO), Atieno Amada argues that litigation, perhaps a natural choice for the domestication of the Protocol, is not the best solution. Litigation involves going to court and having the judge or magistrate preside over the particular case in order to make a decision on the dispute. Atieno Amada’s experiences with FIDO have shown that litigation has several limitations. These include the principle of “Stare Decisis,” that commands similar cases must be decided in the same way. Litigation is time consuming and expensive; involves difficulties in implementation, enforcement and compliance; and the public nature of proceedings often diverts attention from the issue. Finally, the dominance of men in the judicial system is a problem, and may be detrimental to domesticating the Protocol should a particular judge not align himself with the views of women’s rights.

Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) encompasses a variety of process by which conflict can be resolved without litigation. It presents a number of options that cater to the particular situation or conflict. The implementation of the Protocol can be seen as conflict in that it puts women, as claim holders, on one hand and the government, as bearers of duty, on the other. Conflict can be described as a disagreement or competition of interests, and the women’s movement may indeed be perceived as a threat to African governments in these ways. Conflict may be seen in terms of data disputes, which revolve around information; value disputes, which arise as a result of a clash of ideas; relationship disputes, which include marital and commercial disagreements; behavioral disputes caused by clashes in habits, customs and culture, and; structural disputes that take place in institutions and bureaucracies. In implementing the Protocol, and indeed the realization of any women’s rights, all elements of conflict are present. In responding to, and dealing with conflict there are a number of options available. Avoidance, toleration, mediation, litigation, self-help and negotiation are all methods of dealing with conflict that may be potentially employed.

Negotiation involves a formal discussion between people and groups attempting to reach an agreement. The main goal of such an exercise is to meet certain interests or needs in a manner that is collaborative and peaceful, without being apologetic or giving in. In order to be successful, negotiation must separate people from the problem, focus on interests and not positions, involve a variety of possible solutions, and have a result based on some objective standard or practice.

In her conclusion, Atieno Amada states that the Protocol, which, as she adds, is a right of women to equality, non-discrimination, elimination of harmful practices, access to justice and equal protection under the law, cannot be negotiated away by governments. Negotiation, and the process of negotiation, may indeed be a strategy, not only to implement the protocol, but to remind governments of their duty to protect the rights of all citizens.

* * This is a summarised version of a paper presented at a conference on the Ratification and Domestication of The African Union Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on Rights of Women in Africa. The conference, held between 27-30 September in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was co-convened by the African Union Commission and the Solidarity for African Women’s Rights Coalition (SOAWR). The full length versions of all papers presented at the conference will be released in book form in January 2006.

* Summarized by Karoline Kemp, Commonwealth of Learning Young Professionals Intern, Fahamu.

* Please send comments to

The effectiveness of the law as a tool for realizing women’s rights has been, by some, called into question. Because of Africa’s complicated history with inequality between men and women, and the feminisation of poverty, using judicial institutions in order to apply rights on paper into realizable rights is contentious. Sibongile Ndashe asks: What can be done differently to make governments accountable in terms of this protocol in a manner that makes a different to women’s lives? She argues that litigation does play a role in the domestication of the Protocol, but that it can be used amongst other tools.

Strategic litigation (also known as test case litigation, public interest litigation, impact litigation or precedent setting litigation) is used to challenge laws that are in violation of human rights standards and norms, and can be useful because in the event that a case is won against a discriminatory law, that law or policy may be declared invalid. This means that at the same time as successfully winning a case, broader law reform can be made. Litigation has not been widely used in the fight for women’s rights, as it marks a radical departure from traditional methods of legal practice and is indeed, a large task for gender activists, as it involves working not only on women’s rights, but on the building of courts.

Currently there are a number of ways that constitutions have permitted laws to act against women: the claw back clause exempts certain laws from being subject to the right to non-discrimination provided for by the constitution; the provision of rights to be equally applicable can sometimes be turned over in the event of a tension, in favor of the strongest right, and finally; some constitutions pre-empt inconsistency and therefore give preference to some rights over others. In addition, in some cases, in what is known as legal dualism, it is impossible to use international instruments if they have not yet been domesticated, but have been ratified, by that particular country. The Bangalore Principles come into use here – if an uncertainty, ambiguity or obscurity arises in a case, a judge may seek guidance in the general principles of international law, or those accepted by the community of nations.

Strategic litigation can be a powerful tool, but key to its use in the case of the Protocol is a women’s rights responsive judiciary – one who understands women’s inequality in all of its complexities. In addition, a strict separation of the governmental powers of judiciary, legislature and executive is important, in order that each area may fulfill their constitutional obligations. It is necessary not only to engage government, including state departments, but in order to be truly successful litigation must also reach out to research institutions, community based organizations and feminist scholars.

In her conclusion, Ndashe argues that the implementation of the Protocol through strategic litigation depends on various parties, not simply lawyers. There is a need to co-ordinate efforts so that the many complex and varied aspects of women’s rights are represented.

* This is a summarised version of a paper presented at a conference on the Ratification and Domestication of The African Union Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on Rights of Women in Africa. The conference, held between 27-30 September in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was co-convened by the African Union Commission and the Solidarity for African Women’s Rights Coalition (SOAWR). The full length versions of all papers presented at the conference will be released in book form in January 2006.

* Summarized by Karoline Kemp, Commonwealth of Learning Young Professionals Intern, Fahamu

* Please send comments to

Over 40 representatives from the African Union Commission, African governments and the African women’s movement gathered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from September 27-29, 2005 to discuss strategies for the entry into force of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women, its domestication and implementation. The representatives affirmed that the Protocol is indeed the basis for meaningful people driven pan-Africanism and national level constitutional and legal reform in favour of realising African women’s rights.

* Closing Statement from the Conference on Ratification and Domestication of
The African Union Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on Rights of Women in Africa Co-convened by the African Union Commission and the Solidarity for African Women’s Rights Coalition (SOAWR)

Final version 30th September 2005

The speed with which member states have ratified the Protocol is without precedent in the history of similar instruments. To date, 13 African states have ratified the Protocol. Only two more ratifications are required for the Protocol to enter into force. We are confident that the required number will ratify the Protocol by the end of the year. We shall maintain our focused pressure to ensure that the Protocol is ratified by all 53-member states of the African Union at the earliest opportunity. Below is a summary of the strategies and recommendations in five thematic areas

A. Ratification

Even though the entry into force of the Protocol is imminent, the campaign must continue in order to ensure universal ratification. Following are the strategies identified:-
? Mobilization for country wide advocacy
? Translation of the Protocol into local languages
? Reform national legislation consistent with the Protocol
? Sensitization of all the arms of government
? Forging alliances between the various stakeholders
? Inclusion of the Protocol in the law reform processes
? Use of community based awareness creation initiatives
? Engagement of the AU and its specialised organs to support the campaign

B. The Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa, July 2004

We note that supplementary accountability mechanisms are found within the Solemn Declaration on Gender in Africa. The Solemn Declaration relates to the Protocol in a manner comparable to the relationship of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPA) to the Convention to Eliminate all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

We laud the AU Commission for developing a draft monitoring and evaluation framework as well as a draft reporting framework (with targets and indicators), spelling out the role of the African women’s movement, to be approved by a meeting of Ministers of Gender and Women’s Affairs to take place in Dakar, Senegal from October 12-16, 2005. The proposal is that African states will prepare two kinds of reports: a full narrative report every three years; and a comparative report annually in the form of a matrix responding to the targets and indicators selected. The African women’s movement will know the reporting dates for their respective states and also be able to access and respond to their state’s reports from the AU website as well as to forward general and specific recommendations. The African Women’s movement will also be able to participate through the annual African women’s fora around the AU summits, which are being institutionalised.

We propose the following strategies to enhance accountability under the Solemn Declaration:
? Liaising across the relevant AU commission and relevant organs of the AU
? Engaging with the meeting of Ministers of Gender/Women’s Affairs re: the Solemn Declaration to take place in Dakar, Senegal from October 12-16, 2005
? Reviewing and using the monitoring and evaluation mechanisms developed by the AU’s Directorate on Women, Gender and Development
? Developing the capacity within national gender machineries to monitor implementation (including resourcing for implementation)
? Inform the terms of reference for mandate and appointments to the AU Women’s committee
? Establishing working links between the AUWC and the gender sectoral cluster of the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC)
? Convening the annual African women’s Consultation at an appropriate point prior to each Summit

C. Domestication of the Protocol

We reiterate the fact that much remains to be done to ensure universal ratification of the Protocol, as well as its domestication in African states that have already ratified it and, ultimately, its relevance and use to assure African women’s rights at the national level. We have examined the different legal systems that exist in Africa and note that African states must take the initiative for domesticating the Protocol although nothing impedes the African women’s movement from doing so either.

Regardless of whether or not domestication has occurred, African states which have ratified the Protocol will be obliged to submit regular reports to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights every two years on implementation, which then can prepare observations, including recommendations, which African states will report on in another two years.

We have therefore identified the following strategies to advance domestication and accountability:
? Working with national parliaments as well as those of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) on domestication and harmonisation, especially under African common law systems
? Strategic utilisation of international events to reach the decision making organs of states and governments
? Forming regional networks for exchange of ideas and best practices in the campaign
? Encouraging member states to include the Protocol in their law reform processes and particularly in Constitutional review processes
? Encourage the Addis based Ambassadors to advise national capitals on the necessity for urgent ratification and initiate discussion on the steps required for domestication of the protocol.

D. Popularisation of the Protocol

It is critical to ensure that African women everywhere are aware of the Protocol and its provisions so as to avail themselves of the opportunities provided by it. We suggest a number of strategies for the African Union and African states to assist in this process of conscientisation including:
? Convene high-level events around the Protocol to be covered by the African and international media
? Encourage high-level government officials to speak in favour of the Protocol

For the African women’s movement, we need to:
? Convene regional and national meetings of the African women’s movement around the Protocol
? Create alliances between women parliamentarians and parliamentary groupings—regionally, sub-regionally and nationally.
? Develop clear targets and indicators for the Protocol and conducting/disseminating research showing the gap between these targets and indicators and the reality on the ground
? Conduct and disseminate research around coverage of the Protocol and its provisions in the African media and engaging with the African media on the basis of that research
? Engage with African women’s media organisations, particularly sub-regional ones, including through sharing information on the Protocol and training on how to cover it and its provisions
? Campaign in the African media through both the strategic placement of self-generated content as well as pro-active use of other opportunities (for example, invitations to speak during interviews) and lobbying for those opportunities with the African media
? Ensure coverage by the African media of key meetings (for example, AU summits) through cyber dialogues, press releases, press conferences during these meetings and involvement of appropriate staff from the African media in all meetings (relevant media persons, analysts, commentators, feature writers)
? Ensure engagement with diverse media, particularly community media (for example, community radio) so as to reach the broadest base possible of African women
? Feed into other campaigns (for example, the annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender based Violence, 25th November to December 10th) and engagement with key campaign organisations around the issues covered by the Protocol

E. Mobilizing Resources for the Protocol’s Implementation

It will be particularly important to ensure that adequate resources are available for the Protocol’s implementation at the national level. We thus propose the following strategies around resource mobilization for the Protocol’s implementation:
? Identify non-monetary actions that can be taken by Governments to implement the Protocol including the removal of all discriminatory laws
? All states to support the establishment of a Special Rapporteur on Laws that discriminate against women by the UN Commission of Status of Women (UN Resolution 49/3) by March 2006
? Identify easy ‘quick wins’ for initial budgetary allocations for African states
? Identify core costing obligations arising from the Protocol’s provisions through partnerships with Gender Budget Initiatives at the national level
? Develop facts and arguments for the budgetary demands
? Building alliances among relevant civil society constituencies as well as with appropriate entry points in national executives and parliaments
? Promote public debate on budgetary demands (for example, taxation and expenditure reviews)

F. Litigation and Negotiation around the Protocol

The Protocol is a legal instrument for the protection of African women’s rights. But it is a legal skeleton, requiring court action to give it blood and flesh. For it to become relevant and useful at the national level, participants discussed legal strategies to fast-track its implementation including strategic litigation and alternative dispute resolution (ADR).

Strategic litigation includes constitutional test cases to determine and address legal barriers to the Protocol’s realisation so as to fast-track the law reform process required under domestication and harmonisation. Participants here noted new ways of asserting/pleading constitutional human rights provisions under international human rights law, namely though: the theory of legitimate expectation; the Bangalore principle; and the interpretive principle.

We identified the following strategies:
? Supporting African women’s organisations offering strategic litigation
? Carrying out strategic litigation around the Protocol and sharing jurisprudence continentally
? Supporting any court case impacting on women’s rights including amicus curiae brief preparation
? Using ADR to advance the Protocol where appropriate
? Carrying out judicial training on the Protocol
? Engaging with law schools and bar associations on the Protocol
? Advocating around the appointments to the African Court
? States to sign declaration enabling individuals and civil society to file cases at the African Court
? Partnering with the Coalition on the African Court on the establishment and the appointment of judges to it that are competent in African women’s rights
? Increase the number of nominations to the African Court by November 30, 2005 — of the 14 nominations received only four are from women so far.

Maintaining Momentum on the Protocol

Many challenges clearly persist with respect to realising the Protocol. While the Protocol is not a ‘gift’ but concerns African women’s rights, its realisation will require commitment and creativity. It will require ‘building power’ nationally and regionally which entails expanding constituencies, being well-structured and informing ourselves about the opportunities for its advancement that already exist. It will also require consistent, strategic and sustained pressure on African states for its entry into force, its universal ratification, its domestication and implementation. We hereby promise our continued engagement in these processes and urge the engagement of all else concerned.

* Present during the conference were the following

Women, Gender and Development Directorate, African Union Commission, Commission of Political Affairs, African Union Commission, Office of the Legal Counsel, African Union Commission, African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights, Federal Ministry of Women’s Affairs, Government of Nigeria, Ministere charge de la Promotion de la Femme et des Affaires Sociales, Government of Dijbouti, Government of Malawi, Office of the Vice President and Secretary of State for Women’s Affairs, Government of The Gambia, Embassy of the Republic of Angola, Embassy of the Democratic Republic of The Congo, Embassy of the Republic of Gabon, Ministry of Gender Equality, Government of Namibia, African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies (ACDHRS), Akina Mama wa Afrika (AMwA), Association des Femmes Juristes du Mali, Cellule de coordination sur les practiques traditionelle affectant la sante des femmes et des enfants (CPTAFE)-Guine, Child Rights Advisory, Documentation and Legal centre (CRADLE) – Kenya, Coalition on Violence against Women (COVAW) – Kenya, CREDO for the Freedom of Expression and Associated Rights, Eastern African Sub-regional Support Initiative for the Advancement of Women (EASSI), Equality Now – Africa Regional Office, Reseau Inter-Africain Des Femmes, Medias, Genre et Developpement (FAMDEV)- Regional, Federation of Women Lawyers – Kenya, Federation of Women Lawyers – Uganda, African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), Forum Mulher – Mozambique, Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practises (IAC), Media Watch organisation-Mauritius, Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), Pro-poor advocacy Group - The Gambia, Sister Namibia,
Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP), Urgent Action Fund Africa, Voix des Femmes –Burkina Faso, Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), Women’s Legal Centre – South Africa, Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Alternatives (WRAPA) – Nigeria, ActionAid International and Oxfam

Two weeks ago in Pambazuka News 221, Mukoma Wa Ngugi expressed disappointment with the constant comparison of New Orleans to the Third World in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a compliment to that article Khalil Tian Shahyd argues that the application of human rights standards in relation to the debate over the terms ‘refugees’ and ‘internally displaced persons’ could help America deal with the crisis.

Listening to the many news reports and coverage of the disaster left by Hurricane Katrina, it is easy to get frustrated from the lack of depth of discussion. The absence of intelligent debate can be witnessed particularly around the latest hot bed issue, the use of the term, 'refugees'.

Many African-American leaders quickly responded to its use in denunciation. Charging that it devalued a people who are 'American' citizens and taxpayers to the national economy, these leaders demanded the survivors be referred to as 'victims' or simply 'survivors'. The cries from Black leadership grew so loud that President Bush himself had to clearly state in a recent interview his opinion that in fact we are citizens, not refugees.

While being trained academically in the field of International development, the word refugee is one we discussed and used very often, without negative connotation or stereotype. This personal background led me to ask the question as to whether all the fuss against the use of the term was actually motivated by a latent 'American exceptionalism' whereby 'refugee' was a label unfit for people of such high international social status as American citizens. Perhaps the term, although widely used around the world, was meant to be reserved for the 'unfortunate' global majority born in the Global South, sometimes called the Third or Developing World. If this were the case then the advocacy against use of the term can only be termed as some form of humanitarian snobbery.

However, what the discussion on the subject shows in a less evident way, is the overall lack of interaction and integration of international human rights standards, tools and methodology into the repertoire of American civil society, political leadership, media and intellectuals.

While it is hard to say which came first, what should be noted however, is the existence of a circular cause-effect relationship between the lack of involvement of US based civil society and advocates in international rights discussions, and the US refusal to sign even the most basic commitments to human rights such as the CEDAW treaty on women's rights and the Child Rights treaty among others. Our continued lack of involvement plays into the interest of US foreign policy nationalists who continue strong arm tactics at the UN to achieve the interest of a narrow fundamentalist nationalism over internationally agreed mandates. Our isolation from international discussion has left us unaware into the happenings and possibilities for change that exist at the international level.

Not once since the controversy arose have I heard anyone -whether in the media or on internet blogs - use the internationally recognized standard label and definition of 'Internally Displaced Persons'. In fact the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has an entire agency, the Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division (IAIDD), whose mission it is to:

"…coordinate an effective response to the needs of the internally displaced people worldwide." (http://www.reliefweb.int/idp/)

The IAIDD bases its work on the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights', Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. (http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu2/7/b/principles.htm)

Although not legally binding, these principles are increasingly recognized as international standards by which all Internally Displaced People can measure and judge the effectiveness and extent of governmental response to their circumstances. This makes the principles a useful frame of analysis for advocates and defenders of the rights of the internally displaced from the Gulf Coast. As in all human rights legislation, which exists with little capacity for or assurance of implementation, the international pressure of shame is the best way to get governments who otherwise wouldn't, to implement their obligations.

A brief summary of some of the most relevant articles in the guidelines follows.

The first section covers principles 1-4 and gives a basic overview of the rights of IDPs to protection, and sets forth to identify the national government as obligated to positively enforce these rights. What this means simply is that realization of these rights requires government action, while inaction is tantamount to a denial of rights. Now perhaps it will become clear to advocates how these standards and language can be used. The section also explicitly warns against discrimination in the guarantee of these rights, and speaks to the special needs of women, children and the elderly for protection.

Section two, which covers principles 5-9 highlights, the obligation of the national government and international authorities to prevent circumstances that would require displacement. Principle 7 Article 2 states that authorities have an obligation to ensure adequate accommodation for those displaced, such that:

"…such displacements are effected in satisfactory conditions of safety, nutrition, health and hygiene, and that members of the same family are not separated."

Further, if displacement occurs in an emergency as is the case in the Gulf Coast, the authorities are responsible to ensure all people full disclosure of information as to where they will be relocated and about the extent of compensation. We have all heard and read accounts of people forced to board busses with no prior knowledge of where they are going and not being allowed to leave after finding out.

Principle 9 outlines the special obligations states have to minority groups and indigenous people who hold 'special' dependency to their native land base. The uniqueness of New Orleans' Afro-Creole culture, nurtured by the streets and climate of the city, can meet the status of 'special' dependency.

Section 3 deals extensively with the obligations of authorities to protect those displaced from violence and harm. Although primarily written with the context of a war situation in mind, it is easily transferable to the context found in the Gulf, particularly New Orleans, where the lack of response and deficit of organized community institutions opened an opportunity for the breakdown of civility in some cases. Principle 16 in this section proclaims the right of IDPs to know the whereabouts of family and obligates authorities to gathering and relaying this information. It appears through news reports that this is one area of some success so far, within obvious limits.

Again, principle 17 declares the obligation of authorities to reunite separated families, which from what I can tell from news reports is happening fairly consistently.

Principle 18 regards the rights of IDPs to adequate standards of living, food, water, clothing and shelter, medicines and sanitation. All these completely broke down for about six days into the aftermath. Attached to this principle is the special emphasis on the involvement of women in the planning and distribution of these basic needs, which makes sense being that it is women who are overwhelmingly responsible for meeting these needs for families. The positive psychological effect of having control over redistribution could be important as well.

Further principles deal with rights to education, and possessions.

Section 5, the final section, deals explicitly with the rights to return, and the conditions upon return to their homes. It sets forth the obligations of authorities to create the conditions that will be necessary for this return, which has been proposed in some instances. Principle 28 Article 2 states clearly that:

"Special efforts should be made to ensure the full participation of internally displaced persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and reintegration."

This statement I feel marks the major battle to be fought in the coming months and years as the business elites, real estate developers and local chambers of commerce will move to solidify their advantage within the redevelopment process. This section also calls on the authorities to commit to full compensation for those returning or those choosing to resettle in another area.

I hope this outline of the International Human Rights Standards on IDPs might deepen the stagnant debate and ranting over the right legal definition for the people of the Gulf Coast affected by Hurricane Katrina. It could in fact be that the reluctance of the administration to use the term is precisely for fear of being bound or called into account based on these very standards. How and if they are to be used in the debates to come will need to be decided by civil society and supporters in the Gulf region. What I hope will be gained from this is that people will realize the possibility and existence of rights beyond the narrow base upon which American constitutional rights are based.

I hope I have been able to contribute to making advocates aware of tools they may not otherwise have thought to consider.

* Khalil Tian Shahyd is from New Orleans, a community activist and graduate student of Sustainable International Development with a focus on Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Community Development in the Lower Mississippi Basin Region. He is currently in New Delhi with the UNDP working on state-level Human Development Reports. He plans to return to New Orleans and organize an HDR on the Lower Mississippi Basin region. He can be reached at: [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

“You have to be a genius to make a loss in a beer business,” writes Issa Shivji as he critiques the false logic behind privatization on the African continent. The first entities to face privatization were those that were most successful, he notes, with the subsequent argument for further privatization pushing the line that privatization led to a quick turnaround in the fortunes of ailing state enterprises.

The privatisation mania has gripped us like an unpreventable plague. The privatisation list is being expanded inexorably. Whether we admit it or not, and whatever the language we may use to rationalise it, the fact remains that privatisation is thrust down the throats of African governments by the BWIs (Bretton Woods Institutions) and the dominant Western powers. Even the so-called debt relief by the G8 is predicated on privatisation as one of the conditionalities. And the BWIs have a peculiar way of arguing.

The failures of privatisation are used to argue for more privatisation of more resources. The argument goes, “if you don’t privatise enough, you cannot reap its benefits”. And, of course, the success of privatisation per force calls for more privatisation. Either way, the argument is self-fulfilling.

The first rationale was that loss-making parastatals were a burden on the taxpayer. Privatisation would ensure that they were turned into efficient, tax paying enterprises. Yet, of course, the first parastatals to be privatised, like the breweries, were not loss making. You have to be a genius to make a loss in a beer business. Their “quick successes” in terms of turnover and tax revenues were used to justify other privatisations.

Obviously, no private investor would want to buy a loss making enterprise. So they have to be sold at dirt-cheap prices without liabilities and losses. Liabilities have to be taken over by the state, which means the very taxpayer who was supposed to be rescued from the loss making parastatal in the first place. Invariably, one of the first casualties of privatisation is workers, thousands of whom are made redundant. The new owners refuse to pay retrenchment benefits. The government has to do it, if at all. So the taxpayer assumes another liability while at the same time some of the tax payers fall out of the tax payers list as they join the queues of job-seekers.

No private profiteer would want to put in his capital unless he makes profit, and, not just profits, but high rates of profit. Africa today offers very high rates of return on capital, what with its rich resources and dependent governments. As Mwalimu (Julius Nyere) once said, Africa attracts only missionaries and mercenaries: missionaries to console its poor, and mercenaries to oversee its pillage.

But profit-making assumes certain minimum conditions. It is the state which has to take on the burden of creating the enabling environment for capital to make profits: build the infrastructure and supply water and electricity and telecommunications at cheap rates; control recalcitrant workers; maintain law and order and facilitate various service providers - from the entertainment industry to catering to security companies - to service the new “community of expatriates”. It is believed that Africa today has more expatriates than at the time of independence.

But then our water and electricity and telephone parastatals are not efficient. Their tariffs are high. Our markets are below standard; our meat is not hygienic and our tomatoes and onions and oranges do not meet the minimum size. So utilities too have to be denationalized, if not by outright sale, then via leasing and management contracts. Squatters have to be cleared to make way for supermarkets and expatriate villages to supply roasted meat from South Africa and cereals from Switzerland.

But it is not easy to turn around utilities into profit making ventures. Their plants and machinery are outdated. Their billing systems have lots of leakages. Since profits or commissions depend on revenue, more efficient water meters and electric meters have to be imported. Once again the state is called upon to provide enabling finance for rehabilitation. It is obliged to take loans from the World Bank and elsewhere to help the investor to import the necessary machinery. Of course, the loans have to be serviced and repaid from the taxpayer’s money – whether the existent or yet-to-be-born. While public debts mount private profits rocket, all in the name of development.

But corporate profit making has to look for new terrains constantly. From producing commodities to turning pubic goods into commodities, the corporate capital moves from manufacturing to public services, education and health and water and energy and from commoditizing land to privatising forests.

Privatisation and commercialisation of forest products is the new trend. A recent story in Tanzanian newspapers reported the deal to lease out the Longuza Teak Plantation to Kilombero Valley Teak Company (KVTC) and is only a tip of the iceberg. Forests have become important to corporate capital not only for timber resources but for bio-resources. By the same token, the implication of delivering forests to corporate capital go beyond the issues of deforestation, as corporate capital turns them into producers of raw material for their veritable workshops of genetic engineering.

Privatisation of forests and forest products has elicited a lot of resistance in Latin America and Asia and even some developed countries including Canada and the United States. The implication and effects of privatising forests are far reaching. These have been debated and discussed in other countries.

We need to learn from the experience of others and re-assess our own. Let the Longuza incidence open up a wide ranging debate on the issues of privatisation generally, but more particularly, the implications of privatising – in whatever form – one of the most important resource and heritage, our forests.

Let us not deliver our future livelihoods into the hands of corporate pirates.

©Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

* Please send comments to

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) SMS is being used to monitor child rights violations. In Argentina indigenous communities are using SMS to halt the bulldozers that destroy their forest livelihoods. And in the Philippines, angry activists have used SMS to hold government to account. The power of cellular technology is no longer up for debate; what remains to be discussed is how to maximize it for social good. Mobile Active Convergence, held recently in Canada, did just this.

The goal of the first ever conference on using cell phones and SMS in campaign, human rights, and political work was to “help speed the dissemination of innovative practices and technology by skill and knowledge-sharing among participants”.

What came out of the three-day event, held in Toronto, Canada between 22-25 September, went far beyond this expectation, as a diverse group of people from around the world banged their heads together, mixed their ideas and thrashed out a vision for just how far cellular technology can go in creating a better world. The end result was new ideas, the formation of a lasting network and the production of a body of knowledge available to many beyond the confines of the conference.

Organised by Green Media Toolshed (http://www.greenmediatoolshed.org/) and Aspiration (http://www.aspirationtech.org/), 40-odd participants from North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia explored strategies and tactics for the use of cell phones as an organizing tool towards the end of helping civil society activists capitalize on the global wireless phone infrastructure for advocacy communications and organizing.

Key areas addressed by the conference included tactics, networking and funding. The conference produced guides on how to use SMS in organizing work, discussed organizing challenges in the South and addressed issues of language and access. (Read the full conference proceedings by visiting http://www.mobileactive.org/wiki/index.php?title=Proceedings) The conference produced a declaration on the use of mobile phones entitled “Without the people mobile tech means nothing”, which can be read at (http://www.mobileactive.org/wiki/index.php?title=Without_the_people_mob…)

The stories told below were related to Pambazuka News by three participants at the conference, each of whom are using cellular technology in their work to confront power and create change.

* Bukeni, Ajedi-Ka-Child Soldier Project, DRC

“My name is Bukeni and I am from the eastern part of the DRC, South Kivu Province, Uvira. I am a director of a local NGO called Ajedi-Ka-Child Soldier Project and am also a filmmaker. I make films on child soldiers in the DRC and started working on this issue in 1998.

In my town many children were abducted by the RCD-Goma during the conflict in the DRC. There was a militia called the Mai-Mai which was recruiting children by force. At that stage I was a student in Bukavu in 1998. Parents began to send me letters asking me to advocate for information about their children.

I went to the chief commander to talk to him. It was hard to reach him but eventually I got an audience. The list of children that I got from parents contained 22 names and I showed him the list. After discussion he agreed to do what he could and we agreed to meet in a week. When I returned I had to give the bodyguards cigarettes to be able to get an audience with the commander, who provided a list of 11 children who had been found. They said they could not do anything else and warned me not to insist - they threatened they would shoot me. I asked what message I should take to the parents and they told me to tell them that I had found nothing. I sent a letter to the parents telling them what I had found out.

By that time it was Christmas holidays and some parents came to thank me when I returned home. After that I tried to contact some friends to see what could be done to advocate. But the problem was that in the villages there is still a great deal of insecurity. However, we knew relatives in these villages and so we went to them to find out from other parents who had the same problem. We met again after 10 days and in that time had collected the names of 110 names of children who had disappeared. We decided to set up an NGO. Our primary goal was to advocate for these children and to monitor abuses.

In 2 000, I established a transit centre to accommodate children being demobilised from camps. In the training camps I would find hundreds of children and would speak to the commanders to get 3,4,5, or 6 children back. Up to last year we have been able to demobilise 310 children. Primarily we are doing demobilisiation and reintegration by uniting the children with their parents. We also do advocacy to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers.

Advocating in the camps is not without risk. I have been arrested four times and beaten twice.

In 2003 I introduced the use of video as a tool of advocacy. Some parents have encouraged their children to join militia because they believe that it will help to protect them. I began to try to go into the camps to make footage and in 2003 made my first film. The quality was not good, but in 2004 I found a partner in Witness, who specialise in using videos as a tool of advocacy. The video I made had the goal of sensitising the local community to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers. Since June 2005 the video has been screened in villages and sometimes 1000 people come to watch it.

In the villages people often don’t have access to TV. They are sometimes just fascinated to see the images so we often screen it twice so that the message sinks in the second time. The video has been a huge success.

This year in May I also made a video focusing on girl soldiers. The real reason for their recruitment is sexual exploitation. I addressed it to the international community because we need international action because our courts are not effective. Last year the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said the DRC would be the first country investigated before the ICC. The video called on the ICC to take into consideration the recruitment and use of child soldiers because that is a war crime under the ICC. The video raised the necessity of prosecuting those responsible.

In our activities we also do reporting and monitoring activities on child rights. In 2000 we implemented village committees for child protection whose role is in reporting and monitoring on child rights violations. Each committee has five members and are established in each village and are known by the community. Usually when there is a situation they compile a report and send it by mail to our office, but this can take 4-5 days.

During May I got a small grant from a New York based organisation called Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict. I submitted a small proposal that asked if they could provide us with cellphones so that the village could provide reports. We now have 15 committees in 22 villages. They report by cellphone and SMS about abductions and maiming, who is responsible and who the victims are.

For example in a village called Akwe, there was a girl who was shot by militia. Information was collected about who shot her and it was reported to our office. We alerted the local authorities and asked them for quick intervention to make sure that an arrest was made and an investigation done. This was all through SMS and cellphones. It was very fast. Unfortunately, the authorities could not arrest those responsible because in our area there is impunity. We collect about two reports a week, but also do verification.

I have a passion for working on this issue. I am working voluntarily. These children are our children. Let us do something to solve the problem – what we can do is advocate for a cessation of impunity and of violations of child rights and maybe then these children can build a better future for the whole nation.”

* Trixie, TXTPower, The Philippines

“We were initially a consumer advocacy group formed in 2001. This was the year that President Estrade was ousted and one of the tools that we used was SMS. It took SMS to mobilise people to go out on the streets and vent their frustration.

During that time if you were a mobile phone subscriber you received 100 free SMS messages. When companies saw how much people were texting, they looked at decreasing the amount and in August 2001 this is what they proposed. Activists felt that something had to be done.

We formed TXTPower and one of the ways in which we fought against this was through a text boycott. At that time 100 million messages were being sent a day. One text message equals one peso so that was a loss of $2m a day for the companies. Almost immediately the companies made a public announcement saying they would not remove the text allocation.

The next major thing we did was in 2003 when the country was in the middle of a financial crisis. An IMF suggestion was to tax text messages. We said that this was really not going to happen. If something is already free, how are you going to tax it?

This led on to August 2004 when we picketed congress and sent messages out saying ‘Texters Revolt! Say no to text tax!’ We got the cellphone number of the speaker of the parliament and told people to text messages to that number. We also had overseas workers join in the campaign. It became front page headlines in the newspapers in September and it forced the speaker to declare that he would not tax text messages. There are still proposals to tax messaging but we are monitoring it closely. We had some complaints from the speaker because he could not use his cellphone for some time!

Last year we extended our engagement to the May 2004 national elections where we supported progressive party list groups. Cheating and vote-buying were common place. We therefore focused our activities on monitoring and had a central area where we set up a computer to receive messages from people in the regions telling us if there were problems or vote buying. A quick reaction team would be composed of a lawyer, a human rights worker and representatives from different parties.

Our most notorious activity was a few months ago. In the elections there were allegations of cheating. There were wiretaps of the president speaking to an election official. The Department of Justice declared that anyone in possession of wiretap recordings could be arrested at any time. A few days later people made a ring tone out of the tapes and were playing it on their phones. We had the idea of loading the ring tone up onto our website. We had to consult on the legal implications, but eventually we went ahead with it. There was an overwhelming response – we had 300 000 hits on our website in two days. Others emailed us different versions of the ring tone. Sometime later the president apologised for talking to the official.

Anger motivates me. We are an angry bunch of people. The economy is bad – the government does not care about the people. The cellphone is a way for people to express how they feel. Our government hides a whole lot of truth from its people – we have a right to know the truth and advocate to get the government to act in the interests of the people. For this we have been called cyber-terrorists.

We are just a loose group of people. We have no money and no offices. It’s just a group of really angry activists.”

* Oscar, Greenpeace, Argentina

“One of the many campaigns is against forest destruction and we work very closely with indigenous people. In this area the indigenous communities are fighting for the right to their land and are facing trouble because land owners buy up land to cultivate Soya, which is 99% genetically modified. These communities have a long history of resistance to eviction and the destruction of the forests.

One of the problems we detect is that there are no landlines to stay in contact if landowners are trying to destroy homes and forest. We gave mobile phones to different leaders in the communities and are using them to get messages from people.

When we get warnings that the forest is being destroyed we go into action with motorbikes to stop the bulldozers. We blockade the bulldozers with chains and demobilise them. SMS is also used to network and for organising protests. It is a good tool for remaining in close contact with local communities because one of the problems is that the communities are remote and don’t know each other. We now have around 50 leaders with mobile phones and they represent around 10 000 people.

Sometimes the bulldozer operators transmit that we are in action and they call the police, who wait for us at the entrance to the forests. Sometimes we take videos to show the media what is happening. We also have a helicopter which we sometimes use for escape. The Plan B is that we are arrested and one person escapes with the footage in order to get it to the media. Sometimes the police are violent and don’t respect the laws.

The circumstances of these people is that they are very poor and have no access to water or energy. They live in small communities of 5-10 families inside the forest. The forest is very important to them because it is a source of water and food.

According to legislation, the indigenous people have the right to their land but the problem is that they don’t have papers to show that the property belongs to them. Actually the government is selling the land to big landowners who have 10 or 50 000 hectares of land. In some cases it is difficult to know how many hectares of land they own. Once it is sold the bulldozers build routes and then deforest the area and grow Soya. The soil is very fragile and after a few years it becomes a desert.

Soya is a big international business and one of the reasons for the recovery of the economy is the export of Soya. Indigenous people are being evicted and end up on the borders of the big cities to live in very poor areas.

We are winning the local fights. We have stopped the sale of forests in a legal way and stopped the bulldozers with strong local resistance. We are now in a deadlock – they are not going ahead but they are not surrendering. This is the situation now. But Soya expansion means money and a ‘good’ economy.”

* Patrick Burnett works for Fahamu.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

The 60th anniversary of the United Nations in September this year has re-ignited debate over reform of the organisation. But, asks Nicola Bullard, is reform of the organisation really a priority? Bullard debates the issue of the UN’s relevance for social movements, arguing that perhaps the issue is not about reform, but about joining with social movements and communities to build the political and institutional tools so that "we the peoples" can be transformed into an active part of global democracy.

"Ask not what you can do for the United Nations but what the UN can do for you," with apologies to John F Kennedy.

When US president George W. Bush announced that he would invade Iraq, with or without the support of the United Nations Security Council, he repeatedly drew attention to the weaknesses and failings of the United Nations. In effect, he threw down the gauntlet to the UN and, in so doing, inadvertently revived debate about the role of the UN and especially the need to reform and "strengthen" the UN as a foil to US unilateralism.

This debate has become even more alive in the lead up to the UN's 60th anniversary in September this year. It has been fuelled by scandals over the oil for food programme, allegations of nepotism and corruption, release of the high-level report on global security and jockeying for seats in the proposed expanded Security Council. Throughout, the US has maintained an attitude of belligerence and self interest: an attitude underscored in a recent report "American Interests and UN Reform" which confirms the US' lack of vision when it comes to the UN. President Bush's decision to appoint John Bolton as his ambassador to the UN, despite failing to get approval from the Senate, indicates that this posture will continue.

The UN has been in need of reform from the day it was founded because of its "fatal flaw": that the Security Council institutionalises the post-World War 2 balance of power. Throughout the Cold War era, East-West politics were played out in the UN, and were particularly evident in the functioning of the Security Council. Along with its veto power in the Security Council, the US has always used its financial leverage to serve its interests inside the UN. Nonetheless, despite the power plays, stand-offs and bureaucratic sclerosis, there remains a considerable degree of support for the UN amongst some governments, especially those for whom "one country one vote" in the General Assembly is the rare opportunity to be heard on the international stage.

The UN also has many supporters amongst NGOs and some sectors of civil society who believe it has the potential to curb excesses of power, redress injustices and to form the basis of democratic global governance. Some support it simply because their own existence is tied to the fate of the UN.

The prospect of a reformed, democratic and powerful UN is, of course, very tempting: not only as a means of reining in the US but because the global problems of violence, war, inequality, environmental degradation, exploitation and insecurity, desperately need concerted, international action.

Four reasons why UN reform is not the priority

But before we jump on the "save the UN" bandwagon, we should ask the simple question: is the UN worth saving? Whose interests does it serve? Would a "reformed" UN have the capacity to deal with pressing global concerns? Where is the potential for democratising the global system when the main sources of the "democracy deficit"- the market and militarised, globalised capitalism - are outside the UN system? Is it realistic to imagine that the UN could "control" the market and curtail the world's superpower? And, most importantly here, what sort of reforms, if any, would address the concerns of peoples' organisations and social movements, especially those struggling for basic rights such as land, water, work, housing, health and education?

Given the enormity of the power imbalances in the global system, I do not believe that reform of the United Nations is where we should be focusing our efforts. This conclusion is based on an assessment of the present situation, of which there are four important characteristics.

First, the inter-state system on which the United Nations was founded has changed radically in the past 15 years resulting from the processes of economic integration and globalisation in the post-Cold War era, and where US hegemony has no challenger. The consequences of this for UN reform are significant given that states themselves have unequal economic and political power and, as economic integration deepens, fewer and fewer possibilities to shape their own economic and political destinies.

Second, states are no longer the main interface between their citizens and the world beyond their borders. This function is now shared by transnational corporations and financial markets, the Internet and the media, all of which contribute to transforming the consciousness of citizens about their location in a global system. The borders of the nation state no longer exclusively define our physical, political, economic and psychological horizons.

Third, many of the proposed reforms of the United Nations system, such as an expansion of the Security Council or establishing an Economic Security Council, do not address the underlying balance-of-power dynamic that shapes all decisions of the UN -- that is, the balance of power between the US and the rest of the world, and between the globalised capitalism and citizens. Until these fundamental imbalances are resolved, the United Nations will be nothing more than the ineffective "conscience" of the world.

Fourth, the foundations of the United Nations - the Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the derivative human rights conventions - are potentially powerful tools for emancipation. However, while the UN has been exemplary in establishing norms, it has failed, almost without exception, to develop effective instruments to monitor and prosecute states, institutions, individuals and corporations that fail to meet their obligations to uphold individual and collective rights. (1)

Finally, it is impossible to build the superstructure of international democratic governance when the basic conditions for peoples' democracy are so lacking. Creating new means for social movements (2) to defend their rights within an international and universal framework would provide a more solid foundation for the long-term project of global democracy.

Therefore, I suggest that the starting point for democratising the international system is not reform of the UN but instead to find innovative and effective ways to guarantee that social movements have the means available to them at the local, national and international level to defend and protect their rights. That is, rather than using our time and creative energies on cosmetic reforms, we need to find the means by which social movements can use human rights as a tool in their daily struggles and, by doing this, build democracy from the bottom up.

What’s wrong with the UN?

The extent to which the United Nations is now lumped together with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as apologists for neo-liberal globalisation and United States imperialism should not be underestimated. Nor should the validity of the experience that leads many social movements and activists to that conclusion.

Since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the founding of the UN, many Third World countries have seen their sovereignty subverted by Cold War rivalries, often played out in the global political space of the Security Council and the United Nations, and their economies gutted by structural adjustment programmes imposed by the IMF and the World Bank.

In the early 1990s, the UN tried to capture the goodwill unleashed by the end of the Cold War to build a new international agenda of cooperation and common values. Throughout the decade, the UN sponsored a series of summits, dealing with everything from the environment to racism. (3)

The agreements reached in these unwieldy and frequently contentious conferences established a new set of international norms, based on the human rights declarations but elaborated and expanded to include key concerns, such as gender, environment, development and indigenous rights. Each of these summits has been followed-up with five-yearly reviews, often revealing the weakness of government implementation and even resulting in a dilution of previously agreed commitments. (4)

As the 1990s rolled into the 21st century, many of the previously agreed values that underpinned the United Nations -- such as multilateralism and the universality and indivisibility of rights -- were systematically attacked and undermined by right-wing governments and ideologues, as well as by corporations and the financial markets. Indeed, as the speed of global economic integration accelerates and as transnational corporations and finance capital seek to conquer every aspect of human activity, the possibility of achieving human rights, let alone the right to development or peoples' democracy, became an even more distant hope.

To make matters worse, the United Nations propagates the view that it is possible to give "globalisation a human face" by mitigating the worst excesses of market failure without addressing the causes of these excesses.

The scepticism about the UN is deep and justified. For, so long as the Food and Agriculture Organisation advocates genetically modified organisms (GMOs) under pressure from agri-business; so long as the UNDP promotes public private partnerships in basic services such as health and water under pressure from services industry; so long as the UN fails to sanction Israel for repeatedly abusing General Assembly resolutions; and so long as the United States is able to stand outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, the UN (and indeed all international institutions) will be seen as simply another arm of US and corporate domination.

Should the UN be fixed?

Efforts by the UN to present itself as the only thing standing between US unilateralism and chaos are at least partly motivated by organisational self-interest. The fact is that we already have "chaos" (if by this we mean war, poverty, and amoral economic and political systems) and we already have US unilateralism (although this is nothing new - the opportunistic use of unilateralism and multi-lateralism is a long tradition of US foreign policy).

There is no reason to believe that either a "strengthened" or a "reformed" United Nations would make any difference given that any reforms or increased powers will be subject to what is effectively a US veto (by one means or another). From the viewpoint of the UN however, reforms are necessary simply to hold on to what they have. Or, as the Prince reflects in Guiseppe di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardi "If we want things to stay the same, they are going to have to change." (5)

Faced with this record of failure, why should social movements - who are already over-stretched with their own struggles for land, water, food, shelter, work, social security, freedom from oppression and self-determination - spend their time "saving" the UN?

Reform to do what?

However, rather than be accused of throwing out the emancipatory baby with the reformist bathwater, it might be useful to ask whether a "reformed" UN would be useful for social movements.

This raises two questions: (i) what is the basis and character of the relationship between social movements and the United Nations and (ii) how could the UN be used to advance the interests and demands of the impoverished and marginalized who comprise the vast majority of "we the peoples."

To start answering these questions in a very tentative way, let's consider what "we the peoples" means 60 years after the words were first written. (6)

In 1945, "the people" were exclusively the subjects of the state, and all the ensuing institutional and legal constructions were based on a monogamous relationship between the state and its citizens.

These days, we are all "global" citizens in so far as global processes, such as the all-encompassing market, effect us all. However, we are far from being global citizens in terms of rights, either at the national level or at the international level, not least because the market effectively obliterates or subordinates any notion of universal rights by placing everything - whether it's water or knowledge - in the economic realm.

Nonetheless, as mentioned above, we are living in a time when our collective consciousness of being global citizens has never been greater. The global social justice, anti-war and alter-mondialist movements tap into and reinforce this consciousness, and it is here that we should look to build the foundations of global democratic governance.

"We the peoples" in the 21st century is a powerful idea because it is a self-definition that arises out of this consciousness, one which is generated and reinforced by collective action and solidarity. The elegant opening words of the UN Charter have become alive and manifest in the diversity of social movements and NGOs that constitute the "movement of movements." (7)

The "movement or movements" includes the global justice, anti-war, anti-globalisation, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements. It includes workers and women and migrants and peasants and young people and indigenous peoples and all who are struggling for peace and justice. It defies a single category or morphology and encompasses the local and the global, the vertical and the horizontal. It displays a tremendous capacity to create its own organisational forms and processes based on an ever-widening commitment to pluralism and democracy.

What, then, does this have to do with the UN?

Or, to put the question another way, what is the relationship between the emerging (potentially democratic) political and social "culture" of, say, the World Social Forum (as the most visible representation of the "movement of movements") and the declining (and increasingly undemocratic) culture of inter-state elite diplomacy represented by the United Nations.

Or, to put it yet another way, is the 1950s inter-state model of the General Assembly where everyone wears a suit and diplomats rule, relevant to the multi-coloured "assemblias" of the multitude?

Or, more concretely and positively: Does the essence of the United Nations and the universalism of the Declaration of Human Rights, speak to us in new ways?

The question is potent for social movements, which are, by definition, engaged in the struggle for rights. Whether farmers defending their right to seeds, women demanding control of their own bodies, landless claiming land, or unemployed marching for work and a living wage, social movements exist because people organise and mobilise to defend or demand their rights.

In most cases, achieving their demands is only one aspect of the organising and mobilising effort. Social movements also give identity and voice to sectors of society that are marginalized, silenced and forgotten. This is as true of the dalits in India as it is of the homeless in Europe. Transformation of social, and hence power, relations is inherent in the mere act of organising those parts of society that "polite" society (and that, almost by definition, is the part of society that runs the UN) would sooner forget.

In their day-to-day struggles, social movements use the language of rights and responsibilities to pursue their demands, often borrowing from the UN declarations to provide a legal (as well as a moral) base for their claims. The common language of rights also cuts across and (potentially) unites the masses or multitudes. However, in terms of translating the language of rights into actions and results, there are profound weaknesses. While the UN is exemplary at establishing norms in all areas, from the right to development to gender equality, it is particularly weak when it comes to establishing the means for their implementation.

The power for this resides exclusively with the state, yet the state itself is subordinated to the market. The political will and the economic means to "progressively realise" human rights have been decimated by the market, the "economisation" of social policy and the commodification of public goods and services. In a market economy, rights exist only for those who have the means.

Therefore, social movements struggling for their rights find themselves confronted not only with the failings of the state, but also with the formidable task of overcoming the power of the market and global capital.

Clearly, both the state and the United Nations are out of kilter with the realities of a globalising world where power operates through diffuse and unaccountable processes such as the financial markets, transnational corporations, and the media. State power in the Hobbesian sense still exists, but in the age of globalised capitalism hegemony can be exercised through many channels and often with profoundly undemocratic effects. (8)

Hardt and Negri argue that we should learn from the past. "Just as it was illusory in the eighteenth century to repropose the Athenian model on a national scale, so too today it is equally illusionary to repropose national models of democracy and representative institutions at an international scale." (9) They suggest that rather than generating reform proposals, we must develop "experiments for addressing our global situation." (10)

Much of the discussion about reforming the UN system misses the point about the current construction of power and, more importantly, how social movements themselves are attempting to restructure and redefine power. It is not the task of the social movements to build international institutions, no matter how "democratic" they might be. The work of the social movements is to shift power or - as the Zapatistas would have it - to redefine power.

The universal rights scripted within the UN system provide an invaluable tool for social movements as they confront the market, the state, landowners, the militia, international financial institutions and corporations. In Bolivia, for example, the language of "rights" - such as the right to water, the right to self-determination, and sovereignty over resources - are powerful mobilizing tools that have been used to great effect by the farmers, indigenous, workers and urban poor to redress wrongs and reclaim rights. And it is powerful because it taps into deeply held beliefs and emotions.

It is difficult to imagine what sort of institutional reforms would be useful in this struggle. What use would be an expanded Security Council to the coca farmers of Bolivia? Would an Economic Security Council defend the peoples' resources against the multi-nationals? It seems most unlikely. However, the still potent and universalising morality of the human rights discourse is one aspect of the United Nations that must be defended because it can be a genuinely powerful tool (albeit largely rhetorical) for social movements in their struggles.

Experiments for addressing our global situation – some suggestions

We have the elements of a common global agenda amongst social movements, regardless of their sectoral or geographic concerns. This agenda includes rolling back the powers of the corporations and the financial markets, reasserting public services and community control of water, forests, land and natural resources, eliminating debt and expanding economic and social policy space at the national and local level. In the framework of "deglobalisation" (11) this is seen as "deconstructing" the power of the markets and the institutions of neo-liberalism and "reconstructing" communities and livelihoods, local economies, nature and culture. In an attempt to manage this huge agenda, human rights could be an entry point.

But first, the responsibility for protecting and promoting human rights must be extended beyond the states to include corporations, business entities, financial markets, militias, and the international financial institutions. This is not based on a belief that these entities are "reformable" or that they can be "socially responsible" but simply because we need legal mechanisms with binding rules and enforceable penalties to curb the power of those who are presently virtually unaccountable.

As a starting point, the initiative to create the "Norms on the responsibilities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises with regard to human rights" through the Commission on Human Rights deserves our support, but the campaign also needs to be greatly strengthened to counter the current attempts to weaken or destroy it. Kofi Anan's appointment of John Ruggie as Special Representative on "human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises" is an ominous sign given that Ruggie's main claim on the job is his experience as architect of the Global Compact, the UN's non-binding and non-enforceable "code of conduct" which is widely regarded as a corporate "bluewash".

Although it would be politically and, one would hope, legally useful to expand the ambit of human rights to include corporations, approaches based in international law are just one element of a larger strategy that must be based in building movements and campaigns at every level to resist power and to regulate and roll-back financial markets and corporations. However, doing this in the framework of rights can potentially build a unity that is not possible in campaigns based on defending sectoral interests (for example workers or peasants) or ideological positions.

Similarly, elements of the Universal Declaration provide the "language" to defend and "de-commodify" human rights such as food, water, health and education. Indeed, work being done in the Commission on Human Rights (should it survive the swingeing reforms proposed by the Bush administration) by the special rapporteur on the right to food provides a powerful case for a complete transformation and de-commodification of agriculture and food production. (12)

The Commission's work on human rights and trade, debt, intellectual property, health and housing, amongst others, is equally useful.

However, the challenge of bringing those who operate comfortably in the quasi-legal world of international human rights together with the social movements remains. Indeed, as professor of international law Yash Ghai observed "a major weakness of the human rights movement has been the inability to involve the masses as subjects rather than objects of rights."(13)

Therefore, the task is not to "reform" the United Nations but to join arm in arm with the social movements and communities to build the political and institutional tools so that "we the peoples" can, ourselves, fulfil the promises made by the UN 60 years ago. Our work is to transform "we the peoples" from being the objects of an imaginary benevolent state to "we the peoples" who are the active subjects in building global democracy.

How to do this could be one of the common agendas for discussion at the World Social Forum and in the many local and national forums that are blossoming across the world. It is not an abstract proposition, but one that can and must be based in concrete campaigns and struggles. It would be a lot more interesting and useful that (yet) another session on the Millennium Development Goals, and almost certainly a more effective way to achieve them.

* Nicola Bullard is a senior associate with Focus on the Global South.

* A short version of this paper was published in "ONU: droits pour tous ou loi du plus fort? Regards militants sur les Nations Unies," CETIM, Geneva, 2005. Contact Julie Duchatel for more information [email protected] or visit their website http://www.cetim.ch/fr/publications_details.php?pid=115

* Please send comments to [email protected]

References;

1. The International Criminal Court may prove to be an exception, however the fact the United States refuses to recognise the jurisdiction of the ICC is evidence of the US' willingness to put narrowly defined national interests ahead of all else. Unsurprisingly, the recent report "American Interests and UN Reform" refers continually to the need to prosecute war criminals but makes no reference to the ICC.
2. In this paper, the term "social movements" is used in a descriptive and non-theoretical way to denote groups that are organised to defend and claim their rights, in particular social, economic and cultural rights. The list is long, but includes women, indigenous, "sans papiers" and migrants, landless, communities, workers and unemployed, and so on.
3. The list is long: World Summit for Children (1990), the World Conference for Education (1990), the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992), the World Conference on Human Rights (1993), the International Conference on Population and Development (1994), the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995), the World Summit for Social Development (1995), the UN Conference on Human Settlements (1996), the World Food Summit (1996), the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (2001) plus a string of "+5" and "+10" follow-up conferences. See Alison van Rooy, "The Global Legitimacy Game: Civil Society, Globalisation and Protest,' Palgrave, London, 2004, page 20.
4. For example, at the WSSD +10 in Johannesburg in 2002 there was significant "backsliding" with corporations making major inroads into the sustainable development agenda by pushing for the adoption of "solutions" such as "public private partnerships." Similarly in the women's and population review conferences, a great deal of political energy was spent simply maintaining a minimal line on reproductive choice in the face of the reactionary onslaught from the US and the Vatican.
5. Guiseppe di Lampedusa, "Il Gattopardo,"1958, quoted by Jose Saramago in "The Least Bad System is in Need of a Change," Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2004.
6. The opening lines of the Charter of the United Nations says: "We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourges of war, which twice in our lifetime have brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and the worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small and, to establish conditions under which respect for justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom."
7. Notwithstanding the need to update the Charter to incorporate gender, environmental sensibilities.
8. For example, the financial markets were able to force Brazil's popular, but as yet unelected, presidential candidate Lula de Silva to adopt market friendly economic policies even before the election was contested.
9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire," The Penguin Press, New York, 2004, page 307
10. Ibid, page 305
11. What is deglobalisation?
12. "The Right to Food: Report submitted by the special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Zeigler, in accordance with the humans rights resolution 2003/25," Commission on Human Rights, E/CN.4/2004/10, 9 February 2004
13. Yash Ghai, "Human Rights and Social Development," Democracy, Governance and Human Rights Programme Paper Number 5, UNRISD, Geneva, October 2001, page 43.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Mukoma Wa Ngugi is disheartened by the constant comparison of New Orleans to the “Third World”. The main thing, he argues, is that Americans cannot take full responsibility for poor black people and the policies that turned them into victims if they keep filtering poverty through the “Third World”.

Introduction

The devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is being compared to disasters in the “Third World” but with no specific countries or disasters named. And if not compared to this black hole or repository of disaster that is the “Third World,” a comparison to Africa is as specific as it gets. “New Orleans is a scene from the Third World”, “like the Third World”, “US Handles the crisis like a third world country”, “bodies floating on water reminiscent of Africa” etc. This has been a constant with news commentators, analysts, members of the senate and congress and other sections of America commenting on New Orleans. The accompanying statements to this have been “I cannot believe this is America” or “This is not supposed to happen in America”. It is supposed to and can only happen somewhere else. Attending a food festival event in Madison, Wisconsin I overheard a joke – “Where is New Orleans again? New Orleans is next to Somalia”.

What role is the “Third World” playing in how Americans are dealing with the disaster? Where does the “Third World” fit in the imagination of the American people? What does it mean to say that this is not supposed to happen in the United States? To me, it is almost as if by displacing disasters and human suffering to the “Third World,” the New Orleans disaster is not really happening in the United States. New Orleans is “out there” and everyone else is safe and American – the crisis in New Orleans is happening in a “Third World” outpost and the United States remains rich, strong and invulnerable.

The American citizen has been stewing in nationalism, manifest destiny and the myth of the democratic society that errs but never oppresses or marginalizes for so long that even a natural disaster cannot be seen and understood outside this lens. And the fact that most of the victims are predominantly poor and African American is not being understood as a creation of very specific domestic policies and conservative ideologies; it has to be filtered through the “Third World”.

Bush’s Remarks

It is interesting therefore to look at President Bush’s remarks after touring New Orleans on September 2nd after four days of inaction. His first sentence was “I've just completed a tour of some devastated country”. This is a detached statement but it gets worse - a little later he says: “I know the people of this part of the world are suffering…” and he goes on to talk about how progress is being made. Then he says: “ The people in this part of the world have got to understand…” Shortly after this, he says: “You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute, but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen.” He then again refers to his constituents as “good folks of this part of the world”. It is almost as if he is in a different country consoling its citizenry. He himself is so detached about what is happening in the very country he leads that he refers to it as “this part of the world”. As far as I know, no one in the mainstream media picked this up, they too are reporting on that “part of the world”.

Believing that humor is the best medicine, in the same speech he also makes a rather tasteless joke: “I believe the town where I used to come [to] from Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself, occasionally too much, will be that very same town, that it will be a better place to come to.” Now, this is a President who up to this point has not visited New Orleans, a disaster area that is being acknowledged as probably the worst in recent US history, yet, speaking to an evacuated, wounded and dying constituency, he refers to their drowned city that was their whole life as his old party ground. All in all President Bush gives the kind of speech a visiting leader would make during a hurriedly prepared press conference after being caught unawares by a natural disaster. It captures his inability to empathize, to really be one with the victims.

The Myth and the “Third World”

An American dying in a natural disaster will look like a human being dying in any natural disaster and not necessarily like an African. A homeless American looks like any homeless human being and not always like an African. And a natural disaster should not be seen as somebody else’s natural disaster but as one that afflicts all humanity. We are of a common humanity. It is the myth that only other nations torture that led to Abu Ghraib. It is the myth that only other countries have political prisoners that keeps political activists like Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier in American jails for fighting American marginalization. It is the belief that only other countries exile those that oppose their policies that has led to the bounty on Assata Shakur - exiled in Cuba for fighting for African American rights - being raised to one million dollars. And it is the myth that only other countries ignore and exploit their poor that led to the disaster in New Orleans.
But there are ways in which America is like the “Third World”. Privatization, which in “Third World” Countries becomes structural adjustment programs, has been happening in the United States since the Reagan years of small government, through the Clinton years that saw a full assault on welfare and affirmative action originally designed to buoy the marginalized, and through the Bush years that have been rewarding the rich while taking away from the poor through Federal and Supreme Court nominations that support big business and reduce the power of labor unions, among other things.

These have been the years of ‘blaming the victim’ while preying on them. They are poor because they are lazy – enter the “welfare queen”. While the mainstream United States was busy trying to convince itself that poverty and racism were things of the past or happened only to other nations, the marginalized were becoming even more vulnerable. Just like in the “Third World” in times of natural disasters and wars, it is the most victimized in New Orleans that are doing most of the dying.

Contradictions

The reasons why the poor couldn’t leave the city are quite easy to understand. They couldn’t afford it. They simply did not have cars or money for transportation, are jobless, or live pay-check to pay-check and couldn’t have had any money saved up for relocation. Where poor people owned houses to which they had mortgaged their lives, where their homes had become the marker of their humanity and achievement, staying put and essentially fighting for their lives was the only option.

Like the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, or the ongoing genocide in Darfur, this particular disaster had been telegraphed – we all knew it was going to happen, and more political and economic will, including a more comprehensive effort to evacuate the city of New Orleans, could have minimized human suffering. What makes it even worse is that the millions being pledged now by private citizens and corporations and the 10.5 billion initially pledged by the government could have saved New Orleans ten times over through improvement of infrastructure. Because of the federal government’s push for privatization which translates into public services being slashed or sold to private companies, perhaps the government simply no longer has structures in place to handle disasters. This could explain why Bush ended his speech with: “If you want to help, if you're listening to this broadcast, contribute cash to the Salvation Army and the Red Cross.” Each death in New Orleans was preventable. But money is not made in prevention but in reconstruction. Soon, like in Iraq, the big contracts for reconstruction will be on their way – some corporations will make a killing. Let the bidding begin.

Also, it is with a sense of irony that one reads of corporations like Wal-Mart contributing millions of dollars to the relief efforts. Yet were their employees in New Orleans working in better conditions and with better pay, some of those who couldn’t afford to evacuate would have been able to do so. These corporations are responsible for the loss of jobs through outside contracting to sweatshops in “Third World” countries where in turn occasional fires break out leading to hundreds of deaths. In “Third World” countries, they no longer pay government taxes in the tax free trade zones, leading to further destruction of already fragile and poor economies. Where these corporations have remained in the United States as retailers and manufacturers, they have seen to wages being cut. They are rabidly against unions and essentially use the community the same way colonial companies used colonized communities - for cheap labor, extraction of raw materials and of course as buyers of products whose production is finished elsewhere.

Thus coupled with a government that has engineered its own version of structural adjustment to maximize profit, and corporations that economically and politically colonize a community, the vulnerability - which in real terms is the result of victimization - seen in New Orleans is not a surprise. Rather, it is the culmination of well planned and orchestrated policies that consolidate wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the poor. Globalization is not resulting in a world that becomes better as it gets smaller, but rather in a world where poverty becomes more prevalent and more apparent. This globalization of poverty makes New Orleans a village in everybody’s backyard. Instead of outsourcing disaster to an unnamed “Third World” it seems to me that citizens of the United States should be placing the responsibility for the preventable deaths and suffering in New Orleans on their government and corporate board rooms.

* Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Conversing with Africa: Politics of Change and the forthcoming, Looking at America: Politics of Change.

* Please send comments to

Concerns over the impact of current Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiations between African countries and the European Union are mounting. Henning Melber warns the EU trade bureaucracy not to dismiss these concerns lightly, lest they be conceived as “an integral and active part of a new scramble for Africa, in which the EU competes with the US and China to gain access to and/or secure control over markets and resources primarily for their own interests.”

This commentary summarises some recent concerns that current trends in the EU trade policy towards African countries with special reference to the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) could do more harm than good and undermine future efforts towards regional collaboration. An earlier intervention of a similar nature (published in “Development & Cooperation”/D+C, no. 3/2005; see also for a related argument the commentary in “Pambazuka News” no. 197) had provoked the public disapproval of the former Director-General for Development at the EU Commission. In a reader’s letter to the journal, Dieter Frisch “had a bone to pick” with the author and did “not at all like the way that Melber calls the EU’s development-friendly and contractually negotiated EPA policy ‘anything but helpful’” (D+C, no. 7/2005). It is indeed necessary to discuss the substance and relevance of such arguments and concerns further.

Hence follows another effort to present a critical overview, which simply compiles and articulates in a hopefully concise way the reservations expressed by agencies and stakeholders in the current process, who tend to disagree with the view and approach of the trade department in Brussels. They reflect that despite the former EU official’s expressed trust in the “development-friendly and contractually negotiated EPA policy” others involved in the process draw markedly different conclusions. These deserve to be taken as seriously as the affirmative views - also and in particular by those who consider and advocate (if not even propagate) the current EU initiative as a step in the right direction.

Under the paradigm of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) a newly structured economic reality gains momentum. It organises trade relations in a way which requires questioning. This is the simple purpose of this overview, which continues to challenge the likely effects of the currently designed and pursued EPAs as anything but supportive (or helpful, for that matter) to the interests of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) member states.
EUs New Role: WTO, EPAs and regional integration
The EPAs negotiated between the ACP states and the EU not only seek to modify the Cotonou Agreement entered into with all ACP countries as a collective entity by means of separate sub-regional negotiations (which would even allow for bilateral agreements with individual countries instead) but also aim towards compatibility between EU–ACP trade relations and the WTO. But while the Cotonou Agreement, which was ratified in April 2003 and replaced the Lomé Convention, allows for negotiating alternatives to the EPAs, the EU Commission continues to pursue the one-track avenue EPAs stand for.

It might be worthwhile to recall the original objectives for EPAs from article 1 of the Cotonou Agreement, namely to honour that cooperation should “be centred on the objective of reducing and eventually eradicating poverty consistent with the objectives of sustainable development and the gradual integration of the ACP countries into the world economy”. But as a team of the German Development Institute (GDI) in a report on the prospects of the EPA negotiations for Tanzania at an early stage of the negotiations pointed out: “Trade liberalisation does not translate automatically into benefits -especially not in least developed countries, let alone for the poor - if this is not actively supported by and embedded in a whole range of other policy matters. How trade liberalisation can be made pro-poor is not outlined in the ‘EPA concept’.”

The EU uses the EPA negotiations to push through agreements on a number of sensitive matters (such as investment, procurement and competition policy) that were rejected by developing countries at the WTO negotiations during 2003. EPAs are about much more than only the suggested reciprocity within a narrowly defined WTO compliance: non-tariff barriers, such as environmental standards or sanitary and other provisions related to an EU consumer protection policy are crucial issues in the negotiations. This is enough reason to provoke fear that such agreements would reduce the policy space for African governments. It does not help to counteract such suspicions as long as even a high-ranking EU official such as Karl Friedrich Falkenberg (European Commission Director/Trade Directory General, Directorate C – Free trade agreements, Agricultural trade questions, ACP, Bilateral trade relations II) recognises in a briefing paper (“Trade Negotiations Insights”, vol. 3, no. 4/2004) “the right of countries, or rather regions, to regulate economic activity in their territory” and accepts the “idea of a preference in favour of local competition”, when he adds at the same time “provided it is not to be a discretionary one”.

The negotiations on future EPAs introduce serious implementation problems and a negative impact on regionalism within the ACP group and its African member states. Regional organizations within Africa are likely to have capacity problems when entering the negotiations. The matter is complicated further by the fact that all these regions present a mix of LDCs and non-LDCs. A likely result is the further fragmentation of the process of regional integration and a further side-lining of LDCs. Even at a high level Conference on European Development Cooperation at The Hague in September 2004, which discussed extensively the EU links to the South, concern surfaced about the EU position on trade liberalisation. As the summary report stated: “Everybody supported the call for a high level of flexibility in the EPA negotiations. Room should be created for asymmetrical trade relations, meaning that developing countries should be allowed to protect their markets against foreign competition on a temporary basis.” But as experience so far suggest, the EU trade commission seems determined to pursue its much stricter and less compromising course further.

EU Policy, EPAs and SADC

The negotiations by the EU aim at separate accords with each region, and no country may negotiate in more than one bloc. As such, SADC is reduced to seven countries (half of the member states) under the EPA negotiations. It is not far-fetched to see that there is an inbuilt conflict between regionalism as it exists and the negotiations of new multilateral processes. Countries might differ over the advantages between benefits from the continued protection of regional arrangements or the creation of individual preferential access within other trade agreements, but if regionalism is considered as a problem or obstacle towards further global harmonisation under the WTO, it stands little chance of being a viable point of departure for strengthening the South within the global trade arrangements.

The EU-SA free trade agreement, negotiated during the second half of the 1990s, has already had a highly divisive effect on the Southern African region. It entered into a preferential trade relationship with one country and thereby enhanced differences resulting from existing conflicts of interest among the national economies within the region. The fact that this affected directly the “satellite states” in the customs union (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland) was initially overlooked and understandably so the initial non-consultation of these countries was anything but a confidence building measure. South Africa herself, the monetary zone, the South African Customs Union (SACU) and SADC are already not in harmony at any time and less so given the effects of the free trade agreement on regional economic matters.

Hence the EU intervention adds more friction and the beneficiary effects of the FTA for South Africa cannot be used as a convincing argument in favour of more free trade policy with other – less industrialised – countries. South African interests and benefits are not identical with regional ones. Regional integration would have to include the interests of the junior partners in the neighbourhood. The political economy of such regionalism is a constantly negotiated arrangement, with shifting boundaries and changing coalitions of interests. But it clearly has to aim beyond the immediate gains of the sub-imperialist centre, as which South Africa is not only perceived but as which it is at least economically indeed acting under an aggressive expansion into African markets.

The EPA process does not seem to strengthen an alternative route, re-focussing on regional consolidation as a first step. SADC members had to make a choice to negotiate either within the East and Southern African (ESA) bloc or as a SADC Group. Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Tanzania opted to negotiate with the EC under the SADC configuration. It is revealing that the recommendations by the GDI study referred to above were then based on the assumption that Tanzania would negotiate in the East African bloc along side Kenya and Uganda. Meanwhile, Tanzania ultimately decided to join the SADC configuration.

SADC – EC EPA negotiations were officially launched on 8 July 2004 in Windhoek in the presence of EC Commissioners Danuta Hübner and Poul Nielson. Botswana’s Trade Minister acted as SADC coordinator. South Africa - which as mentioned had entered the FTA with the EU in 1999 as Trade, Development and Cooperation Agreement, since it was not considered as an ACP member country due to its more advanced economic status - participated in an observatory and supportive capacity. A Joint Roadmap was adopted, but criticism of the divisive EC approach (subdividing the countries of the sub-region into different SADC and ESA blocs) and the efforts to eliminate preferential trade clauses, which exist under the Cotonou Agreement for the LDCs, was increasingly articulated since then.

A Working Paper by The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek warned in mid-2004 that implementing EPAs as currently designed “violates the originally formulated requirements of the EU according to which ACP countries should have been treated depending on their different development status. This principle was already disregarded when negotiating the EU-South Africa FTA, where the EU locked-in BLNS countries in the same tariff structure as South Africa, without granting them improved market access.” The author sees the risk that EPAs imply a loss for LDCs “when opening their markets without receiving anything substantial in return”. Interesting enough, even South Africa’s Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel - known as a strong key player within the current trade liberalisation schemes - summarised the scepticism among Southern African countries in a lecture at the University of Sussex on 2 December 2004, when he stated: “Greater transparency of intentions would also be helpful – the EU’s request for Africa to divide into groups to negotiate … does little to help Africa coordinate its trade policies - thereby reinforcing the legacy of our colonial economic relationships.”

EPAs and Policy Coherence

Paul Goodison and Colin Stoneman have in an article in the “Review of African Political Economy” (vol. 31, no. 102) maintained “it would be an act of foolish optimism to expect integrity or honesty in the EU’s trade policy towards southern Africa and the wider ACP group”. Instead, as Cosmas Ochieng and Tom Sharman summarise in their report “Trade traps”, published with the London based advocacy group Actionaid International, the EPA initiative during its initial negotiations “has created new regional groupings that are inconsistent with, and undermine, existing African economic and political blocs. Reducing regional integration to trade liberalisation undermines the broader socio-economic and political objectives of existing bodies.”

For many, the outcome of the wider trade offensive, as represented in a combination of NEPAD, the EPAs and the US-American Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) is not encouraging. Referring to the likely effects for African economies, Margaret Lee warns in an article to the “News from the Nordic Africa Institute” (no. 3, 2004): “Anticipated costs include revenue losses, possibly resulting in the worsening of the regional debt situation; de-industrialization; increased unemployment; increased poverty; fragmentation of export and tariff regimes; loss of export competitiveness; undermining of local agriculture and industrial production arising from US and EU dumping; more trade diversion than trade creation; and undermining existing regional economic integration strategies.” And an IDS briefing paper by Christopher Stevens and Jane Kennan in mid-2005 comments upon the argument that EPAs will foster regional integration: “that there will be a significant effect – but a negative one”.

The report tabled by Actionaid International diagnoses that: “EPAs threaten African fiscal stability and public spending. They introduce investment agreements … that would undermine African policy choices. EPAs threaten African regional integration and lack an independent dispute settlement mechanism.”

Ochieng/Sharman therefore appeal that “European Union member states must revise the European Commission’s EPA negotiating mandate to withdraw the demand for reciprocal trade liberalisation” and stop “negotiations on investment, competition policy and public procurement”. They furthermore urge the European Parliament to “launch an investigation into the European Commission’s approach to the EPA negotiations and to exercise effective oversight over the Commission’s negotiating mandate, tactics and processes” while beginning “to immediately examine all possible alternatives to EPAs”.

Conclusion

It might be considered as “anything but helpful” to question “the EU’s development-friendly and contractually negotiated EPA policy”, as Dieter Frisch had put it in his letter. But it reflects the view of a variety of stakeholders in and observers to the current process, who would not agree with the label “development friendly” without further convincing evidence and results pointing in that direction. Instead, they wonder like Paul Goodison (in the “Review of African Political Economy”, vol. 32, no. 103) if the EU trade commission under Peter Mandelson offers a “new start or old spin” - and tend for the moment to conclude the latter.

The leaked documents from the Brussels headquarters of the EU trade department (and disclosed among others by an article in “The Guardian” on 19th May 2005), which showed that Peter Mandelson had initiated a public relations campaign in response to the British government’s critical position on the current format of the EPAs with the aim to counteract the “major and unwelcome shift” in the UK approach, did anything but eliminate such reservations.

As a recent assessment by the British advocacy group Christian Aid summarised: “for more than 20 years, ACP countries have been forced to liberalise their markets to such an extent that many now have economies that are more open than Europe’s. They are already integrated - often harmfully - into the world market. So any new trade agreement between ACP countries and Europe must both help them to improve and diversify what they produce and export, and allow them to protect themselves from imports. In the meantime, EPAs in their current form will do neither.”

The EU trade bureaucracy and its representatives would be well advised not to dismiss such concerns lightly. After all, they would not like to be conceived as an integral and active part of a new scramble for Africa, in which the EU competes with the US and China to gain access to and/or secure control over markets and resources primarily for their own interests, while the partnership talk serves as the necessary cosmetics and lip service. The EU-ACP process unfolding with the EPA negotiations is in its current format unable to meet the criteria for coherence with other fundamental principles of development paradigms and policies of the EU and its member countries, such as support to regional integration as a priority. In times of an intensified rivalry between the haves among the countries in this world to consolidate their particular interests within the regions of the have-nots, EU policy risks a loss of the positive image established and consolidated during various rounds of Lomé treaties earlier on.

To illustrate the case, one only needs to take note of the speech the Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa delivered on 31st August 2005 at the headquarters of the African Union, in which he explicitly took EU policies to task and warned of the devastating consequences of further globalisation. As he added: “I urge African leaders to think afresh about the place of our continent in a rapidly globalising world”. Governments and officials of EU member countries sharing responsibility for “the economics of failure” (Christian Aid) as it currently unfolds under the label of EPAs pursued by the trade directorate in Brussels ought to do the same.

* Dr. Henning Melber is Research Director at The Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden. This text is a short version of an input paper presented to the Second Expert Workshop “From Individual Action to a Common Strategy? EU policy on sub-Saharan Africa”, organised by the Development and Peace Foundation, 20/21 September 2005 in Bonn.

* Please send comments to

Egypt

Education – According to the UNDP, school enrolment rates in Egypt increased during the 1990s, and between 1995 and 2002 the enrolment rates in primary education for boys improved by 5% and 9% for girls. However, in rural areas, the illiteracy rate for females is almost twice that of males (15.5 and 8%, respectively) for children aged 12 to 15. For those aged between 15 and 25, literacy rates have improved for males, by about 12% and 25% for females. As is the case for children, adult literacy rates vary greatly by region, but on average, the estimated illiteracy rate for the entire population of Egypt (15 years and older) dropped only from 25.7% in 2000 to 24.3% in 2003. The UNDP report of 2004 identified barriers to education, which involve the conditions of school facilities, the methods by which students are taught and the implemented curriculum.

Gender - While girls and women are integrating themselves into Egypt’s educational system at a reasonable rate, their participation in the economy lags behind. The gender composition in the economy is more balanced in urban areas. According to the UNDP, the unemployment rates for women decreased from 23.8% in 1995 to 22.6% in 2001, when the rate for men was 5.6%. Politically, Egypt lags behind in terms of the number of women involved in government. There is only a 2.4% representation of women in the People Assembly and 8% in the Shura Council. The Egyptian government is, however, drafting a new election law that may include measures to ensure increasing numbers of women in parliamentary seats.

Health –The infant morality rate dropped from 44 out of 1000 live births to 38 and for children under 5. The eradication of Malaria and TB are showing good progress in Egypt, as Malaria has been under control for almost 10 years, while Tuberculosis only has an infection rate of about 32 cases per 100 000 people. The UNDP report states that HIV/AIDS rates are low in Egypt, at 0.01 percent, but there is a problem with Hepatitis C. Some villages have prevalence rates as high as 57%, and strong public awareness raising campaigns as well as infection control programs are needed to reverse this trend.

http://www.un.org.eg/Documents/MDGREnglish.pdf

Nigeria

Education – School enrolment rates for primary and junior secondary school in Nigeria fluctuated immensely between 1990 and 2000, according to the UNDP’s 2004 report. Enrolment increased between 1990 and 1994 from 68% to 86%, but declined to 70% in 1996. Literacy rates have also deteriorated for the population as a whole, falling from 58% in 1990 to 49% in 2001. Literacy rates among women and girls for this same time period fell from 44% to 41%. The UNDP report states that the challenges faced by the education system include resource and institutional constraints, poverty, culture and the quality of teaching.

Gender – Participation of women in secondary and tertiary education is limited, according to the UNDP, which has an overall effect on the involvement of women in stable wage employment and economic empowerment, although data shows that women are becoming increasingly represented in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector. Membership of women in politics is also limited, with only 1 woman out of 57 in the Senate and 3 of 445 in the Federal House of Representatives.

Health – Not a lot of progress has been made in reducing child mortality in Nigeria, according to the UNDP report. Under-five mortality rates have deteriorated since the 1990s and are now at rates of 243 and 153 out of 1000 births for urban and rural areas, respectively. It is very unlikely than Nigeria will be able to meet its goals for this target, due to obstacles such as poverty, low access to health care facilities, HIV/AIDS and poor maternal health. The HIV/AIDS rates for Nigeria are high, with estimates of between 3.2 to 3.8 million adults and children living with the disease at the end of 2003. In response, Nigeria’s HIV & AIDS Emergency Action Plan aims to increase awareness, promote behavioral change, foster community specific action plans, promote care and support, mitigate the effect of the disease, monitor and produce research.

http://www.undp.org.ng/Docs/NHDR/Executive_Summary.pdf

South Africa

Education – Enrolment rates in primary and secondary schools compare favorably with developed countries, at around 95%. However, there are low rates of high school completion for South Africans, and over half of high school graduates are white. The difference in attendance rates between girls and boys is nominal, according to the UNDP report of 2003, and in some cases is even higher for girls. The adult illiteracy rate for the whole of the country in 1991 was 14.6%, but has today fallen, with over 96% of the population literate.

Gender – While gender parity is at an acceptable level in the educational sphere, men dominate senior employment opportunities, and in turn, earn higher wages. Thus, women are relinquished to lower paying and less skilled positions. This can be seen in the decline of women in senior or managerial positions from 26.3% to 22.7% (1995 to 2001). The UNDP report states that politically, women hold almost one third or all seats in South Africa’s national parliament, comparing favorably to other developed countries.

Health – Under-five mortality has decreased in South Africa, from 93 to 70 per 1000 births, between 1990 and 1000, which is in line with the target of reducing child mortality by two thirds. This number was, however, higher in rural areas, with large disparities between the provinces. HIV/AIDS is an extremely pressing issue for South Africa, with one of the highest prevalence rates in the world. In 2002 an estimated 5.3 million people were infected. The UNDP report states that the areas that South Africa has targeted for improvement include prevention, treatment, care and support and research monitoring and surveillance.

http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0000875/docs/UNDP%20MDG%20Indicators…

Zambia

Education – Zambia is experiencing reversals in educational attainment, with the primary net enrolment ration dropping by 4% between 1990 and 2003. However, the proportion of students reaching grade 7 increased from 64% to 73% between 2000 and 2003. Literacy rates for girls continue to be lower than those of males. A significant reason for these rates is the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has caused a decline in the number of teachers, besides other obvious consequences. Rural schools suffer more than urban areas, due to overcrowding and lack of resources. The 2003 UNDP report states that Zambia’s government has attempted to reverse these trends through the partnership of various organizations, both public and private sector.

Gender – The full participation of girls and women in secondary levels of education due to early marriage, pregnancy and domestic chores has resulted in fewer female university graduates, directly impacting the number of women in skilled, non-agricultural jobs. According to the UNDP, the number of women in Parliament has increased from 6% in 1991 to 12% in 2001, but remains below the target of 30%.

Health - In 1992 the infant mortality rate was 107 per 1000 births, but has dropped to 95 in 2002. Under-five mortality has dropped from 191 to 168 per 1000 births between 1992 and 2002, according to the UNDP. Malaria, inadequate health services and the high incidence rate of HIV/AIDS are some of the leading factors in infant and under-five mortality, but the Zambian government plans on instituting National Immunization Days, an Integrated Management of Childhood Infection Program, prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV and nutrition and breastfeeding support programmes.

http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0000856/P968-MDG_Zambia_2003.pdf

Ethiopia

Education – Rates of enrolment in primary school jumped dramatically from 32% in 1990 to 57.4% in 2000, meaning that it will be possible for the Ethiopian government to meet the target goal, according to the 2005 UNDP report. The number of females enrolled in primary schools has also increased, from 29.4% to 52% between 1990 and 2000.

Health – Rates for under-five mortality have decreased, from 190 out of 1000 births in 1990 to 167 in 2000, and maternal mortality has decreased from 1400 in 100 000 births to somewhere between 500 and 700 in 2000. The HIV/AIDS rates, in 2000, sat at 7.3%, which is on target for the goals, according to the UNDP.

http://www.undp.org/mdg/goodpractices/Ethiopia-casestudy.pdf

* Compiled by Karoline Kemp, Fahamu

Just how long are the poor of Africa expected to wait for poverty to be defeated? asks Rebecca Ajabo Asaba. Until 2015? Not likely – according to current projections it will take hundreds of years for Africa to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Ajabo Asaba states that that before it is too late, the entire global economic, financial and trade architecture needs to be restructured.

The Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) campaign in Africa by civil society organizations and prominent international activists has affirmed civil society as a major player in bringing the plight of the poor in Africa to the fore of the global development agenda. The initiative has mobilized continent wide popular campaigns led by vigilant umbrella civil society groups in the East, North, West and Southern African sub-regions. Civil society in Africa has made steadfast progress on pressuring global leaders to address the impact of poverty, the spread of HIV/AIDS and other poverty challenges confronting Africa. Global leaders are challenged to meet their pledges on the MDGs and in particular address the debt burden on African countries and expand trade opportunities to improve the lives of millions of Africans.

The battle against poverty must be won. How long should the poor of Africa wait for the opportunity for education or the certainty of food or basic health care? Is the answer 2015, the deadline for achieving the MDGs?

No, according to the UNDP Human Development Report 2003. The report cautions that “unless things improve”, it will take Sub-Saharan Africa until 2129 to achieve universal primary education, until 2147 to halve extreme poverty and until 2165 to cut child mortality by two thirds. Baffled by the region’s worsening food security situation there is no date set to end hunger. The report is optimistic that achieving the MDGs is a possibility for Latin America, East Asia, the Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, but once again Africa has been left out.

Among its major challenges, Africa must overcome HIV/AIDS and Malaria, both responsible for devastating economic and human welfare, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. About 150 million Africans are directly affected by HIVAIDS, an estimated 25 percent of the population of the sub-region shouldering a 90% share of the global impact of HIV/AIDS.

The severity of poverty in this region is also of particular concern given that countries have since the 1980s pursued what International Financial Institutions consider the ‘right’ economic policies of market liberalization, privatization, and macroeconomic stability measures. What these policies have not done ‘right’ is to aleniate the masses from meaningful participation in the economy. The architects of liberalization argue that the costs of liberalization are short term while its benefits come in ‘handy’ in the long-term. This has not been the case for most economies in Africa and thus poses questions on how long-term or short term the poor should pay the costs of liberalization.

Despite some GDP achievements in terms of growth, the region’s Least Developed Countries still do not have the growth levels of seven 7% necessary to achieve the MDGs. Besides this, governments face huge budgetary shortfalls that make it difficult to invest adequately in health, education, and the provision of water services.

Rightly, Africa has been reminded that it needs to find solutions to its internal governance evils that demean its social and economic development, chiefly corruption, undemocratic leadership and human rights abuses. With this in mind, the external solutions are equally important. The whole global economic, financial and trade architecture has a fundamental role in the future of Africa’s poor. Definitely there can only be hope of ending the marginalization of Africa in the global economic system when the global partnership for development increases trade opportunities, aid and cancels debt.

To contain poverty in Africa, one of the things that have to improve is the commitment by world leaders to address the region’s challenges that keep it behind other regions of the world in achieving the MDGs. Africa’s economies, compared to other regions, face stagnation. Therefore the levels of progress in education and health achieved in success stories like Uganda and Ghana, will most likely not be sustainable. This is why Africa’s marginalization from the global economy are so important to the achievement of the MDGs in Africa.

Without doubt Africa’s road to the MDGs is a long one. Now that its leadership and the global partnership have pledged their responsibility in reducing poverty in Africa, the MDGs must be taken to the new political height of commitment, without which the prevailing poverty trends will most probably continue.

* Rebecca Ajabo Asaba is Programme Assistant at the African Women’s Economic Policy Network (AWEPON)

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Africa's development indicators are a worrying sign that progress towards the MDGs is lagging. Unconditional cancellation of all debt, the commitment of greater resources to the continent by rich countries, a reformed international trading system and the voices of African people at the centre of the process will all be essential to reinvigorating progress towards the MDGs, says Charles Mutasa.

It is no secret that many developing countries, donors and non-governmental organizations have made reaching the MDGs their top priority, but as the world reaches the 2005 MDGs review there are worrying signs of stagnation and reversal. Although rapid advances by some countries do show that the MDGs are achievable, Sub-Saharan Africa is yet to mobilise resources, political and financial support to meet specific global challenges, especially the fight against HIV/AIDS.

A 2003 UNDP review of sub-Saharan Africa's social development indicators provides a bleak picture of the region's progress towards the MDGs. The number of Africa's population living on less that $1 a day is increasing. It is also true that while most of the world made significant progress in the fight against hunger during the 1990s, the prevalence of underweight children remained at nearly 50% in South-central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The debt crisis, unfair international trading practices, tied aid interwoven with endless conditionalities, HIV/AIDS, conflicts, problems associated with economic indiscipline, lack of sustainable democracies and poor governance are among the host of stumbling problems to Africa's ability to attain the MDGs. Nowhere are the signs more ominous than in Sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest and least developed region. Africa entered the new millennium with the highest poverty and child mortality rates, and the lowest school enrolment figures in the world.

Looking at Uganda as a case in point, the debt stock soared from US$800million to US$4.3billion in 2003, continuing to be a heavy burden for a population of approximately 26 million. 75% of Uganda's debt is owed to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Most African countries, more so Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) graduates, continue to spend more on debt servicing than on health and education.

A number of African countries still need to customize the MDG targets to reflect national circumstances and priorities, which will increase the sense of national ownership and adapt development objectives to the socioeconomic and political realities of each country. For example, countries facing an acute HIV pandemic cannot be expected to achieve the same levels of progress as those not confronting one. In Southern Africa, for instance, there is a severe health crisis, with nine of its member states featuring in the ten African countries with the highest HIV/Aids prevalence rates. Malaria and tuberculosis also continue to wreak havoc in the region, leading to reduced economic productivity, high infant mortality rates and plummeting life expectancy. The problem of insufficient funding and red tape in the release of much-needed donor funds continues to hamstring progress in fighting health and social problems.

One of the problems with the goals is the inconsistency in reporting whether countries are on track to meet the MDGs. UNDP and national MDG reports have shown considerable differences, raising concerns about the reliability and credibility of indicators being used. Global, regional and national frameworks, strategies and processes must be harmonized so that accurate predictions and evidence-based policy decisions can be made.

The outcomes of the G8 on debt, aid and trade have been minimal indeed, failing to meet the desired expectations of many economic justice activists and governments in the South. The UN Millennium Campaign points out that many developing countries are saddled with such high levels of debt that paying off just the annual interest costs more than what is spent on health care and education combined.

While the Scotland G-8 debt deal is a step forward and sets an important precedent in terms of granting a 100% cancellation of debt to all severely indebted poor countries, which is what civic activists have long advocated for over years, the deal only represents one eighth of what Africa needs in terms of debt cancellation, as this means canceling only US $40 billion out of Africa's burgeoning debt stock of over US$330 billion. The $40 billion to be cancelled represents less than 10% of debt cancellation required for poor nations to meet the MDGs in 2015. The plan does not include middle-income countries that are heavily indebted and impoverished. Globally, the 18 countries that qualify immediately represent less than a third of countries (at least 62) that need full cancellation to meet the internationally agreed MDGs.

The G-8 debt agreement does not address the real global power imbalances. The question of creditor-debtor co-responsibility of the South's debt remains unresolved, as issues of odious and illegitimate debts continue to be swept under the carpet. It is not a lasting solution in which all stakeholders - debtors and creditors - have a say. It is just a piecemeal measure that seems to deal with the symptoms of the problems and not the causes.

It is important to note that the MDGs reinforce each other; progress on one front has positive spill-over effects on other variables. For instance, a breakthrough on Goal 8's debt question will definitely lower income poverty and increase household income in Africa which will then facilitate higher school enrolment levels, while better access to clean water reduces the toll of disease, and affects school drop-out rates.

The desire to attain the MDGs among development partners in a given country has had its positive impacts in Africa. In Uganda, for example, bilateral donors are now channeling about half of the country's aid into budgetary support, instead of funding individual projects. This reform gives governments more flexibility in spending decisions, reduces time and paperwork, and helps to align donor programmes with national development priorities. Uganda has in recent years recorded high school enrolment rates, though the quality of education is something still debatable.

In Tanzania, with the MDGs came the concept of donor harmonization, alignment and result based development planning which seems to be yielding results by reducing transaction costs, donor missions per year, corruption and procurement hick-ups.

As global targets the MDGs are as much applicable to countries in conflict or emerging from conflict as they are to countries that are not in the throes of civil unrest. Responses to conflict in Ivory Coast and Sudan's Darfur region demonstrate that the international community has the ability to unite against conflict and its associated ills as long as the political will to fostering a world free of civil unrest is there.

If Africa and other developing regions are to make significant and sustainable progress, far greater resources will have to be generated from all sources - debt relief, overseas development assistance, foreign direct investment, trade, and domestic investment and savings. As the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, rightly noted, apart from developing countries setting national strategies for the attainment of MDGs, "we will also need more convincing action from the developed countries to support those strategies by phasing out harmful trade practices, by providing technical assistance, and by increasing both the volume and quality of aid to levels consistent with the goals."

There is need for total unconditional debt cancellation from both multilateral and bilateral donors in order to give Africa a new start and a chance to attain the MDGs. Debt service in Africa continues to tear down schools and clinics without which MDGs will not be attainable.

Creditors and donors need to commit themselves to a timeline on which to fulfil the long overdue 0.7% of their GNP promised at Monterey's Financing for Development Conference. One of the most important challenges regarding the achievement of the MDGs is that co-operation between rich and poor countries must not turn into a recital of broken promises. The need for increased co-operation among donor governments, NGOs, pharmaceutical companies and African states to increase drug accessibility and strengthen health infrastructure cannot be over-emphasized.

Aid needs to have no strings attached; untied aid will help build local capacities in African countries which are a prerequisite to attaining the MDGs. Many a times local human resource capacity remains undeveloped as donors insist on their countrymen coming to work in the name of technical assistance without necessarily building local capacities.

MDGs will only become reality when those living in poverty have their voices heard. A human rights based development approach in which local grassroots people in Africa are the claim holders, holding their governments and donors accountable for their actions and obligations will foster development. In a nutshell, it is crucial for development practitioners to realise and acknowledge that people are not developed but they develop themselves.

The international trade regime needs to be democratized if Africa is to attain the MDGs. The failure of the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun in September 2003 was a further setback to Africa's development prospects. This has been worsened by the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) that the European Union is promoting. Trade that removes subsides to European farmers and opens markets for African products is a great stride towards the MDGs in Africa.

There is urgent need to end all World Bank and IMF policies that hinder people's access to food, clean water, shelter, health care, education, and the right to organize. Pursuit of the MDGs could well be undermined in the future, as it has been in the past, if there is no change in structural adjustment policies. These policies include user fees, privatization and economic austerity programs forced upon recipient countries in the south, Africa being the chief victim.

Last but not least, political will, social action and the ability to galvanise resources for the MDGs is key. Partnership between the North and the South must be genuine, local participation and ownership of development at grassroots levels should not be cosmetic but real and meaningful. Attaining the MDGs require radical structural, institutional and policy changes at national, regional and global levels. Half baked solutions and measures will only leave Africa in deeper poverty.

* Charles Mutasa is a research and policy analyst and currently the acting coordinator of the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (Afrodad).

* Please send comments to

The MDGs are characterized by a top-down approach, fail to recognize the intangible aspects of poverty and distract from the macro-economic constraints poor countries experience in accessing finance. Despite this, some of the goals are achievable and there is no excuse for missing them, writes Hellen Tombo. Committed leadership, stronger partnerships, extra money, debt cancellation, infrastructure development and deeper participation by the poor can all play a role.

At the beginning of the new millennium (2000), the United Nations set up eight goals that need to be realized by 2015 that became known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The leaders and heads of state of 189 countries signed the Millennium Declaration, which set a series of targets for global action against poverty. Meeting the MDGs would not end economic poverty; but meeting them could make a positive difference to millions of people. This month 189 world leaders re-convene in New York to attend the UN Millennium +5 Summit and review progress in implementation of the MDGs. The question that is constantly ringing in our minds is: Have many countries achieved the goals at all?
Reviewing the positive aspects of the MDGs

The MDGs cover the relative dimensions of poverty, not just income poverty. The goals reflect a broad terrain of basic human wellbeing, representing the many dimensions of poverty as part of an integrated whole. The visible signs of poverty can be calculated in terms of access to basic needs such as food, shelter, sanitation, water, health care and education. The goals underscore the fact that tailored interventions in many sectors are essential if human development is to be achieved.

The MDGs are implicitly linked to the human rights framework although such links are not strong enough. The MDGs link directly to the articles of the universal declaration of human rights, which states that everyone has a right to a standard of living adequate for health and the wellbeing, including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services. Everyone has a right to education. Furthermore article 28 of the UNHR calls for an international order supportive of implementation of human rights, which is reflected in MDG 8.

The MDGs are global and national. The process through which they were elaborated means that they have an impact both at national level and the global level. There is no other source of authority other than heads of state agreeing through a global forum.

There are concrete output targets for the MDGs: The goals offer clear, agreed and quantifiable targets to galvanize the rich and poor counties and to hold their leaders to account. This means that they can be objectively verified, but still it leaves the question of process wide open.

Poverty reduction is regarded as a direct result of economic growth. This is indicated clearly in MDG 1 where the relationship between poverty and other key social indicators is clearly defined.

Although the MDGs might not be ambitious enough, they are achievable. As goals set by world leaders they represent the shared ambitions that can be achieved if there is political will to do so. There are no physical, ecological, and technical or other autonomous reasons to make achieving the MDGs impossible.

Reviewing the negative aspects of the MDGs

There is a persistent top down approach leading to lack of ownership and participation of local actors. It is believed to be owned by leaders. The solution by leaders is not to tell their subjects about global targets, which are barely relevant to them. Rather the people should be involved in bringing the targets closer to home, to a level where they become tangible and relevant, and can make a difference to their daily lives.

Furthermore, there is a lack of attention to the intangible dimensions of poverty. It is no secret that basic needs extend beyond material goods to include needs to be valued or treated with dignity, or to be free to participate politically, culturally or economically in society. Other important psychological dimensions of poverty are powerlessness, voicelessness, dependency and humiliation. The MDGS do not deal with the intangibles but rather concentrate on the tangible aspects. This severely affects the credibility of the MDGS.
There is over-emphasis on external finance volumes rather than the reform that would lead to greater participation and ownership. Most African countries normally prepare their budgets based on external assistance. Sometimes donors do not respond, which clearly limits the MDGs. The current volatility and unpredictability of aid flows is a serious problem in meeting the MDGs. This is further complicated by the debt burden.

The MDGs distract attention from the macro economic constraints underpinning the ability of developing counties to access finance. The policy advice offered by the IMF and the World Bank seems to undermine the potential of countries in reaching the MDGs. The goals and conditionality set by the World Bank and IMF are really hindering these countries from achieving the MDGs.

Africa has been struggling to meet the MDGs. It remains a daunting task for countries in Africa to achieve the goals. The goals are not new at all because they duplicate the National Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP). If what is contained in the PRSPs cannot be achieved, then it is like squeezing water out of a stone to achieve the MDGs.

This inter-linkage with the PRSPs creates further complications. With the World Bank pushing a PRSP model and the UN the MDGs, the risks of PRSPs being exclusively or primary designed around the MDG goals appear to be very real. This unleashes the development process in countries where it is more than likely that the action on factors creating and sustaining poverty is completely left out of the countries development plan, which in turn may be directed by the MDG plans. This process twists the locus and ownership of national poverty planning, taking it a long distance away from poor people and their concerns.

Overview and Recommendations

Africa saw some success stories during the 1990s but, on balance, the continent’s record in moving towards the MDGs has been inadequate, especially for the poor. Progress is slow for child mortality, basic education, malnutrition, improved water supply, maternal mortality and gender discrimination in primary enrolment. With the exception of safe water, regional progress was less than one-tenth of the agreed target between1990 and 2000. Since the MDGs are to be achieved over a 25-year span starting in 1990, 40 per cent of the road should have been covered by 2000—meaning that Africa’s progress represents about one-fifth of what should have been accomplished by now. Even worse, little or no progress was achieved in reversing the HIV/AIDS pandemic. HIV prevalence rates continue to rise in numerous countries, whereas only a few succeeded in reducing the spread of the virus. Not only was progress inadequate, much of it by-passed the poor.

Global goals are primarily meant to help improve the situation of the poor and the disadvantaged, not only that of better-off and privileged people. There is no good reason why universal primary education should not yet be a practical reality. Its cost is perfectly affordable; no new technological breakthroughs are needed to get all children in school; there is consensus that it makes good economic sense; and basic education is a fundamental human right that must not be denied to any child. If these conditions are not enough to ensure success, then the question arises as to what it will take to meet the other MDGs.

In opening the Children’s Summit in May 2002, Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General, stated, “We the grown-ups must reverse this list of failures”. The MDGs remain unfulfilled, but they also remain feasible and affordable.

If the legacy of our generation is to be more than a series of broken promises, then the following is needed: committed leadership, stronger partnerships, extra money, debt cancellation, infrastructure development and deeper participation by the poor. It is not too late to realize the dream by 2015.

* Hellen Tombo is executive director of the Kenya Youth Education and Community Development Programme. She is a member of GCAP and co-chair of the GCAP youth group.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

For Ezra Mbogori, writing off all southern debt, changing the trade regime and raising the level of aid constitute three of the four major steps necessary to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and these are the responsibility of the North, not the South. The fourth step is addressing issues of governance. But behind the MDGs are larger moral and intellectual implications for the North as well as the South, he believes, which relate to finding out how lifestyles can be informed by the basic principles of sustainability and social justice.

It’s become almost a commonplace to find fault with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): they are minimal in their ambitions; they are based disproportionately on the views of the North rather than the needs of the South; they reduce to statistical targets matters of human aspiration and human need; they involve simply throwing money at questions whose solution is not primarily a matter of money – the list could go on. In spite of this, argues Ezra Mbogori of MWENGO,[1] they’re all we’ve got and they’re worth striving for.

There is no question, he feels, that the MDGs are not all that they might be. They do not so much represent progress in the development argument as a kind of holding of the line: “The Millennium Development Goals are really for all intents and purposes minimum development goals. They fall far short of development commitments that were made in the past. But in our current situation, I think, the MDGs do help those who want to maintain some sort of focus on development to at least arrest the flight or regression … and they enable us to start building up arguments again for being a little more ambitious in pursuit of development.”

A spirit of pragmatism

So while the MDGs are unambitious, “they do offer a starting point”. He believes that both developed and developing countries are approaching the MDGs in a pragmatic spirit. He sees the need for the South to make compelling arguments to reinflate the notion of development, which had to some extent gone flat in the North.

In Mbogori’s view, this relates in part to more ambitious goals having been missed in the past. He begins his resume of the recent history of development with the ending of apartheid: “With the dismantling of apartheid and the coming into the fold of the community of states of South Africa, one of the biggest blights to humanity was overcome. And the new enemy of humanity on the planet was poverty … One doesn’t have to think too far back to remember the demands for health and education for all by 2000. Then came the year 2000 and none of those goals had been met. So I think that as the Millennium Declaration was being signed, there were pragmatists who thought, ‘Let’s not be too ambitious, let’s face it we’ve missed targets we’ve set in the past. So let’s set some modest targets that we can meet that will make a difference.’”

However, with terrorism becoming the top priority for northern countries after September 11, he believes poverty and development initiatives were sidelined. “The sudden shift of focus to terrorism tended to shift the attention almost entirely from the development goals that had been set, however modest they were. That’s why the MDGs now appear like such a radical set of targets.”

Moreover, while the MDGs are undoubtedly “less ambitious than developing countries would go for”, they do provide a framework that touches on some of the aspirations of southern countries. “The fact that they at least start to address some of the right questions is important for many of us. It’s almost a question of saying they’re better than nothing.”

Who framed the MDGs?

Another point of criticism of the MDGs is that they are a largely northern initiative that the South had no option but to go along with. Without being quite so categorical, Mbogori agrees that, while the Millennium Declaration was signed by leaders from both the South and the North, “I think quite frankly that the leadership came to a large extent from the North.” This touches on the question of the dynamics of power, about which he has much to say.

The heart of the matter

The dynamics are clearly reflected in the way the Goals are formulated, he argues. “If you analyse the MDGs, you see that Goals 1-7 are all focused on what southern countries and southern governments need to do.”

However, he suggests, the real key to success is Goal 8: “Goal 8 is for me the real clincher. It’s to do with the resources that are required and the structural shifts that need to happen, for instance in the areas of trade and writing off debt. I continue to get really frustrated,” he adds, “at the thought that if we were to write off all debt, and change the trade regime, and double the amount of aid – or take it to the level of 0.7 per cent of GNP that was agreed 35 years ago – the chances of meeting these goals would be increased many fold.”

For Ezra Mbogori, writing off all southern debt, changing the trade regime and raising the level of aid constitute three of the four major steps necessary to achieve the Goals, and these are the responsibility of the North, not the South.

What about corrupt and inefficient governments in the South, many northern commentators would ask at this point. However much aid you throw at the problem, nothing will be done until governance and efficiency are improved. The fourth step, he agrees, is addressing issues of governance, “because that would have a direct impact on the question of corruption and address accountability in relation to application of resources.”

He believes, though, that the common argument that unless governance and efficiency improve, a good deal of aid will be wasted, is largely an “escapist” one. In other words, it is advanced by people who “want to find an excuse for not meeting their commitments anyway”.

Modest goals, massive challenge

Of course, the ambitiousness of any aim is proportionate to the means available to its attainment. In the case of the MDGs, their achievement is dependent on the existence of sufficient will and means among the international community. Seen in this light, 2015 might actually be overambitious as a date for achieving them. Mbogori cites economist Jeffrey Sachs, who claims that at the pace some countries are moving, the MDGs “won’t be met by 2100 let alone 2015”, especially in Africa. At the present rate, some goals may be achieved only in 2150. The MDGs may seem minimal and inadequate, but meeting them by 2015, Mbogori reminds us, would be a major achievement.

Nor does the apparent modesty of the Goals mean that they are not worth pursuing in themselves. Take the example of moving from living on $1 a day to $2 a day – considered in the light of what would be an acceptable standard of living in the North, this aim is so modest as to be offensive. But, he feels, “these sorts of measures give you something to work with”.

He tells a story that he came across during a piece of research for the Commonwealth Foundation. A Malawian woman, asked if she thought she lived in a good society, replied: “It is better to be a dog in the North, in a place like America, than to be a person here.” “It’s in that light,” says Mbogori, “that I look at switching from living on $1 a day to $2 a day to $3 a day. There’s a starkness about it.”

Where do grantmakers come in?

What questions does this pose for grantmakers? Mbogori sees a challenge particularly for those grantmakers who work primarily in the area of social justice. The challenge for them will be to support efforts to achieve the MDGs while continuing to maintain “their interest and creativity around achieving structural changes”.

But there is a bigger challenge still implicit in this, because it is at this point, for Ezra Mbogori, that “one starts to make connections between, for instance, the wasteful lifestyles of the North and the ability of the planet to sustain these lifestyles. If people were to say that development equates to similar kinds of lifestyle for everyone, what would that mean for this world? It requires a certain amount of creativity to begin to act in ways that educate everybody on the planet to see that there is a need for major structural changes. I think that’s a challenge for grantmakers.”

So behind the MDGs are larger moral and intellectual implications for the North as well as the South. “I think that there definitely needs to be a change in lifestyles – I’m not saying a reduction in standards, I’m saying a change in lifestyles. We have to recognize that, for instance, fossil fuel supplies are not infinite. They will run out at some point. So how do we ensure that our lifestyles are informed by basic principles of sustainability and social justice?”

A beginning, not an end

As already stressed, it’s important to keep in mind that while the MDGs can play an important part in development, they are still a minimum. There will be no occasion for complacency on the part of the international community if and when they are met. “I think grantmakers have a role here too. It’s like watching a fairly emotional movie, when the end is one that you feel good about. Now the challenge I see for grantmakers is to bring everybody’s attention to the fact that, even if the MDGs are achieved, it’s not going to be happy ever after. There are still major challenges around sustainability. We live in one world, one planet, and we have to make certain adjustments in order for it to really be a happy ever after situation.”

The role of southern NGOs

According to Mbogori, many southern organizations will already have been through a good deal of soul-searching before deciding to support the MDGs, and they will often have done so from a pragmatic conviction that, while deficient in many respects, the MDGs are “what there is”.

But he raises a final point in this connection. In spite of their willingness to throw their weight behind the MDGs, the contribution southern NGOs can make towards the formulation and achievement of development objectives is limited because they are on the wrong end of the power equation. “I always go back to the question of mutual respect and trying to create a platform on which we can debate these things as equals, which is almost impossible because of the power games that we’re playing all the time.”

In any case, he stresses, it is almost impossible for NGOs to provide any real support for the MDGs in a situation where they are struggling to survive. “I just came back from a meeting in South Africa where even as we tried to gear up the MDGs campaign, a lot of NGOs are on their deathbeds simply because they don’t have the resources to meet their basic operational needs on a day-to-day basis. One NGO leader I spoke to hadn’t been paid for three months.”

This is partly a matter of donors’ well-known reluctance to fund core costs. “Donors continue to exercise this strange control, where sometimes they agree to fund a programme but won’t fund any core costs. We are just going to have to keep pushing donors,” he says, “and telling them, look, for goodness sake, begin to see our point of view, and start to support some of these basic things. Even if it means getting out of your current mode and taking risks and actually helping to build an infrastructure of civil society organizations.”

This is something that’s “at the top of my mind right now”, says Mbogori. “I’ve been looking at how much time I spend simply worrying about whether I can meet my basic operating requirements and how much more I could do if I didn’t need to worry about that. I wonder if our northern partners ever really think about this. And I constantly wonder, how can we get them to a table where we can talk about it?”

A question of balance

The discussion has taken us a long way beyond the MDGs but for Ezra Mbogori the progression is a logical one. His final message seems to be that there is a balance to be struck in any view of the MDGs. While they represent a very modest advance in some respects, in other ways they are significant. Materially, limited though they are, achieving them will constitute a great advance for people in developing countries. Morally, they imply a rethinking of values and lifestyles for the world in general.

In any case, we should guard against the danger of thinking that their achievement – whether it happens sooner or later, and most current forecasts seem to suggest that it will be later – is anything more than a beginning. Development is a continuing process, not an event or series of events. And it’s not just a matter of poor people in poor countries. It concerns us all.

1 MWENGO is one of the focal points for the MDGs campaign in Southern Africa, supporting the building of national coalitions in several countries in the region.

* Ezra Mbogori is Executive Director of Mwelekeo wa NGO (MWENGO) in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted at [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

* This article first appeared in the September issue of the Alliance Magazine and is gratefully reproduced here with permission. Alliance is the leading magazine on philanthropy and social investment across the world. Published quarterly by Allavida, it tracks the latest trends and developments providing expert analysis from northern and southern perspectives. Visit http://www.allavida.org/alliance/alliancehome.html

Esther Mwaura-Muiru introduces two women’s self help groups in Kenya and asks why the contribution of thousands of grassroots organisations are not recognized in helping to achieve the Millennium Devolvement Goals.

It is absolutely clear that the trend the debate on the Millennium Devolvement Goals (MDGs) is taking will have a significant influence on policies and resource allocation in every corner of the world for the next several years. Many national governments are already using the MDGs as the basis for developing policies while development agencies are focusing their resources on institutions and efforts that demonstrate contributions to the targets of the MDGs. While this trend is not necessary bad, there are a number of questions that still remain unclear to many grassroots communities.

These questions include:

Is the MDG framework an exhaustive tool to address inequality between the rich and poor as well as gender disparities? Will the framework assist the world in eradicating extreme poverty? (The majority of poor are women living in urban slums and interior rural areas where accessibility is limited.) One other pertinent question that ultimately must be addressed is whose development and with whom are we talking about? Are the MDGs just one more buzz-word among development agencies that will soon fizzle out ?

Five years since the debate on MDGs kicked off, the language is still very much within development institutions and government offices at the national level. Therefore, it is too much to expect collective efforts that also bring particularly grassroots communities on board in the debate unless deliberate effort is made to unpack and share this language. The irony is that while many agencies and governments are gearing themselves to the development of programmes and tools that will help them account for their contribution to achieving the MDGs, many of the grassroots communities are busy contributing to the set targets oblivious of the ongoing debates.

Consider Tuelewane and Mathare, self-help groups both located in the sprawling Nairobi Mathare slums. These two women self-help groups reclaimed abandoned public toilets over seven years ago. The group has an adjacent water point from which they sell water to the public. Today this project provides several households with access to proper sanitation, clean drinking water and substantial incomes to tens of households, all from resources generated by charging for these facilities.

These women are also members of Mathare Mothers Development Centre that undertakes various capacity building initiatives that benefit communities in Mathare slums, provide entrepreneurship skills to orphaned girls of 13-19 years old, give home care to approximately 400 sick, and provide day care shelter to infants. In addition, these women have formed coalitions and contribute daily savings to buy land with the hope that they will one day provide decent housing to their families. The Mathare Mothers Development Centre spearheaded implementation of the local-to-local dialogue that brings together government officials with local communities to discuss challenges of existing governance structures.

Essentially, these women’s groups are addressing their development holistically. It is needless to say that there are thousands of such many “invisible” innovations all over the world. The experience of GROOTS Kenya in partnering with hundreds of self help groups of women in Mathare makes us convinced that its time that the MDG debate considers grassroots communities.

The return for such investment includes the fact that governments and development agencies will have a credible base to allocate resources to upscale appropriate community driven solutions that are already ongoing. National reports on the MDGs may not be taking into account some of these remote contributions that continue to improve the lives of many people in the slums and are owned by the poor people themselves.

* Esther Mwaura-Muiru works for GROOTS Kenya ([email protected])

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Yifat Susskind explains why, if the MDGs are to be a tool for advancing women’s human rights, they will have to adopt a rights-based approach that goes beyond improving statistical indicators to addressing the root causes of human rights violations.

In 2000, world leaders representing all 191 countries that belong to the United Nations pledged to achieve the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Since then, the goals have become the main framework for development policy worldwide. They have even been adopted by many of the international agencies and banks that control the budgets of most poor countries, giving the MDGs real currency in the political economy of UN declarations. The MDGs create opportunities for advancing women's human rights, but only if we are able to participate effectively in the process of realizing the goals.

Governments' commitments to the MDGs appear to be an extraordinary step forward, but when we scratch the surface of the goals, we find that their progress is measured by a set of technocratic "targets" and "indicators" that are limited in scope, contradictory in approach, and more concerned with statistical change than with creating the structural change that is crucial to improving the lives of women and their families worldwide.

Take Goal 3, for example (promoting gender equality and empowering women): its "target" is to eliminate gender disparity in education. Yet it will take much more than girls' education to combat the deeply entrenched violence, discrimination, stereotypes, laws, and customs that generate grave violations of women's human rights in every country of the world. The indicators intended to measure progress towards this goal are equally problematic.They include:
They include:
1. the ratio of girls to boys at all levels of schooling (with no regard for the quality or content of education and without addressing the social forces that keep girls out of school);
2. the proportion of seats held by women in national parliament (without regard for the more crucial question of whether these women respect human rights);
3. the share of women in non-agricultural sectors of the workforce (without recognition of the need for decent wages, working conditions, and public services such as day care, health care, clean water, and transportation that ease the time burden of women who are expected to work outside the home and fulfill their responsibilities within the family).

As we can see, the MDGs call for change, but not for creating the conditions to make real change possible. To address the root causes of the problems that the goals are supposed to rectify, we need to grapple with precisely those phenomena that the MDGs take for granted. These include policies that have increased poverty and inequality around the world (such as free-trade agreements, wage freezes, and hostility to worker organizing) and subordinated human rights to "national security" as defined by the Bush Administration. In fact, at a moment when the rights of both women and men have been badly eroded by such policies, we can see clearly the limitations of pursuing gender "equality." To whom should women be equal? Should women in Colombia demand "equality" with male co-workers who are being killed for union organizing? Should Rwandan women who are HIV-positive seek "equality" with Rwandan men who are denied high-priced AIDS medications? The real goal is not equality, but justice; and one of the best ways we have of ensuring justice is the fulfillment of human rights.

But the MDGs fail to even mention sexual and reproductive rights, women's labor and property rights, or one of the most fundamental obstacles to ensuring these rights, namely, violence against women. The glaring absence of these issues from the MDGs reflects the powerful role played by right-wing and fundamentalist governments such as the United States in their negotiation.

Reproductive rights, in particular, have been under fire by the US since 2000, when Bush took office and began defunding international family planning programs and revamping US reproductive health policy to placate his religious fundamentalist base. Women's human rights advocates have pointed out that sexual and reproductive rights are central to achieving at least four of the MDGs: women's equality and empowerment (Goal 3); reducing child mortality (Goal 4); improving maternal health (Goal 5); and combating HIV/AIDS (Goal 6). Moreover, since human rights are indivisible, empowering women is crucial to realizing all of the goals. Conversely, none of the goals can be realized without ensuring that goal.

One way to gain insight into any policy is to look at its authors. The MDGs are sponsored jointly by the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While the United Nations operates within a human rights framework, the missions of the World Bank and IMF are to advance a set of economic policies that are often at odds with human rights. In fact, the MDGs infuse neoliberal priorities into development policy using the language of human rights. They seek to "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger" (Goal 1), but rely on the discredited notion that economic growth at the national level (GNP) can eliminate poverty; and they assume that privatization of services is a strategy for rather than an obstacle to-economic development. At the heart of the MDGs beats a fundamental contradiction: poor countries are expected to meet the MDGs by implementing the very neoliberal economic policies that have, in large measure, caused the crises that the goals are intended to address. These policies include cutting government spending, privatizing basic services, liberalizing trade, and producing goods primarily for export.

As we have seen, the methodology and assumptions of neoliberal economics inform the MDGs, which rely heavily on the indicator of "absolute poverty" (which measures the proportion of the population surviving on less than a certain amount of income each day). The MDGs use the World Bank standard of an income of US $1 per day to indicate extreme poverty.

This income-based measurement of poverty obscures the experience of millions of people, for whom poverty is not primarily a function of income, but of their alienation from sustainable patterns of consumption and production. Indigenous women, for example, assert that their poverty and wealth are determined primarily by access to, and control of, their natural resources and traditional knowledge, which are the sources of indigenous culture and livelihoods. In indigenous communities, human rights (namely, governments' recognition of collective indigenous rights over land, natural resources, and traditional knowledge) are key to fighting poverty.

But the MDGs do not recognize that poverty is a function of human rights violations (such as the right to an adequate standard of living, the right to freedom from discrimination, and the right to development). Indeed, the MDGs posit housing, health care, and access to food and water not as non-negotiable and universal rights, but as "needs" to be met. By extension, the poor are not seen as autonomous subjects demanding that governments meet their legal obligations, but as a passive "target group" of policymaking. Sustainable development - which depends on broad civic participation, social justice, and a fundamental shift in the balance of power - is sidelined by this failure of the MDGs to operate within a human rights framework.

In fact, human rights standards are a useful yardstick for evaluating the MDGs. They reveal that the MDGs are not a spontaneous expression of governmental goodwill. Rather, the MDGs constitute pre-existing international obligations, some dating back more than 50 years.

Ultimately, for the goals to be a tool for advancing women's human rights, they must be treated not as a technical process, but as a political process. MADRE is working with our sister organizations and other women's organizations internationally to push for a rights-based approach to the MDGs that goes beyond improving statistical indicators to addressing root causes of human rights violations.

* Yifat Susskind is associate director of Madre. This article first appeared on Madre’s website at www.madre.org/articles/int/mdgcritique.html

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