Africa needs leaders, says Makeda Tsegaya. Africans have known this for years and have long campaigned for more democratic governance. The best service the world could give Africa would be to support their struggles to transform leadership on the continent.

Last weekend saw a large number of gatherings in London and nine other cities around the world for a rock concert aimed at mobilizing support for the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign. Hundreds of thousands of marchers in Edinburgh echoed the political message of this concert, namely debt-relief, fair trade, and better and more aid for Africa and other poor regions of the world. Others expressed their views on the subject via text and e-mail messages. Judging from the sample of messages transmitted via the international media, many seemed to be supporting the cause of the rock concert, while others doubted the efficacy of such campaign on a continent plagued by authoritarianism and corruption. Yet, a few others appeared to give the impression that poverty in Africa is a problem endemic to and created by the continent. As such, the role of developed nations in engendering the problem is hardly, if ever, interrogated. This article intends to bring a few points into the limelight based on the political messages of the campaign with a view to making a positive contribution to the on-going debate regarding the perception and eradication of poverty in Africa.

Indeed, supporters of “Make Poverty History’ have raised the profile of important issues that have significant implications for development in Africa, particularly fair trade and debt-relief. However, a critical factor for poverty eradication in Africa that was missing from the campaign is responsive governance. In fact, the lack of accountable governance and committed leadership in Africa have been the main source of misery and abject poverty on a continent blessed with so much riches. A continent that is still plentiful despite years of massive exploitation from people within and outside the continent. In fact, many Africans are beginning to realize that their vulnerability is a predictable outcome of years of tyranny and not a punishment from God or a biblical curse on the continent. This realization is now leading to a widespread demand for democratically elected leaders. Leaders, who genuinely strive to work in the interest of the people to create better opportunities for employment and economic growth, access to quality education and health care services, and most of all who are accountable to their constituencies and not to domestic cliques or external actors. They are determined to end poverty and a miserable existence sustained by an act of charity year after year.

Nonetheless, as surprising as this may sound to those who cannot imagine Africa beyond making appeals for humanitarian assistance and peacekeeping forces, such desperately needed changes have, indeed, began taking their course on the continent. African civil society organizations are thriving and concerned citizens are promoting freedom, liberty and true independence individually and collectively. Africans are now more convinced than ever before that without a dramatic change in governance and leadership, no development model can bear fruit on their continent.

With this realization, more and more people are exerting utmost pressure on dictators and corrupt leaders within the bounds of legality and peaceful resistance. A recent electoral process in Ethiopia exemplifies a situation in which citizens took advantage of a small window of opportunity to peacefully challenge tyranny, abject poverty, starvation and war. Unfortunately, their efforts to bring peaceful transformation were frustrated by despicable tyranny, which responded to the resistance via mass killings and torture. Yet, the world watched in silence and ignored the plight of Ethiopians for justice. Isn’t it ironic that the world continues to reward dictators and megalomaniacs in Africa on whose watch millions have perished due to starvation, poverty and war? Does the world genuinely believe in ‘making poverty history’ in Africa without the transfer of power from the hands of a few ruthless and self-centered individuals to the people? I hope we do not have to wait for another rock concert in twenty years to find the answers.

The demand for good governance in Africa should not be viewed as a far-fetched intellectual exercise. It is a reasonable demand, as it determines the fate of millions facing unfair and preventable tragedy. It is possible to transform the life of Africans by promoting good governance, which ensures inclusiveness, accountability, and full participation of the people. However, the world should not be deceived by dictators, who often change their tactics to resemble democratic norms, while their underlying motivation is to maintain power at all costs. In fact, the underlying realities in most African countries and the plight of the people are more accurate measures of the extent of democratic reforms than superficial declarations from dictators. Poverty eradication will be an empty declaration as long as dictators and corrupt rulers in Africa are allowed to continue oppressing the people and abusing domestic and foreign resources. It is apparent that the leaders of democratic nations can use political and economic support as leverage to put pressure on dictators to accept the will of the people.

The ultimate objective of sanction is not to hurt the people but to exert pressure on dictators and tyrants. Therefore, sanction can be effective when it is applied to support a struggle that is spearheaded by the people. Regrettably, such a powerful tool is not used when the condition is ripe. For instance, providing any kind of support to the ruling party in Ethiopia now would send the wrong message to Ethiopians who are struggling to end years of oppression and poverty. Ethiopia is a country that continues to inspire rock stars twenty years after its first agonizing images of famine hit the screens of the world at Live Aid in 1985. After twenty years, the agony of Ethiopians has multiplied with over 14 million (20%) of the population declared as ‘drought-affected’ in 2003. Hence, it is clear that the vulnerability of Ethiopians multiplied under oppressive and incompetent leadership. There is no better time than now for the world to recognize that it is not more aid that can change the situation in Ethiopia. Ethiopians have long realized that without democratically elected, committed and able leadership, no volume of aid can save their children dying from starvation, preventable diseases, poverty and war. Their full and remarkable participation in the elections of May 15 was their way of saying enough to starvation and enough to poverty. What they need from the world is enough pressure on the ruling party to respect the rule of law and transfer power to elected leaders.

Evidently, Ethiopia is also affected by the debt burden and unfair trade like any other African country. Still, the proliferation of massive human tragedy in the country cannot be explained without thoroughly examining issues related to debt burden and unfair trade. In other words, one needs to raise questions like how are loans utilized, what kind of development and trade policies are in place and to what extent are they implemented, how are resources from domestic and outside sources managed, and what is the level of the public’s participation? Clearly, these questions force us to examine the nature of governance and leadership in the country. Simply put, increasing aid is not going to prevent Ethiopian or other African children from dying. I am not summarily denigrating the value of aid. It is apparent that appropriate, well-targeted and judiciously administered aid could enhance economic growth. Nevertheless, experience shows that some form of aid in Africa seems to be doing more harm than good. Hence, the role of aid in promoting development in Africa should not be overestimated. The benefits of aid are short-term and the best aid can achieve is to fill gaps and not to be the driving force in development. On the contrary, aid can impede the development of good governance by giving a false impression that needs are met which, in turn, erode accountability by legitimizing dependency on foreign aid.

Conversely, it is indisputable that trade is at the core of economic growth and prosperity; hence, it is appropriate and legitimate that Africans demand fair trade. However, as an important player in international trade, Africa must have the power to make trade a ‘fair game’. In other words, Africa needs to be equipped with the right tools to ensure that trade becomes a ‘fair game’. Fist of all, Africa must have competent and independent leadership that is capable of harnessing its human and capital resources in developing its own macroeconomic policies. This includes making informed decisions on what to trade with whom and in what form. At the same time, Africa needs to have accountable leadership that refrains from engaging in illicit trade with external ‘actors’ for shameful personal gains. Africa must also metamorphose from a raw-material supplier to a genuine trader in order to fully benefit from its trade, thereby, creating employment opportunities and securing better terms of trade. Simultaneously, Africa needs powerful and ingenious entrepreneurs, well-trained and smart negotiators, efficient producers, far-sighted and creative policy makers and so on to take full advantage of international trade. In fact, Africa already has some of this expertise on the continent and its vast Diaspora around the world. This is why visionary and competent leadership is imperative in Africa to harness existing skills and knowledge in order to create wealth and equitable distribution of income among responsible and hard working citizens.

It sum, it is evident that Africa’s most deadly pandemic is lack of committed leadership. Africa needs to have leaders, elected by the people to work for the people. Therefore, the world could do a great service to Africans by supporting their struggle to transform leadership on the continent. Moreover, providing political and economic support to dictators when it is clear that they are not working in the interest of the people is not only morally unacceptable but also an unforgivable crime to humanity.

* Makeda Tsegaye is an Ethiopian woman with a Masters degree in International Peace Studies (with specialization in Economic Development and Peace) currently working for an international development agency in Nairobi, Kenya.

* Please send comments to

Expect sugar-coated statements and hot air from G8 leaders, says Thomas Deve, who discusses various mobilizations to injustices including the World Social Forum and Global Call to Action Against Poverty. The greatest asset for mobilization in Africa, he says, is the testimony poor communities, unemployed youths, women, children and the marginalized can make on how market based dogmas and principles have unleashed untold suffering in Africa.

Once upon a time, most of us used to fancy witty statements from "Red" literature like the Communist Manifesto and highlighted the primacy of social action that was necessary to confront Bourgeois institutions. We all accepted that the executive of a modern state was nothing but a committee for managing the day-to-day affairs of the bourgeoisie, hence the need to study contradictions in society triggered by industrialisation and control over key means of production and people's welfare. The state was correctly portrayed as an arena of struggle, hence the desire to work towards a dictatorship of the proletariat and trigger the withering of the state as a precondition for an egalitarian society. The consensus was on the need for ideological clarity, good arguments and the passion to ignite citizens of the world to belong to movements and organisations seeking to build alternatives to capitalist societies.

With all roads leading to Gleneagles this coming week, a great opportunity is presented which demands that we audit our analytical arsenals and state of mobilisation, and review levels of solidarity which we have shown in struggling against bodies of thought and action giving legitimacy to the G8. Many questions do arise. For example, are there any future scenarios we can project on how the G8 has positioned itself, taking into account that vocal constituencies are telling it that: "Efforts to tackle poverty and sustainable development, as pledged in the UN Millennium Declaration, are grossly inadequate. Governments too often fail to address the needs of their citizens. Aid from rich countries is inadequate in both quality and quantity, and promises of debt cancellation have not materialized. Rich countries have yet to act on their repeated pledges to tackle unfair trade practices."

On our part, will those who have spent their time organising against the G8 take to the streets, issue petitions, position papers and other related actions we have witnessed in the past? If we borrow insights from the struggles of the past and positive passions that used to be triggered by the "Red" experience and questions in my opening remarks, it is clear that the G8 experts and strategists are not sleeping. They recognise that millions of people the world over are not accessing basic necessities in a sustainable manner that will allow the rich to sleep quietly. There is consensus that the G8 is a cabal of the world's richest countries that has overseen the world economy during the debt crisis; introduced aid conditions that forced recipient countries to liberalise, and developed unfair trade rules.

In order for the harmful effects to be redressed, these countries have to be part of the solution, and the time to act is now. Gaps of inequality are increasing and restlessness has increased in both camps of the poor and the rich. Those organising against the G8 have grown in numbers and have visible movements on the ground whose demands are now much more focussed and coordinated globally to such an extent that the rich and powerful have to be seen responding to their demands.

It is this realisation and growing awareness on the dynamics of modern poverty which has led the G8 to move a bit on calls for debt cancellation, more and better aid, and enhance dialogue on global partnerships targeting unfair trade rules. Damning statistics are being churned out everyday on how bad the situation is and all these cannot be ignored when we confront Gleneagles. It has been argued repeatedly that one third of deaths - some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day - are due to poverty-related causes. This amounts to at least 270 million people since 1990, the majority being women and children, and roughly equal to the population of the United States. No less than 535 million still subsist on levels way below the poverty line - earning less than US$1 a day. Almost 185 million people are unemployed and half of these are young people between 15-24 years of age. For every US$1 in grant aid to developing countries, more than US$13 are taken out in debt repayments. For every three seconds that pass in 2005 without action, one more child will die from poverty. That is at least 30 000 children and at most, 50 000 people who will lose their lives from preventable causes. And finally, 245 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 continue to be forced to work (one in six of the world's children).

Poverty is not a given. 50 000 people dying a day from poverty is not acceptable and these telling statistics have inspired many people to continue fighting until figures of this nature are a relic of history rather than the reality of today. It is the situation of real people behind these statistics that has led many of us to use the white-arm band for example, and express our readiness to rededicate energy towards heightened awareness on the need to challenge systems and values of domination that cause this state of affairs. We still put on red T-shirts and feel that value has been added to critical consciousness building as was the case in the mid 70s when we went to a 200 litre fuel containers and tore out the black rubber lining on the lids meant to keep it air tight, proceeded to use them as wrist bangles for proudly proclaiming "Black power" as enounced in the then dominant Black consciousness philosophies of the time.

Back to the G8, our account would be incomplete if we do not acknowledge the role of the World Social Forum (WSF) in bringing together movements that have clearly put forward anti-capitalist struggles at the heart of how they challenge the G8. WSF processes have given some ideological coherence and clarity to many movements as they are proclaiming that "Our world is not for sale" and "Another world is possible." The above calls and pronouncements motivated one of the strongest voices challenging the hegemony of the G8. It is not a far fry from the truth, that since January 2005, most of these voices have coalesced around the "The Global Call to Action against Poverty"(GCAP), which has been described as a fast-growing coalition of millions of people and organisations united in the belief that 2005 offers an unprecedented opportunity for change.

It has simple demands:

- Increased aid from the G7 countries to 0.7% of GNI.
- More and better aid.
- The removal of trade barriers and unfair trade practices that inhibit the development of the poorer economies.
- There should be more trade justice.
- Debt cancellation for countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America
- Maximisation of efforts to eliminate poverty and achieve the Millennium Development Goals and more in a way which is sustainable, and implemented in a way that is democratic, transparent and accountable to citizens.

GCAP, whose organisations and movements are active in over 70 countries and boasts at least 150 million supporters, is organised around charities, trade unions and women's groups, to non-governmental and religious movements that span every culture across the world. Not all its constituencies are for radical reform and revolution, but feel good to lend their weight behind a campaign ready to push more vigorously for unconditional debt cancellation for developing countries for example. Not all in GCAP will say "Smash the WTO", but they are there to make sure that the slogan "One struggle with many fronts!" becomes a reality and meaningful, hence one of the action moments targeted is the Hong Kong WTO December ministerial.

Its diversity is testament to the strength of the movement and billed as one of the world's largest anti-poverty coalitions. It is a strong voice that cannot be ignored as has been shown by the latest coverage it is getting from corporate media that has largely concentrated on GCAP symbols and placing less emphasis on the nature of its demands.

For us in Africa, our greatest asset is the testimony poor communities, unemployed youths, women, children and the marginalized can make on how market based dogmas and principles have unleashed untold suffering in our part of the globe. We have incontrovertible evidence that liberalisation has led to loss of meaningful access to basic social services. Privatisation instigated by market-based public sector reform processes has rendered many services unaffordable for the majority of our citizens. Conditionalities attached to some reform processes spearheaded by institutions that function as extensions of the G8 have emasculated the State in developing countries, leaving it with very little flexibility when it comes to policy options that are pro-poor and defending its people against offensive interests spreading fast via corporate driven globalisation.

In this respect, nothing short of a paradigm shift will radically alter the plight of the poor. We have acknowledged that new languages will be adopted to reify what is happening and pacify the struggling masses through participatory processes like Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and HIPC initiatives, but the essence of solutions underpinning dialogue in the G8 still reinforce market driven fundamentalism despite overwhelming evidence that it is a fundamentally flawed world outlook when it comes to redressing poverty related inequities be-devilling the world. The G8 on its part will produce pronouncements sugar-coated with hot air and radical rhetoric but not good enough to stop the other wave - rooted in brimstone and fire and occasioned by real lived poverty experiences that can only be ended by meaningful social and economic justice.

* Thomas Deve ([email protected]) coordinates the Economic Policy Project at MWENGO (www.mwengo.org), an organisation whose mission is to nurture a community of values by strengthening and mobilising African human resources in support of organisations fighting for social justice.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

'Raised Voices: Testimony from the majority world on the effects of G8 polices on their lives' is a multi-media project that captures a diversity of voices from varying perspectives in text, audio and video. Raised Voices on the G8 captures the viewpoints of people from around the world in countries such as Brazil, South Africa, India, West Papua, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya and more. Below we have reproduced five Raised Voices from Africa. To read more Raised Voices and to download and video and audio files of those interviewed, visit the Raised Voices website at http://www.raisedvoices.net/

Tayo from Nigeria on corruption

I am Tayo Adesina. I am from Nigeria. I'd like to speak on the issue of corruption. People in the West have talked about corruption in Africa, especially as it pertains to African leaders. But it is quite important to note the corruption in Africa has a direct bearing with the relationship between the West and Africa. Western companies operating in Africa have been vectors of corruption. So have banks in the West. So there is no way you can talk about corruption in Africa without dragging the West into it. The day the West stops being corrupt that is when corruption in Africa will stop. Without the West cutting the wings of their companies. Without the West cutting the wings of their banks, the proceeds of some of our vital resources in Africa will continue to be diverted to the West. And so African peoples will continue to suffer. And so I believe that Western leaders should try as much as possible to educate their people about the evils of corruption in Africa and then it will have an effect on African leadership. Once corruption stops then people in Africa will have a new beginning. Thank you.

Kemi from Nigeria on migration

I feel the policies of the G8 has really affected the Nigerian people because these days you know we hear of Nigerian immigrants everywhere as illegal immigrants. And it's mostly the policies of the Western countries that has actually pushed people out of Nigeria. Because the high level of unemployment, the poverty and the educational policies too. It has really affected the young people in Nigeria because their parents can not actually pay for their school fees, because part of the IMF conditionalities is that they should 'hands off' tertiary education in Nigeria. And that has really affected the Nigerian people, because they can hardly feed themselves.

Raufu from Nigeria on debt

My name is Abdul Raufu Mustafa. I'm from Nigeria and I live in Cowley in England. The issue that Nigeria really is bothered about in the conduct of the G8 countries is essentially debt. In the 70s Nigeria borrowed something in the region of 17 billion dollars. Not all of this money got to Nigeria because of collusion between corrupt Nigerian officials and corrupt bankers. But since then Nigeria has paid over 30 billion dollars and still owes another 34 billion dollars in back interest and penalties and the lot. And that has become a major problem for the country because a lot of resources are being diverted just to service the debt. And this is happening in the situation where 7 million Nigerian kids are not having the most basic of primary education. The health system in the country is in dire condition, the universities, the roads, virtually all public infrastructure. That is a situation which is partly contributed to by internal problems but also no doubt by the debt burden. This is an unsustainable debt. And absolutely something has to be done about it at the level of the G8 so that ordinary people in Nigeria can get a look in to the issues of life.

Raj from South Africa on trade

One of the things that's gonna happen at the G8 conference is that the G8 countries are going to talk about agriculture. These countries are the ones that have been pushing on the world a vastly unequal system of agricultural trade. A system that demands that farmers in the Global South turn their fields from growing food for themselves and their communities into food for export. The argument being that this is the most efficient use of their land.

Miles from Zimbabwe on Aid

I'm Miles Tendi. I'm Zimbabwean, I'm a student here in Oxford University. Now George Bush's proposed budget for 2005/6 amounts to $2,570 billion. 22 billion is going to foreign aid. Of that 22 billion, 35% is going to Israel alone. Israel has a population of 6 million and its land size is about the same as Swaziland. Swaziland happens to one of the smallest African countries. Now on top of that 48 African countries, with the combined population of 600 million will receive only 1 billion dollars. Amazing! Even more amazing is the fact that most Americans think that the US government spends 24% of its federal budget on foreign aid when in reality it's only 0.1% of the federal budget that goes towards aid. And I think that's the crux of the matter. There is no electoral price to pay for Western leaders when they do not enhance policies that'll push development forward in the under-developed world.

In the context of this week’s G8 meeting, George Dor critiques the recent debt cancellation “deal” for Africa, the Blair Commission for Africa and the rise of Paul Wolfowitz to the top job at the World Bank. He concludes that they represent “nothing other than a new means of continuing the exploitation initiated under the times of conquest, slavery and colonialism”.

The upcoming G8 meeting or, more accurately as regards economic matters, the G7, to be held in Edinburgh, UK, will put the spotlight on Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa and the issue of debt.

Much has been made of the commission on the release of its report in March and the announcement on debt consequent on the meeting of Finance Ministers in preparation for the G7. But, at most, these developments amount to little more than a reflection of the need to react to the persistence of the activities of Jubilee and other social movements over the years. A closer look at these initiatives suggests very little to celebrate.

Debt “Cancellation” and Control of Africa’s Economies

Starting with the debt issue, the ministers announced an amount of debt to be cancelled of a mere US$40 billion for African and other countries. This is a fraction of the total debt of African countries of US$300 billion and of countries in the South of US$2 400 billion. It is less than the amount of more than US$50 billion that the United States spends EACH YEAR on its illegitimate occupation of Iraq.

It also compares poorly with the G7 offering in Cologne, Germany, in 1999 of US$100 billion. Moreover, the intermittent promises of the G7 include amounts promised before but not fulfilled. In other words, they are little more than recycled promises.

In the case of the Cologne announcement, the real intention was not to provide debt relief but to rescue the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank from their crisis of legitimacy and enforce their continued control over the economic policies of the countries in the South. The institutions were strengthened in the form of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Of course, these new initiatives were also quickly exposed for what they really are, structural adjustment in new guise.

Most importantly, the current offering, like that of 1999, is contingent on countries implementing economic reforms, in other words it is premised on a fundamental difference with the Jubilee South slogan, “total and unconditional debt cancellation”. This is cancellation for countries that have gone through the IMF and WB hoops, those that accept these institutions’ structural adjustment conditions. In other words, it is another deal to strengthen the IMF and WB.

Previously, the G8, IMF and WB have used debt as an instrument to dictate our economies in the form of making loans for debt servicing conditional on IMF and WB policies. Now debt relief/cancellation and grants are being put forward as the new instruments to dictate our economies. If a country wants relief, it first has to meet the prescribed conditions, it has to toe the line.

A related critical point is that debt relief/cancellation does not necessarily translate into more money to spend on meeting people’s needs. The relief may indeed result in less debt servicing, but this is only forthcoming if countries have agreed to the conditions that include cuts in government spending and promotion of the private sector. Indeed, this is the case in Zambia: in order to jump through the hoops to be included in the G7 list of 18 countries, it had to further cut state expenditure over and above the decades of cuts that the debt regime had already forced on the country. That is to say, it will get cancellation with less money to spend on people’s needs.

On the word “cancellation”, this does seem to be an advance on the previous rhetoric of debt “relief”, but the offer only covers 18 countries and it is not yet clear whether it amounts to 100 percent cancellation even for this short list of countries. In the case of the Latin American countries, for example, much of their debt is related to a multilateral institution, the Interamerican Development Bank.

The Blair Commission, Neoliberalism and the International Financial Institutions

As regards the Blair Commission, in its opening lines it states, “For its part, Africa must accelerate reform.” There are two important issues here. First, the report suffers from the recurrent syndrome of blaming the victim for corruption, conflict and war. There are indeed too many instances of African leaders who are guilty of one or more of these charges. But, the role of the Northern countries in slavery, colonialism and the imposition of neoliberal policies and the impact of these Northern interventions on poverty and death across the continent are simply ignored.

Secondly, while the report more explicitly refers to reform of political governance in order to address corruption and conflict, it also makes repeated references to various forms of “economic reforms”. In other words, in failing to address the neoliberal cause of so much of Africa’s current destitution, it simply reiterates that Africa must continue to follow this neoliberal path at a faster pace.

This is perhaps most evident in relation to the report’s treatment of the multilateral institutions. It fails dismally to address the negative impact of the World Bank and IMF on the destruction of African economies and the poverty and death that this has led to. It has been estimated that World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programmes are responsible for the deaths of 19 000 children in the world every day. Yet, the report simply asserts that “The African Development Bank needs to be strengthened… The IMF and World Bank need to give higher priority to Africa’s development.”

Paul Wolfowitz, Military Invasion and Economic War

It is no small surprise that the new President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, echoed this call and visited the continent immediately on assuming office. Wolfowitz was the architect of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which led to the expansion of United States military influence in the Middle East and the awarding of multi-million and billion dollar contracts in Iraq to corporations with close ties to the Republican Party leadership.

He has a history of being against détente and arms control during the years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He supported Asian dictators like the Indonesian General Suharto on behalf of the Reagan administration. He has been a persistently strong proponent of more spending on defense.

Wolfowitz was eagerly pushing for regime change in Iraq well before 9/11. He defined leadership as, “not lecturing and posturing and demanding, but demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support you will regret having done so." He helped convince George Bush 1 to use force to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and urged Bill Clinton to turn his attention “to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power.”

He lied about the purported weapons of mass destruction and claimed, "Intelligence about terrorism is inherently murky, and the US must be prepared to act on less-then perfect information.” He later admitted that oil was a significant reason for the invasion and occupation, stating that North Korea will only be treated to sanctions because it is not sitting on “an ocean of oil”.

The sinister combination of George Bush’s appointment of his man in Iraq to lead the World Bank with the call for the World Bank to play a more significant role in Africa is now being pushed as a boost for Africa’s development. Wolfowitz’ role in the destruction of Iraq and the World Bank’s role in poverty and death on the African continent are being brushed under the carpet. Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s Minister of Finance, described Wolfowitz as a ‘wonderful individual, perfectly capable’. Even some critics are suggesting that Wolfowitz be given a chance in his new role and that the World Bank be given yet another chance on the continent.

Wolfowitz visited Nigeria, Burkino Faso, Rwanda and South Africa from 12 to 18 June. Jubilee South Africa and the Anti-War Coalition organised two demonstrations on 17 June, one outside the offices of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and the other at the Gauteng Provincial Department of Finance and Economic Affairs. The message was clear: “Paul Wolfowitz is not welcome in South Africa, he must go home! The World Bank, its partner, the IMF and related international financial institutions should be shut down!”

For Jubilee South Africa, the opposition to these institutions is based on both their role in the use of debt to impose structural adjustment in the countries of the South as well as their impact on South Africa. The World Bank and IMF supported the Apartheid regime and its institutions in the form of substantial loans until they were instructed to stop doing so. They have returned in the post-Apartheid era to shape the country’s neoliberal macroeconomic and social policies, manifesting in rising unemployment and lack of access to social services.

The Blair Commission, Trade and Resources

The Blair Commission’s handling of trade issues also reflects its insistence that Africa insert itself into the neoliberal global world. It calls on Africa to produce cheaper goods for the world market and suggests that rich countries allow African goods somewhat more access to their markets. In other words, African countries are being told to continue on the path of orientating their productive activities towards exports at the expense of producing the goods and services needed by the people of Africa.

The report’s recommendations on trade must be seen within the broader context of a world in which the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has assumed enormous power and in which unbalanced regional trade agreements are being foisted on African countries. African economies are being opened up to the goods of Northern countries, undermining local production and resulting in increasing unemployment. The report’s approach will, at best, offer limited opportunities to larger-scale private sector enterprises with the capacity to engage in export activities, while continuing to undermine small-scale production, rural economic activity, food security and the like.

The commission does highlight some of the most glaring manifestations of Northern exploitation of the continent. For example, it talks of “conflict resources” and implicitly acknowledges that Northern banks are holding stolen assets, Northern corporations are guilty of making bribes, and the oil, minerals and other extractive industries are less than open about their payments. However, its recommendations in this regard are by and large vague. It notes that “assets stolen from the people of Africa by corrupt leaders must be repatriated” and “Firms who bribe should be refused export credits.” From previous experience, there just isn’t the political will or clout to give effect to these recommendations.

As for resources, the commission is very much in keeping with the meagre offerings of the Finance Ministers in relation to debt. It suggests a mere US$25 billion per year to be committed by donor countries, to be implemented by 2010. This could be doubled by 2015, subject to the condition that “good governance in Africa must continue to advance.”

It argues that half of this amount should go to education and health. It makes positive recommendations on removing primary school and patient fees, but instructions of a similar kind by the United States Congress to the Treasury, World Bank and IMF have gone unheeded before. Most significantly, the pennies proposed in the report won’t come near to restoring the levels of finance to health and education on the continent so consistently undermined by the World Bank and the IMF in the decades of imposed structural adjustment.

Finally, the report argues that a third of the 25 billion a year should go to “growth and poverty reduction”, a euphemism for an increased role for the private sector and a “doubling of expenditure on infrastructure”. This includes large, regional transport and power projects. To date, projects of this sort have realised large profits for Northern and South African corporations at the expense of increasing indebtedness and environmental destruction on the continent.

There are substantial similarities and convergences between the Blair Commission and Thabo Mbeki’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad). This is particularly so in their neoliberal orientation towards the World Bank, IMF, trade and large infrastructure projects. The report has no qualms about exposing Mbeki’s capitulation to the neoliberal approach in stating that, “The developed world must support the African Union’s Nepad programme to build public/private partnerships in order to create a stronger climate for growth, investment and jobs.”

The Blair Commission and the G7 Finance Ministers’ announcement on debt thus represent no more than two additional moments in the decades of neoliberal exploitation of the continent. This is, in turn, nothing other than a new means of continuing the exploitation initiated under the times of conquest, slavery and colonialism.

* George Dor is Jubilee South Africa General Secretary.

* Please send comments to

In a small corner of Mali far from the fanfare of the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, social movements and civil society activists will meet from 6-9 July to discuss international political and economic mechanisms which constrain the national policies of developing countries of the South. “Faced with the G8, which plays the role of a totally illegitimate world board of directors, African social movements are organising themselves to formulate alternatives to current neo-liberal policies and are firmly resolved to show their determination,” writes Barry Amanita Toure.

Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, has decided to make Africa one of the priorities of the next G8 summit to be held from the 6th to the 8th of July 2005 in Scotland. The report of the Commission for Africa, written for the occasion, recommends among other things doubling aid for Africa, cancelling poor countries’ debts “as quickly as possible”, removing rich countries’ customs barriers against African products as well as strengthening “good governance” in our countries. One can only support Mr. Blair’s initiative to finally bring to the G8 governments’ attention this set of problems that social movements throughout the world have raised for years.

However, being an African social movement, we find it difficult to have faith in all this talk. Are the governments of the world’s richest countries suddenly gripped by a guilty conscience in the face of the disastrous consequences of policies they have imposed on Africa for years? Is there a real will to change or was this report only meant to hoodwink the British electorate?

We must admit that a close look at rich countries’ current policies towards Africa tends to make us sceptical. In the nineties, the IMF, the World Bank and the G8 had already promised to write off the poorest countries’ debts, an initiative called Heavily Indebted Poor Countries. This initiative received a huge amount of publicity: the international press announced 90% debt cancellation and even 100% after the Cairo Euro-African summit (April 2000).

Debt reduction linked to this initiative depended on the implementation of structural adjustment programmes, dubbed War on Poverty Strategic Framework. However, upon close analysis the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative turns out to be one more ‘publicity stunt’ on debt cancellation. If we look at the debt levels of those countries which ‘benefited’ from this initiative, we see that, not only has the debt not been reduced but it has even increased.

Our States, being the good students of the IMF and the World Bank that they are, have meanwhile privatised our countries’ public sectors and have disengaged themselves from the health and education sectors, thus contributing to the growth of poverty. The report emphasises the importance of “good governance” in African countries but our governments will soon have nothing to manage, given that all of the State’s functions are now being carried out by the private sector.

On the other hand, doubling of aid to Africa is without a doubt indispensable given the pauperisation of our countries (more than 300 million Africans live on $0.64 a day), but care would have to be taken to ensure that this aid is really destined for African countries and not business enterprises from the North. In fact, aid is often used to fund lucrative contracts involving donor country enterprises implementing projects totally ill suited to the local context.

In speeches, rich countries pretend to contribute to the development of Africa but in reality, Europe and the USA are negotiating free enterprise deals that impose the opening up of African agricultural markets and competition between our economies and those of the North. How will African farmers be able to compete with American and European farmers when the latter benefit from substantial export subsidies? How will a local enterprise be able to continue selling its product in the face of massive importation of goods produced at much less cost by multinational companies? It therefore appears that G8 countries resort to double speaking and that they have unfortunately got us used to vain promises that are never followed by concrete action.

Due to the importance of this year’s G8, which is meeting once more to make false promises to Africa, we feel that it will be very important to mobilise African social movements and civil society to take firm action to reject Blair and the G8’s fraud.
This is why, as has been the case each year for the past four years, the Coalition for African Alternatives Debt and Development (CAD Mali) is organising the People’s Forum in Mali.

This year, it will be held in Fana from the 6th to the 9th of July 2005 so as to run concurrently with the G8 summit. This People’s Forum is a critical opportunity to inform and sensitise African social movements on international political and economic mechanisms, which constrain the national policies of developing countries of the South. Faced with the G8, which plays the role of a totally illegitimate world board of directors, African social movements are organising themselves to formulate alternatives to current neo-liberal policies and are firmly resolved to show their determination.

* Mrs. Barry Amanita Toure is chairperson of CAD-Mali (Coalition for African Alternatives Debt and Development)
E.mail : [email protected]

* This article was translated by Andrew Tichaenzana Manyawu ( [email protected]) For the French version of this article please click on the link below.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Bob Geldof is only the latest in a long line of Europeans who have appointed themselves as spokespersons for Africans, writes Patricia Daley. With a distinct brand of humanitarianism they have acted to serve the demands of global capitalism, suppressing African voices and aiding the exploitation of the continent.

Bob Geldof’s rally against poverty in Africa seems to have incurred admiration from well-meaning whites and indifference or resentment from Africans. The questions the critics pose are: who gave this pop star the authority to speak for us; why does he represent Africa in such a one dimensional way? Can’t he and his supporters see the realities on the ground? Can’t he see that Africans want to speak for themselves? Geldof seems to believe that his mission is noble. To him and his supporters, the moral argument is clear: the West is rich, Africa is poor; the West has the means to help Africa out of poverty. The argument is so simple that only the easily cynical would seek to dispute it. Through his celebrity status Geldof hopes to mobilise western public opinion to put pressure on the leaders of the capitalist world to be more benevolent to Africa.

To understand the Geldof phenomenon, we need to look historically at the role that Africa has played in the European imagination and in global capitalism. Geldof’s crusade and attitude is not new. He is only the latest in a long line of European men whose personal mission has been to transform Africa and Africans. David Livingstone, the celebrity of his day, embarked on a similar crusade in the late 19th century, painting Africa as a land of ‘evil’, of hopelessness and of child-like humans. His mission was to raise money to pursue his personal ambitions.

‘Darkest Africa’ occupies a special place in the white man’s psyche; it remains a place where he [and she] can achieve heroic status. Therefore, does it not make sense that African voices are silenced? Michel Foucault’s treatise on the relationship between power and knowledge may be old hat in academia, but still relevant in the real world. Sir Bob would lose his authenticity and thus his power if he was to give space to the multiplicity of African voices; many of which would certainly challenge his stance.

It may seem amazing that in the twenty-first century, with increased mobility, greater communication and an African heading the United Nations that many westerners are more comfortable with European interlopers translating Africa for them. Perhaps, only then could some be persuaded, as one famous Irish comedian was, ‘to give money to those bloody niggers’. Africa remains the object of western desires not the subject of its own destiny.

Livingstone’s and Geldof’s humanitarianism fits well with the demands of global capitalism, serving to obscure distinct phases in the exploitation of Africa. Livingstone’s redemption of the African savage was very much tied to colonial conquest and exploitation of the continent’s resources; a mission that Livingstone supported in the marriage of commerce and Christian morality. The consequence for most of Africa was dispossession, forced labour, de-humanization, oppression and genocide, as in the Congo Free State.

Geldof’s Live Aid also occurred at a time when neo-liberal policies were being forced on recalcitrant African countries. The results are fully documented: collapse of health and education services, increased unemployment and privatization, leading to greater impoverishment of the masses. All this occurring while westerners bathe in the glory of their collective benevolence to the ‘lost continent’. Geldof was even rewarded for his chivalry with a knighthood.

How convenient for Live 8 - an upsurge of western popular goodwill - to occur at the same time as a new scramble for African resources? With the threat from China, Africa’s oil and other strategic minerals are even more critical to the continuance of western economic dominance. One just has to consider the significance of Africa’s resources in the west’s push for peace settlements in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It is beneficial to western capital for Africans to be seen as the architects of their own misery. Mugabe, thug as he is, is no worse, and certainly less so, than many other leaders in Africa’s post-colonial history, yet his vilification fits into the discourse of corruption and self-inflicted harm and justifies the prevailing view that Africans cannot be trusted with their own destiny. Racism is not often used in explanations of the west’s attitude towards Africa, yet it remains a fundamental component of the west’s interaction with Africans – nowhere is it more visible than in the diaspora. How can one claim to want to save a people, when one is complicit in the marginalization of their relatives? The irony has not been lost on Africans.

Geldof, like Livingstone before him, represents the cultural arm of global capitalism. The inequalities he rallies against are reproduced by the very capitalist system he supports. How many artists, fading or otherwise, would turn down the promotional opportunity of playing to an audience of the magnitude predicted for Live 8? In the cultural as well as in the development industry, African poverty serves as a vehicle for wealth creation.

Those people, whether on the right or the left, who are conversant with the realities of Africa, know that aid will not ‘save’ the continent and deliver the promised land; that the problem in Africa is not poverty but impoverishment and that Africa needs freedom not redemption. Africa’s creativity has to be released through true democracy and not the compromise of ‘good governance’ and western tutelage.

Livingstone’s and Geldof’s suppression of African voices, whether deliberately or inadvertently, aids the continued exploitation of the continent. Geldof has the capacity to transcend Livingstone’s shortcomings, if only he would listen to Africans and engage with issues of reparations and the politics of truth. He would certainly get more diaspora Africans among his London audience, despite their lack of appreciation for rock music.

After Live 8, when African resources are delivering wealth to western trans-nationals and African people suffer further degradation, be it wars, hunger or political oppression, they are likely to find little external support. After all, a whole generation of western civil society will say, “did they not receive debt relief?” “Are they so incompetent or corrupt that they could not make good use of our bountifulness?” In Africa, people will continue to live and die and a lutta continua…

* Dr Patricia Daley holds the posts of University lecturer in Human Geography, and Fellow and Tutor in Geography at Jesus College, Oxford. She is an African from Jamaica.

* Please send comments to

Global leaders like UK prime-minister Tony Blair have been vocal in stating that 2005 is a year where progress must be made on Africa's development. The G8 summit - an opportunity for rich world leaders to put their heads together and change the global development machinery - is now underway in Gleneagles, Scotland. Debt relief, aid flows, global trade and climate change are on the agenda of one of the highest profile G8 meetings ever. But well-known African commentator Issa Shivji is not optimistic that this summit will produce significant changes for the millions of people trapped in poverty.

PAMBAZUKA NEWS: There has been a deluge of promises and debate around issues of aid and debt ahead of this G8 summit. What, if anything, can Africans expect from world leaders this time around?

ISSA SHIVJI: Little. Promises based on utterly wrong premises yield little beyond further humiliation of the African people as permanent beggars. Debt and aid belong to the same system, the system of exploitation of African resources. "Aid as imperialism" is as true today as it was thirty years ago when Teresa Hayter wrote a book with that title.

PN: Reading the various media reports around the G8 there is a very real sense that it is all about Tony Blair's plans for Africa, or Gordon Brown's promises, or what George Bush is or isn't prepared to do. Why is it that African voices seem to be so sidelined in events that are so crucial to their lives?

IS: Truly African voices have been and are being sidelined. This is the show of the very people who plan poverty in the first place! Poverty in Africa, both historically and in contemporary times, is due in no small measure to the exploitation and plundering of its resources by Western multinational capital. The crucial point for me is not that the Africans have little say in Blair's and Brown's plans but that Africans have lost all voice in controlling their own resources, their own destiny.

PN: What is the relevance of Blair's Commission for Africa report, the G8 event and the various other initiatives taking place during 2005? How should African people engage with these initiatives?

IS: Isn't it a cruel irony that a leader of a country that followed Bush into destroying a developing country (Iraq) and that has increased its arms sales to Africa fourfold in the last four years should be spearheading the fight against African poverty? If this is not cyncism, what is it? Commissions on Africa have been many but this was the first time in recent history that it was established and led by the very people whom we used to call 'neo-colonialists'! It is African leaders who like poodles dance to the tune; the African people in their villages have little time to engage in such dances!

PN: Tony Blair's plans for Africa are presented as being anti-poverty, but critics argue that they mask age-old policies that will continue the exploitation of Africa. What's so wrong with Blair's - and by extension - the G8 approach to ending poverty?

IS: As I said, the very premises are wrong. The underdevelopment of Africa and the resultant poverty are the outcome of a long historical process of exploitation of the continent by Western imperialism. That relationship continues today in an even more blatant form as the resources of Africa - from mineral to bio-resources - are siphoned off through various mechanisms that we associate with globalization: the so-called free trade, and various other associated policies such as privitisation and marketisation of the African economy. So while Africa's economies get integrated in global circuits, African people get marginalised. One hates to be cynical but it is literally true that while Blair gives aid with one hand to reduce poverty, he sells arms with another to kill the poor.

PN: Once again, African leaders will attend the summit and be granted an audience with G8 leaders. Are African leaders getting anything substantive in return and are they correct to engage in this way? What should they be doing which they are not doing?

IS: We shouldn't forget that Africa and generally the people of the South are on the defensive. The confidence and arrogance of the nationalist period has been defeated. Imperialism has assumed a more offensive and aggressive posture. African leaders today are more compradors than nationalists. So long as African leaders seek legitimacy from their imperial masters rather than their own people they will continue to appear with bowls in hands at the doorsteps of the G8.

PN: The G8 development approach is largely based on building Africa through a free market economy that attracts foreign investment and trade. What would an alternative development agenda for Africa look like?

IS: There is no doubt in my mind that we, in Africa, have to develop a nationalist, a Pan-Africanist vision, both political and developmental. And this vision has to be in opposition to the domination of imperialism, read globalisation, just as the nationalist vision in the last century was in opposition to colonialism. More than ever before we need Nkrumahs and Fanons who saw in African unity and in the unity of the oppressed people and exploited classes a counter-force, which would be the harbinger of an alternative vision and an alternative path of development.

PN: Plans are afoot to create a human white band around Edinburgh as a symbol of demands for trade justice, debt cancellation and more and better aid. What is your assessment of these mobilisations?

IS: I do not wish to be cynical of the well-intentioned who would want to bring the "plight" of Africa to the world stage. But I would like to see much more and in a more sustained fashion the well-intentioned people with red bands surrounding Edinburgh and highlighting without ambiguity and prevarication the pillage of Africa; pillage through trade, investment, debt and dubious policies.

PN: What is the most effective action that organisations in Africa should take today that will make a significant impact on the relationship between our countries and the G8?

IS : Ultimately, the liberators of Africa will be Africans themselves. Organisations in Africa have to sink their roots among their own people and free themselves of this dependency syndrome. We have to organise and mobilise for a second independence in every sense of the world. Fundamentally, the relationship between Africa and G8 is an unequal exploitative relationship. That is the fundamental premise which should be our point of departure.

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

* Please send comments to [email protected]

With the global music extravaganza that is Live 8 just around the corner, Gerald Caplan is nervous about the crocodile tears shed for Africa by leaders like Tony Blair. Caplan writes that the job of Bono, Bob Geldof and other Live 8 organizers is to let their fans know that Africans need no more missionaries or do-gooders. “Instead, Africans have a right to justice and equity to make up for the incalculable harm that we in the rich world have inflicted on them for such a long, long time,” writes Caplan.

Everybody must be aware by now of the Bob Geldof Live 8 spectacular coming at us next week. The media has been abuzz with burning questions about where the concert will be held and who'll be performing, with a sentence occasionally thrown in about saving poor old Africa or ending poverty. This is a serious problem.

Getting it wrong about Africa is a venerable tradition in the rich world, and music has played its role. Remember the great famine concerts of 20 years ago and the giant hit "Do They Know It's Christmas?" It's just been re-recorded, with its inane lyrics of Africa as a land "underneath a burning sun…where nothing ever grows" and "no rain nor river flows". Get it? Natural causes---bad luck—are at the root of Africa's problems.

Television does its share. Who among us haven't seen inspiring stories about young Canadians who decide to raise pennies for a well or school in Africa? These efforts are invariably motivated by the best of intentions. But I'm concerned with their unintended message. I fear they reinforce wrong-headed stereotypes of both Africa and us. To my eye, they show Africans as helpless, dependent, passive victims, and we westerners as decent, selfless, compassionate, resourceful missionaries.

Now Paul Wolfowitz's has added his explanation for Africa's plight. Moving swiftly from being a maven about Iraq to becoming an authority on Africa's 53 countries, the new head of the World Bank has just completed a whirlwind learning tour of the continent—6 days, 4 countries. The problem in Africa, he announced at the end, is simple: "corruption". Right. If only Africa's leaders were more like our own.

These views reflect a common theme: they leave the rich world blameless for Africa's multitude of problems. I greatly fear that Live 8 is inadvertently strengthening the notion that we in the rich world must be missionaries to save Africans from themselves. The truth is already being lost-- the deep, comprehensive responsibility of western nations and western financial institutions for so much of Africa's continuing underdevelopment and poverty. The real reason the rich world should be racing to deal with African poverty is the central role we have played in causing and perpetuating it. Has anyone told Paul Wolfowitz that vastly more money pours out of Africa each year back to rich countries than flows in? That's the key to Africa's development crisis, and it's almost entirely unrecognized.

The responsibility of the rich world takes many forms. It includes the indispensable support given over the decades to countless African tyrants and to white racists. It includes the demonstrably retrograde free market policies imposed on virtually every Africa government by ideological extremists at the World Bank and International monetary Fund (also known by African pediatricians as the Infant Mortality Fund) and backed by almost all western governments, including Canada. Across west Africa, it's cheaper to buy a subsidized frozen chicken imported from Holland that to buy one from a local producer. Foreign aid is always tied to buying goods and services in the rich country or to sending consultants to Africa to make more in a day than the vast majority of Africans do in a year. Rich countries drain off a huge percentage of the professionals—doctors and nurses, especially—who are trained in African universities. Western corporations plunder Africa's natural resources, pay starvation wages and almost no local taxes, bribe anyone in charge—corruption!--pollute hideously, and leave conflict and human rights abuses in their wake. Western donors demand that user fees be imposed on health services and tuition fees on schooling. They demand that public services be slashed so that health and school systems deteriorate. The US government and fundamentalist western religious groups introduce unrealistic and irrelevant moral dogmas to combat AIDS and undermine evidence-based methods of prevention

Anyone who doesn't distrust the Group of 8 leaders who'll be meeting next month hasn't been paying attention. They're the ones responsible for the economic apartheid that characterizes rich-poor country relations today. Every one of them has failed to live up to repeated pledges about aid, debt relief and agricultural subsidies, solemnly made and blithely ignored. The recent ballyhoo about debt relief for 14 African countries was wildly overblown; it was no more than a modest first step. The more leaders like Tony Blair and Paul Martin shed crocodile tears talk about their moral crusade for Africa, the more liberal imperialist rhetoric they spin, the more nervous we should be. The job of Bono and Bob Geldof and other Live 8 organizers is to let their fans know that Africans need no more missionaries or do-gooders. Instead, Africans have a right to justice and equity to make up for the incalculable harm that we in the rich world have inflicted on them for such a long, long time.

* Gerald Caplan works with various UN agencies on African development issues.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

In the context of World Refugee Day on June 20 and African Diaspora & Development Day (ad3) on July 02, Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie from the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD), suggests that helping the West to wean itself of African aid would be “a great leap forward for humanity”.

In Western media coverage African (and other) refugees and asylum seekers are frequently vilified as illegal aliens, as leeches sucking all the good out of a generous but gullible West taken for a ride by menacing schemers. Similarly, recent media coverage about Africa has created the distinct impression that Africa is a helpless burden, totally dependent on generous Western aid, constantly needy, lacking in its own agency. And yet the reality is quite the opposite. To understand this, you need to see the story the media never tells.

The bulk of aid to reach ordinary Africans comes from Africans themselves in the form of self-help. Moreover, Africa is in fact a big aid donor to the West. To the extent that Africa is dependent upon aid, the vast majority of the “aid” that actually reaches ordinary Africans and communities comes from Africans themselves – those people living in the diaspora who regularly send money, called remittances, home. Monies that flow in to Africa via a combination of formal and informal channels amounts to roughly $200 billion a year, according to World Bank estimates. Although this figure exceeds both official aid and foreign investment for the continent you will not hear the media talk about Africans being their own biggest aid donors and investors.

Africa’s aid to Britain

But the media’s oversight does not stop there. Africa is also a huge aid donor to the West. Taking Ghana as a case study, researchers for Save the Children Fund, a UK-based charity, estimated that between 1999 and 2004, the total number of doctors registered in the UK and trained in Ghana, doubled from 143 to 293. By 2003/4 an estimated cumulative total of 1021 Ghanaian nurses had registered in the UK. The researchers estimate that Ghana has foregone around £35 million of its training investment in health professionals. In comparison, the UK has saved £65 million in training costs by recruiting Ghanaian doctors since 1998. For all of Africa this subsidy amounts to billions of dollars a year.

However, Africa’s giving does not stop there. Africa sells its commodities at give-away prices because rich countries skew their markets through tariffs and subsidies to ensure that little value can be added to raw products at source in Africa. Other subsidies enable American cotton farmers or European beef farmers to dump their products at artificially low prices on African markets, meaning that it is Africa that is keeping Western farmers in business. Yet more aid from Africa comes in the form of capital flight sent to Swiss and other bank accounts by corrupt officials and of course investors who lack confidence in the stability and profitability of African economies.

African Aid Conditionality Summit

Helping the West wean itself off African aid would in fact be a great leap forward for humanity. What a pity, though, that Africa does not impose its own conditionality upon its aid recipients. Instead, African leaders, civil society activists and others are inadvertently complicit in perpetuating the myth that 2005 is a make-or-break year for Africa and that the G8 summit is terribly important or worth a lot of our energy.

Neither is true. Indeed, even more significant than the G8 summit would be a summit among Africans in Africa and the diaspora to decide how to maximize the impact of the aid that flows from Africa and how to maximize the impact of the aid and investment that flows into Africa.

Here is a win-win-win proposal to achieve the former, given that this is Refugee Week. This is a win for African refugees, a win for Africa and a win for the Western societies where so many refugees find themselves today.

In addition to having the right to safe haven when fleeing persecution in their countries of origin, numerous African refugees and asylum seekers (and, of course, people from other parts of the world) actually arrive in the West with valuable skills and experience. Skills and experience that could further help prop up Britain’s ailing National Health Service or NHS, already heavily dependent upon nurses and doctors from Africa.

And yet, far too many such skilled and experienced refugees and asylum-seekers find themselves languishing on the margins of UK society blocked from active paid employment by a combination of regulatory impediments, institutionally racist attitudes and lack of job-preparedness among potential applicants.

Refugee fighting fund – “Live8419”

We need a fighting fund to enable refugee and asylum groups to tackle these numerous obstacles themselves, whether it’s a question of more and better training or lobbying for changes in the law.

The benefits to refugees and asylum-seekers are obvious – the opportunity to regain a sense of self-confidence, hope and dignity rather than be the focus of constant, vicious media hostility; the opportunity to invest in their own personal development; the opportunity to better support loved ones and friends back home; the opportunity, one day, to deploy enhanced skills back in Africa, where they are so desperately needed.

African governments will win because they will have a better chance of retaining talent at home. Of course, African governments and other employers will have to make far more effort to create the sort of environment that will encourage workers to stay in Africa. Otherwise, they will continue to vote with their feet.

The win for the Western societies in which refugees and asylum-seekers will work are also obvious.

Efforts to create this win-win-win scenario are already underway but we need to do more. This is why as part of its annual African Diaspora & Development Day (ad3) on Saturday 2 July this year the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD) has called on African performers to take to what it has called the “Live8419” stage in London to help raise some money to support this effort.

Of course, under normal circumstances we provide this aid directly to the British government. However, the absence of good governance gives us cause for concern. Amnesty International has recently questioned the legality of the detention of asylum-seekers in Britain. Similarly, the British government is implicated in the scandal of the US-controlled illegal detention camp at Guantanimo Bay in Cuba. In light of these concerns, we shall channel our aid via refugee and asylum-seeker led organisations.

With leading African artists relegated to performing in a village somewhere in Cornwall on 2 July we thought it important – some 11 years after apartheid was finally defeated – for African performers to have a presence in London on that day. The excitement will not stop there as African performers at Live8419 will for the first time ever perform the hit song, “Do they know it’s summertime?” written by AFFORD to raise more African aid for Britain. This world exclusive will undoubtedly set the media world alight.

Enterprise Africa! - ad3 2005

And here is a proposal to help Africans maximize the impact of the support they already provide to counterparts back home in Africa. A 2004 BBC survey of the views of 7,500 Africans living in the urban areas of 10 African countries gave a clear picture of their major concerns. Some 20% of respondents identified securing a well-paid job as their main concern. Two out of three respondents said making money is a priority for them. Far from being an example of avarice or greed, this desire to make money focuses attention upon African peoples’ aspirations to make something of their lives and to enjoy basic economic security.

With a job and reasonable economic security more Africans will take care of their own basic needs of health, education, housing, food, clothing, leisure, etc. More people in productive employment, most likely through small and medium sized enterprises would dramatically reduce dependency on an increasingly bloated and self-serving aid industry. An aid industry that will swell further if official aid to Africa was indeed doubled.

That is why AFFORD’s annual ad3 in 2005 will focus on enterprise in Africa - mobilizing African diaspora resources to help create and sustain enterprises, jobs and wealth in Africa. The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Professor Wangari Maathai, will be on hand to provide the keynote address and share her experience of working with grassroots women and communities to plant over 30 million trees and in the process provide people relegated to the margins of society with increased economic security, dignity, hope and self-confidence.

Self-determination, self-help, self-reliance, self-respect, and self-confidence will be our watchwords on 2 July and beyond. Every African in the diaspora needs to take personal responsibility to invest and help create and sustain just one entrepreneur or job, not through charity but through social enterprise. In less than the 30 years it has taken Professor Maathai’s Green Belt Movement to plant 30 million trees we shall have the equivalent self-sustaining tree of hope, dignity, fulfilling and rewarding human existence in Africa.

* Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie works for the London-based African Foundation for Development (AFFORD), organizers of the annual African Diaspora & Development Day (see www.afford-uk.org) on 2 July at The Rocket, London Metropolitan University

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”, writes Issa Shivji. And the bottom line which drives capitalism in Africa is profits and accumulation. Africa offers both with relative ease and apparently little resistance.

The Asian Tsunami was a great human tragedy; so was the invasion of Iraq. In both cases, the US-led financial capitalism found a great opportunity. The opportunity was to “reconstruct” these far flung societies in the image of a neo-conservative ideological world-view: total hegemony of capitalism under the supremacy of the United States, euphemistically called globalization. Condoleeza Rice, the American Secretary of State, unashamedly described tsunami as “a wonderful opportunity” that “has paid great dividends for us.” What was this opportunity?

The answer is given by a group called Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters which says for “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!”

Some 80 per cent of the victims of tsunami were small fishing communities. Little has been done to restore their lives and communities. Instead, the likes of the World Bank, now headed by a neo-con called Paul Wolfowitz, is pushing for the expansion of tourism and industrial fish farms. Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Sri Lanka, warns that his country was now facing “a second tsunami of corporate globalization and militarization.” He says: “We see this as a plan of action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with military assistance from the US Marines.”

Mr. Wolfowitz was the US Deputy Secretary of State when Iraq was reduced to rubbles and Iraqis to corpses by the “coalition” forces. Bodies had been hardly buried before consulting firms started rewriting Iraq’s investment laws and selling off public companies. One of the corporations which bagged big “reconstruction” contracts, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, another country under “reconstruction”, was Halliburton. Halliburton is a giant oil-service company which has been awarded, under dubious circumstances, billions of dollars worth of military, defense and so-called reconstruction contracts by the US government. The US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is the former Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton.

The transition from the bi-polar world, where we had two super-powers and two competing world views, socialism and capitalism, to the uni-polar world where monotheism (the single god being the god of capitalism, Profit) prevails, has been strewn with wars, conflicts, destruction, death and crass ideological propaganda, double-speak, double standards and blatant lies. Seen from a historical standpoint, this should not come as a surprise. After all, the transition from Britain’s imperial hegemony in the first half of the last century to that of the US itself involved the Great Crash of the 1930s, the rise of racist fascism, and two World Wars. From the ashes of WWII emerged the bi-polar world in which the US established its supremacy of the capitalist camp bringing Japan and Europe firmly under its wing. There too followed “reconstruction” which gave a new lease of life to capitalism. (By the way, US assistance for reconstruction was confined to Europe only. Both Japan and the then Soviet Union reconstructed through their own resources and efforts.)

In Europe, the Soviets and the US carved out their respective spheres of armed control while restricting their disputes and conflicts to the ‘war of ideas’ called the Cold War. In the rest of the world, they fought, directly or by proxy, hot wars to assert their spheres of influence. Between 1944 and 2004 there were at least 21 hot conflicts in which the US was directly involved; of these, 11 after the end of the Cold War. These include the gruesome Vietnam War in which hundreds of thousand were literally burnt to death by napalm and the two Gulf wars (still ongoing). In the Vietnam War, US forces sprayed some 21 million gallons of dioxin herbicides, including 800 pounds of Agent Orange, to destroy the foliage so as to flush out guerrillas. The Vietnamese and American troops are still suffering from the after effects of that deadly herbicide.

In the first Gulf War, the “coalition” forces rained bombs on Iraq equivalent of some 11 Hiroshimas. In the second Iraqi war no doubt even more bombs were thrust into the heart and soil of Iraq.

Capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Witness the first genocide ever of the Native Americans and the vicious slave trade which destroyed the social fabric of African empires and depopulated the continent. It has since maintained itself by wars, death and destruction. It brought the peoples and the resources of the tri-continent (Asia, Africa and Latin America) under its hegemony through colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism whose newest edition is christened globalization.

Imperialism is inherent in capitalism just as war is inherent in imperialism. Just as the economic crash of South East Asia in the late 1990s was used by American corporations to hive off the assets of South Korean conglomerates and re-establish their control of the Asian economies, so the tsunami disaster has been used to globalize their coastal and water resources.

In Africa, the so-called aid and debt have been used both as a carrot and a stick. You switch them on and off as necessary. A nationalist African or third world government determined to retain its resources for its people would be threatened with cutting-off of aid and would certainly not find itself among the beneficiaries of debt cancellation, while a pliant and obedient state would get more aid and its debt may just be cancelled. Of course, nothing of this happens without strings attached. Debt cancellation goes hand in hand with more loans (since one is now credit-worthy) and aid is invariably used to create markets and an enabling environment for the multinationals which have a voracious appetite for Africa’s copper, cobalt, oil, timber, diamonds and gold and bio-resources and of course cheap labour.

The bottom line which drives capitalism is profits and accumulation and Africa offers both with relative ease and apparently little resistance. We are good converts to the religion of globalization. Colonialism was enabled by converting us to Christianity to save our souls and steal our resources; globalization teaches us to commoditize, marketise, and privatize to save our skins from poverty. In the process, the majority of us end up being deprived of both souls and skins while a few among us adorn “imported” souls and alien skins. Fanon called it Black skins, White masks.

Whoever said, ‘capitalism with a human face’! Yes, capitalists surely have a human face like the rest of us; a few may even be humane. But capitalism is faceless and colourless. It is defined by a drive; an insatiable drive for profits. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is the Moses and the prophets!” of capitalism.

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

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Notwithstanding the global hype associated with reversing aid, debt and trade injustices during the past few days, it hasn't been an easy time for the huge Non-Governmental Organisations at the centre of the action.

A front-page New Statesman article on May 30 revealed that Oxfam's revolving-door relationship with chancellor Gordon Brown has neutered the demands, strategies and tactics of the 450-member NGO campaign, 'Make Poverty History'. The website of the British magazine Red Pepper followed up with a devastating political critique of the campaign, including a refusal to countenance any anti-war message that will embarrass Brown and Tony Blair.

Embarrassment of this sort seems endemic amongst the charity-minded. The Bob Geldof superstar concert series 'Live 8' correctly stood accused of being 'hideously white' (as Black Information Link put it), since only one band from Africa was scheduled amongst dozens at the five major performances. (A hastily arranged additional concert in Johannesburg may lead to a kind of outsourcing for black bands.) In any case, Sir Bob's mid-1980s Live Aid famine relief strategy is widely understood to have flopped because it ignored the countervailing roles of imperial power relations, capital accumulation, unreformable global institutions and venal local elites - problems repeated and indeed amplified in Live 8.

There was another PR disaster in early June, just a month before the Group of 8 (G8) leaders meet in Gleneagles, Scotland: white wristbands favoured by Blair as a mark of his commitment to Africa were revealed as products of Chinese forced labour at a Shenzhen firm, Tat Shing. According to the Telegraph newspaper, 'Christian Aid, which bought more than 500,000 wristbands from Tat Shing, claims that Oxfam failed to tell other charities that it had decided to stop ordering from the Shenzhen company. Oxfam said it told its coalition partners of its decision, but "perhaps could have put it in writing".'

Do these gaffes signify something deeper? Merely careless paternalism? Or perhaps a sense that the main outcomes of this campaign are to be celebrated in media buzz, fashion statements, celebrity chasing and the NGOs' proximity to power?

NGOs or organic social movements

The heart of the problem is that the large mainstream NGOs - and here we do not mean War on Want, the World Development Movement and Christian Aid - are not putting serious pressure on the G8. For example, when anti-poverty campaigners call for 'cancellation of poor countries' unpayable debts', this leaves undefined what, exactly, is 'unpayable' (quite a weasel word) and concedes that the vast populations of lower-middle income countries will suffer under indefinite debt peonage. NGO and rock star endorsements of the partial debt relief gimmick announced by Gordon Brown and the G8 finance ministers on June 11 illustrate the confusion.

Semantic wiggling is just one of the problems associated with the best of these initiatives, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), whose International Facilitation Group was established in Johannesburg late last year. Many excellent African organisations have joined the campaign, but have they fully applied their minds, and social-change instincts?

For GCAP, 'A single global title for the mobilisation is needed to provide focus, cohesion and to maximise impact of activity... The aim of "White Band Day" will be to get everyone around the world that wants to end poverty to wear a white band on those days.'

There is a genuine need for focus and cohesion. But if it is addressed in the manner conceived by GCAP's strategists, it could have the reverse effect: organisational demobilisation accompanied by lowest-common-denominator analyses and demands.

To illustrate, GCAP's first newsletter, issued on June 14, is a 3600-word report-back on campaigning across the world. Yet it contains no reference to organic anti-poverty activism in the Global South, such as - in no particular order - labour strikes, popular mobilisations for AIDS-treatment and other health services, reconnections of water/electricity, land and housing occupations, anti-GMO and pro-food security campaigns, women's organising, municipal budget campaigns, student and youth movements, community resistance to displacements caused by dam construction and the like, anti-debt and reparations movements, environmental justice struggles, immigrants' rights campaigns, political movements to take state power, etc etc. No mention of Bolivia, Venezuela, Palestine, Iraq.

GCAP has superb member organisations across the Third World, to be sure, but as a network it just seems to float in the air, disconnected from the reality of anti-poverty protest. It's as if the formidable recent upsurge of unrest - 1980s-90s IMF Riots, high-profile indigenous people's protests since Zapatismo in 1994, global justice activism since Seattle in 1999, the Social Forum movement since 2001, anti-war demos since 2001, autonomist protests and the Latin American left's revival - never happened, don't exist, aren't worthy of acknowledgment much less integration and amplification.

Worse, GCAP's promotion of the already watered-down UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) could draw away activist energy and resources in many Third World countries, from organic struggles and organisational imperatives. If GCAP is successful, we foresee a tsunami of distraction, flooding out the diverse local struggles that could instead - if nurtured carefully - support a genuinely bottom-up, internationally-linked, networked fight against injustice.

In contrast to the GCAP rhetoric, albeit sometimes off the beaten path, serious activists are crossing borders, races, classes and political traditions in sector after sector: land (Via Campesino), healthcare (International Peoples Health Council), free schooling (Global Campaign for Education), water (the People's World Water Forum), energy/climate change (the Durban Declaration), debt (Jubilee South), democratic development finance (IFIs-Out! and World Bank Bonds Boycott), trade (Our World is Not for Sale) and so on.

Of course, it is not at all easy to interlock the already overlapping grassroots and shopfloor justice campaigns. South Africans now campaigning for an overall programme of 'decommodification' and socio-economic rights know this, thanks to the various movements' political splits (mainly over the merits of alignment to the corruption-ridden, neoliberal ruling party of Thabo Mbeki).

To be sure, there is broad unity in the South Africans' objectives - free anti-retroviral medicines to fight AIDS; at least 50 litres of free water and 1 kiloWatt hour of free electricity for each individual every day; extensive land reform; prohibitions on service disconnections and evictions; free education; the right to employment; and even a monthly 'Basic Income Grant' - but very hard work lies ahead to connect the concrete struggles.

Globophiles, globophobes

Still, without coherence emerging from organic struggles fought by mass democratic movements across the Global South (including in Northern ghettoes), the construction of a top-down campaign against poverty is both unrealistic and subject to early cooption. According to Catherine Quarmby in the New Statesman last month, 'Some of the most intriguing criticism of the softly-softly approach has come from within the government itself. One senior government source suggests that Oxfam has failed to learn one of the essential techniques of negotiation - if you agree on the basics too early you forfeit real influence.'

Unfortunately this is no aberration, but part of a pattern dating at least to 1995, when Oxfam International broke from the 50 Years is Enough protests against the World Bank, endorsing a large inflow of taxpayer funding at the very peak of the Washington Consensus mentality.

By 2002, Oxfam's leading policy analsyst, quoted in the Washington Post, happily revealed an agenda of divide-and-conquer, between 'globophobes' (the global justice movement protesting the WTO/IMF/World Bank) and 'globophiles' (Oxfam): 'Breaking with some of its anti-globalisation allies, the aid agency Oxfam International issued a report yesterday that praised international trade as a potentially enormous boon to the world's poor... "The extreme element of the anti-globalisation movement is wrong," said Kevin Watkins, a senior policy adviser for Oxfam who wrote most of the report. "Trade can deliver much more [for poor countries] than aid or debt relief."'

As then-director of Food First, Anuradha Mittal, complained, 'We are disappointed that Oxfam, one of the NGO leaders on food security, has chosen to undermine the demands of social movements and think tanks in the South such as Via Campesina, Movement of Landless Workers (Brazil), Third World Network, Focus on the Global South, and Africa Trade Network which have demanded that governments must uphold the rights of all people to food sovereignty and the right to food rather than industry-led export-oriented production... Oxfam undermines the demands of social movements and think tanks in the South.'

Proximity to Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue has unfortunately become a good proxy for political common sense, or lack thereof. For instance, Mohammad Akhter, chief executive officer of Interaction, the 160-member NGO coalition many of whose members are considered de facto subsidiaries of US AID, met Wolfowitz late last month and publicly pronounced: 'The World Bank is in good hands.'

A few days earlier, Interaction and Oxfam had thrown a grateful going-away bash for James Wolfensohn, even though on three high-profile occasions - the World Commission on Dams, Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative and Extractive Industries Review - he seduced NGOs into multi-stakeholder reviews, and then broke their hearts by allying instead with corporate and state suiters.

As a result of these sorts of influences, there appears little benefit - and great risk - for African NGOs to adopt as a high priority top-down Make Poverty History and even GCAP campaigns which endorse MDG end-goals dreamt up in the backrooms of the UN, where Bush administration ideologues breathe down bureaucrats' necks to reduce funding obligations, impose patriarchal and Christian-fundamentalist values, remove the word 'rights' from (already fatuous) official rhetoric, and denude the few progressive UN agencies of any clout. Even Johannesburg-based Civicus International staff have informally relabeled their objective the 'Minimalist Development Goals'.

Why, then, do those white bands grace some African NGO wrists and heads, from Civicus' chief executive officer at the last World Economic Forum in Davos, to a few brave pro-MDG NGOers at the Africa Social Forum? When Civicus staff brought two huge bags of the headbands to Lusaka and made a pitch for the campaign, it was so controversial - alongside a futile appeal to endorse a 'Joint Facilitation Committee' with the hated World Bank - that the bags were left closed.

South Africa's whiteband ('witdoeke') problem

If we flash back 19 years, to mid-1986, we get a better perspective on why wearing white headbands is so distasteful for the South African left. At the time, Cape Town's African township Crossroads had a population of 100 000+ and a high profile in anti-apartheid protest in part because of its location near the airport. Over a fortnight's time, violence erupted, leaving 60 people dead and approximately 60,000 people homeless as a reactionary paramilitary gang swept through, known as the 'witdoeke', whose leader was specifically mandated by the apartheid regime to terrorise anti-apartheid activists.

According to a reliable history of the area, 'The person selected for this in Crossroads was Johnson Ngxobongwana. Ngxobongwana had evolved from being a local warlord to a strong political voice in Crossroads. As chairman of the ward committee he had built up a popular following, and acquired a retinue of local thugs, known as witdoeke (white-cloths) for the white headbands they wore for identification. Unbeknownst to most people he also had "unofficial" sponsorship from South Africa's apartheid government and its security forces. Ngxobongwana was able to use these resources to eliminate rivals in the area, as well as marginalise women's groups and youth groups.'

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found Crossroads' fate to be comparable with techniques used in Johannesburg, Durban and other sites where violence emanating from the witdoeke-style Inkatha movement killed tens of thousands of people: 'In the South African context, contra-mobilisation was used to organise and support "moderate blacks" to oppose the revolutionary movements. Of necessity, it was a covert strategy - concealing the hand of the state as provider of logistical, political and financial support - and making use of "surrogate" forces. Hence, the state would not be seen to be involved in the conflict and violence between groupings and the resistance organisations.'

No one is suggesting that putting on a white headband or wristband makes you a collaborator with neoliberalism, dividing-and-conquering the oppressed forces, and supporting 'moderate' NGOs so that they gain bantustan-style rewards from the global apartheid establishment.

Nevertheless, from the standpoint of the resistance organisations, it is overdue that we collectively consider our fundamental visions, and in particular whether the much welcomed globalisation of people - and of culture, ideas, hospitality, travel and political solidarity - can be accompanied by what we'd argue is just as desperately needed: the deglobalisation of capital.

For or against market tyranny?

After all, the danger of NGO-lubricated ideological alignment with the neoliberal project is serious. At a time men like Jeffrey Sachs are celebrated as saviours of the world's poor - for example, in a Bono song dedication at last month's big New York City concert - a deeper critique of markets and the NGOs which legitimate them is desperately needed.

Bono in particular has been obsequious. At the last New Labour party convention, Bono labeled Blair/Brown the 'Lennon and McCartney of poverty reduction'. According to Quarmby, 'some groups involved in Make Poverty History were horrified. John Hilary, director of campaigns and policy at War on Want, was in the audience. "When Bono said that, many NGO leaders who were there put their heads in their hands and groaned... It's a killer blow for us. To see the smiles on the faces of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair! This is exactly what they want - they want people to believe that this is their crusade, without actually changing their policy."'

Are the Make Poverty History campaign objectives for Gleneagles - greater Third World exposure to market mechanisms, a few crumbs of debt relief and a doubling of (neoliberally-conditioned) aid - actually worth endorsing as a reformist step forward - or should they be condemned as more of the same? In his book Deglobalisation, Bello has convincingly set out the justice movement's case for disempowering and defunding the global-scale institutions that push capitalism down Third World throats.

So when Sachs, Oxfam, Mbeki and others continue to insist that the way to cure poverty is to expand the world market and reverse Africa's alleged 'marginalisation', they elide the reality that Africa's trade/GDP ratio has for many years topped the world charts, and the reality that ever-greater reliance upon exporting cash-crops and minerals - most of which have suffered huge declines in price due to gluts - is a recipe for underdevelopment.

When debt relief comes with more Western neoliberal conditionality, as HIPC shows, the reality is that people often end up in worse shape after relief than before.

And when G8 'phantom aid' continues to foster Northern interests above those of the Third World's people, it should be rethought entirely. In late May, Christian Aid's brilliant Ghanaian researcher/campaigner Charles Abugre declared - personally not organisationally - to a Globalise Resistance conference in London: 'Stop the aid! It's done too much damage!'

What to wear, for fun in the sun?

What, then, should be done in coming weeks, especially on July 2 in Edinburgh? As Naomi Klein suggested at a University of KwaZulu-Natal anti-corporate conference on June 10, 'A million people are going to Edinburgh and joining hands, wearing white, in a circle around the entire city, and it's going to be one big, giant bracelet. Everyone will wear bracelets, and then they'll be a bracelet. Are you excited about this? I always had concerns that some of these big corporate NGOs were less interested in contesting power than acting as accessories to power. But being a giant bracelet for the G8 takes this a little too far.'

Instead, suggested Klein, 'Encircle the G8! But instead of declaring themselves a piece of jewelry, they should say, we are a noose, we are putting pressure and we are squeezing these neoliberal policies that are taking lives around the world. Just like the noose that killed Ken Saro-Wiwa ten years ago this November.'

That is indeed the choice: to be a bauble for - or a noose against - neoliberalism. By joining those active across the Third World in concrete struggles (who in our experience are not wasting time with GCAPs and MDGs), Northern readers can offer real, lasting solidarity.

In making the choice, especially in Britain, consider whether the symbolism of the colour white is appropriate. Are NGOs and their friends painting themselves as virgins at an alter, on the verge of marrying G8 leaders like Bush, Berlusconi, Chirac, Blair? Alternatively, will the NGO-led masses be waving white flags of surrender on July 2 in Edinburgh, with these headbands and wristbands?

It's rather hard to tell. According to Make Poverty History's Bruce Whitehead, 'It's not a march in the sense of a demonstration, but more of a walk. It is going to be very much a family affair. The emphasis is on fun in the sun. The intention is to welcome the G8 leaders to Scotland and to ask them to deliver trade justice, debt cancellation and increased aid to developing countries.'

Perhaps Whitehead and Make Poverty History need a change of both attitude and attire. After all, 'white' armies have traditionally fought 'red' armies. Fortunately, unlike Russia in the late 1910s or Crossroads in the mid-1980s, today's armies of NGOs and social movements are not carrying weapons of physical destruction, only ideas, energy and a few material resources.

Still, we can't help but conclude that, in contrast to the red social movement struggles for dignity and justice, those wearing white and adopting the NGOs' weak programme may appear as... well, if not explicit agents of the G8, then at minimum their decorations.

Hence when protesting against Wolfowitz on his mid-June Africa trip, against the Gleneagles meeting of the world's rulers in early July, and against the World Bank and IMF annual meetings during the late September days of anti-war action in Washington, DC, we'll encourage our comrades to wear something more colourful, with politics to match.

***

Bond is based at the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban; Brutus is a poet and professor emeritus at University of Pittsburgh, and works with Jubilee South Africa and the Centre for Economic Justice; and Setshedi is a Soweto-based anti-privatisation activist employed at the Freedom of Expression Institute.

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G8 finance ministers last Saturday agreed to write off more than $40-billion in debts of 18 of the world's poorest nations in order to free up money for spending on social services like health and education. The 18 nations to benefit immediately are Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. But is the deal all it is cracked up to be?

Immediate reaction from government and international NGOs was positive, but doubts quickly began to emerge about whether the announcement was all it was made out to be. Apart from the amount being written off only making up a small amount of total debt owed, a major area of concern was in paragraph 2 of the statement made by finance ministers when they announced the deal. The paragraph makes clear that conditions will be attached to the deal. To qualify countries must eliminate "impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign". These kinds of conditions attached to previous debt relief packages have been extensively criticized for causing more harm than good.

Below are some of the reactions to the debt deal from various civil society organisations and groupings:

* US lobby group Africa Action emphasized that dozens of other African countries continued to be trapped under a burden of illegitimate debt, which the G-8 plan still failed to address. Africa Action also rejected the G-8's embrace of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative as the framework for debt cancellation, noting the harmful economic conditions tied to this program. Ann-Louise Colgan, Director of Policy Analysis and Communications at Africa Action, noted: "We reject the G-8's affirmation of the harmful HIPC framework as the basis for future debt cancellation, when it is clear that the devastating conditions required by this program have deepened the debt crisis and exacerbated poverty across the African continent. The continued exclusion of countries like Nigeria and South Africa, who also carry massive burdens of illegitimate debt, is unacceptable as a matter of law and justice."

* Mozambique civil society issued a statement saying they were concerned about the price of debt cancellation in terms of the conditions that countries would have to adopt in order to qualify. The statement said the amount freed up by debt cancellation would not be enough in itself - more and better aid would also be needed and issues of trade and access to markets resolved.

* Debt campaigning group Jubilee South reiterated long-standing demands for unconditional cancellation of all debt. The organisation demanded the abolition of all IMF and World Bank policies and reparations for the costs of structural adjustment programs. Furthermore, Jubilee South said stolen wealth should be repatriated, while African leaders and policy makers should move away from destructive neoliberal policies and explore genuine people-centred development policies.

Jubilee South said the deal actually strengthened control over the economies of the countries targeted because in order to qualify for debt cancellation eligible countries would have had to have gone through the HIPC completion point, which involves the implementation of stringent free market reforms. Many commentators, academics, theologians and activists within the economic justice movement point out that the costs of Structural Adjustment Programmes and creditor imposed conditionality far outweigh the amount of debt to be cancelled, Jubilee South said.

* The Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt noted that the financial burden of the operation on rich countries would amount to some 2 billion dollars a year, compared to 350 billion the G8 devoted to farming subsidies or 700 billion they spend in military expenditure. Rich countries would thus be willing to spend every year for the announced cancellation half of the amount the US spends every month on their continued occupation of Iraq. "The G8 decision represents a continuation of the HIPC initiative, which means the imposition of heavily neoliberal policies: privatisation of natural resources and of strategic economic sectors to the benefit of transnational corporations; higher cost of health care and education; a rise in VAT; free flow of capital, which leads to capital leaving the country as shown by several UNCTAD reports; lower tariff protection, which leads to thousands of small and middle producers losing their livelihoods because they cannot compete with imported goods."

* A joint political statement by NGOs worldwide describes as "extremely misleading" statements that the proposals represent 100% multilateral debt cancellation. "It covers only a limited number of countries, and only ones implementing harsh World Bank and IMF policy conditions." Demba Moussa Dembele, of the Forum for African Alternatives, Senegal, recalled that the hype surrounding previous G-7 announcements had not been borne out by the results on the ground. "We've heard this so many times. Africa has already paid enough. We do not owe anything". Neil Watkins, of Jubilee USA said: "The G-8 proposal for 100% debt cancellation for some poor nations to the IMF and other international lenders is an important first step, but the deal must be expanded to include all impoverished countries. Debt cancellation must come without subjecting these countries to devastating economic conditions".

* Please send comments to [email protected]

So, June 16th is the Day of the African Child ... What does it mean? For most African young people, the Day of the African Child does not mean a whole lot. Many will continue their daily lives -- working in fields and factories, caring for younger siblings or older relatives, begging on the streets of sprawling urban centres, fighting in armed groups and militias, tending sheep and cattle, selling their wares and services in markets and on the streets - without even knowing that June 16th is different from any other.

Those who are aware of the Day of the African Child are likely to be enrolled in some kind of formal education, or 'mobilised' for activities by NGOs, UN agencies and governments. For these young people, the Day of the African Child may be simply that - one day in which they are told something about children's rights that contrasts with the other 364 days of the year during which they are ignored or silenced. Other African young people would not consider themselves to be children. In many traditional African societies, puberty is a biological change that has social implications: after puberty, one is no longer treated as a child, although one may not have full status within social hierarchies based on age and sex.

For many civil society organisations, the Day of the African Child has become a celebration of the entry into force of the African Charter of the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC). The ACRWC, together with the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), provide a comprehensive framework for protecting and promoting children's social, economic and political rights. Many civil society organisations thus use June 16th as a day to reflect on the progress made towards the institutionalisation of child rights in law and to call for greater implementation of these legal standards.

For many African governments, June 16th provides a platform for self-aggrandizement. Government leaders often highlight the progress they have made towards upholding and implementing their international and domestic commitments towards children and make more promises about what they will do in the future. This means that the Day of the African Child ensures that children's issues are on the political agenda - for at least one day a year.

In other words, the Day of the African Child is primarily a day for adults, in various capacities and with a variety of motivations. Apart from a few tokenistic children's voices (often under the guise of 'participation'), the overwhelming chorus of speeches, television and radio appearances, and written words (including this commentary) will come from adults. The marginalisation of children's voices is particularly ironic and unfortunate since the day was initially introduced to commemorate a 1976 march by black students in Soweto, South Africa to protest the inferior quality of their education and to demand the right to be taught in their own language. The Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in 1991 declared June 16th a day to remember the hundreds of students, who were gunned down, killed and wounded, during the march and subsequent protests. The fact that a day ostensibly for commemorating children's political action is dominated by adults reflects a broader marginalisation of children in the struggle for social justice.

Who cares?

Since the Day of the African Child is largely dominated by adults, why should we care about it at all? Responses to this question often refer to the importance of children as the future generations and/or pull on heartstrings by listing a litany of the ways in which children are victimised. These common refrains again reflect an adult-centric approach to children as semi-human beings: only important in terms of their future contribution to societies, or as victims in the present.

This is why the question about who cares becomes so important. The focus here is not on the 'who cares?' throw-away question in response to issues that are deemed unimportant, but rather who cares in terms of who is best placed to understand and articulate children's issues. Viewed in this way, the answer clearly appears to be: "Children, of course!" Once children are recognised as active economic and social members of families, communities and societies, it is much more difficult to justify their current political marginalisation not only from children's issues, but also from broader social justice issues. In other words, we need to refocus our attention on the reason why the Day of the African Child was initiated in the first place - to commemorate political action by African young people in their struggle against oppression.

Young people's roles in the struggle for social justice

Since the entry into force of the ACRWC and CRC, children's rights advocates across Africa and globally have worked tirelessly to introduce the language of rights around children's issues. However, while claims around children's rights are a necessary component in the struggle for social justice, they are not sufficient in and of themselves. Since social justice is broader than human rights, we need to complement the work done on promoting and protecting children's rights by recognising children as citizens and actors in building just societies. While young people have important roles to play in the struggle for social justice - as economic and social actors who directly confront such issues, and as political actors with views on their own situation - civil society organisations rarely address children's issues, concerns and opinions.

* In order to increase the priority of children's issues, Fahamu intends to develop training materials for a distance-learning course highlighting the roles of children in social justice for partner organisations in Africa. This initiative is intended to complement existing child rights courses by approaching children's issues from a different perspective. It will start from the philosophy that children are first and foremost human beings, and thus must be recognised as active members of their communities and societies. Taking social justice as the end goal, it will show how children's roles must be integral in working towards this goal because of children's often unequal positions within hierarchical power relations that tend to marginalise their views and make them more vulnerable to particular abuses. We hope that this initiative will help us to move from generating more adult-centric rhetoric on a 'Day of the African Child' to recognising and promoting young people's daily roles in the struggle for social justice in Africa.

* Christina Clark is Commonwealth Scholar, Oxford University and a volunteer with Fahamu. She is currently coordinating a consultation process on Fahamu's proposed initiative on young people in the struggle for social justice. For more information on the initiative and/or a detailed concept paper, please contact her on: [email protected].

* Please send further comments to [email protected]

In Soweto, South Africa, thousands of black school children took to the streets in 1976 to protest the inferior quality of their education. Hundreds of young boys and girls were shot down by apartheid police. To honour the memory of those killed and the courage of those who marched, the Day of the African Child has been celebrated on 16 June every year since 1991. The Day also draws attention to the lives of African children today. In this article Hellen Tombo highlights the negative impact of onerous debt, unfair trade, inefficient aid and poor governance on the lives of African children and youth.

It is estimated that at least 30% of the world's population is aged between 10-24 years while nearly 12% is made up of children between 0-10 years. Out of this population, more than 75% are trapped in abject poverty and have insufficient income levels, if any, and no access to basic education opportunities. Youth and children die as a result of inadequacies in health care and other services, lack basic shelter and are orphaned at an early age. This is in violation of human rights norms as contained in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

It is now an open secret that trade injustice; insufficient aid and poor governance compounds this situation. These aspects are co-related and are all closely interlinked to debt. Studies have shown that states are subjected to unfair trade practices in return for aid, culminating in huge debts and unwise decisions from leaders. As Shridath Ramphal puts it, "debt is an oppressive tyranny that strips a country's population their rights." The discussion in the rest of this article places emphasis on how debt, unfair trade, insufficient aid and poor governance has had an impact on the youth and children of Africa.

Unemployment

With increased heavy dependence on aid, developing countries have been unable to create employment opportunities due to heavy budgetary allocations and expenditure. The GDP of these countries is far too low even to maintain the already existing workers. The culmination of this is borrowing.

Such monies have come with strings attached in the name of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs). One condition contained in SAPs is that nations expecting aid should cut down on their labour force. This has negatively impacted on the youth given that opportunities for public employment are nearly impossible.

Privatisation and liberalization of state owned corporations have serious impacts on the youth. Most foreign investors offer casual jobs, resulting in poor pay and exposure to health risks. Further, workers unions are often not allowed.

Child labour is common. Parents cannot afford to provide for their families, either because of retrenchment or simply because of poor pay. Such families have developed "survival strategies" of engaging their children in labour to substitute a meagre income.

Other serious consequences of the unemployment crisis are child prostitution, street children and children becoming breadwinners for their families, as they take care of their ailing parents who have lost jobs or are too poor to afford health care.

Education

African governments have greatly reduced their expenditure on education, thus failing to commit themselves to "universal basic primary education for all".

Although donor countries have set aside money to support the education sector in many countries, to a large extent the initiative has been harmful to youth and children. Such initiatives have in most cases proved unsustainable. (For example, NARC's ''free primary education for all" in Kenya.) The government was promised funding by donor countries, only for most of them to pull out after the programme was initiated. This led to the evolvement of the cost sharing principle between the government and parents.

In Kenya, liberalization of our education system has seen foreign countries opening up their very expensive universities in our country. They have branded Kenya's public university education a sham. The expensive private universities don't open up job opportunities for our youth, despite pocketing so much money from them.

Trade and environment

Donor countries have made leaders their puppets by forcing them to sign trade agreements that only represent corporate interests. Africa depends on the export of primary commodities. Imports of finished goods expose the public to price violations and huge trade deficits, resulting in an increased debt obligation and meaning a country is unable to utilize its resources to develop the youth.

Trade liberalization and the elimination of barriers to US trade and investment has left hundreds of youth working as casuals in foreign companies. Trade agreements from the West and Europe prevent development of intra-African trade, which could easily create additional markets for talented youths. Unfair trade has also not spared youths striving to be in business. Local products have lost out as consumers prefer imported products.

Aids and health

WHO estimates that at least 30,000 children die daily from malaria and that at least 5,000 youth die daily from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses in Africa alone.

The Bush administration committed $15 billion over five years to fight HIV/AIDS. But the commitment is tied to conditions that have impeded the primary goal. The promotion of abstinence by the Bush administration is a noble cause, but we cannot ignore the fact that youth are exposed to high-risk behaviour. This calls for the distribution of condoms as a control mechanism.

With no funds, the cost of antiretroviral drugs will remain high and very few youth can afford and have access to them. Similarly, governments have had to borrow money to boost their health sectors and fight diseases like malaria.

Insufficient Aid

Donor agents have over the last 10 years been non-committal in giving aid that can sustain government's effort to meet its obligations. Varied reasons for such positions have been given. For example, donors have maintained they will not continue funding corrupt governments or governments that fail to meet their conditions. Some conditions like SAPs have been totally harmful to the people.

Insufficient aid means that a government is not able to offer services like education. Cost sharing (which is unaffordable to most parents) and cutting down on health expenditure are the solutions. Insufficient aid means that the government is unable to support youth initiatives that would help them reshape their lives.

Poor governance

There is perhaps no other better evidence of poor governance than corruption. The costs of corruption on the youth is enormous. First, bribery means that young people have to "buy" their way out through payment for services. For a youth to get a job, a bribe would come in handy. Similarly, in accessing public services like medicine from a hospital, one would be forced to bribe the pharmacist.

Embezzlement culminates in schools, health clinics, roads, sewer systems and other public amenities being in a worse state. Corruption reduces the overall wealth of a country. Thus it discourages business as well as investors from operating.

Conclusion

Any achievement of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) and Millennium Development Goals (MDG) targets, especially with regards the youth, requires due attention to strategies aimed at focusing on how debt, unfair trade, insufficient aid and poor governance has impacted on this population sector.

The MDG targets relating to both youth and children (education attainment, gender balance in education, improved maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and decent employment opportunities, sexual and reproductive health etc) have largely been made unachievable because of issues to do with debt.

The 2015 target of the MDGs is long-term, and if the youth are to benefit, then time for global justice aimed at influencing the world global agenda on how debts have negatively impacted on them is now.

2005 offers opportunities for youth mobilization. The key dates for action that lie ahead (the G8 Summit, the UN Millennium Summit, the WTO Ministerial and other local events as well as regional events such as the Day of the African child, coupled with white band days) are some opportunities for the youth to get on board en masse and add their voice.

The youth should wake up to the call and add their voice to the demand for the cancellation of debts. It is unrealistic to expect that poor countries can meet the MDGs without extra international support, thus the youth are called to mobilise and pressure G8 countries to cancel debt. In support of GCAP, the youth should develop a platform and challenge the World Bank and IMF to allow all people to make decisions on how to run their countries.

* Hellen Tombo is executive director of the Kenya Youth Education and Community Development Programme (KYCEP).

* Please send comments to [email protected]

More than ten years after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, apartheid’s social and economic legacy remains. The majority of its nearly 45 million people continue to live in conditions resembling those of a decade ago. The bulk of the country’s wealth remains in the hands of a small percentage of the population. Though corporate giving is one of the largest sources of funding for civil society,[2] companies remain reluctant to address inequalities and take on social justice grantmaking.

Ironically, it was apartheid, and its consequent social unrest and threat to the economy, that provided the first real stimulus for corporate social investment (CSI). After the 1976 student uprisings in Soweto, several companies banded together to establish the Urban Foundation, which focused on urban development, housing and education in black townships. At about the same time, the Sullivan Principles were introduced, requiring American companies to justify their presence in the country by contributing to local communities, which encouraged more formalized giving by the private sector in general. In 1984-85, the groundswell of the liberation movement against apartheid and the international attention it brought provided a further stimulus to corporate giving.

However, while the Urban Foundation supported community centres, education and training in black townships, it disposed of relatively small financial resources, and did little to dismantle the system that kept black people in those townships in the first place. Other efforts to pool company funds (the Joint Education Trust (JET), formed in 1992, and the Business Trust, formed in 1999) similarly focused more on service delivery than on attacking the root causes of problems. While JET did contribute to the development of government policies and programmes throughout the 1990s, it focused primarily on educational service delivery. The Business Trust’s main focus was on job creation, education and crime. Although it was established jointly by the private sector and government, it appears as yet to have focused little on policy reform.

CSI in South Africa today

Overall, the picture has changed little. The 2004 CSI Handbook covers issues such as knowledge management, employee involvement, evaluation, communications and sustainability, but there is no discussion of policy reform or advocacy. As of 2003/04, CSI funds have gone predominantly to education and training (46 per cent) and health and social development (24 per cent), with the remainder going to a combination of job creation, sports, environment, arts and culture, safety and security, and housing (in descending order of size of contribution).

Over the past four years, with companies recognizing the impact of HIV/AIDS, there has been a significant increase in funding for health and social development. One example is provided by Anglo American’s programme, principally directed towards its 13,900 employees. Initially focused on education and prevention, this has now grown to include voluntary testing and counselling as well as anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy, a controversial stance in South Africa, given the government’s initial reluctance to recognize the need for ARVs (see p58). Another example is Absa Bank, which has over 2,500 employees participating in its ‘give as you earn’ campaign, which deducts contributions from employees’ monthly salary. The contributions are then matched by the Absa Foundation (the separate organization responsible for the bank’s CSI) and given to NGOs focused on HIV/AIDS treatment and care.

These HIV/AIDS programmes represent some of the most creative and forward-thinking elements of CSI, but they hardly amount to social justice grantmaking. The private sector has been hesitant to fund advocacy organizations such as the Treatment Action Campaign. In general, the emphasis is on service delivery. Relatively few CSI initiatives advocate major policy reform or fund organizations that provide a voice for those who are usually outside the arena of policy formation. CSI has not tended to promote public debate on issues such as economic policy and the development of a social safety net that could result in greater attention to social justice. Nor has it paid much attention to rural areas or the needs of women.

Why is CSI not focused on the most marginalized?

An urban focus
Most companies are urban-based and their development efforts reflect this. In 2003, two-thirds of CSI spending was targeted towards urban and peri-urban areas, with only 34 per cent targeted towards rural communities. Given the high levels of poverty in rural areas, this funding pattern is in almost inverse proportion to need.

An insular focus
Fifteen per cent of funds from CSI programmes focus on company employees and their families and another 49 per cent on the communities in which the companies operate. While this may seem logical, it also means that those people and communities who have little or no connection to corporate South Africa, as employees or customers, are badly underserved. With the broadly defined unemployment rate at over 40 per cent, CSI is not reaching those who are most marginalized with least access to resources and information.

Promoting the government line
The new government has promoted the concept of public-private partnerships to address social needs and implement government programmes. Companies are encouraged to support this trend in order to achieve greater exposure and win government favour. It is unlikely, therefore, that companies will publicly criticize government policy or support local communities and organizations that do so. Promoting a social justice agenda would inevitably involve this.

Internal considerations
The majority of CSI budgets in South Africa are not determined through a formula, as they are in the UK and the US, which makes them more vulnerable to the arbitrary decisions of management and less likely to be strategically focused. When it comes to evaluation, companies tend to focus on inputs and anecdotal evidence, with little effort to assess developmental impact, lessons learned and implications for policy reform.

CSI in South Africa is thus limited in scope, often unstrategic, and emphasizing service delivery not structural reform. Without giving attention to the areas of weakness outlined above, it is unlikely to make any significant contribution to social justice. A set of initiatives that have encouraged greater reflection and improved reporting are described below. They are not specifically aimed at promoting social justice programmes, but it is possible that the greater reflection on the role of companies in society that they encourage could lead in this direction.

Broader corporate accountability needed

CSI needs to be complemented by broader corporate accountability in regard to workplace conditions, approach to the environment and sustainable development. In recognition of this, the UN Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) encourage a ‘triple bottom line’ approach. There are several developments in South Africa that have built on this approach.

* The King Report on Corporate Governance (King II) Launched in 2002, this provides a South African voluntary code of conduct, which embraces the ‘triple bottom line’ concept.
* The Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Index Launched in 2004 on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, this assesses companies on a range of social, environmental and economic issues.
* Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Initially focused on extending black equity participation, predominantly to a small black elite, government now encourages BEE to take a broader approach to empowerment that includes guiding government’s procurement decisions to benefit black-owned companies, development of small businesses, skills development, etc. Unfortunately, to date, BEE has focused on redistribution at the apex rather than at the base.[3]
* Industry charters Developed by several industries (banking, mining and finance), with government encouragement, these provide a scorecard for transformation, featuring issues such as black ownership and control, skills development, financing and procurement, and CSI.

Working through other grantmakers

Working through other types of grantmaker, especially those that focus on human rights and reaching the most marginalized, offers a potential way for companies to give their CSI activities a social justice focus. Possible partner organizations include community foundations and women’s funds, two new institutional forms of philanthropy in South Africa in recent years.

Community foundations
A community foundation pilot programme led by the Southern African Grantmakers Association (SAGA) resulted in the creation of the Greater Rustenburg Community Foundation (GRCF) in Northwest province and the Uthungulu Community Foundation (UCF) in KwaZulu Natal. Both serve populations that are predominantly rural with high levels of poverty. Local corporations have shown great interest in the idea. Billiton (a mining corporation) provided UCF with R5 million in endowment support and Impala Platinum provides support to GRCF. Community foundations can channel CSI funds in a way that permits greater community control and influence on how the funds are spent. It remains to be seen, however, whether this will help shift funds away from charity towards social justice.

Women’s funds
There is even greater potential in the WHEAT (Women’s Hope Education and Training) Trust, a women’s fund in Cape Town, with an explicit social justice agenda. WHEAT focuses on issues of violence against women, women’s rights as human rights, HIV/AIDS and support to local women’s community organizations. WHEAT has tapped corporate funding from the retail and IT industries as well as building a R1 million endowment with contributions predominantly from individuals.

Other local grantmakers
Corporates have also begun to partner with other local grantmakers such as the Social Change Assistance Trust (SCAT) and the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund (NMCF). SCAT is a grantmaking development agency that funds rural, community-based organizations focusing on human rights, gender equity, HIV/AIDS and local economic development. It has received money from the De Beers Fund and has helped develop Ditikeni, an investment company that is building assets for a set of non-profit organizations, SCAT included. Given its name and profile, NMCF has received numerous corporate contributions. The organization has been affected by political influences but, given its R250 million endowment, may develop greater independence and a stronger social justice emphasis in the future.

Working through local grantmakers such as these could enable companies to reach those communities outside their immediate ambit. If that greater outreach combines with well-designed advocacy campaigns driven by local communities, there is the potential to influence corporate grantmaking for the better.

1. This article is part of a longer paper by Christa Kuljian commissioned by the Global Equity Initiative (GEI) at Harvard University as part of a series on philanthropy and equity in China, India, the Philippines, Brazil and South Africa. The full paper will be available later this year at www.fas.harvard.edu/~acgei/philanthropy.htm. For the purposes of this paper, social justice is defined as promoting advocacy and policy reform to benefit those who are most marginalized in society.

2 According to Mark Swilling and Bev Russell, ‘The Size and Scope of the Non-profit Sector in South Africa’, linked to the Johns Hopkins international comparative study, private sector funding accounts for 25 per cent of all non-profit income in South Africa compared to an average of 11 per cent in 28 other countries in the study.

3 For those interested in a longer analysis of BEE, see ‘Black Economic Empowerment: Elite enrichment or real transformation?’ by Frank Meintjies in the Isandla Development Communique at www.isandla.org.za

* Christa Kuljian is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg. She can be contacted at [email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

What is the meaning of social justice, and how can charitable foundations apply it in their grantgiving? Increasingly, foundations have begun to debate this issue. This article seeks to identify ways in which foundations, striving to become more socially just in their approach, can begin to reposition themselves. I acknowledge that this may be a difficult task and that the challenges facing philanthropic organizations in so-called ‘developing’ countries may be different from those in more ‘developed’ countries, but the questions of value are the same in each case.

While social justice is a concept that has been debated for thousands of years, it is only since the 1970s, and particularly in the past 15 years, that it has re-emerged in political discourse, notably among governments which have characterized themselves as social democratic or ‘Third Way’.[1] Essentially, as David Miller notes, in the context of the development of liberal democratic societies, ‘the quest for social justice is a natural consequence of the spread of enlightenment’.[2]

The concept is also a contested one, adopted from a variety of political positions and linked to wider arguments about the roles of the state, the market and the individual. Although contemporary social democratic governments appear to ‘own’ the approach of social justice, it has also been espoused by the political right, for example in the UK (where a former leader of the Conservative Party has established a Centre for Social Justice) and in Australia, where the government argues that social justice is best achieved when individuals are able to compete in the marketplace, unconstrained by the action of the state. Current arguments about social justice also expose tensions with other overarching political goals of economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability.[3]

The first critical point for donors, then, is to be clear to themselves and to potential grantees what they understand by social justice. If foundations do espouse the values of social justice, this implies a strongly proactive stance to grantmaking. It will influence not only what they do, but how they do it. They must also have a clear theory of social change, an analysis of the causes of injustice and a strategy for addressing them. This, as we shall see, must involve the participation of grantees in political change. It might, for example, also necessitate building strategic alliances, partnerships or coalitions with other donors or with proxies who can act where donors can’t, to pursue broader aims of social justice.

Justice as fairness

The simplest definition of social justice is that it is ‘fairness’.[4] Drawing on Aristotle, Hume, Hegel, Kant and other moral philosophers, John Rawls argued in the 1970s that ‘... the principal subject of justice is the basic structure of society … the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation ...’ He was not concerned with the benefits to be derived for individuals from private association.

Philanthropic donors have a huge range of options open to them for promoting change: through social action, research, lobbying, partnership working, developing their own voice, promoting information and intelligence, facilitating capacity within specific sectoral interests, supporting the voice of the poor, levering change within other organizations, bringing grantees together to form social movements, and so on. Some or all of these strategies can be pursued with organizations similarly committed to social justice. Which strategies they adopt depends significantly on the political and policy context.

In Rawls’ ‘well-ordered society’, everyone is presumed to act justly and vested interests are put to one side. Other theorists support this view: social justice cannot be found, they argue, in a society oriented towards individual gain and ‘standards and values cannot be developed privately’, ie within one institution or in relation to one practice.[5] What ‘we apply to others we must apply to ourselves’.

These approaches are grounded primarily in the traditions of a redistributive modern welfare state and have big implications for the relationship between donors and grantees. If donors require grantees to live up to claims of being socially just organizations, then the donors have to do so themselves too. Are the decision-making procedures of donors fair, transparent, culturally appropriate and open to challenge?

Social justice and equality

Social justice has a strong relationship with – but is not the same thing as – equality. The obscene disparities in income and wealth which characterize most societies in both North and South are clearly not socially just, particularly as much of that income and wealth is earned at the expense of others’ poorly paid labour. However, it is arguable that the development of skills (often through extended training, on or off the job, and education) and the undertaking of particularly risky jobs that benefit society more generally deserve some public recognition, usually through financial reward. Conversely ‘inequalities which are not to the benefit of all’ constitute injustice, and this would include gross inequalities in income and wealth. This approach to social justice also highlights distinctions between equality of opportunity, or access, equality of outcome, and equality of status.

Most contemporary politicians arguing for equality tend to argue for equality of opportunity. However, those on the political right emphasize simply equality of rules and processes, the state’s role being merely to ensure free market exchanges for all (although we know that the powerful – in Russia, China or the USA alike – can in any case manipulate the so-called ‘free’ market in their own interests). Those broadly on the left emphasize equality of outcome – or at least sufficient equality of outcome to prevent injustice. Technically, all full citizens have equality of status within a society; however, equality of opportunity and access, and of outcome – say, for black and minority ethnic groups, or for women – are clearly not present in any society. We know from educational statistics in most countries that equality of opportunity – in the sense that everyone starts school at roughly the same level of attainment – is not itself enough to achieve social justice. The impact of racism within educational systems in many countries means that many minority ethnic children fall far behind the average in terms of achievement by the time they leave school even if, as is the case in the UK, some are actually ahead of the average when they enter school. This is but one example of the critique that ‘equality of opportunity in the context of economic and social structures that remain profoundly unequal is likely to remain a mirage’.[6]

Desert, need and equality

More recently, David Miller has based his conception of social justice on the themes of desert, need and equality. In relation to desert, a just society is one ‘whose institutions are arranged so that people get the benefits they deserve’. This principle cannot, however, become a rigid formulation contingent simply on institutional arrangements within a society. Resources cannot be committed solely on the basis of desert but also on the basis of need. We should not, for example, starve prisoners who have been tried and convicted; their need for and rights to food override society’s disapproval of their behaviour. And the concept of need cannot be ‘merely idiosyncratic or confined to those who hold a particular view of the good life [as it usually is by the most powerful in society] … it must be capable of being validated on terms that all relevant parties can agree to.’

This validation is a political process; in some countries, consensual versions of poverty have been arrived at through market testing.[7] Generally, however, many parties – usually the poor and disadvantaged – are excluded from defining their needs (or at least from publicly articulating their definitions and seeing them turned into policy) because of their lack of power. Hence, worldwide, definitions of poverty are usually imposed by transnational organizations such as the IMF and not negotiated with the poor themselves.

The implication of this for donors who claim to serve the interests of the poor and disadvantaged is that they must find means for listening to the voice of the poor; this would apply as much to priority setting and evaluation as to the choice of the individual projects that they fund. This is not to argue that the poor have a monopoly on progressive or socially just views, as Emmett Carson rightly points out (see below) – there is plenty of evidence to the contrary – but that their voice is often one which is missing in policy debates and one which donors should engage with.

This raises awkward questions for procedures: for example, what constitutes success and who defines the measures? Should evaluation of project work be done by peer groups rather than outside consultants? Is long-term support for sustainable programmes better than supporting one-off projects? Are donor priorities determined by detached research alone (if that!) or can engagement with potential grantees shape them?[8] Why should grantees not have as powerful a voice as investment advisers ?[9] Most foundations are accountable only to the tax authorities: the claims of social justice suggest that they should develop transparent forms of accountability to their target publics. But the lack of political accountability also places them in a position where they – almost more than anyone else with power and leverage – can take risks. Exploring the causes of social problems may well cause controversy, but if they don’t do this, donors will generally remain locked into dealing with their symptoms.[10]

This approach also raises some interesting issues about the extent to which philanthropic grantmaking operates as subservient to, complementary to or in opposition to the policy of the state. The state often has a strong view on desert, and in most countries social assistance to the poor, for example, is set at extremely low levels. Do foundations support that approach or challenge it? And if they challenge it, by what strategic means? Should donors be in the business of challenging unjust laws – as many do, for example in the case of the treatment of refugees – and how do they determine what is unjust? Again, the voice of the poor can be a guide.

Social justice, citizenship and rights

The concept of social justice is linked closely to other key concepts such as citizenship and rights. T H Marshall’s classic exposition of rights[11] is still used by many to identify the characteristics of citizenship. Human rights have traditionally incorporated:
* Civil rights Property rights, legal guarantees and freedoms.
* Political rights Right to vote, rights of association, constitutional participation.
* Social rights Entitlements to basic standards of education, health and social care, housing and income maintenance (whether through work or benefits).

These rights are not, however, of equal weight. Private property rights underpin the operation of the market economy. This generates much unjust inequality, and ‘political rights and social rights tend to challenge such inequality’.[12]

Moreover, the unrestrained workings of the market, which is the fundamental cause of much injustice, both social and economic, may afford certain rights – for example the elimination of absolute poverty – but it cannot deliver social justice. The goal of social justice as fairness therefore requires governments to confront the inequities of market systems. And if they do not do so, where do donors stand? To implicitly or explicitly challenge the state again involves risk, but not being prepared to take risks in pursuit of social justice implies acceptance of the status quo.

Gender and culture

Earlier analyses of social justice are also limited in their understanding of the way cultural rights and gender rights need to be built into a framework of values, particularly in the context of a globalizing world. For minority ethnic groups, this means the right to be culturally different within a society that provides the same social, civil and political rights to all. How this plays out in particular multicultural societies depends on the nature of each society. It may lead to further tensions for donors: for example, in supporting an independent role for women within cultures which devalue women’s contribution, or encouraging the growth of migrant workers’ groups in countries where they are exploited and given no formal political power.

Increasingly, foundations will face the challenge of exploring the nature of social justice within multicultural societies, particularly in those characterized by institutional and individual racism, whether it be the marginalization of aboriginal groups, structured racism against the Roma, or the ‘everyday racism’ of most societies. Multicultural societies have increasingly been struggling with the difficulties of incorporating respect and recognition for cultural diversity and difference within a framework of universal rights. These arguments have, however, generally been couched in terms of social integration, assimilation and cohesion – and their obvious manifestations such as preferences in food and dress – rather than social justice. Social injustice in these societies comes not just from the unconstrained workings of the mechanisms of the market leading to significant differences in income and wealth and the opportunities and outcomes that these bring, but also from cultural and socially constructed differences based on, for example, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability.[13] Donors have to recognize how these differences operate and work to confront them in their own practices and policies.

Respect and recognition

Social justice is thus, critically, not just about the distribution of material goods and benefits but about the non-material aspects of life, the ‘relations of respect’ and ‘recognition’ between different groups and individuals (and not just the poor).[14] This relational strand, in particular ‘the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression’, needs to be added to the concept of social justice. Donors supporting ‘relational’ social justice may find themselves challenging powerful attitudes and practices, including the biases against women, minority ethnic groups and disability that characterize many societies. The task facing foundations is then to ensure that all cultural groups within their remit are, first, recognized and, second, engaged in the process of determining and acting on these principles. But it also requires them to pay attention to the relations of respect between themselves and their potential grantees. This should be reflected in all donor processes, from application forms through to priority setting.

The disadvantaged as actors

Most conceptions of social justice still fail to consider the role of those most disadvantaged by social injustice as actors – rather than simply victims – in the search for social justice. Some foundations, at least rhetorically, have now acknowledged the importance of processes which empower the disadvantaged to act and speak on their own behalf. An additional dimension to social justice is thus about the role of community development as the means by which the excluded and the marginalized can act in pursuit of it.[15] Human rights cannot be developed in the absence of processes of sustainable development, owned by the poor and disadvantaged themselves. To put it another way, social justice is not simply about achieving human welfare, but about the means by which it is obtained.

This focus on process again raises important questions about foundations’ relationship with their grantees. Are grantees encouraged to develop a critique of the processes and practices of the foundations themselves? Do these structures and processes – which often provide limited funds for limited periods – really empower grantee organizations or simply tie them into a more dependent funding relationship? Does the language that donors use focus on the positive and creative aspects of potential grantees, and the opportunities that funding opens up, or does it encourage them to view themselves as victims, as people simply with needs rather than with skills, aspirations and potential?

A wide-ranging definition

Drawing on these developing analyses, one wide-ranging definition of social justice might be as follows:

A framework of objectives, pursued through social, economic, environmental and political policies, based on an acceptance of difference and diversity, and informed by values concerned with
* achieving fairness and equality of outcomes and treatment;
* recognizing the dignity and equal worth and encouraging the self-esteem of all;
* meeting basic needs;
* reducing inequalities in wealth, income and life chances;
* encouraging the sustainable participation of all, including the most disadvantaged.

This challenging formulation, against which donors can test their programmes and practices, is not intended as a menu from which one can pick and choose but a range of dimensions to social justice, all of which must be contained within a policy programme. Which of these dimensions is focused on at a given moment does, however, depend on the political and cultural context within which donors are operating, as Alexander Irwan (see below) points out. Donors whose programmes focus on meeting basic needs alone cannot be regarded as implementing a social justice programme. Simply supplying the infrastructure for provision of clean water – a basic need for everyone – does not meet the test of social justice. To meet that test, it must enable, for instance, sustainable control of that provision by the recipients – which requires education, provision of skills and investment in human resources, alongside wider programmes to address the reasons why some groups still have difficulty having their basic needs met while others have a disproportionate share of available resources.

This might again suggest to donors that they need to think about the extent to which programmes they support simply address the manifestations of social injustice, or its causes. It may be acceptable in certain instances for donors to support symptomatic issues – for example campaigns to raise the income of poor people – but only if this clearly derives from an analysis of change and is linked to wider action to promote that change. Debt relief by itself is not social justice, but promoting an understanding of and challenging the causes of debt (whether domestic or international) can be. These examples provide illustrations of issues where broader alliances between philanthropic organizations can help to address social injustice at a number of different levels.

Critics of social democratic governments argue that the state has to intervene more strongly to promote social justice both in terms of the process by which it is achieved and in terms of redistributive policies. The market distributes goods and services as well as life chances unfairly, and the state should have a key role in correcting those deficiencies. Governments focusing only on the poor and disadvantaged fail one key test of social justice, which is that it is concerned with the fair distribution of the good and bad things across the whole of society and not just among the poor. This is another way of saying that structural issues matter because the rich and powerful control structures and processes. Donors need to focus on structural issues too: in doing so, they will come to understand more clearly why the world is not a socially just place and why, without social justice, the world will not have peace.

1 Commission for Social Justice (1994) Social Justice: Strategies for national renewal London: Verso.

2 D Miller (1999) Principles of social justice Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press.

3 See for example www.wangarimaathai.or.ke

4 J Rawls (1971) A theory of justice Oxford, Oxford University Press.

5 D Donnison (1998) Policies for a just society Basingstoke, Macmillan.

6 R Lister (2003) Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (2nd edn) Basingstoke, Palgrave.

7 See for example the Breadline Britain studies in the UK.

8 Interestingly, in the UK minority groups are becoming increasingly impatient with research projects that explore their needs, arguing that years of white-controlled research have not changed their impoverished position. They argue that they need to be involved from the start in setting research agendas.

9 The King Baudouin Foundation in Belgium has established a Listening Network whereby 250 individuals feed stories of social injustice to the Foundation to help it shape its priorities See www.kbs-frb.org and box on p30.

10 Emmett Carson, President of the Minneapolis Foundation, is one who has argued that donors must be prepared to take risks in the interests of providing a counterweight to the actions of the state and market. See Alliance Extra, September 2003, at www.allavida.org/allianceonline See also Steven Burkeman’s article in Alliance Extra, March 2003.

11 T H Marshall ‘Citizenship and social class’, in T H Marshall and T Bottomore (1992) Citizenship and social class London, Pluto Press.

12 Lister, op. cit. H Dean and M Melrose (1999) Poverty, riches and social citizenship London, Routledge.

13 N Fraser (2001) ‘Recognition without ethics?’, in Theory, culture and society, 18(2-3), pp21-42.

14 I M Young (1990) Justice and the politics of difference Princeton, Princeton University Press.

15 UNDP (1993) Human Development Report, 1993 Oxford, Oxford University Press.

* Gary Craig is Professor of Social Justice at the University of Hull, UK and President of the International Association for Community Development (www.iacdglobal.org). He can be contacted at [email protected] Craig is Guest editor for the special Alliance feature on ‘Funding social justice’

* This article was first published in the June 2005 issue of Alliance Magazine, which has a special feature on 'Funding Social Justice', for which Firoze Manji and Gary Craig are guest editors. To find out more, visit www.allavida.org/alliance]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Social justice is a political issue as well as a humanitarian one; consequently social justice philanthropy is a political act. This can pose formidable difficulties for donor agencies and activists everywhere, especially in an area as politically complex as the Arab region where human rights activism tends to be interpreted by authoritarian regimes as a direct challenge. Many local philanthropists shy away from such confrontation, leaving organizations in the field dependent on foreign funding. But this raises the problem of agendas and priorities as well as the independence of grantees and their accountability to local stakeholders. One answer, feel the organizers of a new fund, the Arab Human Rights Fund, is to articulate strategies that can build local support for human rights activities in the region and at the same time create bridges between the local and the international to minimize problems and promote international social justice philanthropy.

In most countries, laws preclude the use of public or tax-exempted funds for overtly political work. The politics of social justice are more subtle, however, and it is important to acknowledge the fundamental tension between the political and humanitarian motivations and perceptions involved in working for a more just world. Many funders around the world are unwilling to deal with the political implications of fighting injustices; to see themselves as being on one side or another of a political rather than a humanitarian question; or to occasionally confront those with vested interests in a status quo that perpetuates injustice.

This is also reflected in the relationships between international grantmaking organizations and the local activists they support. Are those who are most effective on the ground and deserving of support politically ‘acceptable’, asks the grantmaker, and is association with them politically safe? The enthusiasm and political perspectives of the recipient can conflict with, and be moderated by, the caution of the grantmaker.

Changing political dynamics

These questions have a particular urgency in the Arab region. The changing dynamics of both the international and Arab political scenes since the turn of the new century, especially the sharp shift to the right in US policies and the after-effects of 9/11, have produced a radicalizing response in the region as well, raising the levels of suspicion and making the debates more complicated. The new ‘due diligence’ procedures set in place by international grantmakers and the governments to which they are legally accountable are the clearest example of these complications. Most grant recipients in the region working in the field of human rights and social justice consider themselves to be on the side of democratization and the promotion of more open and just societies, yet they are being asked to prove this on the grantmakers’ terms. At the same time, they are deeply suspicious of the politics behind increased governmental and non-governmental funds pouring into the region for those same stated purposes.

The local dimension

The tension between politics and philanthropy is evident in local philanthropy as well. In the Arab region, philanthropy has been of a strictly charitable and often religious nature, taking comparatively little account of development approaches, let alone social justice activism. The preponderance of authoritarian regimes makes the philanthropic community very skittish vis-à-vis, for example, human rights activities, which are perceived as being a direct challenge to such regimes, and philanthropists generally will not consider putting themselves on such a crash course. Consequently, local human rights funding is almost non-existent, and groups active in the field must rely on foreign funds which in turn raises questions in the region about their legitimacy, independence and accountability.

The problems of reliance on foreign funding

Reliance on foreign funding gives rise to doubts as to whether or not human rights activists are wittingly or unwittingly implementing donor-defined agendas. Who sets those agendas, it is asked, and on what basis? Similarly, questions are raised over wider NGO accountability to other stakeholders: the individuals and communities they purport to help. How careful are activists to define their agendas in accordance with the immediate and long-term needs of their communities? How open are they in articulating their programmes and priorities? Who challenges them on the decisions they take?

Finally, there is the question of sustainability. The foreign funding that human rights and other social justice activists continue to rely on is, more often than not, project-oriented, with short-term measurable goals and benchmarks rather than strategic approaches based on a long view of social change. If anything, international grantmaking mechanisms are becoming tighter, more careful and more short-term than a decade ago. More alarming is the ease with which funding patterns respond to the changing currents of the political environment. Today, it is very easy to find support for any project at almost any level that has anything to do with ‘democratization,’ but not so for advocacy for refugee rights, for example.

The Arab Human Rights Fund

The nascent Arab Human Rights Fund (AHRF) is an effort to respond to some of these concerns, both within the region and between the region and the international arena, by providing an indigenous, independent and sustainable source of support for human rights activities in the Arab region and by articulating principled, clear and practical strategies.

Over the past two years, a volunteer Preparatory Committee of five individuals from the Arab region, in cooperation with Ford Foundation staff and with support from the Foundation, has been preparing the ground for the establishment of the AHRF. This has involved carrying out research and holding consultative meetings throughout the region, hammering out approaches and strategies based on a commitment to universal standards of human rights with the long-term goal of developing capacity for their protection and promotion. Whether in its grantmaking strategies, fundraising efforts or operating principles, human rights standards remain the primary guidelines for the proposed AHRF.

By implementing transparent, inclusive and participatory processes for agenda and priority setting, and by ensuring indigenous decision-making in its programmes and activities, the AHRF hopes to strengthen local participation, and consequently respond to some of the legitimacy questions raised above. In the planning of the Fund, broad participatory and consultative mechanisms are being developed for nearly every aspect of the work, from Board recruitment to priority setting to the grantmaking process itself.

Promoting indigenous social justice philanthropy

The AHRF is hoping to harness local, regional and international sources of support for human rights and to promote Arab social justice philanthropy in the Arab region as one of its main strategic goals. This will take time, and many political fears within the region will have to be confronted. This is why the AHRF is planned as an endowment, eventually with assets of at least $50 million, in order to become an effective donor with tangible impact and a sustainable source of support for human rights work. (One positive trend is that NGO laws in the region are liberalizing, though very slowly.)

Bridging the local and the international
At the same time, the Preparatory Committee sees the Fund as a potentially important player in the international philanthropy field, and a bridge between the local and the international. It can help articulate priorities, funnelling international funds to the region where funds are most needed. At the same time, it can bring new Arab and regional players into the international philanthropy scene and into discussions of global social justice. This bridging function is desperately needed in today's divided world, especially where the Middle East and the Arab region are concerned.

A political choice
By establishing the Arab Human Rights Fund, the Preparatory Committee is making a significant political choice for the region. It implies a willingness to take risks in a difficult political environment and it will need the support and encouragement of like-minded individuals and organizations within the region and around the world. Today, more than at any other time in the past, we must recognize that local communities know what’s best for them, that human rights are universal values shared by activists and philanthropists alike, and that they form the basis of international cooperation in the promotion of social justice. The challenge is to build the trust necessary for such cooperation and to have the courage to confront each of our own societies and to move them towards the achievement of social justice.

After four years of planning and more than two years of research and investigation, the first meeting of a founding Board of Trustees will take place this summer. As the Fund begins its operations in Beirut, Lebanon, which will happen by the end of the year, it is hoped that the AHRF, and its perspectives on social justice, cooperation and participatory approaches, will be welcomed into the international philanthropic community.

* Fateh Azzam is Director of the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program at the American University in Cairo and a member of the AHRF Preparatory Committee. He was Program Officer for Human Rights at the Cairo office of the Ford Foundation when the idea for the AHRF began. He can be contacted at [email protected] For more information on the Arab Human Rights Fund, see www.ahrfund.org

* Please send comments to [email protected]

* This article was first published in the June 2005 issue of Alliance Magazine, which has a special feature on 'Funding Social Justice', for which Firoze Manji and Gary Craig are guest editors. To find out more, visit www.allavida.org/alliance

"True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the ‘rejects of life’, to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so these hands – whether of individuals or entire people – need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world." Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970

"Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural, it is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. And overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice." Nelson Mandela at a public rally in Trafalgar Square, London, February 2005

A funder said to me recently that ‘the poor are so busy trying to survive that they don’t have the luxury of being concerned with human rights or social justice’. Under any circumstances, I would have been mildly irritated by this remark, but that it was made during a visit to Rwanda – a country that experienced in 1994 a genocide that annihilated nearly a million people in the space of a few months – left me profoundly shocked. What, I wondered, would those who watched their impoverished and undernourished children being butchered with machetes have made of this remark? What about the thousands of women who were sexually violated before being slaughtered? Were they too preoccupied with where the next meal was coming from to care about their rights?

But her remark made me wonder why it is that we are not shocked by the effects of poverty, which take more lives than civil wars or political violence: 11 million children die each year before they reach the age of five because they are not immunized, or because they do not have access to safe drinking water, or as a result of the debt crisis. [1] In many developing countries, complications of pregnancy and childbirth are the leading causes of death among women of reproductive age – 585,000 women die every year from such causes, fewer than 1 per cent of them in developed countries, demonstrating that these deaths could be avoided if resources and services were available.[2] Why is it that such atrocities are not considered an injustice?

Poverty as a violation of rights

The difficulty is that poverty tends to be viewed as a problem that is infinite and incurable, and to do with standards of living, and debate then turns around what is a ‘minimal’ or ‘acceptable’ standard – is it $2 a day or more? And who determines that standard? The crassness of the debate can be illustrated if we look at a parallel: how much freedom should men allow women? Should the extent of their liberty be set by men at some ‘minimal’ or ‘acceptable’ level? Why then should the ‘haves’ determine what standard of living should be afforded to the ‘have-nots’?

If poverty were regarded, argues Pierre Sané, ‘as a massive, systematic and continuous violation of human rights, its persistence would no longer be a regrettable feature of the nature of things. It would become a denial of justice. The burden of proof would shift. The poor, once recognised as the injured party, would acquire a right to reparation for which governments, the international community and, ultimately, each citizen would be jointly liable. A strong interest would thus be established in eliminating, as a matter of urgency, the grounds for liability. This might be expected to unleash much stronger forces than mere compassion, charity, or even concern for one’s own security.’[3]

The limits of the rights approach

The so-called ‘human rights approach to development’ has become a catchphrase among both development agencies and funders in recent times. But what exactly does it mean? Is it, as Pierre Sané suggests, a process of declaring poverty to be a gross and repulsive violation of human rights, requiring us to support social movements to claim reparation for injustices suffered by the millions? Or is it a way of dressing up the ‘business as usual’ of development in more radical-sounding vocabulary?

Elsewhere I have argued that development organizations have long played a role in depoliticizing poverty. In the past, this discourse was framed ‘not in the language of rights and justice, but with the vocabulary of charity, technical expertise, neutrality, and a deep paternalism (albeit accompanied by the rhetoric of participatory development) which was its syntax’.[4] While the language may have been modified to incorporate the vocabulary of human rights, there is little evidence of any change in the types of programmes or projects that are funded and implemented. Are human rights about to become depoliticized in the same way as poverty? If that is the case, it’s hardly surprising that many in the South are deeply cynical about the nature of the ‘rights-based approach to development’.

International human rights organizations claim that human rights are universal. But, as Issa Shivji points out, rights tend to be universal in their proclamation but limited in their application.[5] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed in 1948 when the vast majority of the world’s population was enchained by colonial rule, and had neither a say in its formulation nor rights conferred by it. And what are regarded as ‘rights’ in a particular society at any given time, and incorporated into legislation as such, may not necessarily equate with social justice. In a society where slavery was tolerated, for example, ensuring that the rights of slaves were properly protected would ignore the larger injustice of the existence of slavery at all.[6]

Today, there are still polarized debates about the precedence and priority of rights: in market-based economies, greater weight is given to civil and political rights, with pride of place going to private property rights. In the third world, much greater emphasis is placed on social and economic rights. Redress for the former can be sought in court by individuals, but no mechanism exists for seeking reparations for infractions of social and economic rights. Also, violations of social and economic rights apply not just to individuals, but to large sections of the population. This is why the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights is an important milestone in the history of human rights instruments because it goes some way towards recognizing the rights of groups, including the family, women and children, and the aged and the disabled, who are given the right to special measures of protection in keeping with their physical and moral needs.[7]

Solidarity

Given the problems associated with the term ‘rights-based approach’, many prefer to speak instead about social justice. Social justice is not just about the promotion and protection of human rights. It also incorporates the idea of the struggle for emancipation from social, political and economic oppression. That is to say, it is premised on the belief that those who suffer injustice must themselves be involved in actions to eradicate it. The change that social justice seeks to achieve is based on the principle of self-determination. It is not men who will liberate women but women who will liberate themselves by actions determined by them. It is not those who benefit from keeping people poor who will alleviate poverty, but the ‘poor’ themselves who must challenge the systems that enchain them. The motive for funding social justice comes, therefore, not from noblesse oblige (or ‘false generosity’, as Paulo Freire puts it) but from solidarity (Freire’s ‘true generosity’).

Philanthropy, the market and social justice

The market and philanthropy have a long association. The first and most celebrated period of ‘free trade’, from the 1840s to the 1930s, was also a high point of charitable activity in the most economically powerful countries. Private philanthropy was the preferred solution to social need and private expenditure far outweighed public provision. It is not surprising then, with the resurgence of free market economics since the 1980s, that we have witnessed the emergence of philanthropy on an unprecedented scale.

In the colonial era, philanthropy in Africa may have been motivated by religious conviction, status, compassion or guilt; it was also motivated by fear. In Britain and the colonies alike, politicians frequently alluded to the threat of revolution and actively encouraged greater interest in works of benevolence as a solution to social unrest. In short, charity was not designed just to help the poor, it also served to protect the rich.[8] And it still does. A critical approach needs to be made of the role of today’s philanthropy in shoring up social systems, in which gross inequalities of wealth are enshrined and perpetuated.

Not all philanthropy or social investment is concerned with social justice. This is not surprising. As Gary Craig points out in his article (see below), social justice is (or should be) about addressing structural issues and social change. It requires, he argues, an analysis of the causes of injustice and a strategy for addressing them. Structural issues matter, he suggests, because it is the rich and powerful who control these structures and processes. But since it is the rich and powerful who have the means to establish philanthropic foundations, we should not be surprised that relatively few have an explicitly social justice agenda.

The reticence of foundations

The Urgent Action Fund-Africa (UAF) (see interview with Betty Murungi above) is a good example of social justice funding. What is unusual about UAF, however, is that they are overt activists and funders of social change and proud to be so. Relatively few foundations are so bold, especially in the current US political climate where support for social change is increasingly viewed with suspicion and, at worst, seen as potentially seditious. Fear, rather than explicit legislation, leads to reluctance to express views that might mark them out for criticism.

The position for many foundations is therefore not easy, despite the wish of some to be true to their beliefs about social justice. The result is that it makes it difficult for applicants to identify foundations that might support their cause, and it wastes the opportunity for funders to proclaim their vision and to encourage other funders to support these causes. Initiatives such as those of the International Human Rights Funders Group, which have sought to encourage foundations to support human rights and social justice, are therefore important in providing a basis for solidarity between like-minded philanthropists.

Funding for social justice requires much greater flexibility than conventional grantmaking. Most grants are focused on supporting projects rather than causes. Projects usually produce some kind of physical or tangible result or product (bridges, hospitals, latrines or wells, etc) within a relatively short period, often within 1-3 years. But the outcomes of social justice initiatives are often much longer-term. That is not to say that their achievements are not measurable, but the changes they achieve are more often qualitative than quantitative. It is in recognition of this that many social justice funders prefer to make grants that are not assigned to specific activities but provide core funding for the grantee. This approach requires courage on the part of the funder and it is one that should be more widely practised.

Speaking the same language

But the problem doesn’t always lie just with the foundations. Foundations have their own agenda for what they wish to achieve and grantees are the means by which they achieve it. Unfortunately, organizations applying for funds often mistakenly believe that foundations are there to help them achieve what they want. Organizations whose work focuses on social justice often fail to do their homework about how to engage funders in a dialogue when their vocabulary may differ. Foundations that don’t see themselves as social justice funders may nevertheless be interested in supporting initiatives that will contribute to social justice ends, but the work has to be presented in a language that resonates with what the funders themselves want to do. That is not to say that organizations need to change their missions and objectives to suit the funder (although many do precisely that), but rather that they need to find the vocabulary to articulate their needs in terms that allow a dialogue. The less explicit foundations are about their own agenda, the more difficult the dialogue between the two sides becomes.

A case of schizophrenia: funders and fundraisers

A particular set of difficulties arises with organizations that sit, as it were, on both sides of the begging bowl – who are both funders and fundraisers. These include international development NGOs such as Oxfam, Save The Children, ActionAid, Christian Aid and Comic Relief. This duality often leads to a form of schizophrenia. As funders of social justice initiatives, they will require their ‘partners’ (their current euphemism for grantees) to involve the poor or the oppressed in the formulation and implementation of the work for which funding is sought, to work in solidarity with the oppressed, to renounce all attempts to present the poor as objects of pity. Yet these same organizations, in their role as fundraisers, will dispense with such requirements: the poor are never involved except as objects of pity. Thus ActionAid, with its radical agenda of social activism, raises funds through child sponsorship; Oxfam reduces its programmes to widget-sized micro-initiatives (£10 will buy X amount of whatever). One of the founders of Comic Relief once complained to me that fundraising for disability was really difficult because the disability lobby simply wouldn’t allow Comic Relief to portray disabled people as objects of pity. Presumably, this organization succeeds in raising millions by portraying pathetic images of Africans, using what Rotimi Sankore has termed ‘development pornography’, because it is too far from Africa to feel the ire of the African lobby![9]

Creating a relationship of equals?

Foundations that fund social justice – that is, support the transformation of power relations in society – need to address the question of the relations of power they have with their grantees. Many donor agencies have grappled with the challenge of involving their ‘partners’ in the decision-making process. Some have devolved grantmaking to local representative organizations. Others, especially those wanting to reduce the cost of processing multiple small grants, have experimented with awarding block grants that a local organization or consortium then administers in smaller grants to grassroots organizations. But this in itself creates a problem: an NGO working in the katchiabadis of Karachi with a range of grassroots organizations in the slums, once explained to me that they refuse to accept such block grants. To do so, they argue, would be to dramatically alter the nature of their relationship with the grassroots organizations. The moment they hand out money, they become donors, and their grassroots partners become recipients. And that, they feel, is a relationship of unequals, a relationship of power over others. They value their relationship with their genuine partners, and are therefore wary that money would change their relationship.

And therein lies the problem for philanthropic institutions that are keen to support social justice initiatives. To be effective, they need to be as close as possible to those whose struggles they support. Ideally, they want their grantees to be involved in the decision-making process. But the moment their grantees become part of the funding process, their own relationship with their constituents is potentially altered.

1 www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.aspr />

2 UNICEF (1996) The Progress of Nations UNICEF, New York.

3 Pierre Sané, ‘Poverty, the next frontier in the struggle for human rights’, in F Manji and P Burnett (2005) African Voices on Development and Social Justice Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Dar es Salaam, pp210-214.

4 F Manji, ‘The depoliticisation of poverty’, in Development and Rights, in D Eade (ed) (1998), Oxfam GB, Oxford, pp12-33.

5 I Shivji (1989), The Concept of Human Rights CODESRIA, Dakar.

6 The Greeks and Romans held slavery to be just, and therefore made laws that protected the rights of slave owners. The same was true centuries later in Europe and the US.

7 K Kibwana, K A Acheampon and M Mwagiru Human Rights and Diplomacy in Africa: a critical perspective, see http://www.kent.ac.uk/politics/research/kentp
apers/kibwana.html

8 F Manji and C O’Coill, ‘The missionary position: NGOs and development in Africa’, in International Affairs 78/3 (2002), pp567-83.

9 R Sankore (2005) ‘Behind the image: poverty and “development pornography”’, in Pambazuka News No 203. See www.pambazuka.org

* Firoze Manji is Executive Director of Fahamu, an organization committed to using ICT for social justice (www.fahamu.org), and editor of Pambazuka News, the electronic weekly newsletter and forum for social justice in Africa (www.pambazuka.org). He can be contacted at [email protected]

* This article was first published in the June 2005 issue of Alliance Magazine, which has a special feature on 'Funding Social Justice', for which Firoze Manji and Gary Craig are guest editors. To find out more, visit www.allavida.org/alliance

* Please send comments to [email protected]

In the sugar-dominated economy of Mauritius, workers demanded from their bosses that they be allowed to plant vegetables in between rows of sugar cane, the beginning of a broader campaign to convert land under sugar to land for food production and thus develop an alternative economic system. In the context of rampant neo-liberalism, how can alternatives be constructed and what are the strategies and methods that can be adopted? A recent conference entitled ‘Economic Alternatives to Neoliberalism’ took place in Johannesburg and tackled exactly these issues. George Dor from the Southern Africa Centre for Economic Justice provides more details.

Alternatives to today’s dominant neoliberal system must be built from the bottom up. They must be developed through worker and community struggles against the very real ways in which workers and communities are oppressed by the imposition of neoliberal policies.

The development of alternatives entails transforming the state from one that serves neoliberal interests to one that addresses people’s needs. It also requires doing away with certain institutions that advance corporate globalisation. In particular, the World Bank should be shut down.

Alternatives to neoliberalism should not culminate in a more welfarist version of capitalism. They need to challenge the capitalist system itself and lead to a socialist society different from the examples to date that have been called ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’.

These are some of the points that resonated at a workshop, titled Economic Alternatives to Neoliberalism, organised by the Southern African Centre for Economic Justice (SACEJ) and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (RLS) and held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in May.

The Growth of Resistance to Neoliberalism in Southern Africa

The workshop was an outcome of an increasing interest in debating alternatives in the region. This, in turn, is a consequence of the rapid growth of resistance in various organisational forms over the last few years contesting neoliberialism in our region.

These developments are a reflection of the international upsurge in activism against corporate globalisation, including the Zapatista uprising of 1994, the building of international solidarity in support of the Zapaptistas and against neoliberalism, the growth of the Jubilee campaign calling for the cancellation of debt, the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1999, subsequent actions against the WTO, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the formation of the World Social Forum (WSF) and the growth of the international anti-war movement.

Southern Africa has seen the emergence of organisation around issues such as debt, trade and war. It has also seen the mushrooming of grassroots organisations around issues affecting people’s daily lives, such as privatisation, land, water and large dams. In some countries, these organisations have come together in the form of economic justice networks and this has been complemented by various regional networks.

The formation of the World Social Forum has sparked forums at continental, regional, country and local levels. The African Social Forum (ASF) was first held at the beginning of 2002, and the Southern African Social Forum (SASF) met before the end of 2003. Last year, Malawi and Zimbabwe have held national social forums.

The development of these organisational forms has in large measure been prompted by the very real hardships faced by the vast majority of people, both urban and rural, in the countries of the region. The content of organisational activities and struggles has initially of necessity been largely one of contesting the conditions in which the majority find themselves. This has included protest against the harsh realities of life, such as non-delivery of basic needs, high charges for services of poor quality, local corruption and enrichment of the few at the expense of others, to name a few.

Many organisations and networks have played an important role in educating people about the local, national, regional and international context which results in the gross levels of poverty and inequality experienced in the region. There has been a significant deepening of understanding of the way in which neoliberalism undermines people in their places of work and in their communities. The World Social Forum, held for the first time in 2001 under the banner “Another World Is Possible”, raised the inevitable question as to how this other more people-friendly world can be built and the beginnings of attempts to address this question.

Debating Alternatives at the African Social Forum

These developments prompted the hosting of a three-hour seminar at the African Social Forum, held in Lusaka, Zambia, in December last year. It proved to be a very popular event and attracted nearly 200 people.

It was noted that the relative lack of attention to alternatives was perhaps in part due to a fear of reopening divisions that characterised the left in years past. It was also out of concern not to make the mistake of speaking on behalf of people affected by neoliberalism. Nonetheless, elements of alternatives have been part of debate and practice. For example, in Africa, documents such as the Lagos Plan of Action and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Uneca) critique of structural adjustment were fundamentally different to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad). Anti-debt campaigners have called for and developed ideas around and African People’s Consensus to contest the Washington Consensus. Public sector delivery has been promoted in opposition to water privatisation. Land redistribution, agricultural support and food security have been stressed against GMOs.

The seminar debated how we start to give content to the slogan “Another World is Possible” and how do we do so in a way in which people in social movements drive the development of alternatives.

It was said that talk of alternatives from the top down will run into problems. There is a need to share collective knowledge to demand alternatives. We need social movements to catalyse social change. We must be part of building a groundswell against neoliberalism. In addition, we need to address a theoretical gap, to debate, develop and clarify our ideology. It is important to identify our enemy. We are not fighting poverty, but a system that is ripping us off. We must start to search for alternatives from a position of strength. We have to start talking about political power and collective ownership.

People continued debating in groups and added that we must discuss an alternative vision in local languages, hear people’s voices and develop this vision from the grassroots. This alternative vision must draw from local experiences and emphasize humanity. It must be community based and put people first, not profits. Debate must start on the ground and move to the national, the regional and the international levels. Debate is important because, when you define where you stand, this opens up possibilities for defining solutions. But, debate should result in concrete action and solidarity.

The level of energy and enthusiasm in the seminar and the positive response to the question of whether we should take these debates forward beyond the social forum prompted the organisation of the May workshop. It was attended by some 100 participants, including representation from the union sector, labour researchers, academics, community organisations, social movements, organisations of displaced persons, gender and youth organisations and national and regional economic justice networks.

Understanding Neoliberalism in Southern Africa

On the first day of the workshop, participants shared their collective knowledge of how neoliberalism affects the people of Southern Africa. They provided information on their country experiences, which highlighted the very similar ways in which all the countries in the region are affected.

For example, the textile company, Ramatex, played off three countries, namely Namibia, South Africa and Madagascar, against each other. The Namibian Government exempted the company from taxes, ploughed US$100 million into providing infrastructure for the company’s operations, ensured labour at rates from R300 to R600 a month, required that prospective employees are tested for pregnancy and allowed the company to operate free of health, safety and environmental regulations. The company locked up its factory in the Eastern Cape, an impoverished region of South Africa suffering from a high rate of unemployment, leaving 5 000 people without jobs, and set up in Namibia. This is portrayed by the Namibian Government as a success story.

The state subsidy of the clothing and textile companies in Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho and other countries in the region has, at most, provided temporary employment in these countries as the imminent lifting of WTO quotas on Chinese exports will lead to a relocation of production to China.

Privatisation is a key feature of neoliberalism and is being implemented throughout the region. In Tanzania, 45 000 public sector workers lost their jobs, virtually overnight. In Zambia, the figure is 60 000. Privatisation has been accompanied by the growth of labour broking, in which some retrenched workers are hired on a contract basis as non- unionised labour at lower wages and without benefits.

The impact of privatisation is acutely felt by communities throughout the region in the form of the increased cost of services such as water and local telephone calls as well as the decline in the standard and quality of services provided. Inability to pay for housing and services has led to disconnections and evictions. Prepaid meters are increasingly being used to deny people access to services.

The workshop took place on the eve of the new president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, taking up office and after his stated intention to visit Africa, so the World Bank received special attention. The World Bank, together with the IMF, has used debt as a means to exert a central role in imposing neoliberal policies on countries throughout the region. In Zambia, these institutions have used the promise of ‘debt relief’ under the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC) to intensify cuts in government services and force through privatisation of almost all parastatals. Teachers and nurses earn a pittance, but even so the country cannot stay within the spending limits imposed on government services. When targets are not met, the IMF and World Bank cut resource flows and signal to other funding sources to follow suit. Zambia is thus ‘condemned to debt’.

In Tanzania, these institutions are again promising ‘debt relief’, together with growth and employment, under the latest variant of structural adjustment, namely the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). People have been called on to participate in writing these papers, but the ministry leading the process is that of finance and the international institutions continue to dictate the overarching macroeconomic policy, resulting in a widening gap between rich and poor.

The compliance of the new post-colonial elites has been a central feature in implementing these neoliberal policies. In most countries in the region, the burden of debt makes it very difficult to withstand the imposition of structural adjustment, but, in the case of South Africa, only a small portion of its debt was owed to the World Bank and IMF. Yet, the Government introduced the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (Gear), which bears all the hallmarks of a structural adjustment programme. Moreover, the South African Government has been central to launching the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, endorsing the features of and the institutions that impose structural adjustment.

This facilitates the opening up of the region to the giant corporations and finance houses of the North. At the same time, it creates opportunities for South African corporations to impose themselves on the region and across the continent. These corporations have already had a devastating impact, destroying local production and employment, plundering mineral resources and damaging the environment. Now, the United Kingdom’s Barclays Bank, a key supporter of the Apartheid regime, is bidding to take over the South African ABSA bank, with the willing agreement of the ABSA executive, because the deal will open opportunities to, in the words of the ABSA CEO, “rule the continent”.

These are some of the ways in which neoliberalism manifests at an economic level. Women bear the brunt of these policies. They bear the cost of the failure of neoliberalism to provide services, both financially and emotionally. Women fetch water, bring up children and take care of the sick. This burden is increasing as the impact of HIV/Aids intensifies. The youth in the region are misplaced, unable to find jobs and therefore not in a position to participate economically in society.

The cumulative impact of neoliberalism, structural adjustment and corporate greed is perhaps most starkly illustrated by the deep decline in infant survival rate and life expectancy throughout the region.

But neoliberalism cannot be seen merely in economic terms. Its disastrous consequences inevitably generate resistance, involving various levels of organisation. The implementation of the neoliberal project thus entails both ideological and repressive elements.

At the ideological level, neoliberalism hides behind the façade of democracy. The G7 governments and the international financial institutions have blamed governments in countries suffering the consequences of structural adjustment and the new international trade regime for being corrupt and engaging in wars. The response in the form of Nepad and from many individual countries has been to agree to multiparty democracy and a limitation in presidential terms of office. Yet, policies such as Gear and Nepad and the macroeconomic elements of the PRSPs are strictly non-negotiable.

Neoliberalism also relies on the media, educational institutions and the homogenisation of culture to impose a set of ideas at odds with reality. People are told there is no alternative to the status quo, that this is the way it is. The youth are encouraged to aspire to be rich, in an environment where there are few job opportunities. They are inculcated with notions that individualism and greed are necessary qualities to this end. Lack of service delivery is accompanied by housing lists, prepaid meters and other mechanisms of control that escalate individualism into competition amongst the poor for insufficient resources, fuelling antagonisms such as xenophobia. People are encouraged, from an early age, through advertising and Western forms of culture to aspire to the individual purchase and ownership of commodities and property.

When these mechanisms fail to stem the collectivisation of anger into increasingly organised forms of resistance, the neoliberal system resorts to repression in the forms of legislation restricting protest, national intelligence gathering and the use of the police and military forces. In the case of Zimbabwe, the introduction of structural adjustment led to the free fall of the Zimbabwean dollar, dramatic cuts in services and jobs, resistance and repression. The emergence of the opposition party from the labour movement led to an intensification of violence. The combination of lack of economic opportunities and political violence has resulted in millions of Zimbabweans fleeing the country. Those that have tried to settle in South Africa are continuously harassed by the South African neoliberal state that also faces a crisis of unemployment.

The workshop participants were quickly disabused of the notion that South Africa has moved beyond its violent Apartheid past through the showing of video footage of a peaceful demonstration protesting the lack of service delivery in Harrismith, a small town in the Free State province. The police suddenly, without warning, fired into the crowd, resulting in instant chaos and killing one person. Violence is thus not merely a manifestation of the rule of undemocratic leadership in counties such as Zimbabwe and Swaziland. It is, rather, an essential feature of neoliberalism.

This is not the only way in which violence occurs. The region, in particular the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a battleground between competing corporate interests. At an international level, the appointment of Wolfowitz as President of the World Bank is perhaps the most graphic illustration of the interrelatedness of neoliberalism and war.

Towards Alternatives to Neoliberalism in the Region

On the second day, the workshop moved towards debating alternatives on the basis of the collective understanding developed on the first day. An initiative was started last year, called Alternatives to Neoliberalism in Southern Africa (Ansa). It has been developed by researchers and research institutions affiliated to labour movements in the region. A concept paper was presented to and debated by the regional trade union body, SATUCC and it was agreed to do various sectoral studies. This process is nearing completion and the intention is now to debate the concept paper and sectoral studies amongst unions and social movements at national level.

The Ansa initiative identifies the state as a crucial site of struggle and sees the transformation of the state as critical to the implementation of alternatives. There was extensive debate about the nature of the state in Southern Africa. It was argued, on the one hand, that the nature of the state is essentially capitalist and that Southern African states are cogs in the big machine of global capitalism and, on the other, that the state is inherently neutral and can be reclaimed. The notion of the state as a capitalist state and as an institution that needs to be transformed thus requires much more debate.

It was also argued that the state is under siege, that it is disappearing and that it is becoming non-existent. This was countered by the perspective that the North needs the Southern African states, but in changed form, as vehicles to open up the region to Northern interests. The state is thus increasingly disappearing as a provider of services and a mechanism for regulating corporations and, simultaneously, increasingly visible as an instrument of repression.

The Ansa initiative also defines Africa as badly integrated into the global economy. It was integrated under colonialism and continues to be integrated in a way that reinforces exploitation. This requires selective delinking from the global economy and relinking on Africa’s terms. Related to this point is that of poor cooperation between states in the Southern African region and the domination of the South African economy over the other countries of the region. It is thus important to build a strong and balanced regionalism to both allow for integrated development across countries of the region and generate the economic weight to relink into the global economy on the region’s terms.

The bottom-up approach to developing alternatives, as so clearly stressed at the Lusaka seminar, was reiterated throughout the workshop. Alternatives must be based on the here and now. They have to be developed within the ambit and experience of the working class. We have to support grassroots struggles and become part of the rank and file. We must point the way forward beyond what already exists and challenge the rank and file towards developing a vision.

It was suggested that there are fundamental differences between neoliberalism and welfare capitalism and that there are many similarities between Keynesianism and Marxism. But it was countered that welfarism is introduced at times when capitalism is being challenged, in order to protect the rule of profit and the capitalist system. Neoliberalism is, in turn, introduced at times when the capitalist system encounters problems of accumulation, in order to address the crisis of profitability. There was broad support that an alternative vision needs to look beyond the capitalist horizon and identify methods and actions to challenge the rule of capital. Accommodation within the capitalist system will not provide a lasting solution. We need a different world “for all workers, at all places, for all time”.

The campaign for an alternative economy in Mauritius, led by Lalit, provides a good example of how to link the here and now to the development of an alternative economy. It entails building confidence through struggle. This requires the development of reasonable and winnable demands. These demands, in turn, need to be consistent with the development of an alternative economy, in this way functioning as the germs of a new society.

The Mauritian economy is based on the sugar, textile and tourism industry, all of which are in crisis. Lalit held discussions with workers in the sugar and agricultural industries who were anxious about their jobs. This led to a small pamphlet that served as a tool to initiate discussion. A demand that did not directly threaten the bosses was developed, namely to interline the rows of sugar cane with vegetables. This was followed by a demand that government taxes the sugar cane fields that are not interlined. This is now part of a broader campaign to convert land under sugar to land for food production, a key element of an alternative economy.

Various specific alternatives were explored, including the development of cooperatives and participatory budgeting. The Malawi Economic Justice Network, in its short few years of existence, has already grown to the point where it develops detailed analyses of the national budgets, educates parliamentarians on budgetary issues and influences government in its budgetary decision-making.

It was noted that cooperatives and participatory budgeting do not necessarily constitute the building blocks of alternatives to the neoliberal system. They can be used for strengthening the system or for fighting against it. Cooperatives must be economically successful, inspire confidence and be part of democratic movements in order to be part of the solution. Likewise, participatory budgeting must start from the ground and must incorporate more than just shifting money into different categories towards changing the way in which government works.

It was suggested that all too often organisations are focused on their own issues and concerns. Building alliances, demonstrating solidarity with other struggles and engaging in joint campaigns are vitally important. For example, the region has been so decimated by the World Bank and IMF that organisations across countries need to stand together in opposing these institutions. The Wolfowitz presidency provides the ideal opportunity to link with the anti-war movement to build an international coalition against the role he played in the “military war” against Iraq and role he is now assuming in the “economic war” against Africa. This is a key moment to intensify the call to shut down the World Bank and other international financial institutions. Of course, this in turn provides the opportunity to debate the forces behind these institutions and identify further strategies against the G7 governments, transnational corporations and finance capital.

Any attempt to build economic alternatives to neoliberalism also needs to take account of its ideological and repressive elements. As potentially viable alternatives are developed, the neoliberal system will do all in its power to repress these initiatives. Therefore, as well as being visionary and identifying offensive demands towards realising that vision, attention must also be given to defending the space that is available to develop alternatives. The closing down of forms of expression, passing of restrictive legislation and acts of violent repression must be resisted together with the building of alternatives. Maintaining the space to be able to develop alternatives is thus an integral dimension of the struggle for alternatives.

Taking the Next Steps

The final day of the workshop considered practical ways forward. It was noted that the workshop was perhaps a first of its kind in bringing together such a wide range of organisations and movements for a rigorous discussion of this nature. In particular, it was recognised that the participation of people from the labour sector together with people from social movements and economic justice organisations was a major step forward.

Two divergent experiences of the unions and social movements were highlighted. In Angola, trade unions have only emerged in the last decade or so and are concerned primarily with wages. For example, the teachers union is not yet taking up issues relating to the lack of classroom facilities, syllabi, books and the like. There is very little interaction with other organisations.

In Namibia and South Africa, the unions were a central force for political change in the years of Apartheid. But they have since separated themselves from their social base in the communities. The unions engage in dialogue with government and business, the social movements resist neoliberalism in the streets.

This workshop thus signifies an opportunity to forge new alliances and to overcome divisions and rebuild old alliances.

All participants at the workshop will take forward the issues and debates in their organisations. National networks will share the debates amongst their members. Regional networks will identify ways in which to take forward joint campaigns, two of which include the campaigns to shut down the World Bank and against Barclays and ABSA. The Ansa initiative and SACEJ will explore ways to deepen debate between unions and social movements.

Finally, an event to share and take forward the debate will be organised to take place at the Southern African Social Forum, scheduled to take place in Harare, Zimbabwe, in October this year.

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Since the defeat of apartheid, South African capital has begun a brutal march northwards that is reminiscent of a “Second Great Boer Trek”. South African supermarket chains have sprung up across Africa, as have cell phone companies, mining groups and even South African style water front developments. The next big sector being eyed by Afrikaner farmers is land, writes Issa Shivji.

Nature did not create a group of people with capital on one side and another group with only muscle-power but no capital on the other side. Political economists tell us that this great division of the human race, what we call the system of capitalism, is the result of a long historical process. In this historical process, the original capital was acquired through a gruesome process of plunder, expropriation, looting, wars, invasions, slavery, indentured labour and colonialism and imperialism. Political economists call this process of acquiring original capital ‘primitive accumulation’.

Even after capitalism has established itself and capital more or less follows the laws of the market to accumulate more capital through profits, the processes of primitive accumulation continue side by side in different areas and under different circumstances. Under today’s system of international capitalism called globalisation the processes of primitive accumulation are most intense on the African continent. Let us palaver on one example which is close to this part of the world and which concerns us directly. This is the inflow of South African capital into neighbouring countries after the fall of apartheid.

Apartheid itself was the great human invention to enable primitive accumulation in South Africa. The 1913 Native Land Act declared that the whole of South African lands belonged to white South Africans with a small print provision which stipulated that 13 per cent of the land will be “scheduled areas” held in trust for the welfare and benefit of “natives”. Thus the whites came to own 87 per cent of land while the majority blacks were bundled into the remaining 13 per cent, the reserves.

On this system of segregation was built the whole edifice of South African capitalism in which the state – not the market – played the pivotal role. Migrant labour from the reserves and homelands in South Africa and from neighbouring countries, including Tanganyika, provided the muscle-power to exploit the land and minerals of the southern tip of the continent. Thus was built the modern South Africa in which the Whites created and lived the ‘heaven on earth’ leaving the Blacks to burn out in the man-made hell of apartheid.

The 1913 Land Act was the turning point in the First Primitive Accumulation of the South African capital. The turning point in the Second Primitive Accumulation is the fall of apartheid enabling South African capital to move out into the rest of the African continent. The process is still unfolding whose end result cannot be predicted but certain interesting trends are taking shape.

Africa is the third largest export market for South Africa. Africa’s share of the South African exports rose from 4 per cent in 1991 to 12 per cent in 2001. Much of this export goes to SADC countries. Today we see South African onions and potatoes and oranges and, of course, wines and beers and spirits and steaks and dried meats in “our” supermarkets and restaurants and hotels called Shoprites and Steers and Debonairs and Protea. Shoprite has branches in 15 African counties and is in the process of expanding in other countries.

Then there is the South African investment, both from parastatals as well as private. Over the five years (1997-2001) South African investments in Africa increased by 300 per cent. It stood at 77 billion Rand in 2001. Almost half of this was direct investment and 80 per cent was in SADC countries. South African capital went into strategic sectors: mining, banking, insurance and finance and telecommunications, airline and railways.

The beer industry, which is trumpeted as a success story in this country (Tanzania), is only a showcase. The jugular vein lies in the strategic sectors. The South African AngloGold, now merged with Ashanti Goldfileds, and Randgold control our gold. Vodacom is dominant in cell phones; ABSA, through NBC, and Stanbic dominate banking; Networks “manages” TANESCO; and South African Airways (SAA) have taken over the national airline ATC with a view to create an East African hub for SAA. SAA wanted to create a similar West African hub through taking over Nigeria’s national airline but the deal has apparently fallen through because Nigerians demanded 10 per cent equity in SAA which the South African government refused.

Escom Enterprises, a giant South African electrical corporation, has presence in 33 African countries. It has utility management contracts in Malawi, Mali, Uganda and Nigeria. It would not be surprising if eventually TANESCO falls in Escom’s laps.

Then there is a South African company called V&A Waterfront which has contracts in Mauritius, Gabon and Nigeria to construct waterfront complexes. A similar project is afoot in our ‘Heaven of Peace’ in which, sooner than later, heavens will line the ocean leaving behind “hell-holes” of slums in Kariakoo, Manzese and even the city centre and Upanga.

The next big sector awaiting South African “investment” and keenly eyed by Afrikaner farmers is land; as one South African official put it: “For the Boers, land is next to God and the Bible”. As South Africa attempts land redistribution to redress the wrongs of the apartheid period, it has to find a place for its white farmers. Mozambique has already given 50 year concessions of thousands of acres of land to South Africa’s Boers who are busy recreating apartheid-like settlements.

Mozambique, which is being hailed in the Western, especially the American, official circles as a success story, is almost a text-book case of South African investments. Almost half of South Africa’s corporate investment in Africa is in Mozambique. South Africa has become the single largest investor in Mozambique, Between 1997-2001 some 250 South African companies opened operations in Mozambique.

It is ironical that the land of Samora Machel which was in the forefront of the struggle against makaburu should be the first to fall in the “Second Great Boer Trek”, this time around to the North of the continent. The first Boer Trek was in the mid 19th century when Boer farmers ran away from the British into the interior opening up new lands, in the process decimating African communities. This is how the Boer republics of Free Orange State and Transvaal were created. Tanzanians may do well to study the Mozambiquen experience as they may be next in the path of the “Second Great Boer Trek”.

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

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