Africa's Progressive Movements

Patrick Bond
and Dennis Brutus

ZNet Commentator Patrick Bond (pbond@wn.apc.org) chats with South African poet/activist ZNet Commentator Dennis Brutus  about the state of the African Left

PB: Good to see you back in Johannesburg, comrade Dennis, even briefly, in the midst of your travels. But the news today (December 27) is mixed, because it seems that some Washington sharpies have persuaded Nelson Mandela to lead a World Bank/IMF/Unicef conference on child poverty in London in February. You broke stones on Robben Island with Mandela during the mid-1960s. What's he up to, do you think?

DB: This latest gimmick seems to be Washington's response to the sharp attack leveled at the Bank, especially their new managing director for human development, Mamphela Ramphele, at the Prague annual meetings three months ago. The Bank and IMF stand accused of contributing to 19,000 avoidable deaths of young kids every day. At one NGO-Bank discussion in Prague, a representative of the British trade union Unison really went after Mamphela, who as you know was Steven Biko's partner before moving to Cape Town University. There, as president during the 1990s, she smashed the main trade union and cut lowest-tier workers' wages by half.

Then add to that, our finance minister Trevor Manuel's role as chair of the Prague meeting, which we protesters forced him to shut a day early. So it looks some South African former anti-apartheid leaders are now playing the role of useful idiots for global apartheid. Maybe our allies in Britain can mobilise so that the tarnishing of Mandela's prestige by the IMF and World Bank doesn't go unanswered. A similar thing happened just over a month ago, by the way, when another South African, education minister Kader Asmal, hauled Mandela out to defend his two big Lesotho dams at the London launch of the final report of the World Commission on Dams, which Asmal has been chairing over the past two years.

It was most embarrassing. Across the earth, megadams financed by the World Bank have been catastrophic, so much so that this Commission report has to admit the vast extent of the damage. And yet there was Nelson Mandela being used to put a gloss on Africa's biggest dam--the sanctions-busting Lesotho Highlands Water Project--which community groups in Soweto and Alexandra townships, as well as displaced Basotho people and environmentalists, all agree is a corrupt fiasco. Last month, the progressive movements from both countries together called for a moratorium on the Lesotho dam, which of course was ignored by Pretoria and Washington. So you see the damage Mandela is now doing to social progress. It's tragic, really.

PB: Well, although the African National Congress won the South African municipal elections very comfortably early this month, their leaders failed to inspire even half the population to come out to vote, and the ANC share went down from two-thirds in the national election last year, to just three-fifths. And they did quite badly amongst working-class "coloured" (mixed-race) and Indian people, even losing the city of Cape Town to the old apartheid party. What do you make of that?

DB: This is just one expression of dissatisfaction. There are many others. The point is, that disgruntled mass-based organisations and allied intellectuals in this country are more attuned than ever before to the need for an anti-neoliberal programme than ever before. But not just here. Two weeks ago, in Dakar, Senegal, there was a most encouraging multi-lingual gathering of radical social, church, women's and labour groups and movements from across the continent. Samir Amin, the great Dakar-based marxist economist, opened the gathering.

I hear that the delegates joined 5,000 Senegalese for an anti-austerity march during the conference. It was supposed to culminate at the IMF/Bank office in downtown Dakar, but the new Senegalese government of Abdoulaye Wade was too frightened to allow that. Still, this was a great marker of the growing energy and tight organisation that exist in some African cities.

And the conference proceedings suggest a very tough reckoning of where African social-justice movements are now, and where they need to go. This was the first time that very strong contingents from Anglofone and Francofone countries came together, along with several from Lusofone (portuguese-speaking) countries. The Northern allies who came to observe reportedly learned a great deal and were most impressed.

PB: In terms of programmatic and political thinking, what do you feel Dakar achieved?

DB: From the conference material I've seen, and from what we've learned from South African participants' report-backs, there was a qualitative advance on analysis, consolidation of structures, clearer definition of goals and strategies, and alliance- building with other southern and northern comrades. The environmental debt that the North owes the South is now also a very important issue, recognised by all the participants.

PB: Outputs included the Dakar Declaration and Manifesto, and an excellent statement advancing the African People's Consensus--the principles that stand in opposition to the Washington Consensus of the World Bank--which I suspect will soon be up on the various websites of conference sponsors (e.g., http://aidc.org.za). There was also a meeting of the Jubilee South network, which gathered all the main southern hemisphere campaigns.

DB: The short-term debt-related demands coming from the Jubilee South network were extremely progressive, focusing on the notion of illegitimacy. This has become the basis for critiquing all outstanding debt. The way Jubilee South puts it is clear: "No conditionalities, no structural adjustment programmes for new loans; immediate cancellation of illegitimate debts; and South governments should have a public investigation and audit of the debt, suspend payments until investigations have been made, and non-payment of illegitimate debts."

Some of the concrete strategies advanced include national people's tribunals on debt and structural adjustment programmes across the South, following the extremely successful Brazilian model. By 2002, an international people's tribunal will be convened. I was particularly encouraged about two specific issues I've been following: our demands as a movement are maturing from mere debt cancellation to insisting upon reparations, and the role of the World Bank Bonds Boycott as a handle for local activists, to shrink the power of Washington from the bottom up. The boycott strategy gives readers of ZNet some good activist opportunities at home, between coming to all these wonderful protests at meetings.

By the way, big protests are likely to be at the Davos World Economic Forum in January, Buenos Aires and Quebec City for the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas both in April, May Day in all kinds of places, a World Day of Action against Debt just before the Genoa G-8 Summit in June.

And of course there's the annual meeting of the World Bank and IMF in October. That's back in Washington next year, and unlike last April when there were fewer than 1,000 official delegates at the A16/17 spring meetings, the cops are not going to be able to close off 90 city blocks and get their delegates in next time. Because the meeting is scheduled to be at the Sheraton Hotel at Rock Creek Parkway, we're going to outnumber their 20,000 delegates and have a real party in the park.

PB: Back to Africa, how about relations between states and civil societies? Is there any concrete possibility that governments in Africa will finally listen to the progressive forces?

DB: In Dakar, there was much greater emphasis than there has been so far on relating to governments, but that includes challenging corrupt regimes, of which we have dozens on this continent. So, on the one hand, the African Jubilee groups and other social movements are going to forcefully agitate for their governments to ally with civil society on the demand for debt repudiation and cancellation, and even to form a debtor's cartel and build a reparations movement. And on the other hand, regarding the corrupt regimes, we will not only see Africans being more courageous in denouncing crooked rulers, but also demanding that Western financiers also take responsibility for their complicity.

Our Nigerian comrades, for example, are having success putting the heat on London, Swiss and US banks for bankrolling Sani Abacha and hiding his stolen funds. My friend Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, who replaced Archbishop Desmond Tutu a few years ago, has challenged the World Bank, and Swiss and German banks and governments. Backed by Jubilee South Africa, he's saying they must repay payments made by South African society on loans to Pretoria during the apartheid era which upheld white power.

PB: Do you have any reservations about Dakar? For example, I saw a vicious email attack circulated by Ann Pettifor of Jubilee UK who questioned what otherwise seemed a very unifying process.

DB: As usual, minor tensions developed when some renegades from Jubilee 2000 UK wanted to exert undue influence. I gather it stems from them losing control, and from their rather less ambitious campaigning objectives. Yet overall, the more radical Jubilee South positions were fully endorsed within the South-North meeting.

But I wish there had been more forward planning, in the light of some key points of global movement building. We're not only showing up at the enemy's meetings, you see, we're now putting our own gatherings together, like Dakar, and we must drive towards more inclusivity and programmatic work. The crucial session will be a vast meeting in Porto Allegre, Brazil, next month, where the Workers Party, Movement of the Landless and a huge collection of the best progressive forces in Latin America are bringing in activists and strategists from all over the world.

There'll be another huge event in Durban, South Africa next August, by the way: the UN Conference on Racism. That conference will be an opportunity for Pretoria and the UN bigwigs to showcase South Africa as a model for solving racial problems. I believe that this would be a false image. We will instead be using the occasion to present a more honest picture of the failures of this government. Many of the gross inequities of the apartheid system--homelessness, lack of water, inadequate health services, the Bantu educational system, all originally based on racial distinctions--have actually gotten worse since 1994. The reason for that is, essentially, dictation by proponents of neoliberalism, especially the World Bank. Pretoria has pretty slavishly adopted the Washington Consensus ideology. And there's little or nothing to show for it.

PB: Ok, the best progressive forces in this country share that line of argument. But after Durban on racism next August, there's yet another huge event coming up, the UN's World Summit on Social Development here in Jo'burg in 2002. This was announced a couple of weeks ago, just after Jo'burg successfully hosted the Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) treaty conference. I hear from people in the Ralph Nader circuits that they were fairly pleased with the outcome, because they exerted enough pressure to overcome reactionary positions by not only the United States but by the host, South Africa, which is, for instance, using DDT to treat malarial zones.

DB: Yes, that World Summit is probably the point at which the work done in Dakar, Porto Allegre and various other sites on alternatives to neoliberalism will come to fruition. ZNet readers should put Jo'burg on their agenda.

Hey, will they have finally changed the name of Johannesburg by then? The nineteenth-century land surveyor, Johannes Rissik, doesn't deserve it. I guess it'll be called Igoli, Zulu for City of Gold?

PB: Renaming Jo'eys was another of the ANC promises in the municipal elections earlier this month. Don't hold your breath, though, Dennis. White big business interests say that it's a global brand name, now, and the neoliberals running the city will probably persuade the politicians to let it die.

DB: Yes, like Seattle is a brand name to our comrades!

From Seattle to Soweto, that sounds right. See you there in 2002!