Futures for Southern Africa: A report on a symposium held in Windhoek

'Futures for Southern Africa'
A symposium in Windhoek
15-17 September 2003
Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR)
Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference (SACBC)
Nordic Africa Institute (NAI)
Institute for Commonwealth Studies (ICS)

Hotel Safari, near Eros Airport, Windhoek.
It is almost ten years since the end of apartheid - a moment that appeared to promise peace and prosperity for the future of the region. It is also roughly a decade after several other major regional political events - Namibian independence, Mozambique's first multi-party election, Zambia's first non-liberation movement government, the Lusaka Accord for (temporary) peace in Angola. The above organisations held a symposium in southern Africa on the grounds that it was an appropriate time for an evaluation. It was also the time for some thinking aloud about the future. Has the promised peace dividend come to the region? Have the hopes expressed for peace and prosperity in the region come to fruition? If not why not and was another path possible? Are we stuck with a choice of authoritarian nationalism or neo-liberalism?
Our three-day discussion analysed developments over the past ten years such as:
· The challenge of turning liberation movements into governments
· The NEPAD initiative - a "home grown" African leaders response to the worsening crises in Africa. But what of its neo-liberal approach and its lack of consultation and participation in planning?
· The formation of the African Union with its commitments to human rights, and setting limits to absolute state sovereignty.
· It is impossible to speak of liberation without coming to gender considerations, and yet development here appears stalled and inherently liable to reverse.
· The HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has tragically become the context within which development has to take place.
· The political, social and economic crisis in Zimbabwe and lack of firm regional response
· The outbreak of peace, initially inside Angola, and then the Democratic Republic of Congo (the 'African scramble for Africa') but the legacy of major divisions and problems of reconstruction.

This all takes place against the background of globalisation/greater world inequalities, the humanitarian crisis, and an increasingly fractious and unpredictable world political climate since September 11, 2001 and the war in Iraq.

We brought together civil society activists, people from the churches, academics, policy makers and analysts and journalists. By doing so we hoped to promote greater inter-regional understanding, strengthen southern African and North-South civil society/NGO links and activities, and to ensure (although not immediately since this was a symposium addressing ideas) that policy is directed at understanding and responding to the major challenges.

Firoze Manji of Fahamu offered a withering critique of 'actual existing development' pointing to its failure to improve the living conditions of millions of people, and its task of converting citizens into consumers. 'Life looks different from under the wheels of a Mercedes to riding in the back'. Several speakers including Firoze Manji, Henning Melber and Peter Vale pointed out that civil and political rights and the whole notion of dissent was built into the struggle against colonialism and apartheid only to be dismissed by new post colonial leaders. As Peter Vale put it 'dissent made the region, dissent made liberation and dissent now made emancipation'. Lloyd Sachikonye pointed to the continuities of violence used by such leaders in the immediate post-colonial state and subsequently when the modernising 'nation-building' project ground down under external inequality and restructuring and internal corruption, human rights abuses and determination to stay in power. Janah Ncube of Zimbabwe in a seminal contribution provided the emancipatory and iconic figure of the unemployed mother emerging from positive testing for HIV/AIDS. Without commitment to her, development and democracy will be meaningless she stated and others restated throughout the symposium. The commitment will be to emancipatory politics through Janah’s iconic figure, to a counter-hegemonic project bringing security and development back to all people(s) in the region. The symposium emphatically rejected NEPAD as a starting point for discussions whilst recognising the importance of engaging with the ideas contained within NEPAD (even if it was engagement in order to reject as Firoze Manji put it).

Work to make this a reality will be long and hard (Steve Kibble pointing out that this was a marathon not a sprint), but we will continue to take this fight forward in a number of arenas and ways. CIIR and others will be publishing the papers on their websites soon and CIIR will be producing a report based on them and the symposium proceedings. Money willing we will have follow ups in South and North (provisionally to take place at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in early April 2004) to concretise the debate. In the academic field we are investigating a joint southern African universities fellowship in southern African studies and a summer school at one of the participating universities. We welcome commitment to this from activists, academics and faith-based organisations and the like. We realise that we have only just started and do not as yet have southern Africans from all parts of the region. This we want to rectify – with your help and solidarity.

Steve Kibble
CIIR

Speakers:
- ‘Whatever Happened to Post Apartheid?’ Ideas from his Concept Paper Peter Vale, Nelson Mandela Professor of Politics at Rhodes University, South Africa.
- Regional Overview of Conflict, Peace and Reconstruction, Vasu Gounden, Director of ACCORD, Durban
- Conflict, Peace and Reconstruction: Perspectives from the church and civil society in Angola Friar Manuel Sebastiao, MOSAIKO training centre, Angola
- Conflict, Resources and Reconstruction: Perspectives from DRC, Jacques Depelchin, Exectuive Director OTA Benga International Alliance for Peace in Congo
- Human rights, gender and power - A: Regional Overview, Alice Mogwe, Director, Ditshwanelo, Botswana
- Women of the Region – Power, Patriarchy and Conflict, Janah Ncube, Women in Politics Support Unit, Zimbabwe
- Rediscovering political theologies in the region, Jonah Gokova, Methodist Church of Zimbabwe and Ecumenical Support Services
- The social and economic role of the Church in the region, Lucy Steinitz, National Coordinator, Catholic Aids Action, Namibia.
- Land, reform and farm-workers’ rights, Lloyd Sachikonye, Professor at Institute for Development Studies, University of Zimbabwe
- Workers in the region Herbert Jauch, Director of Labour Resource and Research Institute, Namibia
- NGOs: Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?, Firoze Manji, Director of Fahamu and Editor of Pambazuka News
- NEPAD in the context of globalisation, Henning Melber, Research Director, Nordic Africa Institute
- NEPAD-Pan-African Idealism and/or Post Structural Adjustment Neo-liberalism? Neville Gabriel, Justice and Peace Commission, SACBC, Pretoria.
- SADC and its restructuring, Chris Landsberg, Centre for Policy Studies, Johannesburg
- Liberation Movements as Governments, Henning Melber, Nordic Africa Institute
- "Politics of liberation and legitimisation of state authoritarianism in Southern Africa: The case of Zimbabwe", Amin Kameta , Nordic Africa Institute
- ‘Whence Civil Society?’ Phil ya Nangoloh, Director of the Namibian Society for Human
Rights (NSHR).

HIV/AIDS and conflict: the implications for development and regional integration. Michaela Clayton, Co-ordinator of the AIDS Law Unit at the Legal Assistance Centre, Windhoek.