WSSD: IN JOBURG, STREET LEVEL ACTION TRUMPS BOARDROOM BLUSTER

WSSD: IN JOBURG, STREET LEVEL ACTION TRUMPS BOARDROOM BLUSTER
Patrick Burnett
Fahamu – Learning for Change
The Bill Gates of Johannesburg in the gold rush of the 1880’s was reputed to be a Frenchman by the name of Jacques Lebaudy whose level of excess astonished even the stinking rich of the time. Lebaudy was said to have driven a carriage with a harness made out of solid gold, once filled his swimming pool with champagne, entertained his guests with troops of exotic dancers imported from Baghdad and made sure that a new city fountain gushed with wine. English journalist Flora Shaw coined the term “classless excess” when writing about the materialism of the post gold rush era represented by Lebaudy and - more than 100 years later - Johannesburg still thrives on its reputation as a center of smash-and-grab greed.
It was no different in the lead up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). Prostitutes were interviewed on morning radio about how much money they were making during the Summit as thousands of delegates jetted into the city. Rich homeowners rubbed their hands in glee as their luxury houses where snapped up for R30 000 per day. Convoys of luxury cars could be seen cruising the highways. The promised party even prompted the United Nations to issue an embarrassed directive asking delegates to downplay their gluttony due to the 13 million people slowly starving to death in Southern Africa.
Post summit Joburg gave itself a hearty pat on the back. Johannesburg World Summit Company CEO Moss Mashishi glowed about the “world class” event the city had delivered. Restaurants, transport and accommodation had compared favourably with international standards. In this analysis it didn’t matter that the overall mood was one of deep disappointment, even dismay and anger. “What happened in Johannesburg amounts to a privatization of the Earth…an auction house in which the rights of the poor were given away,” Indian author and activist Dr Vandama Shiva was reported as declaring. Friends of the Earth International called the Summit a “failure” and a “clear step backwards”, while Oxfam called it an “opportunity wasted”.
Even amidst this depressing assessment, NGOs declared that “it could have been worse” but for a few small victories. For example, environmental groups hailed as a victory the removal of text that would have required environmental protection agreements to be consistent with the rules of the World Trade Organization, in effect making environmental agreements subordinate to trade rules. The removal was only after a bitter fight by NGOs - and according to Friends of the Earth even this victory remains partial, as it will still be discussed at the next WTO Ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico. But these small victories were more like damage control than forward movement.
Apart from contentious trade issues, fierce negotiations on renewable energy - seen as crucial if the problem of climate change is to be dealt with -were ambushed by the United States. Greenpeace accused the US of holding the future to ransom by forcing delegates to accept that the US would only provide money for clean water if the world gave up its ambitions for renewable energy. The renewable energy agreement eventually agreed to a “substantial increase” in the use of renewable energy such as solar energy and wind power but stopped short of setting any clear global targets. “Behind that insistence was US energy policy, authored by the big oil interests that elected Bush and Cheney,” said Greenpeace.
Friends of the Earth announced that after analyzing the text they had found only two new targets in the entire document. These were in paragraph seven, where commitment was made to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation. The second, in paragraph 31c would establish marine protected networks by 2012. In all other cases, however, existing commitments were “reaffirmed, watered down or scrapped”.
“The chance to hold back the tide of damage caused by the dominant neoliberal economic ideology that dominates the developed world and institutions such as the World Trade Organisation has been lost,” said Friends of the Earth.
As the Global People’s Forum (GPF) at Nasrec, 25 kilometres from Sandton, petered out, there was also disillusionment. The GPF was supposed to have been the voice of civil society operating in parallel to the main government negotiations taking place in Sandton. Proceedings had started off badly with a row over NGO accreditation to Sandton. NGO representatives complained that corporate advisers were given unlimited access to negotiating rooms, while NGO access was severely restricted. There was one story of a woman from Somalia whose rural village had saved to send her to the Summit. When she arrived in Sandton to make her contribution, she was refused entry. The implication of the accreditation row provided further evidence for a lobby who believed that the UN had deliberately tightened accreditation procedures so as to prevent a strong NGO lobby in the Summit. Many veteran activists said they had never seen such strict accreditation procedures and argued that the UN was faced with a serious credibility crisis.
“It looks like the rich don’t want to speak to the poor,” said an angry civil society representative in a debriefing at Nasrec. “We don’t work for the UN, they work for us. You can’t have UN officials not wanting to meet with us but being quite happy to meet with corporate advisers.” Fears were expressed that the way of doing business in Sandton would set precedents for excluding NGOs from future events. Most people from the floor supported the idea of a walk out, which was narrowly averted.
Other problems also plagued the GPF, not least of which was trying to find out what was going on in Sandton. Massive screens beamed pictures of intense negotiations from Sandton, but delegates couldn’t hear the voices because the sound feed had not been paid for. The GPF did manage to stumble to the finish line, allowing Abie Ditlhake, director of the South African NGO Coalition, to state that the first goal of NGOs had been advancement over the gains achieved at Rio. But he told Earth Times on the penultimate day of the Summit: “It is slowly becoming apparent that there is no advancement from Rio. In fact there is evidence of reversion in some of the very important and milestone principles of Rio.”
An anonymous civil society document went one step further. “We, representatives of diverse civil society groups gathered in Johannesburg, affirm the value of the process of the Earth Summit, but we disassociate ourselves with deep concern from the outcomes of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.
“We are alarmed that the governments of the world continue to show a tragic unwillingness to translate the Rio principles into concrete action and to display an appalling lack of determination to commit themselves to the objectives of Agenda 21. Instead they have shown an irresponsible subservience to corporate led globalization and have made attempts to roll back the commitments they reached in Rio.”
It all seemed pointless. The predictions had long been that the Summit would be a flop and so it had proved to be. But it was away from the main summit venues and down on the grubby streets of Johannesburg that the real battles were being fought and won.
Nine kilometers from Sandton, Alexandria is a reality that few delegates will see first hand. It is a dense, crowded, scrum of humanity, where people live in tin shacks or broken-down buildings. Unemployment is rampant. Youths stroll listlessly in the street or loll about on street corners. There is none of the multinational advertising so evident in Sandton. “Look at this and the way people live here, and then just across the road at Sandton it’s totally different,” says an activist. “This is a place where people live in a way that nobody should be made to live in while Sandton is a place where people live like they should not be allowed to live in,” said another.
It was here that the Social Movements Indaba (SMI), a leftist South African coalition, made their stand against the WSSD, relentlessly hammering home the enormous void between the poverty of Alexandria and the wealth of Sandton nine kilometers away, a situation that so obviously symbolized the global gap between rich and poor.
Sowetan Trevor Ngwane, a member of the SMI, said: “We are fighting against the consequences of privatization represented by electricity and water cut offs and forced removals. The WSSD is a gathering of the powerful and those that act against us. We feel that the Sandton Convention Centre cannot be a part of the solution when they are a part of the problem. We are the solution. Those people speak for the rich and the capitalists, not us.”
Off-summit action peaked on Saturday 31 August when between 20 000 and 30 000 people marched from Alexandria to Sandton to protest against the WSSD. The march embarrassed the official Global People’s Forum and government-backed march, which only drew about 5 000 people. The massive turn out was hailed as a victory for the left and the beginning of a new social movement in opposition to the forces of exploitative economic policies.
As Wits University academic Patrick Bond wrote in a column for Foreign Policy in Focus (http://www.fpif.org/outside/commentary/2002/0209postwssd_body.html), an important feature on the civil society front was the “global-local linkage of protests against privatisation and services disconnections, landlessness and many other neoliberal development policies that Pretoria adopted since 1994, partly at the behest of the World Bank.” And it was the march on August 31 that showed the depth of popular anger against not only the WSSD, but also the government, Bond argues.
Back in Sandton the feeling was that big business had triumphed and that the United Nations had become co-opted into the grand plan of the corporate lobby for sustainable development. As one activist wrote, corporate organisations had succeeded in their project to take over political organisations. “Now, more sharply defined than ever before, the conflict between corporate values and humane, people’s values becomes evident, and becomes the central debate of our time around the world. And so the World Summit on Sustainable Development places the issue on our global agenda. Perhaps that may have been the most important gain.”
Nevertheless, Lebaudy would no doubt have been proud. As a businessman, he would probably have approved of the strong corporate lobby attending the event. After the event he may even have cracked a bottle of champagne and puffed in quiet satisfaction on an expensive cigar. The corporate agenda had not been jeopardized. Profits had been protected.
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