At the same time the Treatment Action Campaign (Tac) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) were holding a massive people's conference in Durban to fight HIV/Aids last week, Thabo Mbeki begged for increased commitments for Africa from G-8 leaders in Kananaskis, Canada.

Included amongst those commitments is the UN Global Fund, which according to Kofi Annan should logically reach $10 billion annually to meet Third World demands for inexpensive medicine, more health workers and improved facilities. But the Fund has received less than a tenth of that money, after George W. Bush denied a congressional allocation of $700 million in May.

Mbeki's search for aid, debt relief and investment resulted in "recycled peanuts," according to informed commentators. Mbeki and other African leaders were reduced to expressing "satisfaction" over their 90-minute appearance before Bush and his Northern cronies, which is a rhetorical measure of power imbalances and global inequity.

Mbeki's New Partnership for Africa's Development was bound to attract scepticism, particularly insofar as its corporate-friendly tone and content compels venal government elites across the continent to make themselves attractive for new investment.

Energised activists from the Tac/Cosatu conference will now have to raise the opposite question: how Africa-friendly are multinational corporations, particularly when so many African workers are HIV+, and when the leading corporations turn their back on anti-retroviral treatments?

Done properly, treatments would potentially transform the disease from inexorably fatal into a chronic illness such as diabetes, as has happened in much of the wealthier West.

But thanks to unemployment above 40%--if one counts those who have given up
trying to find a job under prevailing conditions-international and local firms are faced with a terrible option: replace sick workers with desperate, unemployed people instead of providing them treatment.

Perhaps the ethical challenge was expressed most eloquently by financier George Soros, who was asked about treating HIV+ South Africans by an SABC journalist in April. He answered, `I think to provide treatment to the bulk of the people is just not feasible. I think to provide treatment for instance to qualified workers actually saves money, actually saves money for companies.'

The interviewer responded, `Aren't you uncomfortable to talk in a way that is a kind of death sentence to those who we can't afford to treat?' Replied Soros, `I think the cost of providing actual treatment to everyone at the present... I don't think it's realistic. It's not achievable.'

In a more systematic way, the same conclusion was reached after a year of study at Africa's largest company, Anglo American Corporation. Anglo has 160,000 employees, of whom 21% are HIV+. After the pharmaceutical industry withdrew its lawsuit against Pretoria's potential use of imported generic drugs in April 2001, the company announced it would provide anti-retroviral medicines to its workforce, which meant literally tens of thousands of lives could be saved in the short term.

In June 2001, the Financial Times reported that`treatment of [Anglo's]employees with anti-retrovirals can be cheaper than the costs incurred by leaving them untreated.' In August, Anglo's vice president for medicine, Brian Brink, announced a strategy which 'involved offering wellness programmes, including access to anti-retroviral treatment.'

According to one press report, `The company believed that the cost of its programmes would eventually be outweighed by the benefits it received in gradual gains in productivity, [Brink] concluded. Although it was indeed a risky strategy, it was the only one Anglo could pursue in the face of such
human suffering.'

Then last October, Anglo simply retracted its promise, once cost-benefit analysis showed that 146,000 of those workers just weren't worth saving. According to the FT, Brink `said the company's 14,000 senior staff would receive anti-retroviral treatment as part of their medical insurance, but that the provision of drug treatment for lower income employees was too expensive.'

Brink explained the criteria for the fatal analysis: '[Anti-retrovirals]could save on absenteeism and improved productivity. The saving you achieve can be substantial, but we really don't know how it will stack up. We feel that the cost will be greater than the saving.'

His callous feeling became official policy a few months ago. As the Wall Street Journal recorded on April 16, `In a controversial move that could have wide ramifications for how companies in poor countries handle Aids, mining giant Anglo American PLC has put on hold a feasibility study to provide Aids drugs to its African work force, according to people familiar with the situation. When it disclosed its plans for the study a year ago, Anglo garnered wide praise because it was one of the first major corporations to reveal measures aimed at treating Aids cases among its rank-and-file African employees.'

A month later, South Africa's most eloquent pro-corporate commentator, Ken Owen, defended the merits of Anglo's policy in a Business Day column: `I am sceptical about most doomsday economic scenarios generated by the Aids epidemic... For the rest of this decade, at least, the lost workers will be quite readily replaceable from the millions of unemployed, and society will adjust in a myriad of ways to labour shortages. For example, a million domestic workers constitute a reserve pool of labour that can be drawn into
industry.'

Where does this display of corporate arrogance-bordering on culpable homicide--leave the treatment-activist movement? Will the April 2001 victory over Big Pharma and the expected Constitutional Court ruling against Mbeki on access to drugs for pregnant HIV-positive women allow HIV/Aids activists to turn, with their labour and other international solidarity allies, against capital?

The answer may lie in changing the terms of costs and benefits, by making firms socially liable-even if merely through old-fashioned protest--for killing their workers through malign medical-insurance neglect. With Anglo attempting to shine at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in August, opportunities abound for global humiliation of the genocidal tendencies at these mega-wealthy multinational corporations.

(Wits University political economy professor Patrick Bond is editor of 'Fanon's Warning', a new book critical of Nepad, published by Africa World Press and the Alternative Information and Development Centre.)

Thabo Mbeki is seen as Africa's most legitimate, self-confident and fundamentally pro-Western leader. If anyone can shake down the World Bank in Washington for debt cancellation, or the WTO in Geneva for trade concessions, it's the primary architect of the miracle transition in recently-liberated South Africa.

Africa needs enormous concessions, thanks to what Mbeki has termed "global apartheid" and what Washington/Geneva technocrats prefer to laud as the "Washington Consensus"--or just "globalisation." Africa generates nearly 30% more exports today than in 1980, yet their value has crashed by more than 40% because of falling terms of trade.

Likewise, Sub-Saharan Africa's foreign debt rose from US$60 billion to US$206 bn over the same period notwithstanding 1980s-90s debt repayments of US$229 bn, thanks to the tyranny of compound interest rates and the near-universal failure of intervening structural adjustment programmes. Over the past three years alone, debt repayment by Sub-Saharan African countries was US$16 billion greater than incoming new loans.

Can Africa's leaders finally, vigorously campaign against such extreme uneven world capitalist development? Should we draw hope from a "New Partnership for Africa's Development" ("Nepad"), launched in Abuja, Nigeria by several African heads of state on October 23? And first of all, what background should we have about the Nepad process?

From the late 1990s, Mbeki embarked upon an "African Renaissance" branding exercise with poignant poetics. The contentless form was somewhat remedied in the secretive Millennial Africa Recovery Programme (with the acronym "Map"), whose powerpoint skeleton was unveiled to select elites in 2000, during Mbeki's meetings with Bill Clinton in May, the Okinawa G-8 in July, the UN Millennium Summit in September, and a subsequent European Union gathering in Portugal.

The skeleton was fleshed out in November 2000 with the assistance of several economists. It was immediately endorsed during a special South African visit by World Bank president James Wolfensohn "at an undisclosed location," due presumably to fears of the disruptive civil-society protests which had soured a Johannesburg trip by new IMF czar Horst Koehler a few months earlier.

Thanks to work by a co-author of South Africa's own disastrous 1996 homegrown structural adjustment programme (Stephen Gelb), the content of the 60-page working document was becoming clearer: more privatisation, especially of infrastructure (no matter its profound failure as a strategy, especially in South Africa); more multi-party elections (typically, though, between variants of neoliberal parties, as in the US) as a veil for the lack of thorough-going participatory democracy; grand visions of a developmental kickstart via ICT (hopelessly unrealistic considering the lack of simple reliable electricity across the continent); more trade with the North; and a self-mandate for peace-keeping (which South Africa has subsequently taken for its soldiers stationed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi).

In short, Mbeki dreamed of more globalisation, not less.

By this stage, he had managed to sign on as partners two additional rulers from the crucial West and North regions of the continent: Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Olusegun Obasanjo from Nigeria. Unfortunately, both continued to face mass popular protests and widespread civil/military/religious bloodshed at home, diminishing their utility as model African leaders.

Later, to his credit, Obasanjo led a surprise revolt against Mbeki's capitulation to Northern pressure at the World Conference Against Racism in September 2001, when he helped generate a split between EU and African countries over reparations due the continent for slavery and colonialism. Tellingly, even loose talk of such reparations cannot be found in the Mbeki's document, and the South African host delegation was furious at Obasanjo's outburst because it nearly scuppered a final conference resolution.

But that incident aside, 2001 has been a successful year for selling Nepad. Another pro-Western ruler, Tanzania's Benjamin Mkapa, joined the New Africa leadership group in January 2001. Mkapa's government suffers a dreadful recent human rights record, but he and Mbeki gave the world's leading capitalists and state elites a briefing in Davos, Switzerland, which was very poorly-attended. A few days later, an effort was made in Mali to sell West Africans to the plan, with on-the-spot cheerleading by Wolfensohn and Koehler.

Then, the July 2001 inaugural meeting of the African Union in Lusaka provided the opportunity for a continent-wide leadership endorsement, once Mbeki's plan was merged with the "Omega Plan"--offered by the neoliberal Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade--to become the New African Initiative. For a few months until late October, observers termed Mbeki's initiative "the Nai."

The Genoa G-8 summit offered soothing encouragement. With 300,000 protesters outside the conference accusing the world's main political leaders of running a destructive, elitist club, Mbeki was a useful adornment. Likewise, Mbeki's October visits to Japan and Brussels confirmed his elite popularity, perhaps because there was no apparent demand for formal monetary commitments at this stage.

A recent surge of enthusiasm from Johannesburg corporations, Washington multilateral banks, and European capitals deserves much more consideration than I have space for here, particularly given the geopolitical give-and-take associated with George W. Bush's "anti-terror" coalition-building. But to sum up the ideological partnership that Mbeki proposes, consider the way that the 1980s-90s recolonisation of African economic policy is explained on the website version of Nepad:

"The structural adjustment programmes provided only a partial solution. They promoted reforms that tended to remove serious price distortions, but gave inadequate attention to the provision of social services. As a consequence, only a few countries managed to achieve sustainable higher growth under these programmes."

Slippery, this line of analysis, and worth unpacking briefly, to conclude, for one test of robust analysis is to pose the opposite premise, and to see whether the subsequent hypotheses are worth exploring:

--What if structural adjustment represented not "a partial solution" but instead, reflecting local and global power shifts, a profound defeat for genuine African nationalists, workers, peasants, women, children, manufacturing industry and the environment?

--What if "promoting reforms" really amounted to the IMF and World Bank imposing their cookie-cutter neoliberal policies on desperately disempowered African societies, without any reference to democratic processes, resistance or diverse local conditions?

--What if the removal of "serious price distortions" really meant the repeal of exchange controls (hence allowing massive capital flight), subsidy cuts (hence pushing masses of people below the poverty line), and lowered import tariffs (hence causing widespread deindustrialisation)?

--What if "inadequate attention to the provision of social services" in reality meant the opposite: excessive attention to applying neoliberalism not just to the macroeconomy, but also to health, education, water and other crucial state services?

--And what if the form of IMF/Bank attention included insistence upon greater cost recovery, higher user-fees, lower budgetary allocations, privatisation, and even the disconnection of supplies to those too poor to afford them, hence leading to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people?

If these hypotheses are reasonable, and if the logical implication is to proceed no further with structural adjustment, then a central task of Nepad must be to slip around such arguments without reference to their relevance. By doing so, Nepad fits right into the globalisers' modified neoliberal project, which now insists even more incongruously that economic integration solves poverty.

Apparently, the notion that South Africa might "naai"--translated from Afrikaans as "totally screw over"--the rest of Africa through Mbeki's New, Almost-African Initiative led those gathered at Abuja to revise the name. Still, cheeky commentators are already observing that if prounced "kneepad," the document signifies its merits as the cushion African leaders will need, as they stoop and grovel for more handouts.

But that would be unfair, for Nepad is worth reading even if merely as an ambitious attempt to bring a spirit of "engagement" by at least three African leaders to a world economy which is still totally screwing over Africa. True, like all top-down policy formulations, Nepad reeks of technicism--a scent which could dissipate partially if exposed to the fires of popular debate, protest and participation. But that would risk the transformation of Nepad into a partnership with Africans themselves. And Mbeki's AIDS interventions provide enough evidence of his intentions to keep millions of Africans alive, much less in partnership.

The alternative to Nepad begins with African activists building up networks within and between diverse social movements, visionary trade unions, Jubilee chapters, women's organisations, environmental groups and the progressive intelligentsia. These are already taking seed across the continent via anti-neoliberal protests and longer-term strategic work (e.g., in this subregion, the Southern African Peoples Solidarity Network, at and across the continent flowing from the Dakar 2000 process to promote an African People's Consensus instead of a Map/Nai/Nepad).

A recent precedent for rejection and reformulation was the World Bank's Global Development Gateway, which was repelled in March by creative South/ern African civil society groups, and which instead initiated the Africa Pulse information community. That kind of African partnership, based on a human-rights culture, a decommodification strategy and durable cross-border alliances, is far superior to Pretoria's new gambit.

Indeed, Nepad belongs with many of South Africa's other regional economic strategies: deindustrialising neighbours because of relectance to give the same duty-free preferences to SADC imports that even the apartheid regime had offered; imposing EU and US free-trade regimes on unwilling neighbours; demanding debt repayments from impoverished Mozambique for loans that resettled dissident rightwing Afrikaner farmers and that rebuilt electricity lines which were destroyed by apartheid destabilisation; kicking out 15,000 Zimbabwean farmworkers with no compensation; or treating informal economic migrants like meat for dogs (not merely in extremist SA Police Service training exercises but on a day-to-day basis at the Department of Home Affairs).

To expand this sort of subimperialist project via a warmed-over Washington Consensus, Nepad, means that Mbeki is content merely polishing, not abolishing, global apartheid.

Patrick Bond's new book is Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance (University of Cape Town Press). Ordering information from [email][email protected]