WSSD: NO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WHILE PEOPLE ARE STARVING

Patrick Burnett
Fahamu

JOHANNESBURG - It was useless to talk about sustainable development when people were starving and when there were poor education facilities and declining health care in a country, said Lucie Jessie Nyirenda of the Economic Justice Network in Malawi.
Addressing a roundtable discussion held at Wits University to critique the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), Nyirenda said: “We want to tell the world that a starving nation cannot have any development. You can’t tell someone who is dying from HIV about sustainable development.”
Nyirenda told delegates that Malawi needed proper structures, good governance and food security. “We don’t have these things…they are lacking in Malawi,” she said.
She pointed out that Nepad was problematic because the populations of African countries had never been consulted.
“If you ask a villager what Nepad is they will probably think it is some kind of food,” she said. “We are getting poorer and poorer and people are definitely going to die of hunger.”
Nyirenda said if programmes like Nepad and events like the WSSD were endorsed as formalities by leaders without knowledge amongst populations of what they really represented then “we will suffer and Africa will remain poor”.
The title of the discussion in which Nyirenda spoke was ‘From Southern Africa to the World – Beyond the Rhetoric of Democracy and Development.’ A strong lobby of speakers related their frontline experience of the situation on the ground in Malawi, and stressed the urgency of the situation in the country - where famine is threatening large sections of the population.
The problem of leadership in southern Africa was emphasised as a major problem. There was also a feeling that the WSSD would not be relevant to people on the ground. Without powerful mechanisms to stop leaders behaving badly, similar events would not contribute to the alleviation of poverty.
“We have retrogressed so much one wonders if the international community are even looking. Without the international community flexing muscles …if there is no mechanism at the United Nations then we are lost,” said Emmie Chanelsa, a colleague of Nyirenda.
The condition of social movements that had developed in response to the negative impacts of capitalism in the southern African region also featured in the discussion.
John Saul, from the Socialist Register editorial collective and professor of politics at York University, said: “I do think that what we are seeing are the signs of the future in our continent… and that is the bubbling up of a local resistance that will eventually need to come together.”
He said while the process was just beginning, it would be a period of “new politics” and the movement would have to be profoundly democratic. “We will have to learn democracy from below,” he said
“This movement will have to be not just against the WSSD, Nepad and corporations but against the system of global capital that we will have to confront to overthrow.”
Other delegates spoke about the challenges facing a coordination of social movements in the region – pointing out that all countries were experiencing a stage of “acute Capitalism”.
Movements would have to start relating to each other and working together while being aware that Capitalism served to weaken and undermine emerging movements.
However, regional cooperation was seen as essential to being able to articulate goals on issues such as debt and trade. These issues needed to be dealt with regionally with the hope of developing capacity to shape national agendas. - ENDS