The Social Movements Indaba
No to Nepad! No to an African Union based on Nepad!

Maputo, Mozambique, 30 June 2003

The Social Movements Indaba (SMI) was established in the run-up to the
World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg, South
Africa in August and September last year.

It includes organisations of people in South Africa suffering the consequences
of a world organised around profit at the expense of life.

South Africa is experiencing a massive increase in unemployment. People's
water and electricity services are being cut off. Families are being evicted
from their homes. Small farmers and rural people have no land. People with
HIV/Aids are refused treatment. Communities are being removed to make way
for dams and are suffering the environmental and health consequences of
indiscriminate mining and industry.

It is this reality that informs the SMI's opposition to neoliberal policies. It
rejects the dominance of the United States and the other G8 countries and
calls for the shutting down of their instruments of domination, including the
World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organisation
(WTO).

The SMI also opposes those leaders and governments in Africa that are
complicit in imposing this neoliberal global order.

In particular, we stand against the New Partnership for Africa's Development
(Nepad). This plan was hatched in Pretoria and imposed on the governments
and people of the continent. It talks of partnership, but represents a
relationship of inequality in which the weak are begging the powerful for $64
billion a year. In order to beg, it agrees with the neoliberal paradigm and
commits to following the agenda of the World Bank, IMF and WTO.

Its approach to governance is geared towards governments creating the
economic conditions to facilitate profit-making. It is thus an invitation to the
trans-national corporations to intensify their exploitation of the continent. It is
a blueprint for South African companies to impose themselves on the
continent.

It is no small surprise that the G8 has refused to fill the begging bowl. It
chooses only to support military intervention in the continent. George Bush is
visiting Africa to secure oil resources, in other words to take what he wants
whether Nepad is there or not.

The African Union (AU) has been formed on the basis of Nepad as its
fundamental policy. It thus compels us to stand up to the AU and demand
that it jettisons Nepad before we give consideration to engaging with its
structures.

The anti-people character of Nepad and the AU poses significant challenges.
In the first instance, it emphasises the need for us to develop our own pro-
active approach to addressing people's needs across the continent.

Second, it raises the importance of forging an African unity, not a false unity
in support of the continued oppression of the people of the continent, but a
unity of the oppressed people of the continent towards true liberation from the
economic, social and environmental oppression afflicting the continent.

For further information, contact George Dor +27 11 648 7000,
[email protected] [2], or
Thabo Madihlaba +27 11 403 8978, [email protected] [3]