IMC SOUTH AFRICA PRESS RELEASE ON THE OPENING OF THE GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY FORUM : IMC-SA

Amidst cries of “viva Johannesburg”, “viva the WSSD” and “viva civil society”, president Thabo Mbeki has opened the Global Forum of the Civil Society at the WSSD. Those ritual cries where the best possible introduction for a performance in which Power, represented in this case by the government of the African National Congress, has once again staged its own emptiness and separation from the concerns of ordinary people in relation to the problems it claims to address. In a tired and trite crescendo of rhetoric, Mbeki has stated the obvious while hiding the most damning implications of it for the macroeconomic policies of his own government and of many other governments on this planet. He said that many people are poor, lack access to water, sanitation, health and are daily victims of violence. The conclusion Mbeki draws from these realities is that the poor have to challenge governments to deliver “strategies and practical programmes of action”. Let’s see, therefore, what the Mbeki government has delivered to address the problems he identifies:

- Poverty has been in constant increase since the adoption by the ANC regime of policies inspired by neoliberal orthodoxy, particularly the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy. The collapse of stable waged employment (which provides the means of survival for only one third of the black population in South Africa) is coupled by the collapse of living standards for the poor and the working class due to privatisation of basic services and the lack of social security due to “fiscal constraints”. The current NEPAD programme advocates more privatisation, more trade opening, more policies geared to the needs of corporate investment, that is to say the same medicines that have plunged millions of people of this country in abject immiseration.

- Healthcare is considered nothing more than a financial burden by the ANC government. It is on this basis that hundreds of thousands of people are sentenced to die of AIDS due to intentional refusal by the Mbeki regime to put in place a meaningful anti-AIDS policy or to provide treatment against the HIV virus.

- Water, electricity and sanitation are mere dreams in many impoverished communities. One fourth of urban residents in South Africa have no electricity, one fifth has no water, and in rural areas this is the lot of the absolute majority. Meanwhile, privatisation of municipal services and related “cost recovery” policies means that these services are becoming unaffordable even for those who can still access them. As a result, by now, people who have water and electricity disconnected for inability to pay are more than those who gain access to them.

- People are victims of violence, indeed. In South Africa this includes the thousands of poor people that are evicted, relocated or have their services disconnected with the use of the brutal force of the police or of the government’s own private militias, like the “Red Ants”. For those who resist this violence by a state that in many townships is nothing more than an occupation force, the only service delivered is often a bullet. Alexandra, Delft, Thembalihle are reminders of this.
This is the ‘sustainable development’ that the ANC government has been administering to the South African population, this is the substance behind Mbeki’s vacuous sermons. On this basis this government hosts this international event aimed at solving the developmental and environmental problems of the planet.

And what about the challenge that Mbeki invokes? We believe that the possibilities of the Global Civil Society Forum to provide such a challenge are limited to say the least. Independent only by name, this forum has been controlled by the ANC regime, through its public-private partnership with JOWSCO, from the beginning. JOWSCO has imposed a top-down, centralised control on the totality of the accreditation process, the information system, the publicity and the exhibitors’ spaces at the Forum. With the ideological supervision of the ANC and COSATU, this process has been used to exclude all the organisations, the movements and the dissenting voices that were branded as “anti-government”. Which kind of challenge can come from this? Which accountability can corporate power and the ruling party provide to a civil society reduced to an orderly and compliant crowd of pro-government and pro-capitalist bureaucracies?

However, a different kind of challenge to this blatant subordination of the ‘civil society’ to the imperatives of corporate profit and the arrogance of neoliberal regimes in South Africa as elsewhere is coming and will come, albeit not in the forms that Mbeki hopes. This is the challenge expressed by the mass, peaceful demonstrations by the Landless Peoples’ Movement, the Anti-Privatisation Forum, the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee. The ANC government’s response to this challenge so far has consisted in more than 300 arrests in the last two months alone, police harassment, NIA intimidation, vicious beatings and teargassing. Few square meters in a jail cell have been all the ANC had to offer to those who oppose the lack of land. Often conducted in the form of actual pre-emptive strikes to cripple the most active oppositional movements, this has been the response by the Mbeki government to all those who resist and disobey the orderly encasement of the civil society in the hierarchical structures of the party-state devised by the President. This response demands wholesale domestic and international condemnation and highlights once more the total lack of legitimacy of the ANC government in speaking about “sustainable development” on behalf of the poor.

But repression and intimidation will not deter and stop the wave of disobedience with which the South African movements follow on the steps of Seattle, Prague, Quebec City, Genoa. The march on Sandton on 31 August will send once more loud and clear the message that no sustainable development can be delegated to states actively engaged in the daily oppression of their peoples for the sake of financial stability. The power of their fences, their batons and their guns will once again be no match for the eruption of multitudes determined to take back their lives in their own hands.