BY PATRICK BOND
JOHANNESBURG The October 1-2 national general strike against the privatisation of South Africa's electricity, telephones, water and transport services was a mixed success. But combined with other recent developments and ruling-party convulsions, it indicates that South African activists campaigning against the African National Congress' rampant neo-liberalism are making an impact.
South African President Thabo Mbeki has rarely sounded so paranoid-defensive as he did when opening the September 27 ANC policy conference. Attacking the "left sectarian factions" which allegedly "occupy the same trench with the anti-socialist forces which they claim are their sworn enemies", Mbeki warned his followers that "this ultra-left works to implant itself within our ranks. It strives to abuse our internal democratic processes to advance its agenda, against policies agreed by our most senior decision-making structures".
Meant as a threat to left-leaning leaders of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), Mbeki failed to persuade them to postpone the October 1-2 strike until after a promised economic policy summit next year. At the same time, an abusive document was leaked by the ANC's Political Education Unit.
Although it is still being rewritten, Mbeki's concerns about "ultra-leftism" can be derived from these sentences: "The charge of neo-liberalism constitutes the most consistent platform presented by the 'left' opposition in its fight against the ANC and our government...
"In our country, it is represented by important factions in the SA Communist Party and COSATU, as well as the Anti-Privatisation Forum, the local chapter of Jubilee 2000, and other groups and individuals. All of these maintain links with their like-minded counterparts internationally and work to mobilise these to act in solidarity with them in support of the anti-neo-liberal campaign in our country...
"These specific anti-neo-liberal formations define our efforts to contribute to the victory of the African Renaissance as an expression of sub-imperialism. They assert that the ANC and our government are acting as the representative and instrument of the South African bourgeoisie, which they say seeks to dominate the African continent. They go further to say that the soul of the ANC has been captured by a pro-capitalist, and therefore neo-liberal faction."
This is not a bad summary of independent left views. But here's where the logic twists: "The anti-neo-liberal coalition hopes that it will trample over the fallen colossus, the ANC, and march on to a victorious socialist revolution, however defined. Better still, it hopes that by engaging in all manner of manoeuvre, including conspiring about who its leaders should be, it can capture control of the ANC and use it for its purposes. To achieve these objectives, the anti-neo-liberal coalition is ready to treat the forces of neo-liberalism as its ally. Therefore it joins forces with them, together to open fire on the ANC and our government."
What's new in the ANC tract is, first, the preposterous charge that the independent left is working with the neo-liberal right, and second, the correct perception that international solidarity is now a meaningful political variable.
The Treatment Action Campaign was the first major post-apartheid beneficiary of internationalism, as the world came to learn of Mbeki's genocidal HIV-AIDS policies in 2000. Now, the accusation of South African sub-imperialism is, indeed, being made across the region.
Opposition to NEPAD
In Harare a fortnight ago, strategists of southern African social movements, NGOs, labour, women, landless people and environmentalists met to discuss alternatives to Mbeki's New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). Activist unity had been forged by many of these forces e.g., the South African Social Movements Indaba, Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development, Malawi Economic Justice Network, Swaziland Campaign against Poverty and Economic Inequality, and others in the Southern African Peoples Solidarity Network at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development a month ago.
Strong anti-NEPAD statements have emerged from groups like these over the past year, since Mbeki and Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo formally launched the document in Abuja. Four points need to be reiterated:
1. The process behind authorship/ownership of Africa's plan was fatally flawed, given its origin in meetings between Mbeki, G8 leaders and Davos business tycoons beginning in 1999, augmented by a few African elites in 2001, leaving consultation with civil society until April 2002, six months after NEPAD was finalised.
2. NEPAD's commitment to "good governance" is considered farcical in the wake of Mbeki-Obasanjo's winking at high-profile vote-rigging episodes and oppression in several countries, including Zimbabwe and Zambia, Nigeria and South Africa.
3. As for the development strategy, NEPAD is skewed towards strengthening the role of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation, privatising Africa's infrastructure and rolling out a red carpet to corporate free-trade interests.
4. NEPAD amplifies existing institutions, practices, power relations and even philosophies.
A bit of elite shame has emerged about the first and second points, but not the third and fourth. Indeed, Mbeki successfully steered NEPAD through three major conferences in the last three months: the July launch of the African Union in Durban, the August-September World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and the mid-September UN summit in New York. In spite of protests, the base document, controversial in so many ways (see <http://www.nepad.org>), was not and will not be amended, in spite of harsh critiques from virtually all of African civil society (see <http://www.aidc.org.za>).
Sexism
NEPAD increasingly serves as a pole of opposition, carrying African progressives over barriers that include borders, genders, language and sectoral focus areas.
Uneven political development across the African continent means that different regions will respond at different paces, and with particular interests. But in some areas, we can expect common, or at least overlapping, values and political rhetorics.
Thus advocacy for women's rights is emblematic, because NEPAD is so profoundly sexist. As Zimbabwean feminist Bella Matambanadzo of the Women's Resource Centre and Network put it, "NEPAD is ignorant not only of the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, but also the Africa Platform for Action moving to Beijing conference and the Southern African Development Community's own gender declaration of 1997".
In some of the official statements, sexual rights, especially in terms of HIV-AIDS, have become part of the discourse. Nevertheless, Matambanadzo observes, "NEPAD is frightened to take the blanket off things we consider private: culture, sex and sexuality".
NEPAD also neglects to mention, much less incorporate, unpaid women's labour and the costs of gender-based violence. NEPAD's gender equity component is merely the usual rhetoric about microcredit, income generating projects and integration into markets. In contrast, women's groups are firmly demanding a generous social wage the full array of essential services from their states.
Anti-capitalist perspective
On a continent-wide scale, the search for a post-neo-liberal development philosophy began within these groups in the late 1990s, at conferences in Accra, Johannesburg, Lusaka, Nairobi and Dakar that culminated in the January 2002 Bamako meeting of the African Social Forum. The groups have a general anti-capitalist perspective now, but what they are "for" is still diverse, consistent with the Social Forum formula "One No, Many Yeses".
According to Nancy Kachingwe from the regional network Mwengo, "The weakness of Bamako was that it stayed at the level of generality, which in opposition to liberalisation, austerity and globalisation is fine, but we now need to get detailed alternatives."
There remains a great hunger for an "African People's Consensus" to help hone organic grassroots/shopfloor demands more systematically. Aside from ongoing class and social struggles, those demands seem to take the form of fights on two levels: against specific damaging projects and on policy.
In southern/central Africa, current hot (and mainly successful) campaigns include opposition to three mega-dams: Epupa in Namibia, Bujagali in Uganda and Mepunda Uncua in Mozambique. In Tanzania, an exorbitant British air traffic control system is being contested while in Swaziland, the authoritarian monarchy's purchase of a US$50 million jet for personal use received the same reactions.
Zambia's democratic movements are campaigning not only against neo-liberalism but also for a recontestation of the stolen December 2001 election, while Lesotho activists celebrate last month's bribery conviction of the first of a dozen companies accused of corrupting local officials through a World Bank dam contract.
State policy is harder to crack. Activists working at the intersection of democracy, human rights and socio-economic grievances are sceptical that NEPAD's African Peer Review Mechanism will bring errant countries into line. As Brian Kagoro, director of the watchdog group Crisis in Zimbabwe, pointed out, "The process is voluntary; corrective not punitive; and based on quiet diplomacy as has been so ineffectual in bringing about a free election here".
The main antidote is a different kind of peer review: people's solidarity. At a time when so many opportunities arise to draw attention to malevolent behaviour by states and capital, coordinated protests have been too few and far between, but that may be changing.
The strike against Mbeki's privatisation program was supported by 10-50% of the work force, depending on whether you believe the ANC or COSATU. A militant demonstration of 40,000 workers and the urban poor turned Johannesburg's streets red with banners and T-shirts on October 1.
Moreover, international networks will also be activated in the coming weeks, just as Mbeki fears. Protests against the trial of Trevor Ngwane and the Kensington 87 for their April demonstration at the Johannesburg mayor's house will be held in major cities across the world (including Harare) on October 22. Global pressure is also mounting on Pretoria to free a political prisoner the autonomist intellectual-activist Jaime Yovanovich Prieto, wanted on a frame-up by residual Pinochet supporters in Chile's military courts who could soon face extradition from a local prison.
Meanwhile, community and trade union struggles which make this region such a compelling case of anti-neo-liberalism for the global left will only strengthen, the more Mbeki, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and other regional tyrants respond in predictable ways.
From Green Left Weekly, October 16, 2002.
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