By David Waller, ACORD
davidw@acord.org.uk

The first Africa Social Forum, held in Bamako 5-9^th January, declared that the process of globalisation being imposed on Africa is harming the interests of its people and is unacceptable. In a week of discussions the 200 representatives of civil society organisations from across Africa declared that it is time for Africa to bring its silence to an end and move on, with its allies around the world, to active resistance against the current form of neo-liberal globalisation which is based on Africa’s impoverishment. In this context the New Partnership for Africa, NEPAD, developed and endorsed by African and G8 leaders was also criticised because of being based on all the structures and processes that make up the one-size-fits-all globalisation which is currently being imposed on Africa to the advantage of the world’s economic and military powers.

The Africa Social Forum comes in the context of last year’s first World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in Brazil which was attended by as many as 40,000 people from all sorts of civil society organisations: peasant farmer organisations, networks, researchers, unions, NGOs, the media, consumers, religious groups, women and young people. Of these participants only about 50 were from Africa and about the same number from Asia. There was also very little anglophone participation.

The intention of the Africa Social Forum, organised against the clock by ENDA Tier-Monde in Senegal and the Centre Amadou Hampete Ba in Mali, was to strengthen Africa’s input to the World Social Forum and more specifically to assert that "Another Africa is possible" – that Africa’s future does not have to be just what is forced upon it by the rules of globalisation. In this context the New Partnership for Development in Africa (NEPAD) developed by the Presidents of South Africa, Nigeria and Senegal as a blue print for Africa’s future, was felt to be fundamentally flawed. This document accepts rather than challenges all the different facets of the current globalisation process. As such it was rejected by the majority of forum participants as being inappropriate as a basis for discussing Africa’s future.

The Africa Social Forum brought together views on the many different facets of globalisation and included the denunciation of its effects on the majority of Africa’s population and accusations of hypocrisy, double standards and collusion levelled at those with power including Northern donors and NGOs. What was impressive was not the newness of the analysis but the bleakness of the picture it presented of Africa’s future under a system in which all aspects of a country’s economic and political management appear to be prescribed from the outside by agencies designed to serve the interests of those with combined economic, political and military power seeking to protect and expand their economies. African governments meanwhile are told to leave their future to the hidden hand of the free market even while those with power blatantly ignore such advice.

The systems of aid, trade, debt, governance and the role of the International Financial Institutions and UN are all woven together to create a straight jacket within which nation states are explicitly prevented from controlling their futures. The effect of this is the continuing and accelerating immiseration of Africa’s population both in absolute terms and relative to the rest of the already prosperous world.

Agencies working in Africa but based in the North need to take account of the anger and frustration that is developing in the face of this combination of high principle and hypocrisy; global rhetoric and shameless self interest; acute and increasing poverty combining with the extreme powerlessness of Africa’s states to address the suffering of most of their populations.

The importance of the African Social Forum was thus in presenting development in Africa as a political issue about power to decide on Africa’s future: the power to address the fact that the world and the globalisation process are structured in a way that is blatantly "unjust" by any definition of that term. For too long development has focussed on the physical consequences of this injustice and has limited itself to addressing the lack of water, health, incomes, basic services etc. This has led to NGOs becoming instruments of a globalisation process that from an African perspective is just another form of imperialism.

At present, when Northern NGO’s talk about Politics and Aid (see id21’s recent newsletter on Politics vs Aid at www.id21.org) they are referring to whether working to promote peace and international stability can be allowed to interfere with a purely humanitarian approach to aid. Instead the debate needs to be redefined as working to achieve social justice for those suffering under the present system. The rules of trade, debt relief, aid, international governance and financing for development need to be made to work not just to expand a global market (whose rising tide is clearly failing to raise the incomes of those who are excluded on its margins) but rather to address the issue of global justice between and within nations . We in the North need to recognise that markets are not free but are rather the product of political as well as economic forces. They can therefore be regulated to function for the interests of those on societies margins rather than just for the interests of the rich.

The Africa Social Forum and the second World Social Forum that is about to start, are important in reflecting the impatience of those who are losing under the present process of globalisation. They are getting poorer while their leaders are being lectured on how to behave in the global world by other leaders who ignore the rules when it suits them. These meetings mark a significant threshold for African civil society: if in the coming years "development" becomes "development and social justice" and if all work is considered from the perspective of its relation to the global structure of relations between the rich and the poor, then this first African Social Forum will indeed have been a decisive turning point in development in Africa.

African agencies, and agencies working in Africa, both governmental and non-governmental, need to consider how they will respond to this change so that they are sure they are a part of the solution rather than becoming – if they are not already – a part of the problem that is the current system of globalisation.