Author: Philip Ngunjiri, Special Correspondent
Date: January 29, 2007
Type of article: Commentary
Source: The East African http://www.nationmedia.com/eastafrican/29012007/Opinion/opinion2901077.htm

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The just concluded 7th World Social Forum presented the African continent the opportunity to showcase its rich heritage of natural wealth, cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity. However, what came out more forcefully was Africa’s unbroken history of struggle against foreign domination, colonialism and neo-colonialism.

The WSF is an annual meeting held by members of the anti-globalisation movement that co-ordinates world campaigns, shares and refines strategies, and also informs each other about movements from around the world and relevant issues. These events provide an open meeting place where social movements, networks of NGOs and other civil society organisations opposed to neo-liberalism and a world dominated by capitalism or by any form of imperialism come together to pursue and debate various ideas.

The Nairobi event, taking place in Africa for the first time, attracted four nobel prize laureates, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa, Prof Wangari Mathai from Kenya, American Judy Williams and Iranian Shirin Ebadi.

Organisers of the event, which took place at Kenya’s premier sporting grounds — the Kasarani Sports Complex — barred big corporates from selling their wares to the thousands of delegates attending the five-day meeting. Only local products were allowed entry, and indeed, they recorded booming business.

According to one of the organisers, multinationals have exploited poor countries for a long time, and the occasion became an opportune moment to express this dissatisfaction. “We are here to discuss the multinationals and their presence would only fog our deliberations.” The companies and their governments, he added, want African governments to give up tariffs, the only effective tool in protecting African livelihoods.

In contrast, their mother countries have many tools, including direct subsidy payments to farmers and export subsidies, to protect their people’s livelihoods.

For instance, Africa’s smallholder farmers cannot compete against the EU’s subsidised agriculture, and will have to shift to export cash crops. The danger in relying on export cash crops is the vulnerability that comes from dependence upon income from cash crops to buy food, which leaves one vulnerable to the high variability and unpredictability of export cash crop prices.

Two days in a row, some activists carrying placards broke into the main venue, accusing the forum of being anti-poor. The contention was the Ksh500 ($7) registration fee, which they protested was unaffordable by many poor people.

“I came here to discuss how I’m going to uplift my already poor status and not to enrich someone,” said 24-year-old Otieno Hatari, a resident of Kibera, Kenya’s biggest slum area. However, one of the organisers, Oduor Ong’wen, said about Ksh35 million ($476,000), had been used to organise the event and that some bills were yet to be settled.

For others, the forum provided them with the rare opportunity for identification of common struggles, of inter-related causes which find expression in specific moments and contexts. Yet there were others, such as Kwame Ofwori from Ghana, who saw the forum as a starting and arrival point for developing a process of struggle that was clearly defined by a concrete agenda of struggle against capitalism.

Recently, WSF has been criticised, particularly by socialist and communist left parties, for producing few practical ideas, concentrating instead on general and vague criticisms of neo-liberalism and imperialism. Some quarters, particularly anarchists, have criticised the WSF for attempting to act as a central decision-making location for dissident groups, as the Communist Internationals once did. But WSF participants have countered that by insisting that the WSF is not a decision-making body, but rather a forum for public deliberation.

A far more prevalent criticism runs in the opposite direction. They point out that the group has no established procedure for adopting consensus statements or advocacies.

Some activities by activists attending the WSF have also been criticised, such as in the WSF 2001, where activists invaded and destroyed a plantation of experimental transgenics of the Monsanto enterprise.

The World Social Forum process dates back to 1998 when the proposal for a Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) was made public — a kind of world constitution for capital, which would give capital all rights and almost no duties, especially in Third World countries, where the investment would be made.

The outcry at the absurdities contained in the agreement led to the emergence of a social movement in protest, causing France to withdraw from the negotiations in late 1998 and finally preventing the agreement from being signed.