Author: Philip Ngunjiri, Special Correspondent
Date: January 15, 2007
Type of article: News
Source: The East African http://www.nationmedia.com/eastafrican/15012007/News/News1501073.htm

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Kenya’s conference tourism gets a major boost this month when 50,000 delegates converge on Nairobi for the five-day World Social Forum (WSF).

Over 20,000 foreign delegates join their 30,000 local counterparts in Nairobi for the 7th edition of the Forum, which runs from January 20-25. It brings together activists, social movements, networks and coalitions.

The main theme of the Forum is “People’s struggles, people’s alternatives: Another world is possible.”

The WSF is an annual meeting held by members of the anti-globalisation movement that co-ordinates world campaigns, shares and refines organisational strategies.

Over 1,000 activities, including conferences, workshops and seminars, have so far been registered by various groups. The Nairobi meeting will take place at the same time as the World Economic Forum (WEF) is meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Organisers say this is no coincidence. The date was chosen because of the logistical difficulty of organizing a mass protest in Davos and to try to overshadow the coverage of the WEF in the news media. The WSF has in the past been criticised, particularly by socialist and communist parties, for producing few practical ideas and concentrating instead on general and vague criticisms of neo-liberalism and imperialism.

Some have criticised the WSF for attempting to act as a central decision-making location for dissident groups, as the Communist Internationals once did.

However, WSF participants insist that the Forum is not a decision-making body, but one for public deliberation.

A far more prevalent criticism runs in the opposite direction — that the forum has no established procedure for adopting consensus statements or advocacies.

The WSF has also been viewed as the anti-alternative globalisation movement, because the globalisation and capitalism they oppose are inevitable, are the most effective means of addressing global poverty. WSF have responded that the idea of the “inevitability” of globalisation is simply an ideological myth, hence their embrace of the slogan, “Another world is possible.”

Some of its activities have also been criticised, such as the invasion and destruction of experimental transgenics of the Monsanto enterprise in 2001.

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

The outcry at the contents of 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.

This, therefore, makes the Forum an open meeting-place where social movements, networks, non-governmental organistions and civil society organisations opposed to neo-liberalism and a world dominated by capital or by any form of imperialism come together to pursue their thinking, debate ideas democratically, formulate proposals, share experiences freely and network for effective action.

From its modest origins in Porto Alegre in 2001, the Forum has mushroomed into a global counter-force that, according to its advocates, challenges the assumptions and dictates of imperialism and its associated neo-liberal policies that have over the decades imposed colonialism and neo-colonialism; devastated Southern economies; bolstered the disastrous and repressive reigns of assorted tinpot dictatorships; marginalised women; disenfranchised youth; intensified the destruction of the environment; unleashed bloody, inhuman and needless military conflicts in nations and deepened the exploitation of poor peoples around the world.

Rallying around the clarion call of “Another world is possible,” the Forum has placed social justice, international solidarity, gender equality, peace and defence of the environment on the agenda of the world’s peoples.