Author: Otsieno Namwaya
Date: January 20, 2007
Type of article: Headline
Source: The East African Standard - not available online

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While the official carrier, the Kenya Airways, reports full bookings to Nairobi over this period, the organisers of the World social Forum (WSF) say many more people are streaming in by other airlines, road and even on foot.

Despite this round of the World Social Forum, set to close on January 25, having been described as low key, it is probably the biggest event taking place in the country.

The World Social Forum has its roots in the collapsed World Trade organisation (WTO) talks in Seattle, USA, in 1999.

What was described then as the intellectual opposition to WTO’s rules comprised people concerned mainly with environmental and labour issues. They were concerned, according to Elaine Bernard writing in The Washington Post of December 5, 1999, that the agenda of the WTO meetings was being set by the big businesses, the main culprits in the violation of environmental and labour rules.

This was unacceptable, according to protesters, since big businesses would not want issues of environment and labour discussed.

They thus demanded to be included in the WTO talks. "No one combs our hair in our absence," said a furious Ugandan who had travelled to Seattle to join the protesters, as the talks lurched towards collapse.

WTO dominated by the rich

They were also concerned that WTO, founded in 1995, aside from being dominated by the rich North, did not seem to appreciate the linkage between economic issues and their social aspects.

It was this clique of opposition that secretly organised, using SMS messages and Internet blogs, a powerful protest march on the streets of Seattle city that eventually scuttled the WTO ministerial meeting. The protesters came from all parts of the world.

Kenya has been at the centre of it all, perhaps all the more reason the WSF meeting in Nairobi should bear some remote significance.

"This round is vital to us. We need world trade. We need development. We respect that you are standing up for your rights and are trying to help, but the talks must go on," a Kenyan delegate attending the 1999 WTO talks pleaded with the protesters.

It is this group of protesters, haphazardly cobbled together, that has since organised itself and now regularly meets to discuss the "social challenges". Looking back in time, therefore, it is clear that the WSF has come a long way.

None of the Seattle protesters in 1999 had been formally invited and the meeting. The planning was top secret. The protesters, mainly from the civil society, were only a few thousands and no governments had an idea of their mission.

But now, as the international attention shifts to Nairobi over the WSF scheduled to run from Saturday to January 25, the numbers of participants have hit the roof.

The first formally organised WSF meeting in 2001, says Mr Oduor Ong’wen, had only 2,000 participants. This number had swelled to 155, 000 during the Porto Alegre, Brazil, meeting last year, yet the organisers say the number this year could have been higher were it not for transport and other logistical limitations.

Accommodation a key concern

But the most significant evolution of this movement is that governments are beginning to be involved. The Kenyan Government, through the Ministry of National Planning, officially accepted to help facilitate this year’s World Social Forum meeting through a Cabinet Paper presented in July last year by Prof Peter Any’ang Ny’ong’o, the then Planning minister.

With this kind of numbers, of course, the biggest concern for the organisers has been accommodation for the participants.

"Were it not for the complexities of connecting flights, we would have taken this event to Mombasa because it has more hotels," says Mr Ong’wen, who says only 42, 000 spaces in big and the very small hotels and a further close to 40, 000 spaces in alternative areas—such as private homes and makeshift tents—are guaranteed.

This obviously is an indication of just how tremendously this movement has transformed itself, drawing its humble origins from a group of protesters who had secretly converged in Seattle in 1999.

It is about solidarity economy

Its agenda and scope has also changed, much the same way as the numbers have been growing, and the organisers now talk of a wide range of issues that should result in a totally new world. The slogan of the WSF is: Another World Is Possible.

"When we talk of the World Social Forum, most people just think of Seattle. It includes groups like the Ogiek and their long-standing struggles for land; it is about the solidarity economy. Life is not going to be the way it is. It is going to be built on pillars of justice," says Mrs Wahu Kaara, one of the local organisers of the fete.
Solidarity economy, most probably, is one that takes care of the interests of the poor farmer and the rich farmer; the big multinational companies and the small enterprises among others, and it is the kind of economy in which everyone participates. But most significantly, the WSF fraternity wants to express solidarity with the economically, socially and politically under privileged.

Social political struggles

The World Social Forum, says Prof Edward Oyugi, is also about all forms of social and political struggle that man has waged through history. On the global stage this brings to mind the civil rights movement in the US that opposed racial discrimination and, further, the fight against political colonialism.

Expansion of democratic space, disparity between the rich and poor in accessing educational opportunities and the disparity between the girl child and the boy child in accessing educational opportunities, and culture will also be the concern of the World Social Forum.

While WTO and the multinationals like Napster would be primarily concerned with piracy of music and the declining profit margins mainly for the Western music and movie companies, the WSF will be rooting for the diversified cultures and that the rich and the poor be afforded equitable opportunities.

When they finally converge at Kasarani to deliberate and "express themselves" for the five days, theirs will not be a run-of-the-mill kind of conference in which participants converge in a single conference hall to listen to speakers.

"On any single day, there will be up to 200 sessions going on in different venues, each session handling a different topic. It will be up to the participant to find out which session is handling the subject of his interest," said Ong’wen.

In any case, he says, not all sessions will involve talking. "There will be those whose only form of expression will be to hold processions from one end of the stadium to another without uttering a word," he said.

Big irony

WSF today considers itself ranged against ‘neo-liberalism’ and ‘neo-colonialism", having started as a body of individuals vehemently opposed to globalisation — a big irony to some analysts. For, even a peak at the diversity of cultures, the global character of its membership and the agenda it has set for itself gives a wide reflection of the extent of globalisation.

"People’s movements across the world have been working to demonstrate that the path to sustainable development and to social and economic justice does not lie in neo-liberal globalisation but in alternative models for people-centered and self-reliant progress. Since 2001, the World Social Forum has continued to question the rules of investment and governance dictated by the World Economic Forum," says one of the brochures prepared by WSF organisers.

As Nairobi begins to bustle with activity, the bitterness of 1999 has since mellowed, albeit with loud contradictions.

"The North is welcome, but WSF is a South-South issue," opined a Brazilian organiser of the WSF in a Nairobi hotel this week. The truth is that just as many people from the rich North will be part of the anticipated large procession from Nairobi’s Kibera slum area to Uhuru Park, where the WSF will officially be launched today.