A Critical Utopia moves to Africa

by Mika Rönkkö, NIGD

Moving the World Social Forum (WSF) to Africa is an important symbol and great challenge for the global justice movement. The Bamako WSF in January 2006 was an inspiring event, but it also demonstrated that there is still a lot of work ahead, especially outside Africa, in order to make the Nairobi WSF in January 2007 a great success. Though the Bamako forum was encouraging, and the Caracas forum attracted lot of participants and attention, the experiences of the polycentric forum are not very convincing whilst now heading towards the Karachi forum. The Caracas forum attracted major attention while the African organising committees were more or less abandoned. Movements and media invested in the Caracas hype, and for some reason the WSF International Council (IC) forces were also concentrated in Caracas.

We should congratulate the Malian and African organising committee for a successful forum in Bamako, especially when taking into consideration the difficult problems they had to overcome. African movements demonstrated that they are able to organise global gatherings of civil society, and bring their own perspectives and cases to the agenda.

It was remarkable that despite the scarce resources and the logistical problems, participants arrived from 41 African countries. The many logistical problems included air tickets from Southern Africa to Bamako costing as much as a ticket from Finland, and the route was often via Europe.

The Bamako forum had an African free-wheeling character, and it was an inspiring event, despite not attracting as many militant participants as the Caracas forum did. It was estimated that the Bamako forum had 10,000 participants participating, 8,000 of them from Mali and neighbouring countries.

From aid to World Public Finance

To me, the main issues in Bamako were immigration and aid, linked in many ways. From my experience in Bamako I can now more fully understand the scale of the problem of African immigration to Europe. The Bamako conference centre witnessed a photo exhibition of the surrealistic tragedy of the barbwired fences of Ceuta and Melilla, and the desperate immigrant corpses floating in Mediterranean.

It seems that the EU uses developing cooperation more to strengthen border control in North Africa, rather than resolving the key causes of the problem, or ensuring a viable future in Europe. The current model of mass immigration to Europe stimulates intolerance in Europe, which the xenophobic right (and left) exploit. The consequences of the discourse, of the right-wing government in Denmark, and its xenophobic partners vividly demonstrate the scale of the disaster Europe is heading towards.

It is, of course, the gap of material well-being between Africa (and other poor countries) and most of the rest of the world that causes massive emigration from Africa. International aid has achieved little in regards to repairing the structural underdevelopment of Africa. It is a fact that aid has not been effective. The Bamako forum was convinced that, with traditional aid receipts, Africa will never rise from its position as provider of raw material and cheap labour for Europe and the rest of the world economy. Many Africans suspect that this is exactly the objective of international aid, to keep Africa poor.

I noted many times in Bamako that aid is charity, or simply an act of economic self-interest by donors or opportunistic pop-stars and politicians. Charity will never transform the structural position of Africa. Africans testified once again in Bamako that they do not need charity, or the benevolence of Sir Bob Geldof. Instead, Africa wants an equal chance for self-sustained development. In any case there is an urgent need to elaborate an alternative system of global finance in order to facilitate the rise of Africa from cycles of underfinance. The WSF in Africa must brainstorm, and coordinate campaigns and proposals for concrete programs in global political economics aimed at ending the underdevelopment cycle of Africa.

At the Bamako forum, NIGD, Attac Finland, France, Japan and Brazil, Tax Justice Network, and other partners organised the first meeting of the World Public Finance (WPF) network, an action plan that could have these characteristics. WPF is an open network of movements and organizations which aim to elaborate and promote alternatives on the themes of debt, CTT, control of capital flows, fiscal heavens, money and profit laundering, international taxation, citizen control of public budgets and other issues related to international redistribution of wealth which includes money, credit and taxation, and concrete institutional frameworks on how to organise all this democratically. The objective of WPF is to mobilize the network this year, and launch the initiative in a big way during the Nairobi Forum in 2007.

New conditionality

The financial situation of the Bamako forum was very difficult. Donors were hard to find, all the payments came too late, and donors imposed the usual conditionalities, demonstrating, in ironic way, the position of Africans in the current world system. The Malians did not have the same resources to organise the forum as Brazilians did. Remarkably, the Malian government donated 100,000 USD to organise the forum, and, in many ways, provided logistical support. Support from the Venezuelan government was also much appreciated.

These financial difficulties had a lot to do with the lukewarm support Malians got from the IC. Either there was not enough interest within the IC to organise the WSF in Africa, or, as I would like to believe, the IC does not have enough human and financial resources, or the energy to organise polycentric forums. The decision to organise the forum in Mali came very late, mostly due to European vested interests. Also the IC could have found more funds earlier, for the Bamako forum. Funding was scarce and came too late, and this caused many practical problems.

The main problems were that the program for the Bamako forum came only a few days before the opening, and the conferences were put together during the final days before the forum; plus, many of the 600 self-organised events registered did not even materialize. Ineffective coordination wasted great opportunities, and showed a lack of respect for the forum participants who have had to overcome many difficulties to arrive at the forum only to find out after reaching the venue that the event they wanted participate in had been cancelled or moved somewhere else.

There has to be special attention placed on ensuring that the �agglutinated� program is released on time. The Nairobi program has to be out several weeks before, preferably 6 weeks before, in order to facilitate the proper planning and preparations of the individual participants, and participating organisations in the forum. Also the website needs to be dynamic and constantly updated in order to provide the necessary information for preparations.

We need to ensure early funding for the Nairobi forum now so that the Kenyan organising committee has the means to build a successful forum. In order to eliminate the influence of donors over the forum, the funding base should be as broad as possible, though this causes a frustrating amount of extra work for reporting and financial administration. Actually, the fee for participants and organisations from OECD countries could be much higher, and those payments could be made well in advance by international credit cards. Many of us did not manage to pay our participation fees in Bamako because the registration was so chaotic. We could build a global support network to raise consciousness, and mobilise participation for the WSF in Nairobi. The Africa Committee of the World Social Forum in Finland (ACWSF) has already been formed, and we hope to develop a Nordic ACWSF. Similar support commissions could be launched regionally.

Conservative or Critical Utopia

The Bamako forum returned to the concept of big conferences, which was actually launched only a day before its opening. This development goes tentatively against efforts to strengthen the forum as a horizontal open space of self-organised events by a multitude from the global civil society. Instead of concentrating efforts in large scale conferences, more effort should be put into the agglutination process, which could be the key to effective campaigns, programs, and action plans, that the WSF has quite rightly been heavily criticized for failing to produce.

At the WSF 2005, a more democratic, though rather rudimentary, program building and consultation process was tested, and this should be further implemented and developed for the next WSF. We have to encourage the self-organised events to cooperate, seek convergences, complementarity, and broader alliances to let the forum build a self-organised common action instead of imposing one agenda on the forum.

The initiators of the Bamako appeal are quite correct in pointing out that the forum has not managed to effectively produce �Another World which is possible�. There is an enormous need to create broad based alliances of global campaigns and action. The Bamako appeal, which was prepared in a seminar one day before opening of the Bamako WSF, is one of the initiatives which could grow into universal action. But the Bamako appeal is problematic in reference to its methodology (which has also produced obvious flaws in the content as well). The real problem is the question of how do these initiatives relate to the forum. The Bamako appeal process is seen as tentative, it is supposed to impose one agenda on the forum from outside the forum space itself. It looks like a group of distinguished Forum participants, nominating themselves to elaborate an action plan for the forum. This approach would be against the spirit of the WSF, and in many ways dangerous.

The novelty of the WSF is its wide diversity and pluralism of themes, strategies, and political traditions. It is also perfectly open for WSF participants to come together for common action in any formation, and as broadly as desired. Actually the forum is full of alternatives. In this context the Bamako appeal would be a welcome initiative, but it could also prove why one program imposed outside the open space would be counter-productive. If the IC concludes that there is a necessity for an action plan for the WSF, this programme should be built inside the open space, itself, in a comprehensive participatory process of consultation through successive WSFs, and finally approved in some sort of plebiscite or perhaps electronic voting of registered participants.

No doubt that this process would lead to some sort of disintegration, but at least the process would be legitimate. It is fair enough to guard against the centralising tendencies that would force the WSF to become a conservative hierarchy effectively leading to the fragmentation and the disintegration of the WSF due to the struggle for hegemony and power. The WSF is a critical utopia, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos puts it, �radically democratic utopia�. It is the only realistic utopia after century of conservative utopias. This utopian design, grounded on the denial of the present rather than on a definition of the future, focuses on the processes of intercourse among the movements rather than on an assessment of the movements� political content. It is a major factor in the cohesion of the WSF. It helps to maximise what unites and minimize what divides, to celebrate intercourses rather than dispute power, and to promote a strong presence rather than an agenda.�

We should concentrate on maximising the cohesion of the forum rather than dividing it. Instead of strengthening the centralising approach, we should develop further the democracy of the forum itself. Moving the WSF to Africa is an important step towards further a democratisation of the forum. The integration of African and other than Latino-European movements and their themes to the forum is fundamental. Besides advancing territorial, thematic and strategic diversity, there is a need to clarify the organisational democracy of the WSF. NIGD has consistently pointed out that the WSF organisation lacks transparent rules and regulations. The IC is a shadowy organisation, and forum participants do not even know who they are. Even IC members do not know how the IC works. The IC should elaborate transparent rules and follow them; without transparent rules of its own organisation, the forum cannot launch an action plan.

The Nairobi forum is essential in universalising the WSF; special attention should be given to facilitate the building of a successful WSF in Nairobi. If the WSF in Africa does not create powerful campaigns and proposals for concrete programs to end the neoliberal hegemony that maintains the global mechanism that suck up the African wealth, it has failed. The Bamako appeal could be one of these initiatives, if it is elaborated in a radically democratic manner.