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Minister Essop Pahad
Address:Launch of Chatham House Lecture Series
27 October 2003
A new, new deal - South Africa's international political strategy - both globally and in Africa
Honoured guests, etc.
This Chatham House Lecture Series marks the 10th anniversary of post-apartheid South Africa: a decade of democracy. Do such birthdays matter? Why do we bother to notice them? Is this merely what the American intellectual, Susan Sontag, calls "decade-mongering" - a mere delight in round numbers that cross the calendar, like the childish delight in watching a car's mileage meter turn from 1999 to 2000? Is this, today, a genuine event, or is our tenth anniversary of democracy a false promise: a South African variant of the Millennium Dome, if you will permit the discourteous remark?
The fact that I stand here and am honoured to stand here is already a clue to my own answer. I think that the arrival of our tenth anniversary of South African freedom is much more than mere historical extravaganza. Why? The short answer is that the Dark Place of one-time colonial lore is now restless with optimism, energy and renewal. It can lay claim to the half-century's foremost figure of stature, Nelson Mandela, and it can claim some others as well: most recently JM Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer before him - a line of Nobel Laureates stretching back to Albert Luthuli in 1960, who won our country's first Nobel Peace Prize the year before we in the African National Congress (ANC) embarked on our legitimate armed struggle for justice. What other country can boast four Nobel peace laureates and two literature laureates since 1960 - five of them in the last decade or so?
The hopeless Africa, with its old "basket case" label, now boasts, for instance, a Botswana, a Uganda, a South Africa and numerous other countries that have as much to teach as to learn in the global arenas of good governance, financial management and international humanism. We in South Africa live in a country whose links with the world in the recent past used to be marked by almost total isolation. The links that did exist were furtive and undignified - marked by corrupt sanctions busting, paltry diplomatic representation, and unmemorable visits by heads of state like Stroessner of Paraguay. Now we are able to play an open role in the world and in Africa, and we are able to reap the benefits of this. We are, indeed, able to have a credible international strategy that is the topic of this talk today.
As in any functioning democracy the important thing is not to look for perfection in bureaucratic decision-making but for adequate correction when the inevitable mistakes or excesses occur - as in Nigeria, where the appalling lower court decision on Amina Lawal, who was sentenced to death by stoning for so-called adultery, was corrected by due process of Nigerian law in the higher courts. That is more than Ms Lawal might have hoped for on the Texas death row - though admittedly for a rather different "offence". We in South Africa have our fair share of corruption and lapses of good governance, but we, the Government, disclose most of this ourselves and tackle it with resolution.
We in South Africa, too, are an acknowledged safe haven from worldwide fears of terrorism, so our tourism industry is booming. Just try to get a scheduled flight in and out of South Africa at the year-end. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 our currency slumped as low as R14 to the dollar; but recently it has bettered R7 to the dollar as market hysteria retreats in the face of the cold, optimistic, facts of the South African reality. (Incidentally, the rand climb-back showed how wrong it was to ascribe the earlier fall to, for instance, our policies on Zimbabwe). The political violence about-turn has been dramatic. Between 1990 and 1994 in South Africa there were as many political assassinations as in the entire prior history of apartheid between 1948 and 1990. KwaZulu-Natal was a killing field and the Afropessimists looked for worse to come after our democratic election. But in fact, since 1994, peace has grown along with democracy. Ordinary crime has made itself felt, that is true; but the statistics show a levelling-off in most serious categories. These days the political risk analysts rank South Africa an unambiguous "buy." While Afropessimists warn of a one-party state, investors know that the decades-old ANC, rewarded by sensible voters with solid majorities, is a guarantor of policy and political stability. The latest Nielsen polls show the popularity of our President rising.
I am asked to speak not only against the backdrop of a landmark in time (our tenth anniversary) but also, in a forward-looking way, of South Africa's International Political Strategy, both globally and in Africa. This audience will immediately see - and will perhaps allow me to query - the assumptions built into this subject matter.
How to separate "political" from "economic" or "financial" strategies? I have already said that incoming investors look to policy stability, which is always dependent upon political stability. In South Africa's free politics today, as in its struggle for freedom yesterday, domestic and international strategies have been and remain indivisible. "We are internationalists" Oliver Tambo used to say. And we still are.
Again, how different is an "international" political strategy from a domestic one? If South Africa is a safe haven in the aftermath of 9/11, is not that happy feature of our "domestic" environment the direct result of our widely recognised humanism and sensible non-alignment in foreign policy? Similarly, the end of apartheid itself - the ultimate change is South African "domestic" politics - was the result, in part, of global anti-apartheid mobilisation that peaked in the 1980s. Hence our President's initiative against "global apartheid," announced at the World Conference Against Racism in 2001. The same people who seek a kinder and gentler form of racial privilege in South Africa's democratised politics also carp about the so-called excessive foreign travel of senior state figures. The laager mentality lives on with them. They miss the connection between domestic and foreign.
You will, I know, indulge me if I have already adopted a celebratory tone on this celebratory occasion. There is no shortage of occasions for national self-deprecation-so not tonight. Like all societies - arguably more than most societies in view of our history - South Africa faces the sorts of challenges that might feed dark moods. But our movement has never lent itself to despair and the rewards of this resilience are by now clear to see. Let me demonstrate some of those achievements through a few randomly chosen comparisons.
In South Africa we approach our third election (2004), which will again be supervised by a homegrown Independent Electoral Commission. If that election proves to be close fought or hard won, we would face no risk that dimpled chads or butterfly ballots will be counted on a partisan basis by local officials who may be friendly to one side or the other. We are clear of all such swamps, entirely free of the electoral Everglades.
Our media was, on World Press Freedom Day last week, ranked by Journalists without Frontiers in France as 21st in terms of freedom enjoyed, interestingly ahead of many European countries - and with France listed 26th and Britain 27th.
We have an independent Constitutional Court guided by a bipartisan loyalty to the same constitutional values that were central to our freedom struggle. Our own South African son, Sydney Kentridge, well known in London legal circles, served on our Constitutional Court at a crucial time early in its history, selflessly abandoning his practice for a year just as he had previously abandoned careerist self-interest when he took up the cause of Steve Biko and others, long before Biko - like Che Guevarra - became an icon on trendy T-shirts. After 1994, Sydney Kentridge did his part to give firm foundations to our Constitutional Court's independence and to its considerable international reputation. Our highest court can do what your House of Lords sitting in Judicial Committee cannot: it can strike down parliamentary legislation. And our court bases its decisions passionately upon anti-apartheid principles, so that we have none of the barren political divisiveness that afflicts the judicial review function of some courts in some leading Western democracies.
Our basic Constitutional document, finalised in 1996, is a model for legal progressives internationally. Substantive rights of racial equality and against gender oppression are there; socio-economic rights are there and their implementation constantly weighs on Parliament's mind. We guarantee rights of sexual orientation, which no other written constitution in the world does or ever has. Our parliament itself has more women than yours - with all due respect to the honourable women members at Westminster who were once known as "Blair's Babes," at least among the more recalcitrant Fleet Street scribes. Women in our Parliament are no novelty or curiosity; nor is the gender agenda only the concern of women parliamentarians. In my own office, I am personally tasked with duties as to the status of women - matters deemed important enough to fall directly under The Presidency.
Much is rightly made of the unprecedented transparency and accountability represented by your recent Hutton Inquiry, in which a Prime Minister faced questions. But in our own country - much to our sometimes discomfort - every member of government may face not only questioning at a judicial inquiry but actual criminal proceedings for any misdeeds, with no immunity conferred by mere virtue of High Office. The principle is that the law must take its course. No sitting American President or Vice President operates subject to such a possibility. The immunity of the American Executive is absolute until after the incumbents have passed out of office - whether through impeachment or else after due completion of two terms of office. No sitting British Prime Minister has ever to my knowledge faced the threat of criminal charges. Perhaps the British have been unfailingly blessed by paragons in Downing Street. I politely draw a veil across the recent developments concerning Presidential immunity in Italy, which currently holds your rotating European Union Presidency.
Economics and Finance: Interdependence
"The government's finances are in disarray," said the Economist magazine in a leader on 6 September 2003. Just another piece of Afropessimism, you might immediately think. But in fact the Economist's reference was not to South Africa, where macroeconomic management and tax collection is enviably sound; nor was the reference in fact to anywhere else in Africa. The reference was rather to Washington, where ballooning deficits are creating a fundamental dependence on foreign (particularly Asian) central banks, whose avid purchase of dollar-denominated bonds must continue if the American dollar is to remain strong, despite the weak fundamentals of that still-formidable economy. In South Africa, our deficit has travelled downwards from 6 percent to 4 percent of GDP since 1996. Meanwhile, as Deanne Julius pointed out in her Inaugural Lecture here only last month, the US public sector deficit has just passed through the 4 percent of GDP mark and is headed in the opposite direction. By 2005, Julius told this House, the costs of Iraqi occupation could push the US deficit to 5 to 6 percent of GDP. Let me make it very clear, the point is not to criticise American budgetary or fiscal policies but to emphasise the commonality of governance challenges, rather than a worldview that in superficial vein summarily separates basket cases from competent places.
For all the talk of supposedly American hyper-power, not to mention shock and awe, the truth is of global economic interdependence. Low interest rates in America now rely on the strong trade surpluses in Asia, which create the financial basis for Asian dollar buying by those countries, so that US interest rates may remain low: As the Economist once again pointed out: if US manufacturers, blaming the undervalued Chinese currency for their own flagging performance, actually got their wish; if they actually saw a stronger Chinese Yuan and a consequent falling off in Chinese exports, the resultant slowdown in Asian economies might reduce Asian dollar-bond buying. This would in turn force higher US interest rates, which would impact on US homeowners - and burst the current US housing bubble. Never has the basic security of average American citizens been so dependent upon faraway funders. A similar analysis could be done of, say, the vast Saudi Arabian investments in the US. While the US struggles with the economic costs of a unilateral attempt to re-draw the geopolitical map of the Middle East, the Saudi and other economies could, were they so minded, more easily redraw the economic landscape of Middle America. Again, the point is not to condemn or dismiss any country but to reiterate that globalisation really does mean mutual dependence, not the supplication of the supposedly weak before the anointed strong. It means multilateralism and not unilateralism.
As I hope you will have noticed, I am not trying to shake a stick at America but to point out that when we talk of interdependence we really do mean interdependence. The illusion of unilateral sway in geopolitics is being revealed every turbulent day in "liberated," expensive, chaotic, Iraq. We live in a world of clever illusionists, even in glass boxes over London, but in politics surely we need sound, acceptable and collaborative approaches to what is, after all, the art of the possible.
In the mid-Nineties we heard a lot about the "Asian contagion," which was a regional systemic slowdown with significant effects for the world economy. Since then the direct impact of the so-called "developing" economies on the well-being and security of the so-called "developed" ones has only increased.
Interdependence
The idea of an interdependent and globalised world is not for the ANC a nice new idea from the post Cold War 1990s. Our democratic South African national anthem is not a piece of inward looking or private triumphalism; it is a Pan African hymnal - serving as the anthem of several other African countries as well. Our freedom struggle drew strength from and indeed helped shape the values and practices of the United Nations. I could not be standing here today were it not for the idea that informed the global anti-apartheid movement - the idea that political oppression, when it passes a certain point, becomes a common concern of humanity, beyond parochial national boundaries. When the apartheid regime told you here in London to keep out of their domestic affairs, you did not. Nor did dockers or shop workers in Dublin or students in Paris or Delhi. Bob Marley never stopped calling for Pan African solidarity in the Seventies and American activists struck a crucial blow with sanctions in the mid-1980s. Multilateralism was the oxygen of our anti-apartheid movement. It fuelled one of the most remarkable mobilizations of public opinion of all time. It kept the Trafalgar vigils outside South Africa House alive for years. It gave hope to those in the dank detention cells of Vorster and PW Botha. It inspired the Ivy League students in the US to build replicas of Soweto on campus. It shamed big business into initiating social responsibility programmes. It worked.
But we ourselves in the South African liberation movement have no first claim on multilateralism. Even within our South African borders, we as liberation fighters may acknowledge that while General Jan Smuts unforgivably saw no place for black votes in his whites-only polity, he played some significant role in shaping the founding principles of the United Nations. Or in our own time: let us not too easily pit the virtues of European and African multilateralism against the supposed unilateralism and supposed isolationism of the United States of America. America has its multilateralists as well. No true multilateralist will want to indulge in callow anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism is no more acceptable than other forms of xenophobia. It is as unhelpful as it is superficial.
It is a fact worth facing that the most fundamental multilateralist development of our era - the founding of the United Nations - was itself pivotally driven by the then American President, Franklin D Roosevelt, who prevailed against the indifference or even the active doubts of Stalin and Churchill. This story is brilliantly told in a new book by Stephen Schlesinger, Act of Creation, The Founding of the United Nations. For all the talk of the American hyper-puissance in our own post-Cold War time, American political and economic dominance were even greater in 1945, underwritten by the atomic bomb, an economy that had been boosted rather than damaged by the war, and the fact that all North Atlantic rivals had been lain low by that same war. At this moment of natural American imperium, Roosevelt turned decisively towards multilateralism, not hubris. It is an example that we do well to remember today; an example that true admirers of American civilization will insist upon. It stands for America's best self. As Harry Truman put the point at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco a mere fortnight after Roosevelt's death, "We all have to recognise - no matter how great our strength - that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please." America's true self-interest, Roosevelt and Truman saw, lay in restraint.
It is of more than passing significance that Roosevelt, the architect of the American New Deal as a matter of domestic policy, should at the same time have seen the profound value of multilateralism abroad. It underlines what I have called the indivisibility of domestic and international freedoms. The New Deal itself did not end at the American water's edge. What else was the Marshall Plan but an international extension of the New Deal and a profound expression of generosity by a dominant power? There is a habit of calling for a "new Marshall Plan" for Africa or Iraq or whichever region happens to grab attention as an object of sympathy from time to time. But instead of merely invoking the Marshall Plan as a symbolic mantra, it is worth pausing to understand just what levels of sacrifice per capita were involved in that grand post-war effort. The Marshall plan committed the US to $13.3 billion in 1947 dollars over four years. Those of you with calculators will understand the enormity of that amount when translated into 2003 dollars or when looked at as a percentage of the then US budget. It took an immense effort of socio-economic will. It is no coincidence that George Marshall, a retired general, was recalled to lead the socio-economic battle. As Willie Brandt put it in the early Seventies: Marshall was recalled "as the man who, having organised the war, was now looked upon to organise the peace". Peace-making - nation building, to use the term unfashionable among neo-conservatives - was a co-equal priority and was undertaken with all the vigour of the war-making that had preceded it.
Just as Willie Brandt, that great friend of the South, looked to Marshall for inspiration in his own efforts to enlarge the circle of European humanism and European generosity, so too we here today look both to Marshall and to Brandt and build, along with those two pillars, a third leg of the stool. It is no mere coincidence that Anthony Sampson, well known in your intellectual and journalistic circles here, was both a researcher on the Brandt report and then, three decades later, the authorised biographer of Nelson Mandela. It reflects the ever-widening circle of true humanism.
It is also no accident that Brandt was at once a great visionary of European integration just as of North-South integration. My own government, in that same spirit, seeks pan African integration and good governance, as much as it seeks a fair New Deal in the global trade arena. Hence NEPAD, the New Partnership for African Development, which is one of the main struts of our country's African and global strategy. The heart of this new partnership is to move the eloquent ideals of Pan Africanism into the realm of practical and mundane institutional initiatives, and in active partnership with all who are willing to involve themselves. The Short Term Action Plan, agreed in mid-2002, makes a priority of transport, water and sanitation, energy and communications projects. NEPAD has a specific agenda of itemised, bankable, projects that harmonise the national aspirations of African countries with our ideals of regional cooperation. Technical tasks are aligned with political, economic and corporate governance priorities. African multilateralism joins hands with healthy doses of national pride.
NEPAD is able to report increasing numbers of projects and programmes, such as the West African Gas Pipeline Project where progress has been made towards solving the main commercial and contractual issues; the West African Power Pool, with national teams set up in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Togo; the Action Plan for Integrated Water Resources Management in West Africa; the critically important Grand Inga hydro-power project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); institutional support for the concession of the railways in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania; the East African Road Network; good progress in the implementation of axle load controls along key road corridors in the Comesa region; the formation of a project company by the energy utilities of the DRC, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa to develop the Western Corridor Interconnection Project; expansion and implementation of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Hydrological Cycle Observation System, the first phase of which, financed by the European Union, has been completed; and numbers of agricultural flagship projects in various regions of Africa.
And again, it must be recalled that the recent momentum of NEPAD is itself a product of our first democratic decade. When the Rwandan genocide broke out in 1994 our new democracy, absorbed with the inward-looking tasks of democratic stabilisation, deracialisation of society (including the military) and administrative transformation, was able to offer more moral than practical assistance. Today, building on successful internal reforms, we have been able actively to contribute to pan-African security in very specific ways. In Burundi, we have helped the outbreak of peace by sending the 772 South African Peace Support Detachment. There are 1 500 of our troops in Burundi backed by an anticipated R620 million budgetary commitment in financial year 2003/2004. Our contribution to the stabilisation of the DRC for the current financial year is an estimated R376 million. We have further been active in verifying the Rwandan forces from the DRC and have supported United Nations efforts in Ethiopia/Eritrea. Our peacekeeping plays directly into our plans and hopes for NEPAD, for this economic and social programme can work only in conditions of growing peace and security in Africa.
When we now seek in NEPAD a Marshall Plan for our times and our continent it is necessary to pause and ensure that the scale of the tasks before us is not misunderstood or underestimated. And let us state the point bluntly: is the level of per capita generosity that was achieved by an ascendant America on behalf of a low-flung Europe possible across the racial divide that separates North and South in our own day? Even where progressive Western governments seek multilateralism, will the electorates of Northern countries enforce an unspoken racial unilateralism on matters of budgetary spending and trade fairness? Will we be stopped by the French Le Pen or the hard men of the National Front at Oldham, or the burgeoning right of Switzerland? Before you scoff at the supposed irrelevance of what should be fringe groups, pause to think of what is becoming of the British asylum law debates, even in respectable circles. The migrants making their way to Europe from Africa, legal or illegal, are not over-welcome. Was it kith and kinship alone that allowed Roosevelt to uplift war-torn Europe? Is it in fact politically possible for the electorates of the Northern Atlantic Family to extend their fellow feeling to the dusky continent? They might, of course, do it more readily if they can be convinced that there is a lot in it for them if they do.
These are questions that only the imminent history of the next several years will clarify, questions that animated the life and work of the great humanist and militant, Edward Said, whom to our enduring grief we have now lost. His contribution to the dismantling of false cultural dichotomies such as "East" and "West"; his well-argued disdain for any idea of the permanent "clash of cultures" - these impulses in the great Palestinian scholar's work were played out in our own history, which rejected the supposedly permanent apartheid divides of black and white. The "clash of cultures" or civilizations was not only Samuel Huntington's articulation; it was, though in cruder form, PW Botha's working credo. In 1983 Botha set up separate parliamentary chambers for "whites," "coloureds" and "Indians" and he hoped to leave the African majority in complete legislative homelessness. At the base of his tricameral plan was an assertion as self-evident fact - reinforced by pseudo-intellectuals who were little more than right-wing hacks - that African and non-African in South Africa could never share the same body politic, whereas the truth was that, whatever their wishes, they simply had to do so to survive. All of that evil apartheid system has failed and our ten-year celebration is a worthy commemoration of that failure. So let us rejoice, and never fall into the same error and idiocy again.
The struggle that lies ahead is different, and largely developmental, and with a strong racial overtone. We in the developing world have to combine and marshal our effort and resourcefulness. Knowing the obstacles, we must think up new strategies and approaches. While much was made at Cancun about the so-called "Singapore issues", which sought to open markets to Western companies in new areas of intellectual product and professional services, it is remarkable how little is heard in favour of global movement of the most basic factor of production: labour. If African farmers are to be shut down where they live by the unfair impact of faraway subsidies, why not relocate their farms to the Euro-zone that is richly blessed with subsidies? The idea is not inherently absurd. Those western companies that seek entry into our South African education sector, for instance, openly expect to share in the sectoral subsidies provided by our South African government. Why does the same not apply to dusky farmers who want to move to Iowa? The answer is not the market but racism, what WEB Du Bois a century ago called "the colour line."
Addressing the International Labour Organisation recently our President, Thabo Mbeki, highlighted the principle, operative within the European Union (EU), of structural funds for those members of the European family that need them. These funds have for instance helped to lift the GDP per capita of Portugal from 53% of the EU average to 74% since Portugal joined the European Community in 1986. It is no secret that Ireland benefited greatly from EU assistance in its recent economic leap forward, now slowing down somewhat. Africa is, as President Mbeki pointed out, even more in need of such non-private sector official funding flows. Yet even while we gear up to seek such flows in the international financial system, the existing structural funding programmes already present within the EU for the benefit of countries like Portugal, are under attack by EU conservatives who wish to shut them down: again we see the linkages between global and domestic principles and policies-linkages between intra-European politics and politics beyond the European water's edge. If existing structural funds within the EU are abolished or curtailed, the arguments for analogous transfers between Europe and Africa will be correspondingly weakened. Pro-Africa activists therefore have a keen interest in the debate over the future of structural funding flows within Europe.
Of similar interest to Africa's friends is the European debate over farm subsidies. We have all seen and admired the picturesque and the pastoral in the European countryside. We all know with affection the millet peasant in her russet-clad landscape. But what price the picturesque, in our own day? Is it worth sustaining the idea of the French family farm, in its economic obsolescence, at the price of starving the economically more viable Indian or Patagonian farmer? Is it worth subsidizing American cotton and European milk at such levels that the subsidy exceeds the value of the product itself? North Atlantic cows are subsidized, according to the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, at $2 per day, which is more than the average African farmer makes. What would life be like if these farmers were treated as well as Europe treats its cows, asks Stiglitz?
Such subsidies are a doubly perverse mis-deployment of resources: first, money is spent to subsidise uneconomic activity and, second, the under-priced products of that already uneconomic activity are then dumped on the dinner tables of the northern hemisphere, excluding the wretched of the earth from the dinner tables of the north. The budgets for structural funds are available - the problem is not a shortage of money - but those budgets are at present perversely mis-deployed in the form of inexcusable agricultural subsidies. Why not give the European farmers direct welfare payments with which to buy the agricultural produce from the emerging economies? That would at least be a win-win solution. Or do we really value the vanity - the unaffordable country-squire status - of the European family farmer above the very livelihood and freedom from starvation of the black African farmer? As the Financial Times reported in the immediate aftermath of the failed Cancun round, "the $3 to $4 billion a year in subsidies paid to the US's 25,000 cotton farmers exceeds the gross domestic product of Burkina Faso and is three times the entire US aid budget for Africa." (16 September 2003).
"South Africa's International Political Strategy" is the subject with which I began and it is apt and fitting to address it now, mere weeks after the "sturm und drang" of Cancun. There have been overturned tables in Genoa; similar disturbances in placid Seattle; and now the highly demonstrative suicide of the Korean protestor in Cancun. Nobody can doubt the genuinely life-and-death importance of the debates over trade rules - debates that are at once political, economic and financial. What is to be done?
First, let us not mistake the battlefield for the enemy. The international organisations through which economic outcomes are legitimised - the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And yet they are the battlefield, not the enemy. They are sites of struggle where we must seek to win and which we must never abandon. Ever since the first European "explorers" set out from for other continents with cheap baubles to swap for fertile land, the key question of imperialism has been - and remains - the legitimisation of violent property seizure through an overlay of the rule of law. The imperialist has always known that the Gatling gun cannot long subdue the restive native; the magistrate must follow swiftly. The natives, having already spilt blood, must next spill ink-their "consent" is thus secured-albeit at gunpoint. The wretched of the earth have far better odds standing together within the formal structures of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), than taken separately, each on a separate and desolate beachfront, by unilateral Western trade negotiators. To call for the abolition of the WTO because of current setbacks there is, as George Monbiot has said, to call for the dissolution of the corrupt parliament in favour of the monarchy. I would like to have China, India and Brazil with me when I face the proverbial greedy Westerner - we just might, together, storm that Bastille - rather than being forced to face the music alone. So that is the first principle: the solidarity of the South within international institutions. This was a major and explicit theme of our recent talks in India.
A second principle has been identified by our President Mbeki in his comments before Cancun: the solidification of alliances with progressive grassroots organisations within the countries of the North. This means not turning up our noses at the vibrancy of street protesters, even if we do not always agree with their methods. We of the anti-apartheid movement know very well how effective such "street heat" can be when it is aligned with a morally clear-cut case. It means seeing the links between the local (structural funds for Portugal) and the global (structural funds for Africa). It means seeing the relevance of what at first seems irrelevant.
This brings me to a third principle: we must harness the progressive logic of free trade. This may seem a controversial suggestion. In many of the ideological camps of the left there is the thought that trade is never free and never can be free; is always oppressive and that the poor will always lose the contest. It is true that we in the South must guard against being pitted against ourselves in a "race to the bottom," with the strings pulled by multinational companies who seek to tempt emerging economies to compete against each other in an inverted auction: the contestants each trying to outdo the other in the evisceration of labour standards, environmental standards and taxation levels in the hope that they will be graced, as against their neighbours, with trade and investment inflows. That is a false and self-destructive contest. But it is not the end of the argument.
The left has, over many decades, explored competing models of economic exchange, from cooperatives through barter through the ultra-nationalist aspirations of total self-reliance. Frankly, none of these have worked. Even in the decades before 1990, no number of sugar bushels from Havana could ever really have matched, for economic equality, the technology transfer and barrels of oil that came from Moscow. The relationship was one of subsidy, not sustainable trade - a fact that became painfully clear after the changes of the 1990s, if not before. In the new phase of our decades-long solidarity with Cuba and others alike, we need a more sustainable rallying cry. It may well be true that the logic of free trade and capital accumulation is not the fairest logic of exchange that human intelligence may yet devise. But in the interval while good minds are at work on those deep questions, we have a burning and morally clear-cut argument on our own side. Even accepting the logic of free trade, it is clear that the rich countries are failing to adhere, in practice, to the free trade arguments that they press upon us, in principle. We must hold them to their word.
But our deeds must match our words in all these things we attempt to achieve, as outlined in my remarks today. I shall therefore end with some thoughts about what we are actually doing on the ground to work for a better world and a better Africa. I shall give you, first, a very recent picture of a weary President Mbeki, after three virtually sleepless days working to bring the warring parties in Burundi together, even resorting to flip-charts to clarify points, and finally pulling it off, and earning the remark by one of those present: "We wish to thank the professor". I want to give you a picture of a President in Pretoria manning the telephone links to West Africa, though not there personally, to help pull off peace in Liberia, which led a Liberian opposition figure to remark to me personally that she wanted the deepest gratitude of the people of Liberia to be conveyed to Mr Mbeki and President Obasanjo. I shall give you the picture of the most recent state visit to India by President Mbeki and a party of Ministers, when the leaders of the biggest and one of the newest democracies in the world got down to brass-tacks discussions on key issues such as the democratisation of the United Nations Security Council to more accurately reflect the changed world in which we all live.
And, casting the mind back some years, I shall give you the picture of South Africa becoming the first state on earth to renounce nuclear weapons and to invite open inspection for such devices and also for any biological and chemical means of warfare, not to mention the leading role we, with other countries like Canada, played in forging the UN convention on the prohibition of the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines and on their destruction.
Close to home, I would commend to you the efforts of the South African Government in genuinely seeking durable peace and progress in Zimbabwe. We are well aware of the criticisms of our so-called quiet diplomacy. But we believe there is no other way to peace north of our borders other than a determined, gestureless working at the problem, so that an environment can be created in which the Zimbabwean people themselves can reach a peace that they can live with for years to come. This must include land reform, though we have made clear our criticisms of way this has been done. It must bring inclusive democracy and effective human rights, independence for the judiciary and the media, and security for all citizens. And it must be based on the joint efforts of the two major forces in the land, ZANU-PF and the MDC. It is hoped that, before long, we shall be able to report progress that will be reminiscent of the relative peace breaking out in Liberia and Burundi - not to mention the Congo and Rwanda. If this does not happen, it will not be for lack of trying on our part in South Africa. It should be noted that economic collapse in Zimbabwe impacts directly on our own economy and society generally - from the traders on our city streets to the big corporations. It is not a far-off problem for us South Africans. It is on our doorstep. We cannot put a foot wrong. We must tread with care and determination to help end the troubles there, and this we are doing.
Overall, I present to you a South Africa which is - nearly ten years into its democracy - living up to its responsibilities, shoring up its alliances and improving the lot of its people. In this we can all find much encouragement in the words of World Bank President James Wolfensohn who, in a special article for the Johannesburg Sunday Times (business section) on 19 October, had this to say:
"South Africa can be particularly proud of its social and political transformation into a democracy, as well as what it has achieved with minimal external assistance in addressing the backlogs in basic infrastructure and services. Of course, there are still major challenges. These include high levels of unemployment and persistent inequality, low savings and high rates of HIV/AIDS infection. Growth will need to accelerate to provide both jobs and a rapid improvement in living standards. Service delivery in critical areas needs further improvement and this requires strengthening implementation capacity, not least at local government level.
"But these problems are not unique to South Africa - they severely challenge many developing countries. Building on the achievements of the past decade, there is every confidence that South Africa will continue to provide valuable lessons for all who are committed to a more just and equitable world, free of poverty."
Thank you. Issued by: The Presidency
27 October 2003
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