| JOHANNESBURG--The
presidents and prime ministers followed each
other under impeccable escort to the summit podium.
Then
the platitudes soared ever higher as many a listening
heart sank in the "Pavilion." How to
ignore the nature and scale of summit problems
blocked from resolution by politics, by that
exercise of power which is politics in its real
sense-politics
across the negotiating tables here and the shadow
of political repercussions at home?
President
Mbeki asked all the right questions in his introductory
address but refrained from articulating the answer.
Why are there tragic paucities and a dearth of means
to banish them; why floods and disease with the right
cures available; why wars amid agreements for peace?
Why poverty amid plenty?
The answer is political, as much in
the international frame as at national
level. To call on the world for the right
exercise of political will, as the UK's
Tony Blair did, is the right answer,
but over-simplifying it to the fringes
of platitude. He came up with some clear
points that seem to move his position
out from under the shadow of the US.
Somewhat. More of that in a minute. But
first, what lurks behind Blair's facile
words?
The trouble is that political will is
a weathervane moved by the warm breeze
of benefit. Now, the problems of poverty
and development require that some must
lose as others gain. It is right that
it should be so, but it is also hard
to realize. How to convince people being
asked to deprive themselves of something
that the act will in fact benefit them?
And how to do it if the political power
of the decision-makers is a fragile majority
in a legislature?
So one can take President Mbeki's propositions
a step further-and then run into another
obstacle, harder to scale.
Worse.
It is only partly right to think of
the world as geographically divided
between rich and poor. What of the abjectly
poor in the affluent countries of North
America and Europe, what of the rich
and super-rich in the poor and poorest
nations of the world? It is the latter
group which provides a relevant commentary
on our "poverty summit" in
Jo'burg.
It is
almost always the fat cats who buy
the policies they want in the 140
countries of the world which have multi-party
democracies, many of them poverty stricken.
Why, you may well ask, are those policies
not more pro-poor at home? If a rich
country is doing little, or not enough,
about its own inner cities and deprived
ethnic minorities, will they do much
for "distant others," however
deserving the cause?
There are answers, and one of them is
this summit (or gatherings like it),
whatever its outcome, because they constitute
pressure on national governments. There
is gloom as this final summit week opens.
But such gatherings have been saved at
the last moment. There is mid-week to
come in Jo'burg.
Tony Blair, on this heads of states
and governments' morning, spoke of the
need to open up trade, particularly from
developing to developed countries, particularly
in the field of agricultural goods, not
as charity but as a trigger for development.
He called for facing up to the challenges
of climate change and rising pollution
risks. One takes heart because of the
proxy role his government has often played
for the US in world forums.
Blair
then joined President Chirac of France
in a proposal which, well implemented,
could contribute to the portfolio of
solutions that this summit is seeking:
incentivising and mobilizing the private
capital available in the developing countries
themselves. Countries like India and
the host country have shown the way,
a thorny one but apparently getting somewhere.
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