From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Jeers for Johannesburg
A summit that cheers Mugabe isn't about helping the poor.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was heckled and jeered twice during his 10-minute speech Wednesday to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was easy to see why President Bush didn't go. The summit seemed to come alive only when speakers bashed America like a piñata.
The summit discussed many laudable goals, such as continuing the recent progress in providing clean drinking water and proper sanitation to the world's poor. More than 1.5 billion people in the developing world have gained access to one or the other in the past decade alone, but much more needs to be done. The summit was on shakier ground when it accepted wholesale the argument that the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal represents a clear, deadly threat to the planet.
But the summit's true failing came when it ignored the biggest cause of endemic poverty and suffering in the developing world: corrupt, tyrannical and quasisocialist governments. The elephant in the room was Robert Mugabe of neighboring Zimbabwe. Mr. Mugabe's two-year-old policy of throwing white farmers off their land has turned once self-sufficient Zimbabwe into a country where half its 13 million people face famine. His mobs enforce blatantly racist policies, the media have been muzzled, and this year he was re-elected only through massive voter fraud.
In contrast to Mr. Powell's reception, Mr. Mugabe's anti-Western diatribe drew three rounds of riotous applause as he attacked the conference's failure to confront a "half-baked unilateral agenda of globalization in the service of big corporate interests of the north" who "focus on profits, not the poor." This from a man whose government just this week admitted that many of the white-owned farms it has seized have ended up in the hands of Mr. Mugabe's cronies--including his wife. Patrick Chinamasa, Zimbabwe's justice minister, said the land is being "given to people who apply. It does not matter whether these are people in the leadership of [Mr. Mugabe's] Zanu party or not. We have bankers who have benefited, lecturers from universities that have benefited, we've got even opposition members who have benefited from the land program. As long as they are black they are entitled to benefit."
In speech after speech, the 104 heads of state who did star turns in Johannesburg failed to criticize Mr. Mugabe's tyranny. Even Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair scrapped his normally firm denunciations of Mr. Mugabe and dodged any mention of him during news conferences.
It fell to Helen Clark, the leftish Labor prime minister of New Zealand, to stand alone among heads of state (along with Mr. Powell) in pointing out the evils of Mr. Mugabe's "deliberate and cynical" policies. She said she found it frustrating that "many have a concern that Zimbabwe should not distract the summit."
Journalists also tended to tiptoe around the issue of Mr. Mugabe and similar leaders in other developing countries. Kaizer Nyatsumba of Britain's Independent was a notable exception when he wrote that "Mr. Mugabe, it seems, is no longer content with merely wrecking his own country, which now has to beg for food in order to survive. Instead, he wants to take all of Africa along with him, with his friend and ally, Sam Nujoma of Namibia, marching right behind him. For Western sceptics who heard the two men lashing at Tony Blair in Johannesburg on Monday, their tirade is sufficient proof that Africa is truly irredeemable."
Of course, that is an exaggeration. Leon Louw, executive director of the Free Market Foundation in South Africa, says he sees hopeful signs that--Messrs. Mugabe and Nujoma notwithstanding--more African countries are discussing the need for property rights, transparency and accountability. Even a basket case like Nigeria, where official statistics show the nation's gross domestic product has fallen to a third of what it was 20 years ago, has a thriving underground economy and a population that largely ignores the central government's mindless rules.
A good example of the hopeful trend is in the central African state of Chad, whose per capita income of $200 a year is half that of Haiti. But Chad stands to reap at least $100 million annually from oil revenue. Normally, corruption would ensure that the money would line the pockets of the nation's elites and bypass the country's seven million poor. But Exxon Mobil, the developer of a new $3.7 billion pipeline, has moved to ensure the money doesn't disappear. As a condition for building the pipeline, Chad's government had to put 80% of the money into offshore escrow accounts that could be used only to pay for improvements in the nation's education, health and transportation systems with strict outside auditing at every step of the way. Another 5% of the money is earmarked to help locals affected by the pipeline's construction, and 10% is set aside in an escrow account for future generations.
Only 5% of the money will be left to the central government to spend as it pleases--which is a good thing given that the first untied disbursement of oil money was used to buy guns and cars for cronies of President Idriss Deby.
Mr. Deby admits there are problems with governance in Africa: "If, as the West has alleged, we are bad managers or are corrupt, then we share responsibility with the West. If we are corrupt, then you are the corrupters. We were partners in responsibility." He dryly told Newsweek that the escrow accounts are fine by him: "The oil revenue plan is exactly how we would have spent the money anyway." Mr. Deby's fantasies aside, he should be given credit for hog-tying his own sticky hands as the necessary price of getting the pipeline built.
Africa cannot succeed without curtailing corruption, says Mamadou Koulibaly, speaker of the Ivory Coast's parliament. "The African states are responsible for corruption and the people who run them use that corruption to convert the public purse into private property of their own," he wrote in African Business magazine. "These same statesmen know that corruption is morally deplorable and economically destructive and punishable by law."
Mr. Koulibaly didn't attend the summit in Johannesburg, because he rightly believed it would include a great deal of empty, even harmful rhetoric. "It is not in the interest of Africans for their labor unions to follow the lead of European pressure groups and demand Western wage or environmental standards immediately," he says.
He is also convinced that the failure of African leaders to condemn Mr. Mugabe and his ilk is a far bigger short-term problem for the continent than global warming. "Zimbabwe is a warning signal for what the entire continent could see over the next five to 10 years," he says. "If he succeeds it will be easy to reallocate property in other African countries whenever a leader needs re-election or to distract from a crisis. It won't be just taking from white people, but one tribe taking from another. It is a recipe for civil war." He says South African Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki's silence is especially distressing.
The 45-year-old Mr. Koulibaly preferred to spend his time this week at his alma mater, the University of Aix-en-Provence in France, where conservative and libertarian economists from all over Europe gathered to celebrate the 25th anniversary of an annual summer seminar on the "new economics of liberty." Mr. Koulibaly says the future of Africa lies not so much in waiting for the much-discussed New Partnership for African Development to shower money on debtor nations but to "show the world that our idea of contract doesn't fluctuate. That brings permanent investment."
A former finance and budget minister, Mr. Koulibaly is part of a new government that has brought relative stability to a country once plagued by violence. The cocoa market has been liberalized, strict limits on spending enforced and pay increases for bureaucrats limited. But Mr. Koulibaly says the only way that African countries will be able to pay off their foreign debts is to develop institutions rooted in the rule of law. His dream is to give peasants real title to the land they now farm. But when he approached the World Bank to help with financing to buy land from traditional tribal leaders, he was told there was no money available. "They told me that if I wanted to build bridges I could have money," he recalls. "It seems as if some in the West want us to always be in debt to them and never achieve real independence."
The air of unreality that hangs over Western policy toward Africa and the entire developing world came into vivid relief during the summit. Mr. Louw, a crusader for black entrepreneurs since the days of apartheid, helped organize a protest of 1,000 street vendors who had been swept from their posts as preparations for the conference intensified. "These people are the direct victims of the summit," he told me. "They have been cleaned off the streets as if they were litter." Worse yet, Mr. Louw believes summit attendees then spent their 10 days in a "Disneyfied" Johannesburg "launching an eco-imperialism that is far more insidious than any form of colonialism."
Colin Powell need not be shocked at either the jeers that he faced or the cheers that greeted Robert Mugabe. The World Summit on Sustainable Development wasn't about helping the world's poor. The summiteers' real aim was to put spoiled socialist wine into new green bottles.
