|
Get AfricaFocus Bulletin by e-mail!
Print this page
|
Note: This document is from the archive of the Africa Policy E-Journal, published
by the Africa Policy Information Center (APIC) from 1995 to 2001 and by Africa Action
from 2001 to 2003. APIC was merged into Africa Action in 2001. Please note that many outdated links in this archived
document may not work.
|
USA: Summit Documents, 3
USA: Summit Documents, 3
Date distributed (ymd): 000228
Document reposted by APIC
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +political/rights+ +economy/development+
+US policy focus+
Summary Contents:
Over 5,000 delegates and participants gathered in Washington
February 16-20, 2000 for a "National Summit on Africa." There
were actually at least four related but distinctive gatherings
during the Summit. The first was the high-profile event of
plenaries, receptions and dinners, featuring Presidents Bill
Clinton, Daniel arap Moi and other dignitaries. There was the
deliberative process culminating in a document with 254 policy
recommendations. There were parallel programs on a host of
topics. Perhaps most important if least visible were the
countless informal meetings in and around the conference, in
corridors, restaurants and other venues.
This set of three postings contains material, both official
and critical, primarily relating to the high-profile event --
the only one on which there are now documents available in
electronic format. The National Summit has announced a press
conference on February 29 to present the National Plan of
Action, which is promised to be available later, along with
other materials, on the Summit's web site
(http://www.africasummit.org). Additional news coverage is
available at the Africa News web site
(http://www.africanews.org). APIC will post references to
additional material later as it becomes available.
This posting contains a round-up article from the
Foreign-Policy-in-Focus project. The other two postings
contain remarks by President Bill Clinton, a press release
from the Summit secretariat, a critical statement presented by
concerned delegates at the closing session, and a letter from
a former Summit board member.
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Africa Activism: What Direction Now?
By Jim Lobe and Jim Cason
The Progressive Response
25 February 2000 Vol. 4, No. 8
Editor: Tom Barry
The Progressive Response (PR) is a weekly service of Foreign
Policy in Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the
Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy
Studies. Web site: http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org
(Jim Lobe is a Washington-based correspondent with the Inter
Press Service news agency. Jim Cason is an executive committee
member of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars. Both
are part of FPIF's "think tank without walls.")
From February 16 to 20, some 2,300 committed and energetic
delegates from throughout the United States gathered in
Washington, DC, for a five-day, high-profile "summit"
dedicated to building a politically powerful coalition for
Africa, but there was much uncertainty about how to do it.
The official program and plenary sessions were dominated by
U.S. and African government officials, members of Congress,
and corporate leaders. But the energy in the workshops and
hallways of this event, as well as the commitment of delegates
to use their own funds to get to Washington for the meeting,
demonstrated again the potential for Africa activism that
still exists in the United States ten years after the South
African victory over apartheid. Particularly noticeable was
the high attendance--upwards of 30%--of Africa expatriates who
established themselves during the conference as key players in
any future constituency for the continent.
The National Summit on Africa (NSA) was a four-year effort,
generously funded with almost $8 million by the Ford
Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The NSA
approved a 254-point platform--a sometimes-contradictory
laundry list of policy recommendations--the "National Policy
Plan of Action for U.S.-Africa Relations in the 21st Century."
Beginning in May 1998, the National Summit on Africa convened
a series of "regional summits and policy fora" around five
broad themes in U.S.-African relations: 1) democracy and human
rights; 2) economic development, trade and investment, and job
creation; 3) education and culture; 4) peace and security; and
5) sustainable development, quality of life, and the
environment. Each regional summit elected state delegations
who, together with 500 at-large delegates, participated in the
deliberative process at the Washington gathering. The NSA's
National Policy Plan will be presented to policymakers with
the view that it will form the blueprint for a new and broader
U.S. engagement with Africa in the 21st century.
Among the specific proposals endorsed by the summit were an
urgent request for the U.S. to provide increased funding for
AIDS research, education, and prevention and a demand for
comprehensive debt relief for Africa. The final summit
document also calls for conditional support of the Africa
Growth and Opportunity Act trade bill that is currently before
the U.S. Congress and for a new "Marshall Plan"--scale
commitment of additional financial resources for African
development. The recommendations urge Washington to support a
ban on landmines, end sales of small arms to Africa, and
provide far more money for peacekeeping missions in Africa.
But the final assembly, addressed by two of the most widely
respected black politicians, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Jr.(D-IL) and
former Rep. Ron Dellums (D-CA), was clouded with charges by
many grassroots and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
rooted in the antiapartheid movement that the mobilizing
effort put into the summit risked being hijacked by a
leadership with a "corporate-friendly" agenda. "Somehow all
the hard work we put into making our voices heard here was for
nothing," complained Nunu Kidane, a former cochair of the
California delegation. Kidane had helped organize the San
Francisco regional summit, but she resigned in disgust because
of what she characterized as the top-down nature of the NSA.
"Many of the people who went to Africa to do solidarity work
in the 1960s and 1970s, knew they would never get paid," said
Prexy Nesbitt, a Chicago-based activist and educator who
serves on the board of the Africa Fund and has worked with
TransAfrica, the Washington Office on Africa, and many of the
other national Africa groups. "But today," Nesbitt explained,
"[with the emphasis on trade and investment], you're getting
more and more people going with a sense of 'what is in it for
me?' This [meeting] is controlled by the latter type. These
are the new colonizers."
Although Nesbitt didn't mention him by name, he appeared to
describe Leonard H. Robinson, Jr., the NSA's "president and
CEO", who had defended Washington's "constructive engagement"
policy with apartheid South Africa as Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Reagan and Bush
administrations. More recently Robinson worked as a lobbyist
for both Sani Abacha's military regime in Nigeria and Togolese
president Gnassingbe Eyadema, one of Africa's longest ruling
dictators. Robinson apparently intends to transform the NSA
into a permanent organization directed with a board half of
whose directors will represent U.S. corporations active in
Africa. "We're going to need a board that brings a lot more to
the table," said Sunni Khalid, the former National Public
Radio reporter who is now the summit spokesperson. "It takes
a lot of money to do this."
As originally conceived, the summit was to be used to mobilize
and expand a variety of groups and interests worried about
Africa's marginalization following the end of the cold war.
Since the 1980s, aid to Africa has declined sharply, despite
half-hearted Clinton administration efforts to increase it.
After the 1992-93 Somalia debacle, Washington's refusal to act
decisively to stop or prevent civil conflicts, including the
1994 Rwandan genocide, fueled fears, according to the summit's
literature, "that the United States would continue to
disengage" from Africa despite "unprecedented
opportunities...to promote democratic values and free
markets."
"Little urgency is given to our problems, and when assistance
is rendered, it is relatively too little and often delayed,"
Organization of African Unity (OAU) Secretary-General Salim A.
Salim told the delegates during the opening speeches. "This is
in remarkable contrast to how other societies are treated in
this regard. It boils down to the fact that Africa lacks a
strong constituency in the United States," Secretary-General
Salim added.
Over the past two years, the National Summit on Africa has
convened six regional and three policy conferences--in Boston,
Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta, Los
Angeles, Houston, and Oklahoma City--with attendance ranging
from a low of less than 400 in Chicago to well over 3,000 in
Atlanta. A summit press release claimed that more than 10,000
participated in these regional forums.
Almost from the beginning, however, the NSA secretariat and
executive committee were criticized for a "top-down" approach
that failed to adequately consult with existing local groups
and long-established NGOs with national networks. Many of the
national activist NGOs, fearful of alienating the powerful
donors who were behind the summit, joined the national board
but confined their criticisms to internal discussions. From
early on in the process, according to several board members,
representatives of the International Human Rights Law Group,
Africa Fund, Constituency for Africa, American Friends Service
Committee, and Africa Policy Information Center voiced strong
concerns about the huge expenditures (more than $400,000 on
one regional conference, including $40,000 for fresh flowers)
and the failure to adequately consult with local activists and
groups. Salih Booker, who until recently worked with the
Council on Foreign Relations and who drafted the original
proposal as a consultant for Ford and Africare, resigned from
the board in October 1998 to protest the lack of transparency
with which the process was being conducted and the lack of a
policy for accepting financial contributions from corporations
with questionable records in Africa, including Chevron.
Unease on the twenty-eight member board increased last
December when Robinson circulated an internal memorandum in
which he laid out the case for creating a new organization
after the summit to act as the "central repository on
Africa-related issues and affairs." Arguing that the lobbying
network for Africa had been "moribund [especially since the
conclusion of the Free South Africa movement], largely
ineffectual over a sustained period and considered a nonfactor
by the various power centers of decisionmaking in Washington,"
Robinson asserted that "it would be a travesty if the summit
failed to capitalize on the momentum it has generated to fill
the void."
As originally conceived, the NSA was supposed to cease to
exist a few months after the Washington meeting and the
formulation of the National Policy Plan of Action. Robinson's
memo, however, went on to propose an initial annual budget for
an "American Council on African Affairs" of almost $1 million.
Robinson wrote that, based on recent conversations "with
corporate executives and with representatives of the
foundation community"--including Coca Cola, Sara Lee, World
Space, Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Brothers Foundation,
and the MacArthur Foundation--"it is very conceivable that the
summit will attract additional, substantial capital as a
consequence of the February 2000 event." Robinson noted that
the corporate interest in providing financial support
"represents a sea change in attitude and receptivity and
should mushroom--anticipating a knock-out summit in February."
The following month, the six member executive committee
endorsed Robinson's idea and called for the new organization
to be headed by a board with 50% corporate representation.
Though some NGOs would remain on the board, others, according
to the memo, would shift to an advisory committee. "[T]he new
board cannot afford to be perceived as being other than
'corporate-friendly,'" stated a January 18 memo from the
executive committee.
That agenda became clearer by the time the 2,300 delegates
began arriving to hear President Bill Clinton and half a dozen
other administration and official dignitaries kick off the
summit with a call for participants to lobby their members of
Congress and senators to quickly approve the corporate-backed
Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). "All of the hard
work we had put into trying to get a balanced view of the bill
was excluded," lamented California delegate Kidane, as speaker
after speaker exhorted the delegates to push for the AGOA.
(During the NSA's policy sessions, the AGOA was rejected by
one of the five policy working groups and endorsed with
reservations by another. Yet a press statement released at the
end of the summit by the secretariat cited "support for the
Africa Growth and Opportunity Act" as the first of half a
dozen of the major policy recommendations of the summit
participants.)
More disappointments were to come. Grassroots and NGO
delegates were incensed both about the sponsorship by
corporate giants Chevron and Monsanto of specific events and
about the appearance of Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi as
the sole African head of state to address the meeting. "Taking
money from Chevron was a violation of decisions taken earlier
in the summit process and of the people who are struggling in
the Niger Delta," said Jennifer Davis, director of the New
York-based Africa Fund, which played a leading role in the
antiapartheid movement and more recently in the struggle
against military rule in Nigeria. "I would have preferred to
do without a couple of dinners and not have Chevron and
Monsanto as donors," said New York cochair Mojubaolu Olufunke
Okome, a Nigerian who addressed the final plenary session on
behalf of many of the dissidents and won a standing ovation
for her comments. "Chevron's policies in the Niger delta are
morally bankrupt," she said, adding that a member of her own
family had been killed in the violence that has wracked the
oil-rich region.
Ezekiel Pajibo, who works with the Africa Faith and Justice
Network and was cochair of the Maryland delegation, said he
was so outraged that Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi was the
only African head of state on the program that he helped
organize a demonstration outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel where
Moi addressed a luncheon gathering. Delegates arriving for the
luncheon not only had to walk through a line of demonstrators
shouting "sham" and denouncing Moi as an "African Pinochet,"
they also had to cross a line of picketers from the Hotel and
Restaurant Employees Union who were protesting the hotel's
refusal to allow a union. Vice President Al Gore, who was
scheduled to address the same luncheon, refused to cross the
picket line, and his remarks were instead broadcast into the
gathering.
Summit dignitaries defended Moi's presence. "We invited many
heads of state to come," said NSA cochair Andrew Young, a
former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and ex-mayor of
Atlanta, who stood by Moi as hecklers were led from the hotel
banquet hall by security officials. "President Moi came."
Still, Moi's presence was symptomatic of a larger problem at
the summit. Although the discussion in the policy groups was
lively and participatory, the plenary sessions were dominated
by official and corporate voices, charged David Beckman, who
is president of Bread for the World. "Whereas representation
by African official and privileged sectors is strong," noted
a petition signed by scores of delegates, including some board
members, ''representation within the official summit process
by other Africans in the U.S. and by African civil society,
including women's, farmers', labor, human rights, youth and
other grassroots organizations is woefully inadequate. If the
NSA is about peoples participation in policymaking, why are
these views and voices not given (at least) equal prominence?"
The petition, which charged that the summit process "has been
concentrated in a small, centralized group," also called for
a "full evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses" of the
summit to date and the adoption of a "Framework of Guiding
Principles" on governance, participation, and transparency
before any decisions are taken on the organization's future.
But Robinson, who agreed to allow Okome address the final
plenary session as a representative of the dissenters in order
to avoid a disruptive protest from the floor, declined to be
pinned down on precisely what his organizational intentions
were. Instead, he stressed that he wanted to fully cooperate
with the NGOs and others. "As long as the National Summit on
Africa has a nickel to spend," he said, "we guarantee that we
will work with anybody who has Africa--not self-interest--in
mind. ... Why can't we work together to make this happen?" he
asked.
Salih Booker remains skeptical. In a memo he sent to the board
in early February, Booker strongly opposed perpetuating or
transforming the organization, noting that Robinson's
recommendations "suggest the creation of an entity dominated
by U.S. corporations to act as a catalyst for working against
the existing people-centered NGOs and their public education
and public advocacy networking efforts. These proposals will
only lead to a further diminution of funding possibilities for
existing Africa-focused organizations, especially politically
and economically progressive organizations including
African-American ones," he argued.
Others agree. "Any new organization that has that kind of
money behind it has the potential for defunding the groups
that have been the mainstay of Africa work generally," said
Melvin Foote, director of the Washington-based Constituency
for Africa (CFA). Foote, who resigned from the NSA board in
January, said that it has been difficult for many of the NGOs
that have participated in the summit to criticize it publicly
for fear of offending their donors. Ford and Carnegie have
long dominated Africa funding in the foundation world.
Despite all the profound disagreements and criticisms, the
National Summit on Africa demonstrated decisively that there
is a powerful network of activists in the United States who
are working on, or trying to work on, Africa issues and are
not being reached by existing Africa-focused groups. With $8
million to spend, the NSA succeeded in drawing local
organizers who had not been part of existing networks into the
regional summit process and eventually to the national summit
in Washington.
But, as the protests at the meeting and the resignations from
the summit board showed, many activists and local networks
were not prepared to be paraded into Washington simply to
endorse a corporate--and U.S.-government--dominated agenda
handed down from on high. For every person who protested
publicly at the summit, there were at least two more who told
reporters that they saw the problems but believed they would
be fixed in the future. "They brought us together in New
Jersey, and we plan to stay together and keep organizing, but
we're not going to be taking orders from this crowd in
Washington," said one delegate who asked that his name not be
used.
The NSA organizers have already said they are heading in a
"corporate friendly" direction, so the question for other
Africa-focused organizations is whether they can pick up some
of the energy generated at the summit and channel it into a
new movement.
Ten years after the end of apartheid in South Africa there are
still hundreds of local community groups with linkages to
Africa, but the range of activism on Africa crosses over a
number of issues and is much less nationally focused. Beyond
the direct campaigns for democracy and human rights and
against oil companies in specific countries such as Sudan or
Nigeria, there are global coalitions on trade issues, debt and
economic justice, landmines, and small arms that focus
attention on Africa. In addition, more radical groups in the
black community, such as the Black Radical Congress and
U.S.-based activists organizing for Afrocentric schools, chose
to stay away from this gathering but are passionately
committed to Africa work.
Whether the organizers of the National Summit on Africa manage
to attract additional foundation or corporate funding for
their new project, what they have done is demonstrate the
potential for Africa organizing and present a challenge to
Africa activists in this country. The question now is who will
pick up this challenge?
This material is being reposted for wider distribution by the
Africa Policy Information Center (APIC). APIC's primary
objective is to widen international policy debates around
African issues, by concentrating on providing accessible
policy-relevant information and analysis usable by a wide
range of groups and individuals.
|
