Nizar K. Visram
18 April 2006
opinion
Dar Es Salaam — In September, 2000 the UN General Assembly passed by acclamation a resolution called United Nations Millennium Declaration.
The "consensus" was in stark contrast to the UN tradition, according to which a text has to be carefully prepared and discussed at length in committees before being tabled before the General Assembly.
In this case, however, the UN Millennium Summit of 191 member countries unanimously agreed to a set of eight millennium development goals (MDGs) for the next 15 years for the world's poor nations. To some extent, the "consensus" reflected a change in the international balance of power. It showed how the US and its G-8 allies are now able to exert hegemony over the UN.
In other words, the MDGs were not the result of an initiative from the South itself. They were pushed primarily by the G-8 and co-sponsored by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The eight Millennium Development Goals include a 50 per cent reduction in poverty and hunger, universal primary education, reduction of child mortality by two-thirds, reduction in maternal mortality by three-quarters, promotion of gender equality, environmental sustainability, curbing the spread of diseases, and a global partnership for development between the rich and poor. All this is to be attained by 2015.
THE GOALS certainly seemed commendable, for hardly anyone would disapprove the reduction of poverty or improving health. But the devil is in the detail. Reducing extreme poverty and hunger by half is fine but mere incantation is not enough when the policies that generate poverty are not analysed and no alternatives are proposed. Without so doing, we shall be repeating old mistakes.
As far back as 1960, Unesco devoted itself to the achievement of Universal Primary Education (UPE) hoping to reach the goal in 10 years. In Tanzania, progress was made under programmes but ground was soon lost when an alternative programme was put in place with the advice of the World Bank and IMF. We are now resuscitating UPE under MDGs without examining the mistakes made under the IMF-inspired cut-back in public expenditures and privatisation of education.
The same can be said about reducing infant and maternal mortality and stopping the spread of pandemics. The assumption is that all this is compatible with extreme privatisation.
Under the MDGs, privatisation is aimed at "opening new fields for the expansion of capital." In other words, the existence of national state property should be liquidated by foreign capital.
The privatisation of important natural resources such as petroleum and water facilitates can lead to the pillaging of these resources, thus reducing the talk of sustainable development to mere rhetoric.
Land is also subjected to the market forces, the ultimate aim being the policy of enclosures leading to the destruction and pauperisation of the peasantry and their migration to urban slums.
THE APPROPRIATION of agricultural land within the context of maximum deregulation paves the way for the expansion of an unequal trade and growing concentration of power in the hands of multi-national corporations. This can be illustrated by the example of coffee.
Twenty years ago, all coffee producers were paid $9 billion but consumers paid $20 billion for the same. Today, the proportion is $6 billion to $30 billion respectively.
Another fallacy being advanced is that uncontrolled capital movement and deregulation would make it possible to attract foreign capital.
States are forbidden from interfering in economic affairs and they are reduced to a narrow police function, that of guaranteeing debt service.
For africa, this facilitates the pillage of the continent's natural resources such as petroleum and minerals. It would be an illusion to expect that foreign direct investments will come for anything else. Today, many African governments, donors and NGOs have made the MDGs their top priority. Yet there are already worrying signs of stagnation and reversal.
A UN review of sub-Saharan Africa's social development indicators for 2003 provides a bleak picture of the region's progress towards the MDGs.
The report says that in sub-Saharan Africa alone, the number of poor people increased by almost 90 million in little more than a decade, from 1990 to 2001.
Africa entered the new millennium with the highest poverty and child mortality rates and the lowest school enrolment figures in the world.
Most African countries, including those that pass as Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs), continue to spend more on debt servicing than on health and education.
Nizar Visram is a political scientist and journalist based in Dar es Salaam
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2006 The East African. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
