Glenda Daniels
“Lacking in local protests today is a failure to connect poverty in this country to the government’s economic policies,” says Dennis Brutus, South African poet and a leader in the international globalisation resistance movement.
The radical intellectual and lecturer will be a speaker on the NGO panel on reparations at the United Nations World Conference against Racism next week and will also address a protest march organised against the event.
He says: “The focus of our challenge in South Africa should be the growth economic and redistribution strategy. This is beginning to take place. There should be a challenge to the creation of the black elite and corruption. The dissatisfaction is profound and we will see this on the streets in Durban.”
The veteran anti-apartheid activist was banned and imprisoned in South Africa in the 1960s. He made a home in the United Kingdom and then went on to the United States and is professor emeritus in the Africana studies department at Pittsburgh University. Brutus is a central figure in the worldwide struggle against the “corporate global agenda”.
The fast-growing globalisation resistance movement has organised successful grassroots protests in Seattle in 1999, followed by actions in Davos, Washington DC, Prague, Chiang Mai and Genoa. Its targets are the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for contributing towards the increasing poverty of the poor.
Brutus quotes the WTO director general, who recently said the institution “is writing a constitution for the world”. At the G8 Summit in Genoa last month “we chanted a slogan ‘you are the G8 and we are the 600-billion'”, he says.
A patron of Jubilee South, an organisation with members in African, Asian and Latin American countries, Brutus says South Africa is very central to writing an alternative agenda for global justice.
“What is happening in South Africa today is a consequence of the global corporate agenda. The desperate situation of poverty in the country is becoming steadily worse loss of jobs, lack of social services and increased crime. Take the issue of water, for instance. If you don’t buy it, you die and so 200 people died from cholera in KwaZulu-Natal.”
Brutus slams the government’s collusion with the World Bank and the IMF, saying the structural adjustment programmes of the institutions are leading to privatisation and a lack of basic social services for the poor.
And for him, the issue of linking poverty to racism is what is centrally lacking at the racism conference. “The central point is being missed at the conference and that is the link with privatisation and joblessness, homelessness, lack of social services, poor medical services and poor education. All this also stems from the broad policy flow from the decision to spend money on arms which are unnecessary rather than on social services.”
But Brutus is far from pessimistic about South Africa. The recent labour uprisings and protests are against the government’s privatisation policies, he says. This indicates that people are not just accepting the status quo.
“Labour’s protests are central to the opposition of the transfer of services from government to commodities. And corporations are accountable to stockholders, who put profits before people.”
Brutus says anti-globalisation activists will meet in Brazil in January next year to write an “alternative agenda”.
It will include how to abolish the World Bank and the IMF. It will call for an “alternative global financial architecture where people are more important than profits”. It will look at ways of ensuring a greater degree of participation by civil society in decision-making and examine the issue of reparations and debt cancellation.
At this stage, however, there is no firm programme, but one is beginning to emerge through consensus around the world, says Brutus. “People from all over will send contributions which will be built into an alternative agenda, and South Africa is very much a part of this.”
Brutus says there are many signs of successes and strengths in the new struggle against corporations, governments, armies and police. The strengths lie in the fact that this is a grassroots and non-violent movement.
“It is a massive peoples’ movement committed to change through non-violence. The only real violence has come from the police.”
Brutus is optimistic that among trade unions and the NGO sector, “articulate” positions are emerging against globalisation. These are signs of a growing civil movement, which is directly challenging the government head-on. “There are still people loyal to the government and the African National Congress. They chant the slogans of liberation but the fact of the matter is [Minister of Finance] Trevor Manuel does more for the World Bank than for the people of South Africa,” he says.