The African incarnations of the World Economic Forum — the latest held in Durban last week — are a bit like beauty pageants for folk from Uglyville.
Lumpy African leaders (some trying to hide the warts of questionable elections) parade wearing their best ”to-know-me-is-to-love-me” smiles and all tell the audience how much they adore the free market.
Businessmen and bureaucrats enjoying the Uglyville hospitality are polite, but you know there are unlikely to be any modelling contracts signed.
The theme at this year’s event was President Thabo Mbeki’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) project — and it remained just that: a marketing theme, rather than a subject for serious analysis and debate.
As with most beauty shows, the padding of bras or expense accounts is part of the fun, but criticising the judges is not. Thus the only two instances of real emotion were treated by the South African hosts as embarrassing faux pas of naive or eccentric contestants who didn’t understand the rules.
The first was the outburst of Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, complaining about the sudden withdrawal of Anglo American from its Zambian copper mines. And, bumpkin that he is, Mwanawasa was fool enough to show this dirty underwear in open plenary.
”Tut, tut,” went the South African officials. ”Now he’s blown any chance of foreign investment in Zambia.”
Absent was any notion that this was a good opportunity to tackle the real issues involved in running a weak economy dominated by a single multi-national, to confront the imbalance of power that lay behind Mwanawasa’s frustration. No, poor, ugly Levy must not be allowed to disrupt the pageant.
The second instance, generated by Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, at least garnered some genuine attention from the suits, though it had the flavour of fascination for the girl who’s ”been around a bit” and dares to tell them — stylishly — what miserable upper-class sods they are.
Museveni complained that, in the past 10 years, his coffee exports had roughly doubled, but his earnings had halved. Buttonholing the man from NestlÃ