As of filing this column, the Very Important Global Summit is at its end. Racks of “world leaders” have added their five-minute ha’pennyworths to the jabber, the cliches, the fine-sounding waffle, which has been the primary harvest of this extravagant junket. Northern suburbs kugels might think they know how to splash out in Sandton. They’ve been put to shame.
R500-million. Straight down the tubes.
Often the summit’s been just good, clean fun. Political analyst Mr John Battersby — now appearing weekly in The Sunday Independent — was at his hilarious best when, in another of his public adorations of Thabo Mbeki, he produced what will probably go down as the most comic line of the whole shebang. “There needs to be a full acceptance by every human being, of their individual role in polluting the planet,” wrote John, trying unsuccessfully to contain his mirth. “The American using a deodorant spray in New York or driving his car around the block needs to be aware how he is affecting a herder in Mongolia before his government will sign the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gases.”
Now we all know that John Battersby is unique in that he’s the only praise-singer in the world who works from close behind his subject instead of close in front. We also acknowledge that, because of his positioning, John has slipstream contact with any wisdom that happens to waft from his icon. Some of it seems to have stuck to him because if John Battersby seriously believes that some male motorist in New York — or anywhere else in the despicable Western world for that matter — is going to abandon his comfortable vehicle in order to traipse around the block emitting ropes of spicy armpit-pong just because he feels vaguely remiss about how he might have been affecting the quality of air enveloping a goat-minder half a planet away, then John Battersby needs to consult someone professional — fairly urgently, I’d say.
Mr B’s diverting column last Sunday did, however, fulfil an unexpected function in that it provided further evidence that they got the summit’s title wrong. The Sandton party would better have been called the World Summit on Sustainable Victimhood. That’s what it was really about because there’s nothing more appealing these days — or more exploitable — than self-flagellation. Forget about Mongolian herders and any other distant human fallout. They’re only there to lend “globality” to the whinging. The harder tragedies are closer to conscience.
It can be argued strongly that the so-called “greenhouse effect” is a theory. No incontrovertible proof exists of a correlation between the burning of fossil fuels and climatic change. But at summits like Sandton the more emotional and therefore much more persuasive argument is that “greedy developed” nations are to blame for uncontrolled pollution. The fact is that among the worst of all global atmospheric polluters are the greedy underdeveloped Asian countries which, by uncontrolled forest fires, vehicle emissions, “dirty” power stations and all the rest of it, have produced one of the single most devastating contaminants of all: the suffocating Asian “brown cloud”, which is said already to have killed more than a million — sadly including one or two Mongolian herders. Asian pollution didn’t get much of a mention at Sandton simply because Asia pollutes only by default. The West does it on purpose.
Adjacent to all the bitching about the planet-wide erosions of rampant capitalism and corporate avarice, have been embittered recollections about how African or Asian countries slid helplessly into bankruptcy and political chaos the moment their colonial chains were sundered. How markets hadn’t been opened, unfair trading conditions hadn’t prevailed, there hadn’t been adequate investment. Wretched and corrupt governments of the countries are never at fault. Not in Sandton.
But back to the ever-ingenious Battersby. Wondering at the “powerful symbolism” evoked by holding a luxury summit conference within a journalist’s spitting distance of the abject poverty of Alexandra township, John expanded generously on his victim theme; however, I’m not prepared to repeat any of that here.
What John didn’t acknowledge is the blinding irony that South Africa is about the only place in Africa capable, in practical terms, of hosting something big and brassy like the World Summit. Sandton itself is a resplendent shrine to the success of corporate endeavour, colonial-style business practices, Western-style indulgence and many other factors contributing to what John describes as “humanity’s headlong march to self-destruction”.
Sustainable Victimhood got its single biggest endorsement when Thabo Mbeki announced his newest catchphrase, “global apartheid”, and with it made a giant leap backward in the business of being perpetual casualties. It seems very enterprising to suggest the canons of apartheid now underwrite far greater crimes, but actually it’s no more than a new way of playing the worn out old race card. The dreaded A-word may now be used to assign blame, increase guilt and give wider foundation to even more self-pity. To which corkscrew rhetoric John Battersby has answered: “We’re right behind you, Thabo”.
We know you are, John. We know you are.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby