President Thabo Mbeki has spent a long week in New York swimming against the tide.
It may be difficult to get the United Nations General Assembly to focus on practicalities at the best of times, but the president’s call for a ”new definition” of security premised on expanded prosperity and democracy, struggled for media and diplomatic oxygen on a day dominated by a succession of appalling reports from Iraq.
He contrasted the way the wealthy and powerful feel ”mortally threatened by the fanatical rage of the terrorists” with the ”permanent hurricane of poverty” that is devastating poor communities.
But as he spoke Iraqi insurgents were detonating car bombs in Baghdad, and there was fierce fighting in Sadr city.
International news reports on Thursday morning, to the extent that they mentioned African participation at the General Assembly at all, focused largely on the vintage performance delivered by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who complained of the new ”political cum religious doctrine” that ”there is but one political god, George W Bush, and Tony Blair is his prophet”.
Several, mostly from the developing world, commented approvingly on Mbeki’s calls for the UN to address more urgently the concerns of its poorer members.
Presidency and foreign affairs officials were unavailable for comment as the Mail & Guardian went to press, but Mbeki has clearly had a hectic diplomatic schedule on the sidelines of the meeting.
Despite this, South Africa’s position in the vanguard of the developing world seems less secure than it has been in the past.
Brazil and India joined Germany and Japan in a bid for permanent seats on the Security Council, and although South Africa has repeatedly called for institutional reform at the global body, and might have been expected to provide an African element to the bid for permanent seats, it has not done so.
Efforts in New York to find new multilateral approaches to development finance at the meeting have also been dominated by Brazilian president Ignacio Lula da Silva who has floated a series of ideas ranging from a global tax on arms sales and foreign exchange transactions, to a credit card that would enable consumers to funnel transaction charges toward the millennium development goals of the UN.
South Africa is lukewarm on these proposals, which officials suggest are largely unworkable.
Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel is instead leading efforts through Blair’s Africa Commission, and his chair on the development committee of the International Monetary Fund, to devise improvements in existing development finance mechanisms.
Manuel is particularly keen to see improvements in donor coordination and lending, including perhaps the international borrowing facility proposed by Britain’s Gordon Brown.
He is due to attend the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington during the first week of October, and he is expected to use his high profile at the Bretton-Woods institutions to once again press for improved representation at board level, and to push the New Partnership for Africa’s Development back on to the global agenda.