I have it on pretty good authority (and my sources seldom fail me — since I am one of them myself) that the Senegalese capital of Dakar is giving Johannesburg and Durban a pretty good run for their money when it comes to staging international conferences with an African bent. The rise of the African conference city is now being called the New Nepad Nexus.
In the last week alone in Dakar, there has been Unesco’s conference on ”Media and Good Governance”, Shell’s ”Africa Country Chair -Meeting” (whatever that means, although it sounds pretty sinister) and the ”African Gender Forum 2005” — to name but a few.
All of these have taken place at the fabulously expensive Meridian President hotel some kilometres out of town, built by the largesse of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia — hence the very Mecca-friendly blue and turquoise tiled dome that crowns its conference centre, a particularly user-unfriendly labyrinth of lifts and staircases and windowless rooms.
The ceaseless round of conferences seem to be identically and simultaneously all dressed up with no place to go. Professional conference-goers, NGO functionaries and CIA agents feign surprise at seeing each other checking in at the reception desk. ”Hi!” they say -suspiciously to each other in a cacophony of NGO accents. ”Which one are you going to?” ”The Shell one,” comes the reply. ”Oh, I’d have thought you were more of the gender type,” comes the rejoinder. ”I guess I’ll have better luck next time,” goes the leering response — neither one quite knowing what it is they are leering about.
And so they part company at the lifts on the sixth floor and retire down the long, carpeted corridors to their rooms, where they each spend the next 12 hours poring over vague conference documents that will hopefully tell them what the hell it is that they are doing there.
They are not helped by a comedy of errors, designed by a well-paid think-tank at the United Nations building in New York, that has their English-speaking, NGO-speak world cast adrift on the turbulent waters of decidedly Franco-Islamic Senegal.
The country, meanwhile, has -cleverly spawned a whole sub–industry of corrupt conference organisers who cream a substantial percentage off the top of each project (themselves having no clue as to what is supposed to be achieved by the event) in exchange for providing a hospitality desk at the hotel entrance, staffed by extremely pretty but totally uncommunicative ”hostesses”. If you manage to get one who has a vague interest in improving her English skills, you have struck lucky. But believe me, even if you speak fluent French, you are faced with plenty of uphill. Like everyone else in the country, they have been given absolutely no incentive for being there, apart from the chance to wear a rather elegant designer uniform and a pair of black high-heeled shoes.
It is not hard to imagine a jet-lagged, world-weary media/gender expert stumbling into the wrong conference and only waking up (often literally) to his or her mistake two days later. Alone in a darkened and now deserted room, you are about to rise to your feet and give your stock concluding contribution to the list of conference resolutions when you realise that everyone else has left. Puzzled, you stuff your conference papers and half-eaten sandwiches into your Bandung II briefcase and rush out of the room, looking for that familiar blue hostess uniform with its red sash. Instead you find a whole new team of hostess chickies wearing grey shirts with black ties lining the walls. They shake their heads pityingly, shrugging that they know nothing about media, and especially gender. And especially gender in the media, or media and good -governance or, for that matter, good -governance and gender, just in case you were going to ask. More than her job’s worth.
There is more than a whiff in this of the vast gulf that separates these unbelievably expensive shindigs and the constituencies whose cause they claim to espouse. Ordinary people and their issues are never anywhere near the conference room. In fact, they are kept studiously at arms length, hidden away beyond well fortified gates with armed guards, their daily lives growing steadily worse in the sewage-lined quartiers populairs as the black presidential motorcades sweep towards another meeting with destiny in the air -conditioned sanctity of the King Fahd conference complex. And -others of that ilk dotted up and down the globe.
One of my well-connected informants on the ground reminds me over dinner that the poverty alleviation business is the biggest industry in the world at the present time. This may be a slight exaggeration, given the relentless spread of Coca-Cola and the Chinese steel and textile industries, among others.
But the point is well taken. Aid agencies wring their hands over the fact that the massacres and rapes of innocents at Darfur in Southern Sudan will continue at least until the end of next year — which means that they will not have to look elsewhere to keep themselves busy for at least that period of time. And, of course, much grist for the international conference mill will be generated to keep ancillary industries making a decent turnover. And at least there will be a semblance of job creation achieved in the production of thick documents that say very little, and ever more inventive uniforms for conference hostesses who don’t have a clue.
Dakar and Durban and Johannesburg, the back-slapping Nepad Nexus, will feel mightily empowered as Third World hosts of First World-style conferences.
Apart from that, nothing much will have changed.