African rights champions like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and environmentalist Wangari Maathai will join thousands of fellow campaigners when the continent hosts a global anti-capitalist jamboree for the first time this weekend.
Organisers predict more than 80 000 people will descend on Kenya’s self-declared ”Green City In The Sun” — Nairobi — to campaign over trade, poverty, war and the environment at the seventh annual World Social Forum.
The forum, attended in the past by left-wing leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, began in 2001 as a counter-balance to the annual gathering of business and government leaders in Davos, Switzerland.
Problems afflicting the world’s poorest continent, Africa, are sure to top the packed and chaotic-looking agenda of the six-day meeting from Saturday.
The meeting kicks off with an anti-poverty march from Nairobi’s Kibera slum — home to about 800 000 people and one of the biggest informal settlements in Africa — to Uhuru Park named after the Swahili word for freedom when British rule ended in Kenya.
Some of the participants were due to drive to Kenya in a massive caravan of buses, vans and cars originating from places as far as Cape Town, South Africa, and Lusaka, Zambia.
The main events will centre round the Kasarani sports complex in the outskirts of Nairobi, also named the ”Moi International Sports Centre” for Kenya’s previous president Daniel arap Moi, whose 24-year rule ended in 2002.
Debt cancellation
Edward Oyugi, a member of the organising committee, said the event was intended to stimulate challenges to the world’s capitalist social order.
”At the end of the forum, there will be more people questioning why we have adopted a market-driven economy, why we don’t challenge debt and say it should be repudiated,” Oyugi, who heads a Kenyan non-governmental organisation, told Reuters.
While no heads of state were due this year, South Africa’s anti-apartheid campaigner Tutu and Kenyan activist Maathai — both Nobel laureates — were due to provide some star turn.
The world forum, which began in Porto Alegre in Brazil, comes this year just days before the World Economic Forum in the Alpine resort of Davos from January 27.
Stalled global trade talks will be a key theme at Davos.
Activists say fairer trade rules, including an end to First World farm subsidies and less tariffs for Third World goods, are key to combating crippling poverty in Africa and elsewhere.
During last year’s World Social Forum in Venezuela, thousands — led by firebrand president Chávez — marched against United States ”imperialism” and the Iraq war. Organisers of the Nairobi event predicted similar protests over debt and poverty.
”We have already paid much more than we borrowed, so why should we continue paying debts when people are dying of hunger and disease?” said Wahu Kaara, of the Kenya Debt Relief Network.
Although it has the largest economy and is one of the most stable nations in east Africa, host country Kenya nevertheless encapsulates many of the problems under the microscope.
HIV/Aids has devastated the Kenyan population, while more than half of its 35-million people live on less than a dollar a day.
Organisers face a logistical nightmare housing participants, with many expected to put up in tents or in local homes. – Reuters