Thanks Doug, any advice you have on what follows would be warmly appreciated. Jhb ain't NYC but we do like to invoke context in our activism sometimes, too...
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Date sent: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 16:11:18 +0200 Subject: 15/11/99: Corrupt World Bank Out! and Jubilee South Summit
Announcement for two events:
Corrupt!Corrupt!Corrupt! Stop the World Bank
Barely a month ago, James Wolfensohn, World Bank President, blamed third world countries for corruption at the Durban anti- corruption summit. On 17 November, his organisation will be meeting to cover up the World Bank's role in the alleged corrupt activities of twelve of the biggest dam-building companies from the North. The World Bank is also guilty of selling out the promises of the RDP and preventing social delivery by supporting the iGoli 2002 plan to privatise Johannesburg. And through debt and structural adjustment programmes, the World Bank has re-colonised the African continent.
Shut down the Lesotho Highlands Water Project Stop iGoli 2002 Scrap the Debt End Poverty
Send the World Bank and IMF home! JOIN THE PROTEST! Support the Africa Day of Action Against Another of the Wicked Triplets, the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
* Outside the World Bank Offices
Pro-Equity Court, 1250 Pretorius Street, Hatfield, Pretoria * On Wednesday, 17 November * From 12 to 2 pm
For further information, contact Nicolas or George at 011 648 7000 or cansa at sn.apc.org
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THE JUBILEE SOUTH SUMMIT
>From 18 to 21 November, debt organisations and social
movements from Latin America, Asia and Africa will meet as the
South to thrash out a common southern perspective on Third World
Debt, International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural
adjustment and Northern domination over the South.
You are invited to the opening session of the Summit
* At the Eskom Conference Centre, Midrand * On Thurday, 18 November * 5.00 pm onwards
Welcoming Address and Outline of the Summit Objectives:
Molefe Tsele, Chair, Jubilee 2000 South Africa Keynote Addresses:
Bishop Mandlate, Mozambique
Archbishop Ndungane, Cape Town The Significance of Debt in the South African Context:
Blade Nzimande, South African Communist Party
To be followed by The Debt Play, performed by artists from Cape Town
For further information, contact Donna Andrews at 082 370 7999 or donna.andrews at usa.net, or Nicolas or George at 011 648 7000 or cansa at sn.apc.org
Campaign Against Neo-liberalism in South Africa (CANSA) 60 Isipingo Street, Bellevue East 2198 South Africa Tel: (27) (11) 648 7000 Email: cansa at sn.apc.org
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forthcoming, Business Day, 17/11/99
Will the World Bank halt corruption
and cancel debt?
by Patrick Bond and David Letsie
Today, in Pretoria, the World Bank meets on corruption associated with the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP). Bank president James Wolfensohn is said to have a strong interest in this case, and he now has a chance to put his money where his good-governance mouth is. After his speech to last month's Transparency International conference in Durban, expectations are high.
But they have been high in relation to Third World debt cancellation, too, because of the worldwide Jubilee 2000 movement. Wolfensohn has disappointed the Jubilee campaign by providing stingy relief tied to onerous conditions (such as his 1998 demand that Mozambican public health fees for impoverished clients be quintupled, in exchange for a meagre 9% annual payment reduction).
The Jubilee 2000 South-South Summit is being held later this week in Midrand. More than 200 representatives of debt groups from across the Third World are demanding that Wolfensohn fulfil his historic duty on the eve of the millennium, or face calls for a boycott and disinvestment campaign against World Bank bonds.
But the simpler issue on the agenda of today's Bank meeting is corruption, specifically the padding of Katse Dam construction costs by a "dirty dozen" multinational corporations, so as to fatten at least one official's Swiss bank account by at least R12 million.
The Bank catalysed the LHWP, project-managed many core components, lent Lesotho $150 million (which it should now cancel), and established a secret London trust as a way of circumventing mid-1980s anti-apartheid financial sanctions.
It was revealed in late September that the Bank also gave official support to the terribly corrupt LHWP head, Masupha Sole. In 1994, more than six years after Sole's reign of bribery began, a senior Bank official sent a strongly worded letter to the Lesotho government insisting no action be taken against Sole because it would "seriously jeopardize the progress of the project." Dubiously, the Bank claimed it was unaware Sole was about to be fired for corruption.
A closely-related background issue evokes corruption of a different type: the role the Bank plays behind the scenes in persuading South African officials to adopt its controversial views on water pricing and privatisation.
The Bank's March 1999 South Africa Country Assistance Strategy claims that Bank LHWP taskmanager John Roome's October 1995 "power-point presentation [was] instrumental in facilitating a radical revision in South Africa's approach to bulk water management." In stingy Bank style, Roome advised then-minister Kader Asmal to drop proposals for a free lifeline tariff and rising block tariffs because municipal "private concessions [would be] much harder to establish"; to establish a "credible threat of cutting service" to non-paying consumers; and to be "very careful about irrigation for `previously disadvantaged' South Africans."
Moreover, a proposed $750 million World Bank loan for infrastructure apparently now under consideration would, if deputy resident representative Junaid Achmad has his way, promote municipal services privatisation, including Johannesburg's controversial iGoli 2002 corporatisation plan.
The iGoli plan also envisages a mass transition of low- income Johannesburg residents into pit-latrine ghettoes. This followed the argument by Achmad in a 1994 plan for urban infrastructure--adopted in revised form in 1997--that the SA government should not provide a basic free supply of water to urban low-income households for the purpose, in part, of improving sanitary hygiene.
Achmad offered this advice with no reference to the public health, environmental and gender implications of dumping excrement directly through porous dolomitic soils into a high water table--even though in 1991 when such a strategy was applied by apartheid bureaucrats in Winterveld, cholera broke out.
No wonder Johannesburg's policy has been nicknamed "eColi 2002."
But Johannesburg now faces a spectacular contradiction associated with Bank advice: the enormous waste of money associated with the first two LHWP dams.
The main reason why Vaal water which until 1995 cost R0,30 per cubic metre is being augmented by Lesotho water that is five times as expensive, is that the Bank overestimated the expected demand for LHWP water in Gauteng by 40%, it now admits.
The same mistake is being made with the Mohale Dam, now under construction, which should be delayed for many years while tough water conservation and redistribution measures are adopted.
A triple threat is therefore emerging for the World Bank:
* firstly, that when more Bank loans for Lesotho dams
are pushed upon unwilling Gauteng water consumers, they
will be increasingly--and justifiably--unwilling to pay;
* secondly, that Bank ideas about water infrastructure
policy--especially Achmad's promotion of mass pit
latrine installation in Johannesburg--will be rejected
by the "beneficiaries"; and
* thirdly, that municipal worker, community and
political protest will derail the privatisation of
Johannesburg.
These errors of technical and political judgment are coming to a head, just as Wolfensohn addresses the LHWP corruption crisis. A wide range of social, community and labour movements have united in protest, including the SA Municipal Workers Union, SA Students Congress, Jubilee 2000, township civic groups, and the Campaign Against Neoliberalism in South Africa.
For not only have Achmad, Roome and other staff erred in policy and project work, so too did Wolfensohn probably overstate his institution's commitment to fighting corruption at the Transparency International conference in Durban last month. After all the hype about how corruption causes poverty, and how the Bank must fight corruption to fight poverty, expectations are high that Wolfensohn will debar the major corporations implicated in LHWP bribery.
Many of the dozen companies--including ABB of Switzerland, Impregilio of Italy, Lyonnais des Eaux' Dumez subsidiary of France, not to mention Anglo American Corporation and Group 5--are still active in current Bank projects, including the Mohale Dam.
But will Wolfensohn have sufficient will to blacklist the big firms whose big Northern governments ultimately pay his salary?
Sadly, his lack of will on Third World debt cancellation is telling. Minister Alec Erwin was right to label Northern reluctance "criminal, just criminal" at a World Economic Forum meeting this year.
The same anger will emerge today, if Wolfensohn and Bank staff merely wink and nod at the dirty dozen.
Patrick Bond is a Wits political economist and David Letsie is an Alexandra activist. They submitted invited testimony to last week's World Commission on Dams Southern Africa hearing.
Patrick Bond (Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management) home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094, Johannesburg office: 22 Gordon Building, Wits University Parktown Campus mailing address: PO Box 601 WITS 2050 phones: (h) (2711) 614-8088; (o) 488-5917; fax 484-2729 emails: (h) pbond at wn.apc.org; (o) bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za