Hey, Ian, two interesting things to keep an eye on: the global sell-out by the UN mainly based on privatisation ("Public Private Partnerships" and "Type 2 Outcomes"), and the simmering conflict within South Africa between the various factions of the left... I'll report back on the latter in a few days. Here's some background on the host city:
(version forthcoming in New Internationalist)
Unsustainable Johannesburg
Patrick Bond describes why "Jo'burg" is not a fit city to host a world environment summit
Symbolically, the post-apartheid geography of Johannesburg--whose retained name commemorates Johannes Risski, the 19th century surveyor of the stolen land--hints at why the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development-better known as "Rio+10"--cannot be expected to deliver either the environmental or poverty-reduction goods.
Flying in to Africa's main commercial complex, you break through a thick brown cloud of particulates. The cold dry season (it won't have rained for the past four months) and temperature inversions are the natural reasons Johannesburg's 1500 meter elevation and brisk winter winds still don't provide clean air in August.
Viewed from the air, smudges of human fingerprints are everywhere to partake: concentrated industrial pollution over the east-west factory strip and power plants; gold-mine dumps to the south of the city which perpetually blow sand and dust; periodic bush fires; and the ongoing use of coal and fuelwood for cooking and heating in black townships like Soweto and Alexandra. Across the country, electricity privatisation has led to supply cut-offs for more than a million households who cannot afford price increases for the cleaner form of energy. From the air, be thankful that you do not experience the most dangerous results, such as the re-emergence of tuberculosis and other rampant respiratory infections that threaten the lives of South Africa's five million HIV+ people.
Just before landing, you are, however, close enough to notice the silvery glinting of thousands of tiny metal-roofed shacks in the bright sun, like cauterised wounds on the yellowish skin of a wintry Africa. The township slums stretch to the horizon, and house the majority of Gauteng Province's ten million inhabitants. But because of a stingy government policy based on World Bank advice in mid-1994 (shortly after Nelson Mandela was elected president), Johannesburg's post-apartheid squatter camps and meagre new formal residential areas for low-income black residents are actually further away from job opportunities and are worse served with community amenities, schools and clinics, than even apartheid-era ghettoes.
Looking down, your eyes are soon drawn away to the bright green of well-watered english gardens and thick alien trees that shade traditionally-white--now slightly desegregated--suburbs, permeated by ubiquitous sky-blue swimming pools. To achieve the striking effect, Johannesburg abuses water. Waste occurs not only in the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois residential zones sprawling north and east of the city centre, but in the southern mining belt and the corporate-dominated farms on the city's outskirts.
Further scarce water is used for cooling coal-burning electricity generators. South Africa brags about supplying the world's cheapest energy for industrial use, because it doesn't price in the damage to the environment, including the world's worst global greenhouse gas emissions corrected for population size and income.
Gold was discovered here in 1886, immediately drawing thousands of fortune hunters and proletarians. Johannesburg soon became the planet's largest metropolis with no substantial natural water source. Sixty 60 kms to the south, the Vaal River is pumped uphill to Johannesburg, but by the 1980s it became apparent that the source would be insufficient for the next century.
Apartheid-era engineers and World Bank project officers tried to solve the looming shortages with a dam and tunnel scheme that draws water several hundred kms from across a mountain range atop the small and perpetually impoverished nation of Lesotho. Africa's largest infrastructure project, costing an estimated $8 billion if all six dams are built, the project is now less than half finished but has already displaced tens of thousands of Basotho peasants, inundated sacred land and threatened the Orange River's downstream ecosystem.
Who pays the bills? Johannesburg water prices went up by 35% during the late 1990s, but township residents in the lowest consumption tier found themselves paying 55% more because of the cost of the Lesotho dams, which Pretoria wanted to finance during the mid-1980s so as to break apartheid-era financial sanctions. The World Bank set up a secret London account to facilitate matters, overriding objections from the black liberation movement, including its then representative in Ireland, Kader Asmal.
As South Africa's water minister from 1994-99, Asmal was chosen to chair the 1998-2000 World Commission on Dams. Entangled in the massive contradictions and hypocrisies, he refused to let the Commission study the Lesotho dam and angrily rejected grassroots demands--from Alexandra, Soweto and Lesotho--that hedonistic water users in the mines, factories and mansions be responsible for paying the dam's bills and conserving water so as to prevent future dam construction. Such "demand-side management" would also have included repair of perpetual leaks in the apartheid-era township infrastructure, where half of Soweto's water is lost.
Bankers were anxious to continue financing, and construction companies ready to keep building the multi-billion dollar dams. The World Bank's Inspection Panel refused a full investigation of township residents' complaints in 1998, after Bank official James MacNeill--formerly Brundtland Commission general secretary--whitewashed a preliminary enquiry. The Bank's US executive director and behind-the-scenes power, Jan Piercy, refused to even meet Alexandra township critics during her 1998 stay at a nearby Sandton luxury hotel.
The Bank also went to great lengths to protect a corrupt senior official in the project, Masupha Sole, from being fired, in spite of documented bribes to his Swiss bank account by a dozen of the world's largest construction companies over a decade's time (1988-98). Not only did the Bank refuse to bar the companies from further contracts, but it withdrew promised financial support for their public prosection in Lesotho.
Then in 2001, Pretoria's current water minister Ronnie Kasrils announced a halt to further dam construction once two of the five mega-dams are completed in 2004. Yet no environmentalist or community activist trusts Kasrils' instincts, in the wake of his 2001 rejection of the Dam Commission report and his trip to China's ultra-destructive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, which he inexplicably endorsed.
As is true across the world, Johannesburg's worsening environmental mess is mainly due to the logic of capital accumulation, at a time of rampant environmental deregulation associated with the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio. South Africa's traditionally racist and pollution-intensive companies have been embraced by a grateful black elite, including sleazy politicians and the neoliberal officials who control many arms of the government.
To be sure, the onset of free-market economic policies based on an export-orientation fetish preceded Mandela's African National Congress government by a few years. But a small clique of "new guard" ANC officials today work closely with the leftover "old guard" bureaucrats whose commitment to racial apartheid has been forgotten but who prosper just as nicely while building class apartheid.
Together, the ruling party and its new-found Afrikaner co-conspirators have allowed the vast bulk of rich white people's loot to escape through relaxing already porous exchange controls; let the largest firms relocate their financial headquarters to London, hence sucking out profit and dividend flows forever; cut corporate tax rates from 48% in 1994 to 30% five years later in search of new investment that never materialised; watched aimlessly as business fired a fifth of all formal-sector workers; allowed industries like clothing, footwear and appliances to collapse under international competition; incessantly privatised once-formidable public assets; provided pollution permits to some of the world's most irresponsible companies (such as the infamous Iscor iron and steel polluters of Vaal River water); and now aim to dump vast taxpayer funds into bizarre projects like "Blue IQ" (to make smart Johannesburgers smarter and leave the rest behind) and the "Gautrain" rail system linking the airport to Sandton, central Johannesburg and Pretoria for what are unselfconsciously termed "elite" passengers.
The ANC's "Igoli 2002" privatisation plan, drafted alongside World Bank consultants, was renamed by critics "E.coli 2002" for a reason worth reviewing. Excrement from pit latrines in Johannesburg's slums--which are still not supplied by the French water privatiser Suez, beneficiary of the world's largest water commercialisation contract--despoiled Sandton's borehole water supplies in February 2001.
As cholera devastated the countryside and spread to Alexandra at the same time, internationally televised apartheid-style forced removals were the answer. Likewise, when non-violent protesters marched to mayor Amos Masondo's house in April 2002 against evictions and the cut-offs of water and electricity due to unaffordability, his bodyguard responded by pumping eight rounds of live ammo into the crowd, wounding two. Emblematically for the South African "justice" system, 87 Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee protesters (including elderly people and minors) were arrested and jailed for ten days before getting a bail hearing, while the bodyguard remained at large.
The Johannesburg landscape is also being defaced by other greed-driven processes, including bank "redlining" (denial of loan access) in many townships and inner-city sites of racial desegregation such as cosmopolitan but poverty-stricken Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville. Slum landlords from the kombi-taxi sector are running down huge inner-city blocks of flats while government officials yet again attempt the gentrification of the Newtown arts district which wealthy whites remain too fearful to patronise.
One reason is ongoing "crime and grime" downtown, in spite of a new camera surveillance system that Foucault would have admired. The old Central Business District spent the 1990s being virtually emptied of professionals, with more than two-thirds of office space vacant at one point and Africa's largest prestige building--the Carlton Centre--sold in 2000 at 5% of its 1974 construction costs.
Where, then, aside from London and "EsCapeTown," did smart money flee? Fifteen kilometers northeast of the old CBD, the edge-city of Sandton attracted billions of dollars worth of 1990s commercial property investment, as well as world-class traffic jams, nouveau-riche conspicuous consumption and discordant postmodern architecture. Only the world's most least socially conscious financial speculators would trash their ex-headquarters downtown to build a new city while draining South Africa of capital. Only the most aesthetically-barren rich would build their little Tuscanies on Africa's beautiful highveld (prairies), behind three-meter high walls adorned with barbed wire to keep out the criminals.
The environmental destruction, malgovernance, political repression, social hypocrisy and parasitical financial activity together attract a backlash, of course. What was by all accounts the world's most impressive urban social movements, the South African "civics," were systematically demobilised during the mid-1990s but have arisen again in several Johannesburg townships through the Anti-Privatisation Forum network. Municipal workers and other public sector unions often demonstrate against grievances. Mass anti-privatisation marches of workers and residents are not uncommon.
Yet the 2001-02 fragmentation of the various WSSD hosting committees--the UN Civil Society Secretariat, the South African Multi-stakeholder Forum set up by trade union and church leaders, and some independent-left social movements--symbolises why power relations remain so skewed. Still, elite Johannesburg's repeated attacks on both ecology and the poor will inevitably lead to a genuine "Social Forum" process, as the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre achieves to some extent.
And like the corporate-controlled WSSD itself, Johannesburg will continue to self-delegitimise the very idea of "sustainable development"--until the grassroots, shopfloor, women, youth, church and environmental comrades get their acts together and take power away from those old and new rulers who have made such a mess of Africa's wealthiest city.