Is a brave new world of social equity possible?
Story by RASNA WARAH | Publication Date: 1/22/2007 
www.nationmedia.com
the World Social Forum, where buzz-words such as "anti-globalisation" "democratisation", and "empowerment" will be chanted in the name of the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised, the disabled and the HIV-positive.
Forum organisers claim that this year's event - possibly the largest ever - will bring together hundreds of non-governmental and civil society organisations "opposed to neo-liberalism and a world dominated by capital or by any form of imperialism".
Protesters from around the world will rally around a variety of issues ranging from "ensuring universal and sustainable access to the common goods and nature" to "building a world of peace, justice, ethics and respect for diverse spiritualities".
Although events such as this are extremely important in bringing together like-minded people whose energy and enthusiasm can impact the global collective consciousness, one fact that seems to have eluded participants is that it is precisely this globalising neo-liberal world that makes jamborees like the World Social Forum possible. Before you throw a Molotov cocktail at me, let me explain.
First of all, the rapid growth of non-governmental and civil society organisations in the last two decades, particularly in Africa, is in itself a result of what the Tanzanian leftist intellectual, Prof Issa Shivji, refers to as "the neo-liberal offensive" that accompanied the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent democratisation drive on the continent.
While the demands made by these organisations to increase democratic space within their societies had positive benefits, such as a freer press and fairer elections, some analysts, such as Ji Giles Ungpakorn of Thailand, believe that the demands by NGOs to reduce the role of the State also dovetailed nicely with the neo-liberal demand to reduce taxation and spending on welfare.
Because service provision has now been appropriated by donor-funded NGOs and self-help groups, welfare has become a donor project rather than a State obligation.
Prof Shivji, in a brilliant address to the Symposium on NGOs held in Arusha in 2005, even went as far as claiming that "just as the colonial enterprise assumed the garb of a civilising mission and used the church as its avantgarde, so did the globalisation pundits put on the clothing of secular human rights and use NGOs as their ideological foot soldiers".
Because the neo-liberal discourse makes a villain of the African State and deifies NGOs, it creates a false dichotomy that assumes the moral superiority of the latter.
HOWEVER, BECAUSE NGOs, BY their very nature, derive not only their sustenance but their legitimacy from the donor community", their agendas are also determined by those same donor s.
Hence, issues on top of the donors' agenda, such as gender, development, environment and governance, dominate the NGO discourse.
This, says Firoze Manji, editor of the online journal, Pambazuka News, is because "the dominant discourse on development was framed?with the vocabulary of charity, technical expertise, neutrality, and a deep paternalism".
Even the hoi polloi - slum-dwellers and the like - who will be participating in the Forum will do so as a result of some donor- or NGO-funded project, as "showcases of poverty" who will be encouraged to give their testimonials on what life is really like at the bottom rung of society.
Their participation may boost the careers of the NGO elite that brought them to Nairobi, but will do little to change the reality of their lives.
One of the problems with civil society organisations championing the current anti-globalisation movement is that they have failed to rally around one key issue, which has had the net impact of generalising and diluting all the other issues.
So there is a vague sense that all is not right with the world, but no clear-cut solutions on how the political and economic landscape might be changed.
As journalist and author Thomas Friedman has noted, "These disparate groups are bound by a common sense that a world so dominated by global corporations . . . can't help but be a profoundly unfair world . . . hostile to the real interests of human beings . . . but when it comes to actually identifying what the real interests of human beings are and how they should be protected, these groups are as different as their costumes."
This fact was made evident to me when organisers of the event told me that there would be up to 1,000 events on different issues taking place simultaneously during a four-day period, or an average of 250 events a day. How is it possible to have one coherent voice on one issue when there are over a thousand issues to choose from?
If organisations participating in the World Social Forum are to have any real impact on the global power-structure, they must first examine, as Prof Shivji so eloquently put it, "the philosophical and political premises that underpin their activities . . . and must refuse to legitimise, rationalise and provide a veneer of respectability and morality to global pillage by voracious transnationals under the guise of creating a global village."
Ms Warah is a Nairobi-based writer and freelance journalist.