ANTI-CORRUPTION NOW! will carry relevant information to its members and partners on anti-corruption initiatives and programmes that TI-Z is embarking on. This information should be of use and interest to the public, as well as officials in the public and private sectors. The first edition carries background information on the mission and objectives of TI-Z, articles on the Presidential Elections, and unfinished cases of corruption.

The eve of the WSSD is an opportune moment to reflect on the meaning of 'sustainable development', its genesis, the road it has traversed and what it means for the peoples of the world. More importantly, it is an opportunity to assess whether the rhetoric of sustainable development has the potential to shift the emphasis from wealth generation and bring wellbeing of the world's peoples into centre-stage of societal concerns.

Increased migration is one of the most visible and significant aspects of globalisation: growing numbers of people move within countries and across borders, looking for better employment opportunities and better lifestyles. National and international policies need to reflect the contribution of migration to sustainable development, and to explicitly protect the rights of migrants which are all too often ignored in attempts to curb their movement.

For sustainable development to mean anything people must be healthy enough to benefit from it and not have their lives cut off prematurely. Development without health is meaningless. But the processes that are likely to occur in a world undergoing globalisation, climate change, urbanisation, population increase and many other changes, will impact on human health in many complex ways. Some of them will benefit us, others will create new threats to survival and health, while many others will have a complex mixture of threats.

It makes perfect sense to link human rights to sustainable development: the right to life cannot be realized without basic rights to safe water, air and land. A human rights approach allows the quality of life of all people to be a central part of decision-making.

Current development approaches often exacerbate existing tensions, create new reasons for violence and undermine conflict resolution mechanisms that are already in place. Approaches based on short term goals that are mechanistic and driven by indicators that fail to take people into account can only lead to increased violence and a breakdown of the very development they seek to achieve, argues a document for the WSSD formulated by the Peace and Development Movement.

The civic society in Zimbabwe is getting ready to be part of proceedings at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). The focus for some is to be able to link up with the civic movement in South Africa and internationally as common issues are addressed with the hope of sustaining a coherent and permanent civic coalition in the region and internationally. Some are looking forward to making submissions to lobby the leaders of various nations on particular issues.

A leading UN agency on Wednesday called on aid groups to rethink how they tackle humanitarian crises in Southern Africa following indications that people are poorer than they were five years ago.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) will have to reflect on poverty, inequality, HIV/Aids and trade inequalities -- all of which are central to the achievement of the
millennium's development goals. All of these highlight the importance of the
summit in as much as they threaten to derail it.

Development NGOs operating in Africa have inadvertently become part of the neo-liberal global agenda, serving to undermine the battle for social justice and human rights in much the same way as their missionary predecessors, argues a paper in the July issue of International Affairs. The paper says that the contribution of NGOs to relieving poverty is minimal, while they play a “significant role” in undermining the struggle of African people to emancipate themselves from economic, social and political oppression. In this compromised position, NGOs face a stark choice: They can move into the political domain and support social movements that seek to challenge a social system that benefits a few and impoverishes the majority; or they can continue unchanged and thus become complicit in a system that leaves the majority in misery.

Entitled ‘The Missionary Position: NGOs and Development in Africa’, and co-authored by Firoze Manji and Carl O’Coill, the paper traces the emergence and role of NGOs on the continent from their missionary beginnings through to the discourse of ‘development’ that emerged in the post-independence period and the later influence of structural adjustment programmes and globalisation.

Beginning in colonial Africa, the paper argues that missionary organisations played a key role in winning the ideological war that supported the colonial apparatus. “While colonial philanthropy may have been motivated by religious conviction, status, compassion or guilt, it was also motivated by fear. In Britain and the colonies alike, politicians frequently alluded to the threat of revolution and actively encouraged greater interest in works of benevolence as a solution to social unrest. In short, charity was not only designed to help the poor, it also served to protect the rich.”

In some cases, charitable organisations “actively” helped to suppress anti-colonial struggles, as was the case in Kenya, where the Women’s Association, Maendeleo Ya Wanawake (MYWO) and the Christian Council of Kenya (CCK) were both involved in government-funded schemes designed to subvert black resistance during the ‘Mau Mau’ uprising.

But independence created a crisis for these organisations because they had in many cases opposed nationalistic tendencies. However, instead of dying a natural death they were in fact able to prosper – a result Manji and O’Coill argue was due to the emergence of the ‘development NGO’ on the national and international stage.

Independence, they argue, had forced missionary societies and charitable organisations to reinvent their attitude of ‘trusteeship’ associated with colonial oppression. They did this by replacing white staff with black and revamping their ideological outlook by appropriating the new discourse on ‘development’ in place of overt racism.

The difference was in name only, say the authors. Development discourse was flawed from the beginning because non-Western people were defined by their divergence from Western cultural standards. “While the vision of ‘development’ appeared to offer a more inclusive path to ‘progress’ than had previously been the case, in fact the discourse was little more than a superficial reformulation of old colonial prejudices.”

However, during this time period NGOs were regarded by development agencies as playing a peripheral role in development, with the state assuming overarching responsibility for this role. This meant that the role of NGOs in the post-independent period remained marginal.

This was set to change with a new set of political circumstances that led to a boom in NGOs on the continent. The late 1970s saw the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, with both leaders championing the concept of the minimalist state. According to this outlook the state had to take a backseat in development and create the economic conditions for the accumulation of wealth by a minority. The rest of society would begin to benefit when growth “trickled down” from the wealthy. This neo-liberal agenda “radically” altered the landscape of development practice say Manji and O’Coill.

African countries were at this time heavily in debt and this gave the multilateral lending agencies the leverage they needed to impose their neo-liberal policy demands, something that was not always popular with African people. Manji and O’Coill argue that unhappiness with economic adjustment and its polices was often widespread and led to demonstrations that were sometimes violently suppressed. The protests in turn led to an attempt by lending agencies to present a “human face” to their policies. What emerged was the ‘good governance’ agenda of the 1990s and the decision to co-opt NGOs and other civil society organisations to a repackaged programme of welfare provision.

NGOs suddenly found themselves in the situation where they usurped the state as the provider of social services to the ‘vulnerable’ and became the beneficiaries of funds intended to mitigate the inequalities of adjustment policies. This had a “profound” impact on the sector and together with an increase in their function as a conduit for government aid led to dramatic growth in the number of NGOs in Africa.

Globalisation therefore led to a “loss of authority” by African states over social development and policy. At the same time, Manji and O’Coill point out, social conditions worsened because of external controls over areas such as health, education and welfare measures and social programmes, tax concessions on profits, liberalisation of price controls, and dismantling of state owned enterprises.

In fact, development appears to have failed, says the paper, with real per capita GDP falling and welfare gains achieved after independence reversed. Per-capita incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa fell by 21 percent in real terms between 1981 and 1989. In 16 other Sub-Saharan countries per capita incomes were lower in 1999 than in 1975.

The situation in which NGOs thrived, was therefore one of continued poverty and an increase in armed conflict. “As African governments increasingly become pushed into becoming caretakers of what might be described as the peripheral Bantustans of globalisation, are we seeing a return to the colonial paradigm in which social services are delivered on the basis of favour or charity and their power to placate?”

Manji and O’Coill state that NGOs have come to be preferred to the state as providers of services. “Development NGOs have become an integral, and necessary, part of a system that sacrifices respect for justice and rights. They have taken the ‘missionary position’ – service delivery, running projects that are motivated by charity, pity and doing things for people (implicitly who can’t do it for themselves), albeit with the verbiage of participatory approaches.”

Manji and O’Coill use the example of apartheid South Africa to illustrate the choice open to NGOs. NGOs either supported the emerging movements that aimed to topple the Nationalist regime or they kept quiet – a position tantamount to complicity with a system of exploitation.

“The challenge that both local and Western NGOs face in making this choice will be that funding – at least from the bilateral and multilateral agencies – will not necessarily be forthcoming to support the struggle for emancipation. But then, one would hardly have expected the apartheid regime in South Africa to have funded the movement that brought about the downfall of the regime,” the paper concludes.

Published in International Affairs, 78:3 (2002) 567-83.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has expressed concern at the constitution of the new African Union (AU), which it says does not protect the right to press freedom.

President Denis Sassou-Nguesso promised to fight corruption as he was sworn in Wednesday after winning this central African nation's first elections since back-to-back civil wars.

The Center for Democratic Development (CDD)has called for the formulation of a framework for Corruption Impact Analysis (CIA) to evaluate and assess the acceptability of important policy measures, laws and regulations to mitigate corruption.

The biggest attempt to tackle the Earth's worsening environment problems and help the planet's poorest gets underway in less than two weeks, but already the prospect of failure hangs over the Johannesburg summit. Wrangling over textual nuances, squabbling over financial commitments and a doctrinal row between Europe and Washington could hollow out the summit, transforming the second Earth Summit into a ludicrous exercise in hot air.

I enjoy your newsletter, usually read through it, and follow up links to specific stories. I have also passed on copies to colleagues working in development. Keep it up.

The best way to understand the Bush Administration's attitude toward Africa is to look at what took place during the G-8 summit in Canada recently. In everything leading up to the summit it was made clear to the world that the focus was to be on Africa. Leaders from the continent presented a plan to secure about $60 billion in aid to jumpstart an economic development plan. While cynics expected nothing from the G-8, the presidents of South Africa, Nigeria and Senegal were cautiously optimistic. Turns out that the cynics were correct. The G-8 promised no new financial assistance; packaged $6 billion in already-promised aid as if it were something new; and waved their fingers at the continent, insisting that Africans open up their economies to greater penetration from the West, as well as take greater action to fight corruption.

A senior government minister has accepted that corruption is a problem following allegations levelled by Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group.

Dear Colleagues
The Crisis in Zimbabwe Committee will be hosting a feedback meeting for all CSO heads on Friday, the 23rd of August 2002, at OTD . The meeting will start at 0830hrs in the morning, up to lunch. This is a follow-up to the meetings held in May and June 2002.

I am researching for the Global Centre for Health and Economic Development, New York at Columbia University. I am working on formulating a task force to work on controling and eliminating HIV/AIDS under the UN Millenial Development Goals Project. The task force will consist of 'leaders' and organisations who/which have shown committment or have distinguished themselves in any aspect of HIV/AIDS from any part of the world.

A major report published this week by the International Bar Association (IBA) exposes how threats to freedom and justice have triggered off a chain reaction putting millions of people in Malawi under threat of famine.