The Challenges Of Human Rights And Globalisation -

Thank you for that generous introduction. I am delighted to have to opportunity to share with you the journey my country South Africa has embarked upon towards attainment of a genuine democracy. I would like to gainsay the perception that this quest has been due to a miracle or that it was an event which is over. It is particular relevant to be with you who are on the threshold of your careers and full of potential to make a better world. Indeed our ten year old democracy is in no small part due to earlier generations of students inside and outside South Africa, who lent support to the struggle against apartheid and set the scene for the establishment for our non-racial democracy.

They protested, they marched, they militated for boycotts and disinvestment and generally helped shame their elders into seeing that the status quo in my country had to be changed as surely as the high schools of Little Rock had had to be desegregated years earlier.

My starting point is the intersection between human rights and globalization as seen from a South African perspective. These issues resonate deeply in a country like my own where so many were so long denied their fundamental rights, and where, in part because of that, globalization can be seen as such a double edged sword.

We defeated oppression, arbitrary arrest, torture, death squads and all the other machinery of a state devoted to denying the full and equal humanity of all our people.

Now we must secure our hard won human rights against all the conditions that still exist to render them hollow. The threat to our human rights is not simply the tyranny of men, but also the tyrannies of poverty, illiteracy, disease and marginalization.

These tyrannies are just as much an obstacle to the pursuit of happiness as any despotic regime. Does globalization reinforce them or is it a panacea against them? That is a question with which we are deeply engaged.

Apartheid denied millions of South Africans access to all but the most rudimentary education and skills and consigned them to abject poverty. As children not only did they not receive adequate education, they were denied adequate nutrition and health care as well.

What hope do these millions have of escaping poverty and earning decent livelihoods for themselves and their families when suddenly they find themselves having to compete on a global playing field?

Of course, we are not only talking about South Africans here, but about people - especially women -- who have been marginalized in one way or another in every corner of the world. How should our governments, our multilateral institutions and civil society respond? How do we as human beings respond?

Apartheid South Africa was a pariah state, increasingly isolated from the global economy. This isolation had severe long-term implications for the economy. By the end of the 80's the country was spiraling into an inescapable economic abyss. It was clear to all that without a democratic solution, there would be no winners, only losers, for generations to come.

If South Africa was to reintegrate successfully into the global economy - and there was consensus that that was the only way forward - we had to have peace and reconciliation. So we set ourselves some ground rules.

Together, as President Mbeki has said, we decided that in the search for a solution to our problems, nobody should be demonized or excluded. We agreed that everyone should become part of the solution, whatever they might have done or represented in the past - and this was to apply not just to negotiating the future of our country, but to working to build the new South Africa we had all negotiated.

We said there would be no Nuremburg trials for the crimes of apartheid. We wanted to find a way to forgive our compatriots and together forge a way forward. As the opening sentence of the Freedom Charter, the foundational document of our struggle states, South Africa belongs to all us. So we established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and offered amnesty for truth.

The essence of the TRC was that the truth would set us free from pain, uncertainty and hatred.

We also insisted that our new constitution be drafted as inclusively as possible. Our goal was that all our people feel they owned it and be proud of what we had accomplished together.

We all agreed that our people had the right not simply to be let alone by their government, but the right to be served and protected by it and to have their basic human needs met. So we enumerated access to such necessities as education, health care, clean water, shelter and nutrition as justiciable rights.

If our government is to meet its constitutional obligations, it is also obliged to promote and sustain generation of the necessary wealth.

The emphasis is on the word sustain. From the outset, we have taken the view that the only way to ensure a decent quality of life for all is through long-term economic growth. Thus it was that our first task was to tackle the macro economic challenges and to deal with the fundamentals of fiscal discipline, diversification of the economy and social programs to redress the legacy of apartheid. There would be no quick fixes.

Populism - defined as the politics of instant gratification or cheap pandering - is a luxury we must reject for the sake of our grandchildren, and for the sake of all those we buried in the fight to secure our inalienable rights. We are not going to sell cheap what cost us so dear.

This is how South Africa's Finance Minister Trevor Manuel put it in this year's budget speech: "we will seek assurance that a progressive realisation of economic development and social rights has been achieved without compromising sustainability and the legacy we pass our children's children."

Across a broad spectrum of social and development challenges - housing, municipal services, land restitution, access to health care, extension of the social security net, protection of workers' basic rights, access to legal aid, financial assistance to students - we have made real progress. And we have done it without tax hikes and without ballooning budget deficits.

The past decade has seen the construction of 1.6 million houses and 56 000 classrooms. 9 million people have gained ready access to clean water, 4 million to electricity, and 6 and half million to decent sanitation, none of whom had such things before. 7 and a half million acres of land have been redistributed, benefiting 700 000 families. 4.5 million children are getting free school meals. The number of people receiving income support of one form or another has grown to 7.4 million.

Nonetheless, one of the biggest challenges South Africa faces today is the high rate of unemployment.

No one disputes that this is in large measure a legacy of the fact that , for generations, the state deliberately denied the majority of our people just about everything that could have prepared them to compete in the global economy: education, training, advancement, business opportunity and access to productive assets.

One response would have been to maintain the kind of closed economy South Africa had before 1994 and to have engaged in a combination of labour-intensive import substitution and wholesale redistribution of wealth. History and experience told us that was a dead end.

We chose rather to open the economy, expose our companies and workers to global competition and create conditions for long-term growth. This would be driven by a diversified, export-oriented manufacturing base adding value to our low cost raw materials and energy.

We are becoming a world-class trading nation. Our companies are increasingly knitted into global supply and value chains. One result: cars and auto components are today a bigger export earner for us than gold. If you drive a recent BMW 3 series, it was probably made in South Africa.

We are starting to see returns on our strategy. Between March 2003 and March 2004, according to the latest labour force survey, employment increased by around 400 000, reducing the unemployment rate by three and a half percentage points.

We have a long way to go. We still have two economies.

The first is modern and all but indistinguishable from your own. It produces most of country's wealth, and is well integrated into the global economy.

The second remains home to a tragically large percentage of our people: the poorest of the rural and urban poor, contributing little to GDP, disconnected from the First and the global economy.

But by harnessing globalization with our first economy, we have made sure we continue to generate the resources we need to uplift the second and keep advancing in the fight against poverty and disease.

We are in a position, for example, to launch a New Deal-style public works programme. The aim is to employ significant numbers of unemployed on economically-valuable infrastructure projects where they will gain skills that will keep them employed after they leave the programme.

We are also in a position to roll out a treatment programme for HIV on a scale never before attempted by any country in the world. By the end of 2007 we plan to be treating 1,4 million people with antiretroviral drugs purchased out of our own budget revenues on a sustainable basis.

The South African Government has over time committed significant resources to transforming the public health sector, in particular in the fight against HIV and Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis. In order to meet these challenges, we have collaborated with the Clinton Foundation and continue to work with international partners including, donor countries such as the United States through the Presidential Emergency Program for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), pharmaceutical companies and the United Nations Global Fund.

This is an incredibly complex and often misunderstood undertaking. We're heading into unchartered territory, which is why we've taken so much time and care to getting ready. We are, however, confident that we will emerge from this epidemic with a first class public health and a globally competitive pharmaceuticals industry contributing to growth and employment.

You have perhaps detected some common threads in the way we have approached the challenges we face. We talk a lot about sustainability. We place a high value on building consensus. And we are very stubborn about developing our own solutions.

We are stubborn because we had to fight so long and hard for our people to become fully sovereign in their own land. The post-colonial world is full of examples in which liberation quickly turned into an exchange of yokes and did nothing to ease those other tyrannies I've spoken of - poverty and all its manifestations and causes.

We are also stubborn because the wreckage of bad advice, misguided choices and dashed hopes is all around and it has sustained a mindset which holds us in Africa to be victims, perennial indigents, global second class citizens.

The stabbing consciousness of that mindset drives our determination to succeed not just as South Africans, but as Africans, and to succeed in our own right, as the result of our own actions, choices and decisions.

That means taking globalization by the horns and making it work for us to achieve what President Mbeki has called the African Renaissance. First of all acknowledging that South Africa is not an island and that the potential wealth of Africa lies in its resources, its people and its culture and that these had to be harnessed into greater development.

The nations of Africa have come together to formulate a detailed blueprint for the continent's development. This is an initiative called the New Partnership for Africa's Development, or NEPAD.

NEPAD seeks to reverse the traditional donor-client relationship under which the donor countries of the industrialized North and multilateral institutions like the World Bank seek to assist African and other developing countries.

The donors and the institutions tend to work on a country by country and project by project basis. They have considerable influence on the policies of the clients, and their advice, while well-intended, often reflects their own assumptions and priorities rather than the realities to be addressed on the ground.

NEPAD presents the donors and institutions with a programme, including specific projects and priorities, on which consensus has been reached by Africans themselves as the best way forward to tackle poverty and underdevelopment on a continent-wide basis.

As President Mbeki has said, Africa, in agreeing on NEPAD, has taken responsibility for defining its ills, finding solutions and addressing them through its own strategies.

This does not mean we do not welcome initiatives like the US African Growth and Opportunity Act or the new Millennium Challenge Account. To the contrary. AGOA's grant of preferential access to US markets has boosted and helped diversify the exports of several African countries, including South Africa. We hope that through the MCA, a growing number of countries will receive substantial grants to undertake projects of their own design.

To receive AGOA benefits and MCA grants, countries have to meet certain conditions relating to good governance, the rule of law and respect for human rights. The MCA is premised on idea that aid delivers the best results in countries whose governments rule justly, invest in their people and have good economic policies.

The conditionalities contained in AGOA and MCA are questioned by some. But for us, perhaps the most important thing is that we should be setting and applying our own high standards for and to ourselves. To that end, NEPAD contains a peer review mechanism in which a growing number of countries are volunteering to participate.

Technically, NEPAD is the economic programme of the new African Union. The AU is the mechanism through which Africa means to take charge of its own destiny and set its own house in order.

Anyone who is serious about freedom and human rights in Africa, should get serious about the AU and become involved in building its institutions, its parliament, its councils, its courts.

The AU's Constitutive Act - now the law of the land in every member state - commits members to respect democratic principles and human rights, including popular participation and good governance.

The Union may apply sanctions to any member that fails to comply with its policies and decisions, and has established a court to adjudicate claims that members have violated their obligations.

If Africa is to integrate successfully into the global economy and address the tyrannies of underdevelopment, it must above all cease to be wracked by civil conflict that all but inevitably spills across borders and brings nations into conflict.

The AU, with its Peace and Security Council, is beginning to play a defining role in finding African solutions to African conflicts. It is working through mediation and the provision of peacekeepers to end the Darfur crisis in Sudan. Last week, it sent President Mbeki to help restore the shattered ceasefire and revive stalled peace process in Cote D'Ivoire.

Our experience in South Africa reminds us that lasting peace is something that cannot easily be imposed or coerced from outside. It must be based on the broadest possible consent and buy-in from all members of the society concerned.

The day we hope is coming when policymakers here and around the world react to crises in Africa by asking first: what is the AU doing, and how can we contribute?

We also hope the day is coming when the voices of Africa and other regions still struggling with the tyrannies of underdevelopment will have a permanent place in the decision-making bodies of the multinational institutions established to help them.

In his speech at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Mbeki expressed our frustration that the lofty goals the international community has set for itself -- on women's rights at the Beijing Summit, for example, or on reducing global poverty in the Millennium Declaration - are not being met.

"Have we achieved the goals we set ourselves", he asked, answering: "I have found it impossible not to answer that we have failed." Part of the reason, he went on to argue, that the people for whom the goals mattered most had the least power to see them implemented.

It is perhaps ironic that the one body most associated with globalization (and the one most often vilified) - the World Trade Organisation - is also the most democratic. Its decisions are arrived at through consensus so the voices of the poor must be heard in the writing of trade rules that have far-reaching impacts on their lives.

That is why the current round of trade negotiations is called the Doha Development Round, and why rich countries are being convinced to review agricultural and other policies that stunt the poor, especially Africa's poor.

We must seize whatever opportunities we can to defeat the tyrannies that still beset us. We are confident we will succeed whether or not global commitments are kept. You should be too.

If you care about human rights and democracy in Africa, if you want to see an Africa where scourges like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria are being tamed, if you want to see conflicts resolved, corruption corralled and child soldiers disarmed and in school, check whatever pre-existing assumptions you may have at the door and start paying attention to what Africans themselves are actually doing to solve their own problems.

Do not always assume that foreign experts and NGO's, however well-intentioned, have a better grasp on the facts than Africans themselves. Do not be beguiled into a mindset that sees Africans as victims. And do not automatically assume that when an African leader does not openly and stridently condemn human rights violations in another African country, that he is condoning or ignoring or otherwise doing nothing to find a sustainable solution.

We are problem solvers. We are pragmatists. We work by consensus. And we prefer long term solutions to quick, expedient fixes. But we are still revolutionaries: we want to hand succeeding generations a truly better world.