“Too Important to Be a Spectator Sport . . . "

Vol. 7, No. 3

September, 2004

by Njoki Njoroge Njehu
50 Years Is Enough Network

“Too Important to Be a Spectator Sport . . . "
by Njoki Njoroge Njehu
50 Years Is Enough Network

On the first day of the Republican National Convention, U.S. President
George W. Bush, speaking to workers in Wheeling, West Virginia, defended
the war and occupation in Iraq as a "catastrophic success." In a Time
Magazine interview he defines that as “…being so successful so fast that an
enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to
fight another day". I looked up the words “catastrophic” and “success” in The
Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and on the thesaurus on my
computer, both sources have almost identical definitions. Catastrophic is
associated with the following words “disastrous, shattering, calamitous,
appalling, terrible, ruinous, tragic, cataclysmic.” Success is associated with
“achievement, accomplishment, victory, triumph.” I have no doubt that the use
of the phrase “catastrophic success” was much tested in focus groups: it is just
too calculated to be another verbal misadventure of the kind that Bush is
famous for. It is a calculated phrase that is both boastful, but also
acknowledges the terrible price paid in lives -- some lives that is.

Living and working in Washington, DC one can often feel disconnected from
the rest of the world. It feels like we live in a more and more cynical time, a
time when words, events, activities, and actions are crafted and manipulated
to produce a desired reality. And then the media and pundits line up to
analyze and declare the manufactured reality as genuine. Nothing is more
indicative of this right now than the U.S. presidential electoral process;
“catastrophic success” is only the latest in a long line of well-crafted,
manipulated realities and sound bites.

It makes it harder to be hopeful. Yes, harder to be hopeful, but not impossible.
After all, the first day of the Republican National Convention was preceded by
a march of hundreds of thousands of people under the banner “Say No to the
Bush Agenda.” Yes, repeated news of the death of the movements for justice
is not only premature, but greatly exaggerated. Conventional wisdom has it
that is hard to get and/or hold the U.S. public’s attention about many important
issues in a presidential election year. Convention wisdom also has it that
U.S. presidential elections do not turn on foreign policy issues. Perhaps 2004
is the year that this particular brand of conventional wisdom gets dethroned.

This year is significant for different reasons, among them the 200th
anniversary of Haiti’s independence, the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the
return of the Olympic Games to Greece, and the 60th anniversary of the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Haiti is mired in political
crisis, again. The anniversary of D-Day hearkened to a war that laid waste to
life, land, and three continents, and raised the specter of a so-called “good
war” – a category the Bush Administration tried to carry over to the declaration
of war against Iraq. The return of the modern Olympic Games to Greece
seemed to produce a bumper crop of naysayers and prophets of doom using
the country’s former reputation as one of the “backward” countries in Europe
and predicting massive infrastructure snafus and terrorist attacks. The 60th
anniversary of the IMF & World Bank continues to focus attention on the
disastrous legacy of the institutions, the decades of campaigning for
accountability, debt cancellation, community rights, etc., and how much we
still have to do. There is energy, hope, and inspiration in looking back at
where we have come from. And there is energy, hope, and inspiration in
looking forward to where we need to get to win justice and in facing the
challenges that threaten the future of peoples and the planet.

We have come far and there is too much at stake this year, and I don’t just
mean who wins the U.S. presidential election. There is another presidency
that looms large for IFI campaigners. The term of World Bank president
James Wolfensohn ends in June 2005. The Bank’s sister institution, the IMF,
recently changed its top leadership, and for the second time in four years its
most powerful members insisted on a closed and opaque process, restricted
to Western European candidates as always, despite growing criticism around
the world – and even from within its own board. Eleven board members,
representing 126 countries, issued a public demand for a more open process
that would consider candidates from any part of the world. Their effort, an
unprecedented public display of divisions on the IMF Board, was
acknowledged only with an agreement to interview an Egyptian candidate –
and then only after the decision had been made. Part of the “unwritten
agreement” that allots that post to Western Europe is the awarding of the right
to name the President of the World Bank to the President of the United States.

Whether Bush or Kerry wins the election, the U.S. is nearly certain to insist on
retaining its prerogative. The candidates for the post might be different (the
most intriguing suggestions circulating are Colin Powell and Al Gore, for the
Republicans and Democrats, respectively), but until the Bank is willing to
democratize and become transparent, there can be little hope for other
improvements.

Despite a lot of talk about transparency and democracy/democratic process,
the World Bank, the G8, and other governments continue to partake in these
deeply flawed processes of choosing institutional leaders. Together with the
secretive and undemocratic day-to-day decision-making at the IFIs, the
blatantly politicized selection process deepens the lack of credibility that
assails the IMF and World Bank even as they profess transparency and
accountability, and demand it of the countries they lend to.

A case in point, a session entitled “How to Make Accountability Mechanisms
Effective” which is billed as “Part of the World Bank/IMF Program of Seminars”
during their joint annual meetings in October. The session will be moderated
by Edith Brown Weiss, who is Chair of World Bank’s The Inspection Panel
while the panelists for the session are Peter Eigen, head of Transparency
International (and former World Bank official) and Rajendra Pachuri,
Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It should not
require much imagination to think that representatives of communities that
have needed or that have availed themselves of the “Accountability
Mechanisms” should be part of the panel to give it some ‘accountability.’

For IMF and World Bank campaigners (many of whom support international
debt cancellation, indigenous and community rights, environmental
protection, transparency and accountability of the institutions and oppose the
external imposition of economic policies and privatization of basic rights and
services, such as water, health, education, etc.) the inconsistencies, the flaws,
and the failures of the global economic system need challenging and
changing. As the institutions mark their 60th anniversary they, as well as civil
society, must evaluate and guard against a march forward with little or no
accountability for their performance in the last six decades. International
debts continue to grow, in spite of all manners of initiatives and policy
prescriptions – such as structural adjustment programs -- meant to address
the crisis. Life expectancy in many countries, especially in Africa, keeps
falling. Access to basic rights is shrinking with ever-expanding privatization.

We need to fight for true human security, especially in these times when there
is so much talk of imminent danger, inevitable terrorist attacks, and the need
for security. It would serve all well to think about real security, human security
which addresses the gaps and impoverishment that many in our world suffer.
Not because, as some including Wolfensohn argued after the attacks of
September 11, 2001, ‘poverty breeds terrorism’, but because the fates of the
haves and have-nots are conjoined. The late Mahbub ul-Haq, the original
creator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human
Development Reports best defined human security when he said, "In the last
analysis, human security means a child who did not die, a disease that did not
spread, an ethnic tension that did not explode, a dissident who was not
silenced, a human spirit that was not crushed. The imperatives of this human
security have become universal, indivisible, and truly global today." This
definition and its fulfillment is imperative, as a goal and as an ideal.

The work of all who claim to care about the poor, to care about justice, peace,
sustainability, accountability, human rights, and other progressive ideals must
be measured by how our works advance what ul-Haq defined as human
security. We must build on what has been achieved so far and then deliver
even more. We cannot afford to fail. And we won’t. We stand on the very tall
shoulders of movements, organizations, campaigns, and individuals that have
come and gone before us. We follow a path blazed and marked with the
sweat, blood, and tears of many. We can rest if we need to, but we cannot tire
or give up when so many have given so much of their lives, skills, talents, and
resources in the struggles for peace, justice, dignity, and sustainability.

At the end of the day, no matter who is the next president of the United States
or of the World Bank, we will still have much to do. There is much that is
broken in our world, much which needs healing, much that requires our
vigilant campaigning. We are weary of the destructive, institutionalized
processes and policies that change little, if at all, with a change in who is in
the top position. Most people who are dissatisfied and disillusioned by the
Bush administration want Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry to win,
but the painful lessons of Clinton’s presidency must not be forgotten or
ignored. We must not be complacent if Kerry wins. We must be vigilant and
hold the next administration’s feet to the fire. And so too for the next president
of the World Bank, whoever he (she?) is. To paraphrase the late US
Congresswoman, Barbara Jordan, ‘too much is at stake for policy making to
be a spectator sport.’

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