Conversations on the Ground: Singing the Summit Blues

By Qurratul-Ain-Tahmina

Thousands of sessions and events, hundreds of venues – at least that’s what it seems like. In the end you stop wondering and wandering about. You just do whatever your assignment of the day is.

The well-fed, covered-in-enough-warm-clothes, and more-than-adequately cared-for people who are taking part in the process of deciding the world’s future are perhaps doing the same. They have millions of problems to deliberate on, billions of views to argue, but in the end only one or perhaps two deciding factors to consider and compromise on. That unfortunately is the reality of their summit assignment.

Saturday, when the landless and the summit-denouncers were marching towards the opulence of Sandton City from the squalor of the slums in Alexandra where 350,000 people eternally fight poverty, I met a few very young boys tentatively joining the walk. Where were they going? “Sandton,” whispers one. “Where is your mama,” asks my colleague. “Sandton,” comes the barely audible answer. And where do they come from? From an uncaring home or just from the streets of Joburg? Who knows and who cares?

Earlier in the week I had an assignment at Shareworld in the landless people’s camp. At one point I was looking for some landless people to talk to and get a few quotes from. I met this group from Limpopo. One of them answered my queries in broken English. My business done, I was about to go away when the man confronted me saying, “I gave you the information you wanted, but what will you be giving me in return?”

To take a very bleak and black view of things, the poor after all have provided some 40,000 or as they say, 60,000 people with a noble excuse for gathering here. But what do the poor get in return?

The summit wants to eradicate poverty and replace the present trend of environmental degradation with that of sustainability. In the swish Sandton City; in the quaint, sprawling grounds of Nasrec; in the friendly and trendy Ubuntu Village; or in any of the other places -- where do you think is the place for the people afflicted with poverty and its many faces? In Nasrec and Ubuntu you are at least reminded of the fact that poor people exist in this world -- you chance upon some petty vendor or trader; you may have a glimpse of one or two beggars or homeless persons. But no such imperfection in Sandton.

And environmental damages? How much fuel would be burnt to fly in and back all the delegates? How much of energy and other resources is being consumed? The venues are literally flooded with tonnes of papers bearing statements of intents and concerns of all the anxious groups attending this top-level, development fair. But this is a point that stands self-explanatory.

“Hope” becomes the magic word for this summit. While shuttling to Nasrec the other day, I met this gentleman, a mayor in a city in the United States. He had come to participate in the local government sessions. Identifying the limited powers and capacities of the local governments as a major impediment to sustainable development, all his hopes for effecting positive changes lay with the summit. This gentleman believes that exchanging blame gets you nowhere, to get anything done one must get down to doing it.

The United Nations and the world leaders are apparently largely pinning their hopes on the big businesses. “We want businesses to buy into our basic values of promoting human rights and economic growth in an environmentally friendly way,” as U.N. spokesperson Susan Markham is quoted in a summit daily.

But it appears that only the United Nations and some Western governments believe that that will ever happen. And with diverging loyalties among the civil society or the people’s forum as manifested in Saturday’s multiple demonstrations, the hopes of the ordinary people drift in uncertain waters.

Where and what is the essential focus? To the overwhelming majority of the world’s population -- the poor -– the issue of sustainable development is simple enough: three square meals a day, a decent shelter, health and security for the family and assurance that their children will have a future. This of course is also the goal of the world’s small minority -- the rich. But can the rich and the poor share a common future on a planet that could be given a new lease on life?

But such questions and the buzzwords of hope, commitment, rights … well, all such concepts begin to get too confusing, let me rather concentrate on my assignment of the day. And I hope you do not share with me this gratitude to poverty and the destruction of the environment. After all, thanks to these two evils I could come to Joburg. With any luck, should they live long, I hope to see you all in ten year’s time in some other place on Earth.