Southern Africa Debt Summit Declaration (fwd)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

Southern African Jubilee Debt Summit 
Gauteng Declaration
Freedom from Debt = Freedom from Domination
March 18-21, 1999

On the eve of the new millennium, we are witnessing the rapid growth of
Jubilee 2000 structures and debt coalitions across the region to tackle
the existing problems we face and to move to a new millennium of hope
and change.
The vast majority of the people of sub-Saharan Africa live in pervasive
poverty. In Southern Africa tens of millions of people are hungry,
homeless, jobless, formally uneducated and die from preventable
diseases.v
Yet Southern Africa is not intrinsically poor. Indeed, it is a region
rich in natural and human resources. Debt slavery, the same system of
debt bondage that excludes four fifths of the world's population from
economic and social development, is a central part of this nightmare. 
Southern Africa is shackled by debt owed to the same forces which
initiated, enforced, condoned and sustained slavery and colonialism.
Today this debt is both a manifestation and an instrument of the unjust
international economic order in which the North dominates the South and
the elites in our countries are willing accomplices and beneficiaries.
Countries in Southern Africa pay as much as 40% of its export earnings
to service the debt. This outflow of resources in debt repayments along
with profit remittances have led to the most wretched of human
conditions. 
Not only is the debt burden choking the life of Southern Africa's human
potential, indebted nations have also been pressurised to agree to
crippling conditionalities to get loans to repay the debt in a deepening
spiral of indebtedness.  The Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs)
have caused increasing levels of unemployment, reduced government
services, higher prices of food and other basic commodities and
intensified poverty.  

Through the imposition of export-led growth, financial and trade
liberalisation, fiscal austerity, privatization and deregulation, our
economies remain sources of cheap raw materials and pools of cheap
labour for the interests of the industrialised North. Through SAPs our
governments have become more accountable to the elites of the North
rather than to their own people. We have been denied the right to be
active participants in the decision making process of our own
development. In this sense we see how debt has come to be an instrument
of control and domination.

The domination of the North over the South has led to conditions which
have spawned wars and conflicts in our region that have further
exacerbated the levels of poverty, human suffering - and debt bondage.

The legacy of apartheid compounds this situation. Southern Africa, as a
region, suffers the effects of apartheid-caused debt.
Apartheid-sponsored wars and economic destabilisation forced nations to
borrow billions of dollars because of the international communities'
failure to enforce the international law violated by apartheid.

Over two million people have been killed in Southern Africa in
apartheid-related wars, millions more have been maimed and thousands of
schools, clinics, bridges and roads have been destroyed. Today, Southern
African nations are paying millions of dollars annually to service
apartheid-caused debt to creditors who were in the main supporters of
apartheid. The total cost of apartheid-caused destabilisation in
Southern Africa is far greater than the actual apartheid-caused debts. 
The former estimated cost exceeds US$115-billion while apartheid-caused
debt is some $27-billion.  


Wars have now escalated to the point of forcing states of the region to
borrow even more and thereby further deepen our dependence on
militarised politics and economic management.

Under these circumstances the debt of Southern Africa is illegitimate
and immoral. Yet there is a debt which we do recognise - a moral debt.
This is the debt that our governments, the governments of the G7/8,
multilaterals and international commercial banks owe us for unbuilt and
broken down schools, for women and girls who continue to bear the burden
of poverty and for the jobs, homes, clean water and all the fundamental
human rights we do not have. 
 
We thus demand:
キ the unconditional, immediate and total cancellation of the debt;
キ the immediate termination of the conditions attached to all the
internationally designed debt relief mechanisms to tying this to further
economic adjustment; and
キ the scrapping of the HIPC initiative

The only conditions we recognise are those that are developed by the
popular and representative civil society organisations. We believe that
the results of debt cancellation can only benefit our people if it is
accompanied by deep-going processes of democratisation, the upholding of
human rights - including workers rights - transparency, accountability
and the provision of basic social services.

We reiterate the call for reparations in the 1993 Abuja Declaration
embracing the totality of all the quantifiable and unquantifiable costs
that have been incurred. Reparations must compensate for economic and
social damage incurred by our people, to finance the rebuilding of our
own infrastructure and society and to restore our dignity. We believe
reparations are long overdue as our initiative to regain control over
our destiny and to ensure that the African holocaust will never occur
again.

We call for the building of a new democratic world order upon the
eradication of the present order that continues to bond us to debt
through the ties of free trade, exploitative and extractive movement of
Transnational corporate investment, volatile and speculative hot money
flows; all within an ideology concocted by a tiny minority based in the
USA, the so called 'Washington Consensus'.

We see the gathering of Jubilee 2000 coalitions and other popular forces
in Cologne in June as an important step in the march towards the
realisation of the objectives of our unifying movements. We demand that
the G7 and Bretton Woods Institutions do justice to us but are under no
illusion that this will happen without an intensification of popular
pressure. That is why we deem it necessary to galvanise our forces in
buliding up momentum for a strong South-South coaliton and our own
agenda for total liberation at the South-South Summit.

We affirm the Accra, Rome and Tegucigalpa Declarations and the World
Council of Churches Harare Statement on Debt and welcome the forthcoming
Asia Pacific Jubilee summit as part of our South-South Jubilee process.
We call on our Church and other civil society allies in the North to
support our struggle and the process that has led to this and previous
declarations.  In so doing they would be transforming themselves, as we
desire, into vehicles of genuine solidarity within a Jubilee 2000 global
movement led by the South for a new world in the new millennium.

On our part we shall continue to build Jubilee 2000 coalitions that will
empower the broad masses of people to respond effectively to all the
challenges posed by the debt crisis and the Jubilee clarion for a new
millennium.  We mean in this regard people-to-people campaigning to
build our own power, capacity and "globalisation of solidarity"
networking in order to ensure the achievement of our goals.  We are
building our campaign in such a way that will secure debt cancellation
by all possible means, including exerting pressure upon all those
concerned or by the collective mass action of unified South debt
repudiation if necessary.

We are calling upon everybody to act accordingly and thus contribute
towards realising the above objectives. Most importantly, let us boost
each other's confidence in our collective ability to achieve these goals
through principled unity, South-to South, and South-to-North. 

Finally, we commit ourselves to self-determination in working for debt
cancellation within a broader concept of Jubilee, including assertion of
our sovereignty from Northern domination and transformation towards an
alternative global economic system.

Southern African Debt Summit
Johannesburg 
21st March 1999
Jubilee 2000 Southern African Coalitions

Affirmed by delegates from: Angola, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South
Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Jubilee 2000
Afrika and Jubilee 2000 Coalitions from Latin America and Philippines