Lusaka Declaration

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

The following declaration was the outcome of the conference attended 
by delegates from debt and jubilee 2000 structures from southern, 
east and west African countries:

The Lusaka Declaration
and Areas of Action

Towards an "Africa Consensus" on
Sustainable Development and Sustainable Solutions
to the Debt Crisis

 We represent social organisations from across the African continent,
 and we have deliberated for three days about our experiences, values
 and visions for solving the debt crisis, an affliction that has
 reversed human development and environmental progress over the past
 quarter-century.

Our conference is part of a process of Movement-building within and
beyond Africa: a Movement against the crippling impact of debt on
billions of people across the world, and for a new, people-centred
genuine form of development.

Our objectives were to expand upon our predecessors-the Accra, Lome
and Gauteng Declarations; to begin to establish a new "Africa
Consensus" on debt and sustainable development (to replace the
bankrupt "Washington Consensus"); to identify demands, strategies and
enhanced roles for Debt Coalitions and Jubilee 2000 chapters-and,
indeed, civil society more broadly; and to define and undertake a plan
of action leading to debt cancellation and genuine development, based
on freedom, justice and equality for both genders and all communities.

We endorse the spirit of the Accra, Lome and Gauteng Declarations in
their recognition of the magnitude and unacceptability of Africa's
illegitimate debt, and their commitment to moving beyond debt bondage
and abject poverty, towards sustainable human development, which
specifically addresses the needs of the historically, socially and
economically disadvantaged groups.

We reiterate the call for total debt cancellation, and we insist that
creditors and G7 countries cannot be allowed, anymore, to dictate the
terms of cancellation. Africans ourselves must determine our own
development path. We as civil society have a strong-sometimes
decisive-role in determining the necessary conditions for sustainable
development.

The Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative and other debt
relief proposals, including the recent proposals from G7 countries
(notably from the United States, Britain and Germany), all insist on
unacceptable conditions, and entail inadequate amounts of relief. The
conditions are invariably associated with the top-down Washington
Consensus, which has had such a devastating impact on so many
countries these past two decades. Structural Adjustment Programmes
(SAPs) and the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) have
deepening economic, social and ecological hardships for the vast
majority of people on the continent. Enough is enough.

In very practical ways, the case studies we have considered from our
colleagues in Uganda and Mozambique have shown the limits to the HIPC
initiative, the disastrous effect of HIPC conditionality, the lack of
meaningful debt relief, and the reinforced status quo of social
inequality, economic exploitation and domination by international
financiers and rich-country governments.

Moreover, the so-called Debt Relief Initiatives have not resulted from
inclusive negotiations. The Paris Club and the HIPC Initiative are
merely processes and frameworks imposed by Creditors on Debtors. 

In sum, we reject HIPC and the other current debt relief processes and
commit ourselves to expose their fundamental flaws in each of the
countries, particularly in the run-up to the June 1999 G-8 Meeting in
Cologne, Germany. As members of African civil society, we believe we
have the standing to speak truth to power, in a way that often our own
political leaders lack courage to do, in the presence of overwhelming
Northern financial arrogance.

In addition, we commit ourselves to working against localised symptoms
of our debt burden and economic process, including war, corruption and
other evils that undermine our development processes. We declare that
we will intensify our work towards the democratisation of our
societies, in a gender-sensitive manner.

Ultimately, however, we insist that debt is a manifestation of the
neoliberal world order, the power of international banks to push loans
on Southern borrowers without the democratic inputs of parliaments and
civil societies, and the disastrous character of the world economy,
which charges ever greater prices for imports from the North while
paying ever lower prices for Southern exports.

In short, debt is one of the most important instruments of Northern
domination over the South, and the domination of financiers over
people, production and nature everywhere. As part of our struggle to
liberate ourselves from this bondage, we make demands for the
cancellation of debt as part of a broader struggle to fundamentally
transform the current world economic order and transfer power from the
political leadership of the rich countries and the economic power of
Transnational Corporations and international financiers, and their
instruments, notably the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and
World Trade Organisation. Likewise, these forces have instruments in
the South, namely some of our own technocratic, political and
commercial elites who are in the tiny minority of Africans who
continue to promote the Washington Consensus.

In the same spirit, we will make reasonable, rational demands for
reparations to compensate for the economic, social and environmental
damage which affect our people. These reparations will not be allowed
to trickle into our elites' pockets, but must be directed into
rebuilding our societies and environments, and in the process to
restoring our human dignity, and especially that of women.

We draw strength from the experiences of gains made by civil societies
in the world in securing their demands. For example, in helping to end
apartheid, in successfully questioning ecologically-destructive
projects (such as big dams), in banning landmines, and in halting the
transnational corporate "Multilateral Agreement on Investment," our
civil societies have made their mark over the past decade.

We are convinced that the world's people of conscience are now fully
aware of the damage being done by debt to Africa's women, men,
children and environment. We are confident in linking the conditions
associated with current forms of debt relief, to our ongoing
suffering. And we are committed to ending such conditions, replacing
the Washington Consensus on neoliberal development with an Africa
Consensus on genuine development, and adding to our demands the need
for the reparations required to assure our society's ability to meet
our basic human needs and to repair our degraded environments.

We commit ourselves to mobilising ourselves at local, national,
sub-regional and Africa regional levels. We commit ourselves to
strengthening the various tools and instruments of democratic
governance in Africa, in order to ensure that our governments finally
begin to represent the interests of our peoples. We commit ourselves,
to these ends, to strengthening relationships with the progressive
civil societies of the South as well as in the North. 

 Areas of Action

Our strategy to achieving our objectives include the following
principles and action areas:

1) Conditions on debt cancellation

In the context of an Africa Consensus for genuine development-NOT the
neoliberal Washington Context-we endorse the total cancellation of
African foreign debt in order that ALL the proceeds go to meeting our
society's basic human needs and restoring our environment. (National
processes can determine particular priorities to these ends.) If such
redirection of development resources is not the demonstrable outcome
of the immediate stages of debt cancellation, a mechanism must be
developed-probably involving an international human rights arbitration
institution (to remove conditionality power from Washington Consensus
organisations)-to assure that proceeds from cancellation go to meeting
basic human needs (with no decline in existing resources to this end).
A follow-up task force will work to take forward activities to more
forcefully define the Africa Consensus, and in addition, to define the
terrain of the international mechanism required, to establish more
detailed guidelines on beneficiaries of debt cancellation proceeds,
and to forge the local, regional and international alliances required
to bring this mechanism about.

2) Enhancing civil society capacity

We believe that without a dramatic increase in our own power, we will
not succeed. This power comes from more mass education and
moblilisation towards effective mass campaigns and actions; more
contact and persuasion through the media (just as we intensify our
efforts to achieve media freedom); and more sophisticated engagement
with our governments and parliaments. African civil society
organisations have great needs, of which some are material but some
reflect our own capacity to better represent our constituents.
Regarding funding, Northern support with strings attached continues to
be a barrier to our own development. What is needed is a share of debt
cancellation proceeds to be earmarked to capacitate civil society to
carry out all the areas of action outlined here (as well as others
that might arise). This is the only logical way to level the playing
fields between international institutions, African governments and
civil society, which have dramatically declining capacity in that
order. But more generally, in grappling with complex debt-related
issues, African civil society organisations need to prioritise
research (and training of researchers), better dissemination of
information, deeper empowerment of people through information and
organisation, and continued attention to disaggregation of issues by
gender. We believe that our Lusaka Declaration and forthcoming work in
the same spirit should feed into a South-South process.

3) Reparations and loan audits

African civil society realises that Northern institutions and
governments have long dominated and exploited Africa. Some estimates
of this exploitation have been made, for example in studies of the
damage done by apartheid-caused lending until 1994 conducted by Action
for Southern Africa (London). More research is required, and we call
on progressive researchers and academics to intensify their
documentation of the ongoing and historic ways in which Africa has
been exploited, in the tradition of Walter Rodney's How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa. As a first priority, additional research on
audits of foreign loans (for failed development or structural
adjustment projects) will be required, partly to establish
coresponsibility of the creditors in very specific ways. This
information will help establish how much in reparations we can
legitimately demand, and will allow us to approach lenders and donors
on a bilateral and multilateral basis. In particular, corrupt
political leaders, bureaucrats and businesspeople have engaged in
systematic capital flight and corruption, and we call on our allies
who monitor offshore financial flows to intensify their studies of how
much of Africa's resources have been raided. In turn, we require
strategies to force those in the North who have benefitted from
African capital flight-including the major international banks-to
acknowledge their responsibility to pay reparations to our societies.
Examples of previous reparations include Swiss banks in relation to
Nazi Germany and the Marcos regime in the Philippines, and land rights
reparations for indigenous Canadians and Australians. Led by the South
African demand for reparations from banks which funded apartheid, we
will intensify our demands for social justice the more we identify how
our continent has been systematically exploited.

4) New international financial arrangements

As we develop our Africa Consensus on genuine development, we in civil
society will also more firmly advocate the disengagement of our
countries from the IMF and World Bank, whose interests are
diametrically opposed to our own. To this end, we commit to starting
debates on disengagement and proposing alternatives (and to acquiring
capacity to do better research and advocacy to make our case).
International aid should be channelled primarily into meeting human
needs. In cases where hard currency is absolutely required (for vital
inputs that have no local replacements, not for luxury goods imports
and inappropriate capital-intensive machinery and debt repayments) and
where donor grants are not required, the source of hard currency loans
should be interest-free credits.

5) Towards parliamentary and civil society oversight on foreign loans

Any approval for new foreign loans should be passed through
parliaments, and if this is not already a feature of constitutions or
legislation, it should become so. The relationship between civil
society and government, especially parliaments, in each of our
countries should be strengthened. Civil society organisations
representing poor and working people should at the very least have
formal standing in assessing and monitoring these proposed loans, for
example through providing submissions to parliamentary committees,
regularly scheduled public debates, serving on statutory financial
commissions, and engaging in formal evaluations. In general,
transparent disclosure of information associated with our debt burdens
should become policy and law. Civil society organisations commit to
increasing their parliamentary advocacy and doing rigorous,
widely-disseminated and accessible research to these ends.

6) Towards a Debtors' Cartel

We endorse the collective repudiation of illegitimate foreign debt by
our political leaders, again on the condition that the benefits from
cancellation be redirected to Africa Consensus forms of sustainable
development. However, in view of the failure of efforts along these
lines (for example by Julius Nyerere of Tanzania in 1983), we
recognise that our political elites may not have either the courage
(or self-interest) to establish such a cartel. As a result, we make a
commitment to linking our arms across borders to not only put united
pressure on our leaders to establish a Debtors' Cartel, but also to
compel them to include civil society in negotiations with Creditors.

7) Our Jubilee ultimatum

If we do not see progress towards the cancellation of Africa's foreign
debt by the end of December 2000, African civil society organisations
will ratchet up pressure towards the debt repudiation option, and
intensify our commit to disengage from the international forces which
continue to chain us.

 19-21 May, 1999
 Lusaka, Zambia