Southern Africa calls for debt cancellation plus reparations

 

“The unconditional, immediate and total cancellation of the debt” was demanded by the Southern African Jubilee 2000 campaigns at a meeting in Johannesburg on 21 March. The Gauteng Declaration also demands “the immediate termination of the conditions attached to all the internationally designed debt relief mechanisms tying this to further economic adjustment; and the scrapping of the HIPC initiative.”

The conference took up the issues of corruption and conditionality, and concluded that “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.”

The vast majority of the people of sub-Saharan Africa live in pervasive poverty, yet Southern Africa is not intrinsically poor, the conference argued. “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.”

“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.”

“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 reiterate the call for reparations in the 1993 Abuja Declaration. ... 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'.”

The Southern African Debt Summit in Johannesburg was attended 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.