Quotes of the Day
Advice for delegates to next week's United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg: if someone approaches your car, pushes a gun in your face and shouts "Hijack!'' don't reply, "My name's not Jack." The good news is that there will be 8,000 extra police for protection at the biggest conference ever held in South Africa's biggest and baddest city, where carjacking is so common it's a running joke.
Apart from figuring out how economic growth can be sustained without harming the environment, South Africans hope the summit will put Johannesburg back in business. Once it was the financial and commercial hub of the country. But a frighteningly high crime rate, as well as an influx of black squatters and illegal immigrants exploited by slumlords, forced white businesses to move out. Many fled to the wealthy neighboring city of Sandton, where the summit's main conference center is situated. There are big plans now to revive eGoli — the Place of Gold, as Johannesburg was once known. The inner city, where some backstreets look like scenes out of Blade Runner, is being cleaned up. Johannesburg's ebullient black mayor Amos Masondo — "I'm no Guiliani, but we're getting there" — is committed to reducing crime and pushing development schemes he says could see the growth of a world-class city by 2010. That includes a new look for Soweto, the sprawling township that was once the black apartheid labor pool for Johannesburg's white-owned commercial and industrial sectors. The summit could kick-start this transformation. "It will reposition Johannesburg as a business and tourist destination,'' says Moss Mashishi, CEO of the Johannesburg World Summit Co. (JOWSCO), which was set up specifically to manage the summit.
The giant leap from Sandton and its sophisticated First World hotels, office blocks and shopping malls to the squalid, matchbox shanties of Soweto is the sort of gulf between rich and poor that delegates to the summit will be discussing. "People — planet — prosperity": the conference's slogan has particular significance not merely for the host country but for all Africa as a mirror of the global issues of social development, the protection of natural resources and the curse of poverty. The previous summit, 10 years ago in Rio, focused more narrowly on environmental protection. The Johannesburg meeting will assess the changes since then and set the course for action on how human activity impacts the global environment.
The organizers are hoping too that it will go ahead without any major glitches. A get-together of between 50,000 and 65,000 participants, including 100 or so heads of state and government, spread around four locations is a logistical nightmare by any standards. Some 30 hotels in and around Johannesburg and Sandton, scores of guest-houses and bed-and-breakfasts and up to 600 private houses have been booked to accommodate the participants. The government has already spent close to $7 million on upgrading and rerouting roads around the Sandton convention site, which will be sealed to all but summit participants for the 10-day duration. Protesters and demonstrations must be organized and officially sanctioned and will be confined to a "speakers' corner'' well away from the main conference. A $1 million, 11,000-sq-m marquee, said to be the world's biggest portable tent, will accommodate a media center and an African arts and cultural village. There was concern that Sandton's sewage system wouldn't be able to cope, but local officials now say that the waterworks will be able to go with the flow.
The whole shebang will cost around $50 million, which could feed a lot of people in Africa. With about 13 million facing starvation in drought-ravaged southern Africa, the U.N. has advised its officials to refrain from "excessive levels of hospitality" at the summit. But that won't preclude the usual round of dinners, cocktail parties and banquets. The South African government has pledged $20 million toward the cost of the event, and the remainder will be met by foreign governments and major business sponsors. In return South Africa gets an opportunity to become a symbolic showcase for less-developed countries, to parade its post-apartheid democracy in an interdependent world and to redefine Africa's global economic relations.
Johannesburg 2002 will also be a chance for South African President Thabo Mbeki to push his New Partnership for Africa's Development, a plan to obtain aid from the industrialized West in return for commitments on peace and good governance in Africa. As host chairman, Mbeki must figure out how to get the participants to agree on development and environment goals for the next 10 years. Despite much lobbying by the South Africans, the summit still doesn't have a formal agenda. Nonetheless, the organizers are confident the meeting will come together and give Johannesburg's local economy a much-needed boost. Whether that development can be sustained — let alone sustainable — won't be known until long after the delegates have left.
- PETER HAWTHORNE/Cape Town
- Joburgers hope eco-summit will boost their economy