Speech by Mr. Kumi Naidoo, Secretary general of CIVICUS

Geneva, 15 July 2002—World Civil Society Forum

Audio

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Friends, Colleagues,

My dear brothers and sisters,

In the South African liberation movement when you were the speaker that followed many other distinguished and eloquent speakers, you started by saying "most of the points that I was going to make, have been already made". However, he spoke for 2 hours, but I'll try to be brief and many of the points have, in fact, been made.

Let me just focus on four points and the first one is the question and challenge of definition, and the question of accountability which I am rest at frustrated.

While on the positive side, we can say that, because the discourse on Civil Society has gained such prominence and that many international leaders, including certain national political leaders, these days, cannot give a major policy speech without the term Civil Society rolling rapidly off the tongues of the speeder for BOEING 747.

Does that mean that today we can rest assured that the notion that citizens have a role to play in public life beyond simply costing a vote once every 4-5 years?

Whether that has been established, still remains a question for us to address.

It is true that many political leaders have accepted the notion of Civil Society having a role around the delivery of various social services to peoples in need.

I would argue that we still have a major journey to travel before Civil Society can say to itself, that our national political leaders as well as the international political establishment have genuinely accepted that Civil Society also has a role to play around the question of input into policy making.

On the one hand, we can say that Civil Society discourse has got so popular that, in fact, today it has become all things to all people and it has also become blend.

Based in the United States for the last three and a half years, I was quite horrified, when I first arrived, somebody suggested me that he Ku-Klux-Klan was part of Civil Society. I asked how is the Ku-Klux-Klan part of the Civil Society and they told me, it is non-profit, it is non-governmental, it is membership based, it is reasonably internally democratic and it works passionately on a voluntary basis to advance the interests of its members.

One of the challenges that Civil Society has to face today is the question of the values that we propagate. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides us with a consensual set of values that we can lobby around. The question is also about what is our value base. And this is the question that we have to address in Conferences like this very important one that we are at. Particularly, since increasingly, there are challenges that have been made on the accountability and the questions of legitimacy of the non-profit sector.

The arguments sometimes go like this, it says: "Well, we in government are elected by the citizens of the country", you folks in Civil Society are well-meaning do-gooders who did not derive your legitimacy in the right to speak other than the fact, out of the goodness of your heart, you organise and take public positions.

This does raise a question for us. There's no question about it that civil society has gained status, influence and power over the last 20 years. We have to recognise that with increasing influence and status, also comes increasing responsibility. That, much as we might have reservations about some of the intentions behind those that raise the question of accountability, whether those criticisms were they or not based on our own sense of ethics, we need to be ensuring that we are able to perform with the highest levels of ethics, standards and accountability, and to ensure that every cent that we raise in the names of people living in poverty, is used in the ethical ways in which we say we will.

We also need to recognise that some of the challenges around the legitimacy, does not only come form national governments but also comes from within the international system itself. At the World Economical Forum in January this year, the Director General of the World Trade Organisation, Mike Moore, said, at a breakfast session, that the WTO will only engage with Civil Society Organisations that are transparent, accountable and elected by a defined constituency. That would be a quite good thing if in fact that criteria was applied to all the member governments of the WTO for starters, but that having been left aside we need to recognise that the question of accountability and public legitimacy is a very complicated one in the current world that we live in.

Firstly, let's understand that Civil Society and practically the non-profit sector, has an accountability mechanism built into it. It is a simple one. It is not sufficient, but it is a powerful one. It's a simple, logic of perform or perish. Not one single non-profit organisation receives any source of funding on an obligatory basis.

Whether the money comes from an individual, a government, a business, a foundation. These are sources of funding that are honest on a completely voluntary basis.

While, we do know of course, governments have the luxury that, even if they are performing disastrously, they can still guarantee a resource flow from taxation on an annual basis until they get voted out in the next election.

But let's also look then at the second question and that is the challenge of democracy. Today, one of the problems we face is that even in countries with long standing democratic traditions, political processes have become completely inaccessible to the vast majority of citizens, in some countries, even those that see themselves as exporters of democracies.

Today there are only three types of people that can run successfully for national political office: the rich, the very rich and the extremely rich. Political parties have become intensely undemocratic institutions even though they are supposed to be the bedrock of functioning electoral democracies. To get access and to participate effectively in political parties is becoming increasingly an impossible task for the ordinary citizen.

Today, we see a lack of trust in the political leadership of many countries. The declining numbers of voters should not simply be seen as "well the people are pathetic!"

That might be so in some instances, but I think we have to address the real issue that many people are making an inform judgment that unfortunately, voting does not change anything and to recognise that we have to do so much more to enrich our political cultures, to enrich our democratic institutions, is, as has already been pointed out a challenge that both Civil Society and government face.

The other issue we face is a question of social exclusion.

Quite often when Civil Society, ourselves are guilty, when we talk about social exclusion, we talk about it as if social exclusion affects the minority of people on the planet.

But let's think about, today: who are socially excluded? When we talk about young people in social societies, about women in many social societies, about all the persons, about indigenous peoples, about cultural, religious, ethnic and racial minorities, talking about people living with HIV, Aids and disabilities, we find that in fact we are not talking of minority of mankind, we are talking about the majority.

So it does raise the question of a real crisis of democracy.

Democracy has to serve the majority of the people on the planet and unless we can ensure that the scandalous situation that women, after so many years of activism by the Women's movement, still less than 10 % occupy leadership positions in government, business and in Civil Society Organisations. Unless we can reverse that statistic drastically, we are not getting anywhere. Unless we recognise that young people, for example, are not simply the leaders of tomorrow, but in Africa, where I come from, with the designation of HIV, AIDS, today young people demographically are not simply the leaders of tomorrow, but the leaders of today, as well, because they have a crucial role to play in securing the social fabrics in our different society.

The third point I want to quickly make, is that of globalisation which has been made.

Let me jus add few things to it.

One is the real Civil Society activism that we have seen, has often been called anti-globalisation movement.

Firstly I would like to say that anti-globalisation movement is probably the most globalized movement of all.

Secondly, that it is really, if we think deeply of the discourses that are there, it's about social, it's a movement for greater social and economic justice. What people are concerned about, it's not only that globalisation is unstoppable process, but globalisation has come with growing inequality in every single country, the gap between rich and poor is growing at a disastrous rate, between the rich and the poor countries, that gap is growing at an equally disastrous rate and if the current trends continue, the challenge is that we are sitting here in this hall all today, 20 to 30 years from now, we'll look like a Sunday morning pick-nick.

The other issue is that, we also need to recognise that globalisation is much beyond economic globalisation and one of the challenges for us is also dealing with the question of what we might call the mono-collateralisation of the world. That, in fact, many cultures of the world are under threat.

My last and final comment that I want to make is one of the challenges we face at global meetings like this, with Civil Societies trying to come together, is the challenge of what we might call the curtailment of international Civic mobility.

What I'm talking about here, is that one of the things that globalisation was supposed to bring was an unhindered movement of goods, capital, technologies and so on. But we have never lived in a moment of world history where the movement of people from poor countries to rich countries, has been as restricted as it is right now.

In my job I am an African travelling on an African passport where I have to travel to many countries. If I have to write an autobiography at the end of my time at Civics it will be called "Visas, Bloody Visas".

An irony, historical irony, just listening to my sister form the indigenous people's movement is, it would be very interesting if the indigenous peoples of the Americas, New Zeeland, Australia and the people of Africa were able to discover visas, many many centuries ago and effectively implemented, how different the world we would look today.

But it is a question, quite often we say simply September 11^th.

Of course September 11^th has made it worse, but we have to recognise that this poses a major challenge for us because the equity that we need to build in Global Civil Society, will already facing the challenge of resources and so on, As Walter Fust very brilliantly put it earlier. But added to that is just an inability for people to be able to get access.

So I want to say, to round them up, that there are three levels in which Civil Society engages with the UN system and International Community and we need to just separate that and recognise that all three are important.

Firstly, increasingly, many Civil Society Organizations are engaged at a micro-programming-delivery level that many good relationships exist between UNDP; UNICEF and so on, and Civil Society Organisations. Much more needs to be done on that level to see how we can do it more professionally and we will recognise some of the strengths and weaknesses of the Civil Society Organisation.

This middle level where Civil Society are engaging in the global policy making processes around various world conferences, is far form a perfect exercise but we have to engage with it, to try to ensure that we try to get the best short outcomes in the short term, and also to ensure that we change the very structures of way that engagement happens. But is also a macro level and that is the very governance of these international institutions. The UN itself was formed at a point in 1945 at the end of the 2^nd World War, when the world was a completely different place.

It was driven by the victims of the 2^nd World War, those who had nuclear power and so on.

Most of the world was in colonial bondage if we can try to just remember the moment of 1945. Today we live in a world that is vastly changed that was appropriate in1945 but totally inappropriate today.

Why should certain nations have the VETO power at the UN when in fact they have relatively small population sizes. Should not if democracy is a major determinant of governance of global institutions that we should give more weight to countries, that have a greater population size not simply those who have greatest military and economic power.

So let me live you with the thought that these are 3 levels that we need to intervene and if I can live you with the words of the indigenous people of New Zeeland, when the Maoris were asked: "What is the most important thing in the world?" and they answered "It is people, it is people, it is people."

Thank you.