WSSD Statements: Nigeria, Zimbabwe

NIGERIA

Statement

by

His Excellency Chief Olusegun Obasanjo
President

At The World Summit On Sustainable Development

Johannesburg, South Africa.
2 September, 2002

The World Summit on Sustainable Development comes at a significant point in history, as the world embrace the 21s` century. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio in 1992, gave hope for a better future for humanity. At that Summit, world leaders made a solemn commitment not only to improve the quality of life globally, but also to save our ecosystems from further degradation. However, ten years after Rio, it is obvious that the hopes generated by Rio have not been realized and nowhere is this more evident than in Africa, where all the economic and social indices present a picture far more gloomy today than in 1992.

The major objective of this Summit, therefore, should be to undertake a comprehensive review and appraisal of the implementation of Agenda-21 and to fashion the way forward. The World Summit On Sustainable Development Plan of Implementation document, which we shall be adopting at the end of this Summit, is an aggregation of our commitments in Agenda-21, the Millennium Summit, Doha and Monterrey.

We hope that the commitments made in these conferences will be matched by action sufficient enough to launch developing countries on a sound path of sustainable development. However, we believe that for as long as the external debt remain a burden, development would remain severely impaired.

Poverty eradication is not only one of the greatest challenges facing humankind today, but is also a pre-requisite for sustainable development. For us in Nigeria, and indeed, many African countries, the first step towards the eradication of poverty is food security. To eradicate poverty, therefore, we should eliminate factors that threaten our agriculture such as drought and desertification.

It is in this regard that we wish to call upon this Summit to urge the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to provide support for the implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), by making GEF the Convention's financial mechanism. In the same vein, we call upon this Summit to support the African Process on Development and Protection of the Marine and Coastal Environment in sub-Saharan Africa.

As we gather in the ambience of this great hall, millions of people out there are dying from hunger and disease. Their deaths are preventable and certainly not beyond us to reverse if only we can demonstrate the will to act. HIV/AIDS and Malaria are major causes of these deaths, especially among the active labour force in Africa. The economic and social consequences of this are self-evident. Let us, therefore, renew our commitment to combat these diseases.
I note with satisfaction, that the plan of Implementation document we are about to adopt includes support for the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), which is anchored on the tripod of ownership, partnership, and responsibility. No doubt, there is a clear symmetry and synergy between NEPAD and the objectives of WSSD. l, therefore, urge the international community as Africa's partners in development, to support the provisions in the Africa section of the WSSD Plan of Implementation document, particularly the targets and time frames contained in the programme of action.

May I, at this juncture, present part of the declaration of the African Ministerial Council on Water adopted in April this year.

After noting various international events on improving the management and care for water resources, from Rio Principle in 1992 through to NEPAD programme, the Ministers express their concern in graphic statistical terms for the dire need for water in Africa.

The Ministers recognise the priority that should be placed and what has to be done nationally and regionally and what resources are required. Then, they resolve to promote action which will translate their goals into reality through local, national, regional and global efforts and partnership in development with enhanced resource flows. They call on the international community to work with Africa on this issue.

Earlier today, I listened attentively to the children of the world and their views on poverty, sustainable development and this Summit. As an African the worst indignity that happen to you is to be publicly criticised by your own children and grandchildren. Today, the children of the world have openly, clearly and strongly condemned the leaders of the world for failure to act collectively and positively in their interest and the interest of the world. We have to talk less and act more so as to earn the commendation of the children of the world.

Today, the whole world is with us here in Johannesburg as a witness to the solemn declaration we are going to make. However, implementation remains the bane of past similar declarations, with incremental gap between words and action in successive conferences. Let our success in Johannesburg be judged in ten years' time, by the action we take to translate the commitments made in this historic city a reality.

I thank you

ENDS

*************

ZIMBABWE
Statement

by

HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT OF ZIMBABWE
COMRADE R.G. MUGABE,

on the occasion of the
World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD),

Johannesburg,
2 September, 2002

Your Excellency, Thabo Mbeki, President of the Republic of South Africa,
Your Excellency, Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations,
Majesties,
Your Excellencies, Heads of State and Government,
Mr. Nitin Desai, the Secretary General of the World Summit on Sustainable Development,
Distinguished Delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Comrades and Friends.

Comrade President, let me begin by congratulating you and the people of South Africa on hosting this mammoth and yet historic Earth Summit- on the southern tip of our continent. It is a great honour and source of African pride to all of us who live, belong and rightfully own this great corner of the Earth.

Ten years ago, we gathered in Rio de Jeneiro, in the same numbers and were moved by the same developmental anxieties that many of us have today. We worried about our troubled Earth and its dangerously diminishing flora and fauna. We worried about the variegated poor of our societies, in their swelling numbers and ever deepening, distressful social conditions. We complained about the unequal economic power that existed and still exists between the North and the South and had historically reposed itself in our international institutions, including the United Nations. We spoke against unequal terms of trade that made rich and powerful nations enjoy undeserved rewards from world trade.

Indeed, we denounced the debt burden by which the rich North continued to take away the impoverished South even that little which they still had.

Your Excellencies, we must examine why, 10 years after Rio, the poor remain very much with us, poorer and far more exposed and vulnerable than ever before. Our children suffer from malnutrition, hunger and diseases, compounded now by the deadly HIV-Aids pandemic. No, the World is not like it was at Rio; it is much worse and much more dangerous. Today Rio stands out in history as a milestone betrayed.

The multilateral programme of action we set for ourselves at Rio has not only been unfulfilled but it has also been ignored, sidelined and replaced by a half-baked unilateral agenda of globalisation in the service of big corporate interests of the North. The focus is profit, not the poor, the process is globalisation, not sustainable development, while the objective is exploitation, not liberation.

Comrade President, 10 years ,after Rio, the time has come for all of us to state quite categorically that the agenda of sustainable development is not compatible with the current dominant market fundamentalism coming from the proponents of globalisation.

The betrayal of the collective agenda we set at Rio is a compelling manifestation of bad global governance, lack of real political will by the North and a total absence of a just rule of law in international affairs. The unilateralism of the unipolar world has reduced the rest of mankind to collective underdogs, chattels of a rich, the wilful few in the North who beat, batter and bully us under the dirty cover of democracy, rule of law and good governance. Otherwise how would they undermine at global level the same values of good governance and rule of law they arrogantly demand from the South?

Institutionally, we have relied for much too long on structures originally set to recover and rebuild Europe after a devastating war against Nazism. Over the years, these outdated institutions have been unilaterally transformed to dominate the world for the realisation of the strategic national goals of the rich North. That is why, for example, the International Monetary Fund has never been a fund for poor peasants seeking sustainable development. Even the United Nations, a body that is supposed to give us equal voices, remains unreformed and undemocratic, largely because of resistance from the powerful and often selfish North.

Comrade President, it has become starkly clear to us that the failure of sustainable development is a direct and necessary outcome of a neo-liberal model of development propelled by runaway market forces that have been defended in the name of globalisation. Far from putting people first, this model rests on entrenching inequities; give away privatisation of public enterprises and banishing of the State from the public sphere for the benefit of big business. This has been a vicious, all-out, assault on the poor and their instruments of sustainable development. In Zimbabwe, we have, with a clear mind and vision, resolved to bring -to an end this neo-liberal model.

For us in Zimbabwe, the agenda for sustainable development has to be reasserted, with a vigorous, democratic and progressive interventionist State and public sector capable of playing a full and responsible developmental role. We are ready to defend the agenda of the poor and we are clear that we can only do that if we do not pander to foreign interests or answer to false imperatives that are not only clearly alien and inimical to the interests of the poor who have given us the mandate to govern them but are also hostile to the agenda for sustainable development.

For these reasons, we join our brothers and sisters in the Third World in rejecting completely manipulative and intimidatory attempts by some countries and regional blocks that are bent on subordinating our sovereignty to their hegemonic ambitions and imperial interests, falsely presented as matters of rule of law, democracy and good governance. The rule of law, democracy and governance are values that we cherish because we fought for them against the very same people who today seek to preach to us. The sustainable empowerment of the poor cannot take place in circumstances where democratic national sovereignties are assaulted and demonised on a daily basis. The poor should be able to use their sovereignty to fight poverty and preserve their heritage in their corner of the earth.

That is why we, in Zimbabwe, understand only too well that sustainable development is not possible without agrarian reforms that acknowledges, in our case, that land comes first before all else, and that all else grows from and off it. This is the one asset that not only defines the Zimbabwean personality and demarcates sovereignty but also that has a direct bearing on the fortunes of the poor and prospects for their immediate empowerment and sustainable development. Indeed, ours is an agrarian economy, an imperative that renders the issue of access to land paramount. Inequitable access to land is at the heart of poverty, food insecurity and lack of development in Zimbabwe. Consequently, the question of agrarian reforms has, in many developing countries, to be high on the agenda of sustainable development if we are to meet the targets that are before us for adoption at this Summit.

In our situation in Zimbabwe, this fundamental question has pitted the black majority who are the right-holders, and, therefore, primary stakeholders, to our land against an obdurate and internationally well-connected racial minority, largely of British descent and brought in and sustained by British colonialism. Economically, we are an occupied country, 22 years after our Independence. Accordingly, my Government has decided to do the only right and just thing by taking back land and giving it to its rightful indigenous, black owners who lost it in circumstances of colonial pillage. This process is being done in accordance with the rule of law as enshrined in our national Constitution and laws. It is in pursuit of true justice as we know and understand it, and so we have no apologies to make to any one.

Finally Comrade President, Zimbabwe has alongside other Southern African countries suffered a severe drought, itself a reminder that all is not well on our Earth. We continue to import food to sustain all our citizens during this period of drought. I join other Heads of State or Government in our SADC region in expressing my gratitude and appreciation to those countries and organisations that pledged to assist us.

Mr Chairman, as we look at the next decade we must honestly acknowledge those of our actions which have served mankind and those many others which have undermined our collective well-being. Clearly there has to be a paradigm shift from the globalised corporate model to a people centred paradigm that reaffirms that people must always come first in any process of sustainable development.

I thank you.

ENDS

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