DAN SANDERS MEMORIAL LECTURE
11th International Symposium
Cape Town, South Africa, 8th July 1999

Social Development for the New Millennium: Visions and Strategies for Global Transformation

Keynote address given by
Dr. Franklin A. Sonn
Former South African Ambassador to the United States

Poverty is the single greatest social burden in the world today.  It is a timeless matter.  It defies all economic and social systems.  Up to this day it occupies the national debate in varying degrees depending on the nature of the government in power.  Governments' successes are often determined by the extent to which it is able to meet the challenge of poverty.  Poverty brought governments down.  It insured the demise of economical systems.  It insured the rise of dictatorships.  It was also the case in our country.  The bitter conflation of race and poverty ushered in democracy.  Academics and thinkers have argued through the ages whether a strong monarch or a resolute authoritarian state or a free market system is the answer.  There is the proposition in the U.S. that as little government as possible would be able better to meet the challenge of poverty.

Poverty is not merely the lack of income.  An enormous proportion of basic needs of people in the wealthiest to the poorest nations today remain unmet.  There is a distinction between poor people and poverty people.  Poor people lack resources, and when resources are, they resume their positions in society.  Poverty, on the other hand, is a sub-culture and people are stuck in the vicious cycle of ever recurring poverty.  There normally is a fundamental lack of understanding among people outside the vicious cycle that poverty creates.  Its' own norms are marked by very short term objectives and live for the moment.  It is essentially a demeaning and dis-empowering condition.  Few social factors diminish and demean people like being caught up in the vicious cycle of poverty.

In South Africa and in colonialist times, the lack of basic human and political rights were at the same time the cause and effect of poverty.  The negative attributes the dominant political group ascribe to the dominated poverty people are more often than not symptoms of economic deprivation to be found among poverty people all over the world regardless of race.  Poverty, nonetheless, feeds racism.  To fight against poverty is accordingly a struggle against racism.

Let me turn to Robben Island - this hallowed place!  It is propitious that we meet on this island this morning.  It is a tribute to the organizers of this conference that they have had the foresight to arrange a congregation of leaders whose primary mandate is poverty and whose obligation is finding answers to social dysfunction and injustice.  This is the eleventh convention on Robben Island.  This island, after all, is a sacred monument ot the sacrifice and struggle against racism and poverty of the people of South Africa.  It is more than that.  It signifies in a tangible way the courage of all people everywhere who gave their talents to work for greater equity and equality in the world.  It is correct that Robben Island should be the place for fine minds and tough wills to come together to ask hard questions and to find right answers.  It takes place around the stone quarry of this island and the air is thin and cold- It is indeed amidst the belligerent screams of seagulls that, over decades, our leaders sharpened their ideas and re-affirmed their commitment to give all they have to overcome human beings inhumanity.  It was on the wings of the island breeze that the prayers and hopes of our icons............ were carried to the mainland so that we, who lived under apartheid, might never give up the struggle and might continue in the noble tradition of the example they had set.  The island is in the misty distance from Cape Town. It is a sacred reminder that acquiescence was... to betrayal.

It is from these conditions I am honored to say that letters were smuggled by Nelson Mandela and given to certain people among who were fortunate enough to be encouraged by the letters that told us not to give up no matter how hard it may be. Letters, which in the regularity of the script and the firmness of the prose, assured us that we shall overcome and even if we did not in our lifetime, it was a cause worth dying for.   One had fought a battle which in time will prevail.

This island used to be a place of isolation for lepers.  It became a prison for people that the apartheid government wanted to define as utter political and social outcasts or veritable social lepers.  Instead, it became a source of hope and a symbol of the nobility of our struggle.  The novel values and intentions of our cause and its' international quality transcended the worse apartheid could ever do.

Dan Sanders would be proud to know that a meeting of his friends, admirers, colleagues, and his fellow believers are meeting in his honor and that they are meeting on Robben Island, not as lepers but as warriors, as courageous women and men who have retained the faith and are honing the faith into action.  It does his memory proud that in fine tradition we once again are taking courage to make poverty amidst bounty, powerlessness amidst freedom and power the centerpiece of our discourse.  If thinkers and leaders driven by social justice and developmental concerns do not raise and persist in addressing and naming poverty, it might recede into the background.  We are as humans always tempted to forget.  We, after all are always too inclined to make poverty a weapon of political struggle and once we assume power we are prone to feel accused by it.  I often said in the U.S. that poverty is the word least uttered and least liked in that nation of plenty.  I am sure I am correct in saying that we in South Africa talk less of poverty today than we did at the height of our struggle.

Was it a sigh of desperation or was it an admission that we should neither despair nor be naive when Christ proclaimed that the poor and the blind will always have among us?

Ethan B. Kapstein expresses desperation when he says, "...The world may be moving inexorably towards one of those tragic moments that will lead future historians to ask why was nothing done in time.  Were the economic and policy elite's unaware of the profound disruption that economic and technological change were causing working men and women?"  The title of which they borrowed from Lenin and called the commanding heights: the battle between government and the marketplace that is remaking the modern world.

They chronicled a global transformation and proceeded to take the reader through the various phases of interventionist policies and practices in an attempt to break the cycle of institutionalized poverty.

They show that the cyclical and inexorable interplay between statism and market forces tend to present history as dialectic, moving like a pendulum - for every swing in one direction, there is a swing back.  There is a justified cynicism in their discourse about the potential capacity of systems- social and economic - alone to ensure social and economic justice.

Their view of the progress of history is in terms of a spangled type inevitable cycle; in the 1890's and in the first years of this century, the European world enjoyed a golden age of open trade and laisse-faire government - the markets had their way.  Imperialist colonial rule where in the ascendancy.  The new world was the possession of the European empires.  Our continent in particular, provided bounty of raw materials and physical human power. The colonialist imperialist empires demeaned and exploited our people with impunity and entrenched arrogance which dies hard.

As early as 1879, Henry George in Progress and Poverty had this to say," ...At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected that labor saving intentions would lighten the toil and improve the conditions of the poor laborer, that the enormous power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past."  The Industrial Revolution was far from exacerbating poverty and introduced the element of industrial poverty which was touted the solution to poverty.  Automation, technological and industrial advancement succeeded in creating more wealth and increased avarice.  It also heightened the tension between competing nations which in certain cases increased the pressure on the workers.  It did not, however, alleviate poverty under the aegis of a liberal Great Britain.  This period of industrialization and doom produced the Fabians of Britain, the French communists who trained Deng and Ho Chi Minh and chiefly produced Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, who in 1916 presented a book called Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. A response to the effect of the Industrial Revolution and its' economic consequences of monopoly and renewed worker exploitation was given.  This wasalso the case in Czarist Russia.

Towards the end of this millennium we are once again experiencing another form of Industrial Revolution which consist of information technology, communications discovery, and proliferation of mind boggling proportions.  Again the hope abounds that the new found technologies will somehow help us to , as it were, grow out of poverty.

To return to the pendulum swing theory: - After World War II, communism entered its' period of greatest success - The 1950's and 1960's  and western governments vacillated over their economic role as the Colonial era came to protectionism, deficit spending, and import substitution.

The oil shock of the 1970's followed by the debt shock of the 1980's were followed by the collapse of the central control of the economy by communism.  With these three death blows, statism expired and markets became ascendant.  It presaged a period the political or military power reigned supreme, but the strongest producer of goods and services and the country with the strongest concentration of wealth took center stage a new and much more sophisticated form of domination.  Some refer to this as the advent of Pax Americana.  But even as people recognize that markets are progressively more global, in virtually every country there is a back-lash against perceived inadequacies of the market as a custodian of the best social values.  There was a growing concern that the bottom line became more important than care for people.

This clearly also produces the demand for political authority and governments to recede in importance.  The thrust is to allow markets to take charge.  This particular issue of less government is the area of confluence between Reagan and Clinton.  Both promised less government and more free market.  Both committed to more deregulation, privatization, and equal opportunity under democracy. The government would determine the regulatory framework and the markets would run free, not only nationally, but internationally.  Globalization accordingly became the catch phrase.

For a country with a strong economic base and enormous resources of disposable wealth and large numbers of wealthy people this seems attractive.  It is arguable whether in new democracies with limited resources and vast pools of poverty, that the government can step back to the same extent or be pushed into this direction by the dominant nation in the world.  In poorer countries governments have a different and more international vent............................. role to play.

Smaller democracies with weaker economies and greater social challenges and poverty look to conferences like this to help them find ways to deal with globalization and also to articulate to the world the limitation and encumbrances of smaller and poorer countries to follow the dictates of globalization.

I furthermore do not think it is our duty as social development agencies to reflect too much on issues like less government.  What, however, is our duty?  Are we to be like our predecessors at the turn of the century, viz.  "We are simply not beating poverty and as responsible global citizens we are looking to what is our duty in the face of this reality."

We do not see it as our role to mouth palliative solutions for the consequences of poverty, like soup kitchens, increased producing,and the return of the death penalty.  We must find truly empowering measures that will bring the victims of the world that Marx foresaw on the one hand and the propositions that Adam thought out on the other hand into the mainstream social, political and economical.

There is a contention that growth and economic prosperity by themselves will destroy poverty and promote good development programs like schools, health and welfare services, good housing, and job creation.

Yet the news from the U.S. is that we should also admit to ourselves that there are, for the moment, at the very least no conceivable and plausible alternative economic systems available which could claim success over poverty.  It is also our moral and academic duty to say to ourselves that we still have the poor among us and that in fact global poverty is not.

Receding in spite to the fact that the U.S. is wealthier than any other nation has probably been.  Growing income inequality, insecurity, increased criminality and white and blue collar corruption, however, appears to be the flip side of globalization.  Is it true or am I going too far to say that the imposed doctrine of globalization presupposes a restrictive fiscal policy which is basically telling the poor that the state cannot afford to offer them a system promise.  Is democracy a free market at election times?  The further logic is that reduced access to the good life and jobs are a pre-requisite for economic resurgence which promises us to grow out of the malaise so that we may successfully provide adequately for our poor.  The further disconcerting reality remains that any state which at best questions and at worse appears to deviate too far from the principles of globalization will be punished by currency markets and bondholders and could be cast out into the outside darkness.  The options for new democracies opting for free market is not so open.  In fact the central theme in the U.S. is wealth and not poverty.  That does not mean that poverty does not exist.  In fact it is a sad commentary that in the nation which spawned globalization; which is the only real super power in the world and where the markets are in the ascendancy and disposable wealth is poverty still abounding.

For the sake of perspective - it is worth our while for a moment to examine the extent to which the wealthy U.S. is coping with poverty: President Clinton's first term labor secretary, Robert Reich, says that the United States is divided into three social classes: A small over class of extreme wealth, a large underclass unable to fully enter the economic mainstream and an anxious middle class employed but feeling vulnerable.

Amidst the economic boom of unprecedented proportion, income equality in the U.S. is at its highest level in 50 years according to the Census Bureau.

Wealth enjoyed by the elite few is concentrated.  In 1980 the incomes of the richest one percent of U.S. families equaled the incomes of the families in the bottom twenty percent.  A decade later inequality doubled.  By 1990 the family incomes of the top one percent were greater than the bottom forty percent.  Nearly one in five U.S. workers live in poverty.  The average CEO's salary is more than 149 times that of a U.S. worker.  In Japan the ratio is 31 to 1.  About 40 million U.S. citizens- the size of the South African population- live below or just above the federal poverty line at $18,000 for a family of four.  In our own country 17 million out of 40 million - more than 40 percent of people live in poverty.

Poverty largely conflates with race in both the U.S. and South Africa.  The further significance being that the people of enormous wealth are by and large white and those living in poverty and abject poverty are black.

Let us look at the situation globally: The accumulated wealth of the world's top 358 billionaires equals the per capita incomes of 45 percent of humanity.  Sixty percent of the world's people are living and dying on six percent of the world's wealth (these figures were published from the American Economist Xabier Sorostiaga in the Minneapolis Star Tribune of May 4, 1966 by J.N. Pallmeyer).

The point I am making is that this very bad state of affairs is a result of market forces, historical injustice and bad public policy.  It assumes the contention of growth by itself removes poverty.  All it does is exponentionally widen the gap between rich and poor and incidentally, between black and white.  This is the effect of globalization.  The world markets have the ability almost immediately to punish national economies who opt for what the west perceives as too much government intervention to distribute wealth.  Without extraordinary measures globalization will continue to promote equal opportunity as a doctrine within the democratic state.  Everyone knows the real result of this.  The conventional response to poverty tends to be that those who remain poor or are caught in the vicious cycle of poverty in a free market democratic state only have themselves to blame.  Under these circumstances it will be understood by emerging nations which have great difficulty in embracing economic policies and who do not promise a real capacity for socioeconomic justice.  South Africa's challenges are exacerbated by the fact that the bottom 60 percent of the population are the people who have only just been politically liberated and are looking to the government.  They have voted material power to help them to overcome poverty.  In the next elections Thabo Mbeki's government will be tested by this particular criterion.  Atul Kohli writes in his chapter "Development strategies reconsidered" of John Lewis and Val Kallab under the heading: Democracy and Development that...... "Where poverty remains massive and where the state is involved in all manner of where adult suffrage has come long before the capacity to feed the adults.  Democracy is much more difficult to sustain." - hope not true in South Africa.

Developmental experts in free democracies must help us to understand how free market forces can support the efforts of development agencies to bring more and more people into the economic mainstream and to close the large income gap and preserve democracy.

In a country like South Africa statist delivery programs to the poor is vital.  The rights of citizens, after all, will remain meaningless for as long as the state fails economically to intervene in their lives.  We are experiencing a crime wave that is unacceptably high and extremely worrying.  While we remain deeply committed to it.  Rights  and democracy despair is creeping in whether this is the way to deal with the horrendous- further pressure on democracy.

There must furthermore be empowerment measures which will enable enterprising black young people from poor families to overcome the informal but real obstacles businesses place in their way to upward mobility.  In this regard the employment equity set is an example.

Market forces must continue to create wealth but the government must continue to insist that the market take actions to redress poverty.  Good diplomacy must explain this to the international agencies like the IMF, World Bank and the banks.

Foreign models of development have a double-edged implication for South Africa.  They suggest that South Africa has to liberalize if it is to have a chance of attracting foreign capital investment and increasing productivity growth trade.  South Africa's competitors in Eastern Europe, South East Asia and Latin America are already well along this path.  On the other hand , liberalization is not likely to bring quick gains.  Latin experience suggests that liberalization often worsens poverty in the short run.  We have to do things at our pace and in our own way making industry................... less labor intensive.

We as a civil society must redouble our efforts to help our poor people to come to recognize their power.  We must strengthen civil society.  We must create our own globalization by interacting with civil society.  We must create our own globalization by interacting with civil society in the U.S. and elsewhere.  Strengthening civil society and creating jobs are the long term answer to crime which is a symbol of the extent to which numbers of people have become alienated- though action is needed.

We must strengthen the civil consciousness of churches to turn their faith into a socially active one.  Churches can again be involved in the development process where empowerment may flourish.  New organizations must be founded and led by the people, but serviced by independent academies.  The reliance on the state may foster a culture of entitlement while what we need is self-reliance and independence.  Civil society in South Africa illustrated tangibly what a mighty force it could be.  It could become that force again.

We are poised on the cusp of the new millennium.  Great challenges are awaiting us.  Without sounding presumptuous I want to suggest that South Africa's commitment to democracy and the fundamental freedoms is unquestionable.  I must state however, that socioeconomic realities as I have shown put our democracy at peril.  The demands on our government is multifarious and varied and often contradictory.  EG.  The death penalty is a strong action.  In order to bring this system to the point of effective delivery and to make an impact on poverty, extraordinary state intervention is inevitable.  When and should this occur we will look to informed intellectual leadership across the world to interpret this in the light of the challenges I addressed in my lecture.  South Africa can succeed because we are young and flexible and because we have excellent leadership, good though largely untrained people.  We also have a reasonable resource base and a government able, excited and keen to take all the right measures.

Should South Africa succeed in achieving real development economic improvement of all and genuine empowerment of the disadvantaged and poor who happen to be largely black - we should, we hope, be able to show that poverty can be severely diminished when civil society and the state work in real partnership.

- People - Ordinary people must organize themselves and empower themselves.

A reliance on capitalism or socialism alone to address developmental concerns to impact on poverty has never worked .  The third approach is that privatizing poverty clearly cannot bear fruits because of the huge resources required.

We must reinstate civil society and enable civil society to lobby the state and the private sector to combine forces and make poverty priority number one.  Civil society must lead the process and should work with government and business as a triangular partnership.

Once we empower all people to discover that development is something they should  do for themselves, we will begin to move towards a better resolution.  To make people wholly dependent on government businesses brings temporary relief, but is anti-development because of the culture of dependency and entitlement it creates and the sense people get that others should solve their problems for them.  This was the single biggest failing of Leninist-Marxism and certainly also lies at the core of free market failure.

We the ordinary citizens must come to a recognition that we are our brother's keeper and that development without real empowerment is dead.  The state and business must play a very important part, but the partnership of people is the vital missing link.

If we value democracy we must not only protect and nurture it; we must join hands with the government and businesses to combat huge social and economic elements which tend to threaten our democracy and commitment to free market and a long term reduction rather than increase of government.  We must purge trends like the U.S. that we simply cannot adopt their strategies and policies.  We must be allowed to accept the support of our friends in our own way and meet our challenges independently.

CLOSE:
I do not believe that a generation that gave us the micro-chip cannot beat poverty through development.