by Munetsi Madakufamba
When politicians and business-people meet to discuss development issues, the question that is often asked at the end is whether a conference was well attended, and at what level, as a measure of its success.
Quite often, very little is said about the ground that was covered since the last conference, or the cost in terms of time spent sitting in such meetings.
Recently, a record 600 representatives of business, trade unions and the media had a chance to interact with 14 political leaders from most southern African countries, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and Malaysia at the third Southern African International Dialogue (SAJD’99) in Zimbabwe’s resort town of Victoria Falls.
The last two editions, in Botswana (1997) and Namibia (1998), had not attracted so many participants nor were they attended by so many political leaders.
By usual standards, would one be wrong to conclude that the Victoria Falls dialogue was the most successful of the three? You would never be forgiven for making such a conclusion after listening to South African President Thabo Mbeki’s dinner message at SAID 99.
“We meet in conference to answer the question – what is to be done! At the conclusion of a successful conference we should have come to a determination as to what is to be done,” Mbeki told the participants in his speech entitled “From Swakopmund to Victoria Falls”.
“However, the fact that we knew [at Swakopmund] what needed to be done did not mean that what we planned to do was therefore done,” he said.
“Nothing is done until it is done,” he reminded his colleagues before embarking on a recital of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Conference Crazy”. In this light but serious recital, Mbeki called for future conferences where political leaders would be asked to explain what they had done to implement decisions taken at the last conference.
“The question that all of us should answer as smart partners is – since Victoria Falls, what have we done actually to implement the decisions we took to realise the perspective of smart partnership?” he said, adding that “The first political leaders to report would be ourselves, given that we were the last in our region to be exposed to the excellent idea of smart partnerships.”
He summed up his contribution with the call to include time factor as a cost of production. “Perhaps to declare war on the misuse of this resource [time], we could count the time spent on planning as a cost and the time spent doing what we had decided to do as a benefit,” he advised delegates.
The concept of smart partnership was adopted from Malaysia, which started it four years ago as an attempt to bring to dialogue, governments, business and labour. Meeting in an informal interactive atmosphere, away from the usual “jacket-and-tie” formalities, the players engage in frank discussions with the hope of finding solutions to the many problems that plague society today.
SAlD’99 was unique in that it brought into the fold a fourth “smart partner” – the media. This also marked a reversal of roles – if only momentarily – when heads of state and government fired questions to media chiefs. In a no-holds-barred two-hour discussion, political leaders grilled journalists on whether they believed in the efficacy of a partnership in development and how the latter could contribute to the process.
The media’s first contribution, the editors concurred, would be to monitor the process of development, beginning with accessing progress on implementation of conference decisions. To be able to do that, the politicians were told, journalists needed a constitutional guarantee on the freedom of the press.
The pledge to monitor development progress could not have come at a better time, especially given the long wish-list of projects drawn at the end of the conference. The dialogue agreed on an economic programme that will promote cross-border investment especially in tourism, transport and energy sectors.
“Several business projects, such as regional tourism, have been identified as having immediate and great potential. The economic benefits of regionally packaged tourism in terms of labour intensive employment, and the potential from the development of infrastructural and other ancillary services, were recognised,” said host President Robert Mugabe in his closing remarks entitled “The Way Forward”.
So much to be implemented by governments, business and labour as they race against time in the run up to SAID’2000 planned for Mozambique in the new millennium. But for the media, the way forward as watchdog of the society would be to continuously remind their fellow “smart partners” that “nothing is done until it is done.” (SARDC)
