From: The Sowetan (Johannesburg)

August 29, 2001

By: Ido Lekota

The negative effects of globalisation were felt most sharply by black people, President Thabo Mbeki told a forum of non-governmental organisations gathered in Durban yesterday before the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) due to start on Friday.

"Its worst victims, within countries and universally, have been those who are not white," Mbeki said.

"Even as it marches triumphantly throughout the globe like an invincible army, the process of globalisation contains within it the makings of an insoluble crisis that will affect even its greatest beneficiaries, unless its inherent tendency to marginalise many is halted and reversed.

"This has not only meant the development gap has grown even wider, it has also meant the further structural disempowerment of billions of people, making it even more difficult to break the trap of poverty and underdevelopment."

Those who were victims of globalisation had become permanent welfare cases, forever to be assisted by the humanitarian deeds of the minority, who owned the bulk of global wealth, Mbeki said.

After seven years of freedom South Africa, like many underdeveloped countries, continued to show the symptoms of colonialism, racism and slavery, which had entrenched economic inequalities along racial lines.

"If you move around this city and the country as a whole, you0 will need no high academic certificate to determine the extent to which our socio-economic realities - and therefore the lives of millions - continue to be defined by the legacy of slavery, colonialism and racism," he said.

The challenge was for delegates at the NGO forum to ensure that there was a programme of action that dealt directly with the effects of racism, colonialism, slavery and globalisation.

A major step would be for the delegates to refuse to accept that globalisation existed in the natural order of things, condemning some to poverty, subservience and dehumanisation.

Mbeki said that what should drive the delegates was a belief that human conditions, like the ones created by globalisation, could be changed through human intervention.