A front-page New Statesman article on May 30 revealed that Oxfam's
revolving-door relationship with chancellor Gordon Brown has neutered
the demands, strategies and tactics of the 450-member NGO campaign,
'Make Poverty History'. The website of the British magazine Red
Pepper followed up with a devastating political critique of the
campaign, including a refusal to countenance any anti-war message
that will embarrass Brown and Tony Blair.

Embarrassment of this sort seems endemic amongst the charity-minded.
The Bob Geldof superstar concert series 'Live 8' correctly stood
accused of being 'hideously white' (as Black Information Link put
it), since only one band from Africa was scheduled amongst dozens at
the five major performances. (A hastily arranged additional concert
in Johannesburg may lead to a kind of outsourcing for black bands.)
In any case, Sir Bob's mid-1980s Live Aid famine relief strategy is
widely understood to have flopped because it ignored the
countervailing roles of imperial power relations, capital
accumulation, unreformable global institutions and venal local elites
- problems repeated and indeed amplified in Live 8.

There was another PR disaster in early June, just a month before the
Group of 8 (G8) leaders meet in Gleneagles, Scotland: white
wristbands favoured by Blair as a mark of his commitment to Africa
were revealed as products of Chinese forced labour at a Shenzhen
firm, Tat Shing. According to the Telegraph newspaper, 'Christian
Aid, which bought more than 500,000 wristbands from Tat Shing, claims
that Oxfam failed to tell other charities that it had decided to stop
ordering from the Shenzhen company. Oxfam said it told its coalition
partners of its decision, but "perhaps could have put it in writing".'

Do these gaffes signify something deeper? Merely careless
paternalism? Or perhaps a sense that the main outcomes of this
campaign are to be celebrated in media buzz, fashion statements,
celebrity chasing and the NGOs' proximity to power?

NGOs or organic social movements

The heart of the problem is that the large mainstream NGOs - and here
we do not mean War on Want, the World Development Movement and
Christian Aid - are not putting serious pressure on the G8. For
example, when anti-poverty campaigners call for 'cancellation of poor
countries' unpayable debts', this leaves undefined what, exactly, is
'unpayable' (quite a weasel word) and concedes that the vast
populations of lower-middle income countries will suffer under
indefinite debt peonage. NGO and rock star endorsements of the
partial debt relief gimmick announced by Gordon Brown and the G8
finance ministers on June 11 illustrate the confusion.

Semantic wiggling is just one of the problems associated with the
best of these initiatives, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty
(GCAP), whose International Facilitation Group was established in
Johannesburg late last year. Many excellent African organisations
have joined the campaign, but have they fully applied their minds,
and social-change instincts?

For GCAP, 'A single global title for the mobilisation is needed to
provide focus, cohesion and to maximise impact of activity... The aim
of "White Band Day" will be to get everyone around the world that
wants to end poverty to wear a white band on those days.'

There is a genuine need for focus and cohesion. But if it is
addressed in the manner conceived by GCAP's strategists, it could
have the reverse effect: organisational demobilisation accompanied by
lowest-common-denominator analyses and demands.

To illustrate, GCAP's first newsletter, issued on June 14, is a 3600-
word report-back on campaigning across the world. Yet it contains no
reference to organic anti-poverty activism in the Global South, such
as - in no particular order - labour strikes, popular mobilisations
for AIDS-treatment and other health services, reconnections of water/
electricity, land and housing occupations, anti-GMO and pro-food
security campaigns, women's organising, municipal budget campaigns,
student and youth movements, community resistance to displacements
caused by dam construction and the like, anti-debt and reparations
movements, environmental justice struggles, immigrants' rights
campaigns, political movements to take state power, etc etc. No
mention of Bolivia, Venezuela, Palestine, Iraq.

GCAP has superb member organisations across the Third World, to be
sure, but as a network it just seems to float in the air,
disconnected from the reality of anti-poverty protest. It's as if the
formidable recent upsurge of unrest - 1980s-90s IMF Riots, high-
profile indigenous people's protests since Zapatismo in 1994, global
justice activism since Seattle in 1999, the Social Forum movement
since 2001, anti-war demos since 2001, autonomist protests and the
Latin American left's revival - never happened, don't exist, aren't
worthy of acknowledgment much less integration and amplification.

Worse, GCAP's promotion of the already watered-down UN Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) could draw away activist energy and
resources in many Third World countries, from organic struggles and
organisational imperatives. If GCAP is successful, we foresee a
tsunami of distraction, flooding out the diverse local struggles that
could instead - if nurtured carefully - support a genuinely bottom-
up, internationally-linked, networked fight against injustice.

In contrast to the GCAP rhetoric, albeit sometimes off the beaten
path, serious activists are crossing borders, races, classes and
political traditions in sector after sector: land (Via Campesino),
healthcare (International Peoples Health Council), free schooling
(Global Campaign for Education), water (the People's World Water
Forum), energy/climate change (the Durban Declaration), debt (Jubilee
South), democratic development finance (IFIs-Out! and World Bank
Bonds Boycott), trade (Our World is Not for Sale) and so on.

Of course, it is not at all easy to interlock the already overlapping
grassroots and shopfloor justice campaigns. South Africans now
campaigning for an overall programme of 'decommodification' and socio-
economic rights know this, thanks to the various movements' political
splits (mainly over the merits of alignment to the corruption-ridden,
neoliberal ruling party of Thabo Mbeki).

To be sure, there is broad unity in the South Africans' objectives -
free anti-retroviral medicines to fight AIDS; at least 50 litres of
free water and 1 kiloWatt hour of free electricity for each
individual every day; extensive land reform; prohibitions on service
disconnections and evictions; free education; the right to
employment; and even a monthly 'Basic Income Grant' - but very hard
work lies ahead to connect the concrete struggles.

Globophiles, globophobes

Still, without coherence emerging from organic struggles fought by
mass democratic movements across the Global South (including in
Northern ghettoes), the construction of a top-down campaign against
poverty is both unrealistic and subject to early cooption. According
to Catherine Quarmby in the New Statesman last month, 'Some of the
most intriguing criticism of the softly-softly approach has come from
within the government itself. One senior government source suggests
that Oxfam has failed to learn one of the essential techniques of
negotiation - if you agree on the basics too early you forfeit real
influence.'

Unfortunately this is no aberration, but part of a pattern dating at
least to 1995, when Oxfam International broke from the 50 Years is
Enough protests against the World Bank, endorsing a large inflow of
taxpayer funding at the very peak of the Washington Consensus
mentality.

By 2002, Oxfam's leading policy analsyst, quoted in the Washington
Post, happily revealed an agenda of divide-and-conquer, between
'globophobes' (the global justice movement protesting the WTO/IMF/
World Bank) and 'globophiles' (Oxfam): 'Breaking with some of its
anti-globalisation allies, the aid agency Oxfam International issued
a report yesterday that praised international trade as a potentially
enormous boon to the world's poor... "The extreme element of the anti-
globalisation movement is wrong," said Kevin Watkins, a senior policy
adviser for Oxfam who wrote most of the report. "Trade can deliver
much more [for poor countries] than aid or debt relief."'

As then-director of Food First, Anuradha Mittal, complained, 'We are
disappointed that Oxfam, one of the NGO leaders on food security, has
chosen to undermine the demands of social movements and think tanks
in the South such as Via Campesina, Movement of Landless Workers
(Brazil), Third World Network, Focus on the Global South, and Africa
Trade Network which have demanded that governments must uphold the
rights of all people to food sovereignty and the right to food rather
than industry-led export-oriented production... Oxfam undermines the
demands of social movements and think tanks in the South.'

Proximity to Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue has unfortunately
become a good proxy for political common sense, or lack thereof. For
instance, Mohammad Akhter, chief executive officer of Interaction,
the 160-member NGO coalition many of whose members are considered de
facto subsidiaries of US AID, met Wolfowitz late last month and
publicly pronounced: 'The World Bank is in good hands.'

A few days earlier, Interaction and Oxfam had thrown a grateful going-
away bash for James Wolfensohn, even though on three high-profile
occasions - the World Commission on Dams, Structural Adjustment
Participatory Review Initiative and Extractive Industries Review - he
seduced NGOs into multi-stakeholder reviews, and then broke their
hearts by allying instead with corporate and state suiters.

As a result of these sorts of influences, there appears little
benefit - and great risk - for African NGOs to adopt as a high
priority top-down Make Poverty History and even GCAP campaigns which
endorse MDG end-goals dreamt up in the backrooms of the UN, where
Bush administration ideologues breathe down bureaucrats' necks to
reduce funding obligations, impose patriarchal and Christian-
fundamentalist values, remove the word 'rights' from (already
fatuous) official rhetoric, and denude the few progressive UN
agencies of any clout. Even Johannesburg-based Civicus International
staff have informally relabeled their objective the 'Minimalist
Development Goals'.

Why, then, do those white bands grace some African NGO wrists and
heads, from Civicus' chief executive officer at the last World
Economic Forum in Davos, to a few brave pro-MDG NGOers at the Africa
Social Forum? When Civicus staff brought two huge bags of the
headbands to Lusaka and made a pitch for the campaign, it was so
controversial - alongside a futile appeal to endorse a 'Joint
Facilitation Committee' with the hated World Bank - that the bags
were left closed.

South Africa's whiteband ('witdoeke') problem

If we flash back 19 years, to mid-1986, we get a better perspective
on why wearing white headbands is so distasteful for the South
African left. At the time, Cape Town's African township Crossroads
had a population of 100 000+ and a high profile in anti-apartheid
protest in part because of its location near the airport. Over a
fortnight's time, violence erupted, leaving 60 people dead and
approximately 60,000 people homeless as a reactionary paramilitary
gang swept through, known as the 'witdoeke', whose leader was
specifically mandated by the apartheid regime to terrorise anti-
apartheid activists.

According to a reliable history of the area, 'The person selected for
this in Crossroads was Johnson Ngxobongwana. Ngxobongwana had evolved
from being a local warlord to a strong political voice in Crossroads.
As chairman of the ward committee he had built up a popular
following, and acquired a retinue of local thugs, known as witdoeke
(white-cloths) for the white headbands they wore for identification.
Unbeknownst to most people he also had "unofficial" sponsorship from
South Africa's apartheid government and its security forces.
Ngxobongwana was able to use these resources to eliminate rivals in
the area, as well as marginalise women's groups and youth groups.'

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found Crossroads' fate to be
comparable with techniques used in Johannesburg, Durban and other
sites where violence emanating from the witdoeke-style Inkatha
movement killed tens of thousands of people: 'In the South African
context, contra-mobilisation was used to organise and support
"moderate blacks" to oppose the revolutionary movements. Of
necessity, it was a covert strategy - concealing the hand of the
state as provider of logistical, political and financial support -
and making use of "surrogate" forces. Hence, the state would not be
seen to be involved in the conflict and violence between groupings
and the resistance organisations.'

No one is suggesting that putting on a white headband or wristband
makes you a collaborator with neoliberalism, dividing-and-conquering
the oppressed forces, and supporting 'moderate' NGOs so that they
gain bantustan-style rewards from the global apartheid establishment.

Nevertheless, from the standpoint of the resistance organisations, it
is overdue that we collectively consider our fundamental visions, and
in particular whether the much welcomed globalisation of people - and
of culture, ideas, hospitality, travel and political solidarity - can
be accompanied by what we'd argue is just as desperately needed: the
deglobalisation of capital.

For or against market tyranny?

After all, the danger of NGO-lubricated ideological alignment with
the neoliberal project is serious. At a time men like Jeffrey Sachs
are celebrated as saviours of the world's poor - for example, in a
Bono song dedication at last month's big New York City concert - a
deeper critique of markets and the NGOs which legitimate them is
desperately needed.

Bono in particular has been obsequious. At the last New Labour party
convention, Bono labeled Blair/Brown the 'Lennon and McCartney of
poverty reduction'. According to Quarmby, 'some groups involved in
Make Poverty History were horrified. John Hilary, director of
campaigns and policy at War on Want, was in the audience. "When Bono
said that, many NGO leaders who were there put their heads in their
hands and groaned... It's a killer blow for us. To see the smiles on
the faces of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair! This is exactly what they
want - they want people to believe that this is their crusade,
without actually changing their policy."'

Are the Make Poverty History campaign objectives for Gleneagles -
greater Third World exposure to market mechanisms, a few crumbs of
debt relief and a doubling of (neoliberally-conditioned) aid -
actually worth endorsing as a reformist step forward - or should they
be condemned as more of the same? In his book Deglobalisation, Bello
has convincingly set out the justice movement's case for
disempowering and defunding the global-scale institutions that push
capitalism down Third World throats.

So when Sachs, Oxfam, Mbeki and others continue to insist that the
way to cure poverty is to expand the world market and reverse
Africa's alleged 'marginalisation', they elide the reality that
Africa's trade/GDP ratio has for many years topped the world charts,
and the reality that ever-greater reliance upon exporting cash-crops
and minerals - most of which have suffered huge declines in price due
to gluts - is a recipe for underdevelopment.

When debt relief comes with more Western neoliberal conditionality,
as HIPC shows, the reality is that people often end up in worse shape
after relief than before.

And when G8 'phantom aid' continues to foster Northern interests
above those of the Third World's people, it should be rethought
entirely. In late May, Christian Aid's brilliant Ghanaian researcher/
campaigner Charles Abugre declared - personally not organisationally
- to a Globalise Resistance conference in London: 'Stop the aid! It's
done too much damage!'

What to wear, for fun in the sun?

What, then, should be done in coming weeks, especially on July 2 in
Edinburgh? As Naomi Klein suggested at a University of KwaZulu-Natal
anti-corporate conference on June 10, 'A million people are going to
Edinburgh and joining hands, wearing white, in a circle around the
entire city, and it's going to be one big, giant bracelet. Everyone
will wear bracelets, and then they'll be a bracelet. Are you excited
about this? I always had concerns that some of these big corporate
NGOs were less interested in contesting power than acting as
accessories to power. But being a giant bracelet for the G8 takes
this a little too far.'

Instead, suggested Klein, 'Encircle the G8! But instead of declaring
themselves a piece of jewelry, they should say, we are a noose, we
are putting pressure and we are squeezing these neoliberal policies
that are taking lives around the world. Just like the noose that
killed Ken Saro-Wiwa ten years ago this November.'

That is indeed the choice: to be a bauble for - or a noose against -
neoliberalism. By joining those active across the Third World in
concrete struggles (who in our experience are not wasting time with
GCAPs and MDGs), Northern readers can offer real, lasting solidarity.

In making the choice, especially in Britain, consider whether the
symbolism of the colour white is appropriate. Are NGOs and their
friends painting themselves as virgins at an alter, on the verge of
marrying G8 leaders like Bush, Berlusconi, Chirac, Blair?
Alternatively, will the NGO-led masses be waving white flags of
surrender on July 2 in Edinburgh, with these headbands and wristbands?

It's rather hard to tell. According to Make Poverty History's Bruce
Whitehead, 'It's not a march in the sense of a demonstration, but
more of a walk. It is going to be very much a family affair. The
emphasis is on fun in the sun. The intention is to welcome the G8
leaders to Scotland and to ask them to deliver trade justice, debt
cancellation and increased aid to developing countries.'

Perhaps Whitehead and Make Poverty History need a change of both
attitude and attire. After all, 'white' armies have traditionally
fought 'red' armies. Fortunately, unlike Russia in the late 1910s or
Crossroads in the mid-1980s, today's armies of NGOs and social
movements are not carrying weapons of physical destruction, only
ideas, energy and a few material resources.

Still, we can't help but conclude that, in contrast to the red social
movement struggles for dignity and justice, those wearing white and
adopting the NGOs' weak programme may appear as... well, if not
explicit agents of the G8, then at minimum their decorations.

Hence when protesting against Wolfowitz on his mid-June Africa trip,
against the Gleneagles meeting of the world's rulers in early July,
and against the World Bank and IMF annual meetings during the late
September days of anti-war action in Washington, DC, we'll encourage
our comrades to wear something more colourful, with politics to match.

***

Bond is based at the Centre for Civil Society at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal, Durban; Brutus is a poet and professor emeritus at
University of Pittsburgh, and works with Jubilee South Africa and the
Centre for Economic Justice; and Setshedi is a Soweto-based anti-
privatisation activist employed at the Freedom of _Expression Institut