By Nelson Mandela
January 4, 2000
Johannesburg - At the end of the day, what the ordinary people of all countries in the world are asking for is the simple opportunity to live a decent life, to have proper shelter and food to eat, to be able to care for their children and live with dignity, to have good education for their charges and their health needs cared for, and to have access to gainful employment. In short, the fundamental challenge our world faces in the next century is the eradication of the large-scale poverty still besetting too many parts of the globe and plaguing too large a percentage of humankind.
It is worthwhile quoting from the 1999 United Nations Human Development Report to remind ourselves of the scale of inequality as we exit the century and the millennium. The report points to opportunities and rewards of globalization being spread unequally and inequitably, concentrating power and wealth in a select group of people, nations, and corporations, marginalizing others. It warns that when the profit motives of market players get out of hand, they challenge people's ethics and sacrifice respect for justice and human rights.
The report proceeds to give specific figures highlighting the unequal and inequitable distribution. The top fifth of countries have 86 percent of GDP; the bottom fifth just 1 percent. The top fifth command 82 percent of the world export markets and 68 percent of foreign direct investment; the bottom fifth just 1 percent of each of these.
These global indicators of inequality can be transferred to individual societies and nations. In some countries with the greatest wealth, large pockets of poverty and penury can be found. We as South Africans have enough experience of that; next to opulence that matches anything the developed world can offer, our country has the most massive and pervasive incidence of poverty. We rate among the worst of the countries for which the gap between the rich and the poor has been measured.
Our situation is largely the result of decades and centuries of colonialism and racist rule. Now that we have achieved nonracial democratic governance, our primary national agenda today is the eradication of poverty. The liberation movement has been voted into government with the simple but daunting mandate of building a better life for all. While there are sharp differences among our political parties, the one common point of agreement is that we cannot live with such poverty and inequality.
What we have quickly learned, however, is that the economic fate of a country is not solely in its own hands. In the globalized world in which we live, events in one corner of the planet can have an immense effect upon the fortunes of others far away and not at all involved in those events. Our government, through its capable and internationally respected minister of finance, conducts a prudent fiscal policy, yet in our first five years we often found external circumstances putting our economy under pressure and complicating our efforts to improve the material conditions of our poor.
This state of affairs should remind us that as we affect the fate of one another, we also have a common responsibility in the world to address poverty as our greatest single challenge. A simple reliance on the market to eradicate poverty and gross inequality is a grave fallacy. We all know that the market with all its benefits does not, as it were, sort it all out. If a well-known international financier like George Soros warns in his book about the crisis of global capitalism and the negative impact of unregulated financial markets, we should take him seriously.
If overnight, as a result of turmoil on the financial markets, 17 million people in Indonesia fall back into poverty, if 1 million children in that region will not be able to return to school, if across the world 1.3 billion people live on less than $1 a day and 3 billion people on less than $2 a day, if 1.3 billion have no access to clean water, 3 billion no access to sanitation, 2 billion no access to power, if all this is so, we cannot go on with business as usual.
The inclination to point out restraints and problems without moving to concrete action is, however, not very helpful, either. In Africa, for example, there is an increasing realization that our cause will not be served by complaining about the ills of colonialism and neocolonial exploitation. Increasingly, African leaders are rising to the challenge to take primary responsibility for the fate of the continent. This, it is realized, starts with good governance, respect for human rights, sound economic policies and management, and the eradication of self-serving corruption.
Together we all live in a global neighborhood, and it is not to the long-term benefit of any that there are islands of wealth in a sea of poverty. We need a globalization of responsibility as well. Above all, that is the challenge of the next century.
Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.
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