Are NGO`s Silencing Community Voices?

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At the Alternative Mining Indaba held in Cape Town in 2014, a community leader stood up and made an impassioned plea for the AMI to be opened up to more community participation and for the AMI to be held closer to where communities are experiencing the effects of mining.

By the time the 2015 AMI came around, communities had become so frustrated at their exclusion that they initiated an impromptu protests as the AMI was about to get underway. The organisers were livid and could not understand why the AMI should be the target of community protest.

Yet for the 2016 AMI, community funding support to attend the Indaba had been withdrawn resulting in less than 10% of the delegates being made up of community members affected by mining.

The AMI states in its objectives that its first aim is “to provide a platform for communities affected and impacted by the extractive industries to reclaim their rights through the formulation of alternatives”. The theme of foregrounding communities, and providing space to “create meaningful decision making processes for communities”, dominate the key objectives set out by the AMI.

Yet looking through the programme of the AMI, one is struck that out of 69 speaking slots or allocations to influence discussions, only 10 slots were allocated to communities. When one considers the make-up of the delegates, it is quite difficult to miss the fact that less than 10% of the delegates were from communities. In commission after commission when counting the participants and doing a roll call of who was present, community participants were noticeably absent and rarely pipped the 10% level.  

Sunday evening at about 11PM before the AMI was due to start, I received a call from community members who were bitterly disappointed that the small group of them that had managed to squeeze out an invitation and support to attend the AMI, were housed in dire old army barracks with stinking toilets and poor facilities while the organisers were all enjoying four star luxury. While I understand the difficulties of finding accommodation in Cape Town during this period, I do think it speaks to the preference, or rather lack of preference that community members enjoy.

Where community members were present in commissions of the AMI, they were often faced with hostile interventions by business delegates who often sort to limit the intensity of the debate or the radical contributions of the participants. Often the business delegates were disguised as free thinking hippies in one case, or as NGO`s in others, very seldom announcing their funders or members.

Having been invited by the organisers to facilitate a session on Business and Human Rights I was confronted by a situation where the organisers had asked me to co-facilitate with an NGO which upon further investigation turned out to be a proxy for Shell, Vale Mining, Total and other corporate entities. When I raised my concerns with the organisers I was asked to accommodate their inclusion.

During my exchange with the coordinating committee of the AMI however, it became clear that the incorporation of business into the life of the AMI and indeed a policy of dialogue and collaboration which excludes communities had already taken root within the funders of the AMI and the organising committee of the AMI.

Collaboration and dialogue with business and capital is of course not a new phenomenon and has been the cornerstone of efforts by people such as Ban Ki Moon of the UN who has promoted big business as a “truly transformative force” whose goodwill and resources provide a “unique opportunity” to drive sustainable development.

Others such as Simon Zadek, a recent contributor to Ban Ki-Moon’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability whose 2008 article “Global Collaborative Governance, There is No Alternative” argued, “It is through collaboration, often involving the oddest bedfellows, that we vest this generation’s hope for effectively addressing the challenges of poverty, inequality, and environmental insecurity.”

The logic here is rather straight forward and through various processes such as the Sustainable Development Goals the message rings consistently as Maria Hengeveld, a Fulbright fellow in human rights at Columbia University explains the message to convey; that corporations are our partners, not our enemies. We reach out to them asking for responsibility, and we don’t demand accountability. We are urged to charm them and not to scold them.

We should of course do all of this, while ignoring the long violent history of dispossession and exclusion presided over by the very corporates we are now to embrace as our partners.  We are asked to ignore that corporates have a long history of assimilating the liberal language of NGO`s, while fastidiously bulldozing communities off their land.

In an address at the AMI, by the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM, a body representing major mining companies with which the AMI have been having private meetings), the chairperson noted how progressive their members were and how Mark Cutifani the CEO of Anglo was one their most forward thinking members, I was struck by the irony of it all. Mark Cutifani`s Anglo is currently presiding over almost a century of dispossession and the abuse of 65 000 community members human rights in Mokopane. 

This systemic and structural violence against the community of Mapela in Mokopane is vividly captured in a current report which I authored for ActionAid South Africa entitled, Precious Metal II, A systemic Inequality.

The promotion by the AMI for certain NGO groups to participate in the corporate Mining Indaba, itself raises serious questions about the efficacy of providing legitimacy to the corporate Mining Indaba. Having a few dissenting voices in a limited number of discussions does more for the corporates than it does for the people the NGO`s profess to do it for. 

Maria Hengeveld captures it well when she argues that; “corporations have long recognized that investing in NGOs and attaching their brands to trusted activist organizations — preferably those who represent “innocent victims,” such as children and women and, ideally, those who focus on the cultural and traditional practices that oppress them — is a lucrative way to protect their reputations and pacify opposition to corporate globalization. Increasingly, they rely on NGOs not just to legitimize their direct practices but also to normalize neoliberal, market-led development.”

The issue then is not so much that we engage business and government on the issues that affect mining affected communities, for this we must, but how do we do this in a way that not only builds the agency of communities to articulate their issues to the duty bearers in government and business but also in ensuring that our engagement does not provide legitimacy to corporate and state abuses and does not further entrench the inequality that is inherent in the current system.

It is in challenging the current inequities of the system which silences communities living in poverty that social justice NGO`s have stepped into the breach to facilitate community engagement. 

The danger with the current model adopted by the AMI, which excludes communities and preferences NGO elites is that it sets up NGO`s as a 6^th Estate of elites that speaks on behalf of communities, raises funds in the name of communities, but which limits and excludes communities in the very same way that state and corporate duty bearers consistently do.  

Without placing communities in a position where they are empowered to drive their own change agenda, the intervention and agenda setting by NGO`s are more likely to affirm existing inequalities rather than provide alternatives or a challenge to the status quo.

 This brings me to the way the AMI is coordinated and run.

The AMI does not have an elected governance structure with no community voices in the coordinating structure which develops its strategy and agenda. This by itself is not unusual, but it does raise concerns when the AMI, abrogates to itself the right to engage in negotiations with governments and business on behalf of communities. As already pointed out above, communities have an extremely limited role in its deliberations and absolutely no role in setting agendas.

It is ironic then, that the AMI in its 2016 declaration declares that it seeks to end the exclusion and injustice against communities and seeks to give a voice to communities, while the AMI appears to be doing the very same thing it accuses government and corporates of doing.

The need to open this conversation to include communities goes to the heart of the role of NGO`s in contemporary society and it`s is my hope that this opinion will facilitate such a discussion. 

*This article was first published in GrounUp http: //www.groundup.org.za/article/not-alternative-mining-indaba/