Lula: Arab revolt revives hope for a new world

Former Brazilian president: millions protesting against poverty, rule of tyrants, submission to world powers.

Middle East Online

By Laurence Boutreux - DAKAR

'The global economic order is no longer shaped by a few leading economies' Former Brazilian president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva on Monday urged Africa to become aware of its own power amid rising hopes of a new world order in the wake of the popular revolts sweeping the Arab world. Attending the annual World Social Forum which brings together leftists seeking an alternative to globalisation and capitalism, Lula said here that liberal "dogmas" had failed. "In South America, but especially in the streets of Tunis and Cairo and many other African cities, hopes for a new world are being revived," Lula said, "Millions of people are protesting against the poverty to which they are subjected to, against the rule of tyrants, against the submission of their country to world powers." Recalling that Brazil is home to "the world's second largest black community after Nigeria," Lula urged Africans to realise they had "an extraordinary future" with the continent's 800 million people, vast territory and riches and could achieve food self-sufficiency. "The global economic order is no longer shaped by a few leading economies," he noted. Rich countries who "saw us as peripheral and dangerous ... those who arrogantly gave lessons on how we should manage our economy, have not been able to avoid the crises which reached their own countries and all humanity," he said. "All efforts to tackle poverty and inequality were seen as charity or populism ... but history has refuted these false theories... the market is not a panacea," the Brazilian statesman said. Another keynote speaker was Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, who portrayed himself as a "liberal", an "advocate of the market economy and not the state economy that has failed almost everywhere in the world." Participants at the gathering, an alternative to the World Economic Forum held in Davos last week, hope to change the world economy and the relationship with the environment. The six-day meeting is being held in Africa for the second time after Nairobi in 2007 and comes 10 years after the first edition of the Forum took place in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 2001. This year's theme is: "Crises of the system and civilisation." The 83-year-old Wade who is seeking a controversial third presidnetial mandate next year, said he "does not agree" with the anti-globalisation movement even though he shares "the idea of changing the world which is going badly." He caused a slight uproar when he asked whether the Social Forum had succeeded in changing things on a global scale. The second day of the forum focused on the rush across Africa to buy up land amid a growing global food crisis. Lamine Ndiaye, a Senegalese working for Oxfam cited "the case of a Libyan company which acquired 200,000 hectares in Mali, a private British company buying land in Tanzania" and other examples in Senegal, Ghana, Mozambique and Ethiopia. "Africa is not a battleground for powerful countries ... It is a rich continent, provided it is allowed to determine its policies and development strategies," Tunisian Taoufik Ben Abdallah, coordinator of the African Social Forum, said at the opening of the gathering.