Scant take-aways from Cape Town meet

By Richard Dowden

The World Economic Forum in Cape Town sounds like a wonderful gathering – a chance for the rich and powerful to sort out Africa’s problems and discuss its opportunities in the coolest city on the continent. But don’t get carried away. Cape Town may be on the continent but it is definitely not African. And while there’s a lot of talk about the continent’s immense potential, the news coverage does not suggest that the journalists, who are trained to spot a new idea or fact, heard very much new – in public at least.

And being at a conference like that is not what you might think. You fly into an airport – they are the same the world over. A car meets you and you catch a glimpse of Table Mountain and a flash of the sea as you whizz along the motorway. Cape Town is the world’s most beautiful site for a city but close up, it is one of the world’s ugliest - a random collection of grandiose Victorian or brutalist 1960s concrete and boring 1990s boxes of glass. The whole town is sliced and diced by motorways and one way streets. Only in the centre do a few elegant art nouveau buildings from the 1920s survive. Two half finished motorway flyovers, stopped in the 1970s, still hang in midair like an invitation to lemming motorcars driven mad by jams. Then you are in a hotel – and international hotels are pretty much the same the world over.

You spend the next three days in the hotel, or a great airliner hangar of a conference centre trying to improve the state of Africa through speeches, panels discussions and workshops. Some people hardly go to the sessions but use these occasions like a speed dating event, desperate to meet as many people they might do business with in as short a time as possible. Both groups constantly check their BlackBerries and Iphones for texts and email messages, or occasionally go into a corner alone and talk urgently. And before you know it, you are back in that taxi heading for the airport – and oh yes there’s Table Mountain again, and it’s soooo like the pictures of it!

Since everyone comes away with something different, specific to their needs, it is hard to say what exactly these gatherings achieve. Occasionally a whole meeting like this does catch fire because of an inspiring new speech, idea or a row. There were 700 plus at Cape Town, four or five heads of state, plus numerous other politicians (especially finances ministers), several bosses of mega businesses, and lots of other senior business executives, plus a few handpicked journalists, experts and single issue advocates. My role I am told is to chuck some rocks into the pool if it gets too placid.

I don’t think I succeeded this year. On the China in Africa panel I asked the audience to let me know if they ever spot an African manager bossing Chinese workers. The big Western Corporates all have Africans in senior positions in Africa, but for all their declarations of friendship and equality and lack of colonial mentality the Chinese like to do everything themselves.

The other panel I was on included Kofi Annan, Morgan Tsvangirai and Raila Odinga. It was fascinating – Tsvangirai talked about his first invitation to dinner with Robert Mugabe after he entered the fray against him. They had never met and he admitted that at first he refused to eat. Mugabe had to reassure him he was not trying to poison him. Raila told how reluctant he was to enter into a coalition with Mwai Kibaki when he felt he had won fair and square.

So interesting were these stories that I realised only at the last minute I had contributed nothing. Then I realised this was an amazing moment: here were two veteran opposition leaders, both persecuted for years, who then almost certainly both won presidential elections, but had victory snatched from them and were forced into coalitions. Both might also soon become President of their countries. The question was obvious - I asked them to state  in front of the cameras on the record  whether they would accept term limits and how they would treat their opposition leaders. Tsvangirai’s answers were straightforward. I will need to look at Raila’s more carefully when I get the transcripts (see video above).

Most UN Secretary Generals - trained in the art of never saying anything that might upset anyone - disappear into obscurity once they step down, but Kofi Annan is becoming more outspoken by the day. At this meeting he said that Africa suffers from a “leadership deficit,” and warned that the tendency for leaders to cling to power was “extreme arrogance”.

He was one of the few speakers that said something controversial. You don’t expect business people to speak out or ask difficult sessions in open fora, but the politicians and others were also very bland this time. This was brought home to me in the very last session when the Ethiopian Deputy Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, said the C word. A half-suppressed murmur went round the hall. In this, the last session – why spoil it now? It was like farting in Church. Until then the word corruption had not been mentioned in any session I attended.

I still can’t think of a headline for the meeting – which considering it followed the biggest revolutions the continent has seen since the end of the Cold War – is surprising. But I am sure lots of deals were made, meetings set up and a thousand small ideas that might change the world were born or multiplied.