IMF directorship
The Congress of South African Trade Unions has noted the debate around the replacement of Dominique Strauss-Khan as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.
COSATU agrees with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan and Australian Deputy Prime Minister, Wayne Swan - co-chairs of the G20 IMF Reform Working Group - that the selection of a new IMF head should be made urgently and should be appointed through an open, transparent and merit based process.
The federation also insists however that the MD should not come from any particular nationality, country or region, but should represent the world as a whole.
The debate should be not just about personalities but the campaign for substantive changes to the orientation and functioning of the institution and its sister global organisations, particularly the World Bank.
Having the next IMF MD from outside the developed world could give added momentum to this campaign but it will solve nothing unless we also start to resolve the urgent problems facing humanity's developmental needs and priorities.
The world economic crisis and the failure of the neo-liberal paradigm, particularly in the whole developing world, is evidence of the IMF's disastrous performance.
The world, particularly developing countries, need global institutions which recognise that neo-liberalism is not, and will never be, the solution to humanity. It must adopt an alternative developmental economic strategy to redesign the world and serve humanity and not profit.
The IMF was conceived at a United Nations Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA, in July, 1944. The founding objective was, "to build a framework for economic cooperation that would avoid a repetition of the vicious circle of competitive devaluations that had contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s".
In political terms, it was established as one of the principal instruments of US imperialism to reorganise the world under its hegemony and to defend its own interests and those of its junior allies in Europe.
It was meant to assert the global dominance of the victorious powers after both world wars, working to design the world and determine the developmental agenda in line with their conception of a new capitalist post-war world order.
Part of this strategy was to subordinate the world to the narrow profit-seeking interests of the big powers and their multinational corporations. This explains the record of the IMF and World Bank in Africa, Latin America and Asia where it has left a legacy of socio-economic destruction and suffering as economic policies designed by the IMF and allied corrupt elites have subjected people to inhumane policies, further driving them down the road to extreme poverty and underdevelopment.
Its preoccupation with monetary free trade, financial stability, balanced budgets and other such indicators has failed to resolve the fundamental structural crises faced by the people in developing countries and humanity in general. Any meaningful change to this structure must entail a change in its values and mission, as well as its functioning, governance and leadership.
COSATU therefore calls on developing countries, progressive forces and development activists to unite behind a transformative platform, against the continued enslavement of humanity by a few financial oligarchs in the struggle to build a new and just world economic system. Such a platform should be based on the following pillars:
1. Commitment to a new and just world order, free from the dominance of rich and industrialised countries and their big corporations who exploit the poor people of the developing world and pillage and their natural resources
2. Economic democracy, common ownership and collective control over wealth and power
3. Defence of the interests of developing countries and poor people in general, particularly their right to choose their own development paths, sovereign ownership of their natural resources and guaranteed access to basic needs.
4. Special measures to transfer resources and capacity to assist developing countries overcome their massive challenges in the interests of global development and lasting stability
5. Fight against patronage and corrupt elites in the global south who act as agents of these institutions and their plundering agenda
6. Fight for the rights of workers and environmental justice as central principles for any meaningful and sustainable development
Statement issued by Bongani Masuku, COSATU International Relations Secretary, May 23 2011
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