Babel would have been better

The mother of all summits has gone by like a ship in the night, leaving a few resolutions in its wake. Barring the closed official sessions,...

The mother of all summits has gone by like a ship in the night, leaving a few resolutions in its wake. Barring the closed official sessions, where the world8217;s future was decided, very little happened apart from noise.

The organisers ensured that these sessions where negotiators sat and 8216;made significant progress by agreeing 17 of 54 paragraphs8217; carried on undisturbed. All around, a confused media and NGO populace struggled to find their feet throughout the first week of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

Unlike Rio, where everything was held at one place and coordination was easier, this summit took full advantage of Johannesburg8217;s vast urban sprawl. Thus, you found the official talks at the main convention at Sandton, the NGOs flung far away at NASREC and the in-betweens at a cultural village called Ubuntu. In addition, there were 8216;side events8217; at about a 100 another venues. It all added to one thing 8212; if you were not into a caucus, official delegations or negotiations, you were doomed to be forever finding out what was happening where. As with all big conferences, there were daily posting of events.

When you reached the venue, you were sometimes told that the event was off. It took an hour and a half to travel between venues ensuring that you could never get the official and NGO versions of the same issue.

At NASREC, NGOs tried running events parallel to the official plenary and parallel sessions. As the two were held in distant locations the same person had no chance of getting two views on the same thing.

Sure you could resort to press briefings if you were from the media. These were incredibly sterile versions of otherwise fairly lively debates. More often than not, the briefings were on the limited progress made by negotiators than the plenary sessions.

The same went for press conferences organised by NGOs who had little of consequence to say. In the first few days, entry to the Sandton convention center was strictly regulated and no more than 6,000 delegates and media were allowed at any one time through the official entrance.

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Voluntary organisations raised a stink about this and the organisers decided to relent and let more in. But even then, only registered delegates were allowed in; the others had to be content with visiting NASREC and Ubuntu. They never got access to the official deliberations.

When the Waterdome opened on August 28, it fast became the star attraction. This expo of over 100 companies, governments and NGOs working on water, was an instant hit with people. They soon discovered that getting there and back was no easy task. It took 45 minutes one way and buses were irregular. This sure put a dampener on people8217;s enthusiasm to visit the Waterdome.

Not that registration was cheap. It was 150 for NGOs to register a single delegate, an amount that included travel. At the airport, however, you heard of people being charge an extra 60 for a travel card that lets you use the official transport. So some paid 210 for the conference, plus boarding and lodging. Not a cheap proposition this seeing that you weren8217;t allowed into all sessions in any case.

On the whole, it was a great chance to meet people from different cultures and backgrounds. It was also a great chance to get a first hand idea of what organisations around the world were doing. But what the WSSD wasn8217;t was a place to try and be heard. Babel would have been better.