Is ASA Dead, Buried & Forgotten?
Whither? Yes, whither will the ASA go? It has gone into a bewildering state of dormancy after writing a bold statement at its incipient stages. The big bang turned into a big crunch. Did Gaddafi die with it? Did Chavez die with it?
ASA is the abbreviation for the Africa-South American summits which had its maiden gathering in Abuja, Nigeria, on 30 November 2006.
Its second summit took place on Margarita Island of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in September 2009. Significantly, this particular one came on the heels of the 64th UN General Assembly Meeting of Heads of State and Governments held in New York.
Libya’s leader Col. Muammar Al-Gaddafi harangued his audience in the UN building 405 East 42nd Street in New York, issuing anti-imperialist sentiments that other African leaders are hesitant at expressing at such venues. He said, if America was not safe in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC, Libya was safer and a ready alternative to the United States.
His counter-hegemonic narrative and extreme verbiage exceeded the 15-minute time allocated to the Heads of State to 100 minutes. Gaddafi was a cynosure for cynical reasons. It was his first visit to America and he stoke tempers over what the West had targeted him for, the suspected mastermind of the sabotage on Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. He was an unwelcome visitor and he quickly jetted out of the United States to Venezuela to attend the second Africa-South America summit.
Gaddafi wanted to avoid external influence in his oil transactions by using gold as his benchmark. He launched the gold dinar project, and other major African governments were ready to support him in this project. It was both an African dream and a nightmare for the West’s financial system.
Another socialist titan Hugo Chavez was to become his host and of more than 30 Heads of State from regional cooperation areas. The attendance at the summit and the content of the speeches delivered showed up the ideological divisions that exist among South Americans. Colombia and Peru did not attend, while Bolivia and Ecuador were the main cheerleaders in support of Chavez’s “anti-imperialist” ideas, reminiscent of Fidel Castro in his prime. The leaders of Brazil and Argentina, while claiming leftist credentials, were more nuanced and less extravagant in their comments. Below is Chavez.
A majority of African leaders who were at the UN General Assembly also attended the Venezuela summit. Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ghana amongst others. Point number 5 of the communique issued at the end of the Venezuela summit was an ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of the active participation of the Afro-descendant population in the development of South America as well as the contribution of South American countries to the consolidation of political independence and development of the African continent as part of this process. It firmly situated the nexus between Africa and South America in the anti-colonial struggle, which drew attention to imperialist forces as the common enemy.
By Point 13, the ASA Forum fully immersed itself in global multilateralism under the aegis of the United Nations. From here, the orientation of ASA departed remarkably in some key areas. First of all, the Gaddafi factor was a diplomatic earthquake as he had torn the UN Charter before delegates which immediately sparked an international mobilization against him after the back-to-back meetings in New York and Venezuela.
In his speech at the ASA summit, Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi proposed the creation of a NATO of the South, an idea supported by Chavez, but there was no further action on the idea. Hugo Chavez also called for the establishment of a Bank of the South with 20 billion US Dollars as seed capital. The rationale was to offset what they described as the harsh conditionalities usually imposed by the northern-controlled Bretton Woods Institutions.
Much of the activity was aimed at promoting the Venezuelan socialist and radical agenda. An example was the decision to set up a Radio of the South, which was to be based in Caracas, “to bring the revolutionary struggles of the people of the South to the forefront, and to promote the union of peoples of the South through information exchange and cross-national collaboration.”
What is the significance of the ASA Summit? Extravagant rhetoric aside, it was a further manifestation of the desire of countries of the two continents to strengthen South-South cooperation and to provide a counterweight to their long-standing focus on the countries of the North, the developed world. It has for some time been their aim to diversify markets, sources, and targets of investment and other areas of cooperation. The global financial crisis has strongly emphasized the importance of pursuing the ASA community objectives, particularly in trade and finance.
The two names mentioned so far became the protagonists of ASA and the whole group took the appearance of the radical forces which was to be countered at various levels. Instead of hosting the third ASA summit in 2011, Libya faced turbulence that year in the wake of the Arab Spring which eventually led to the assassination of Gaddafi. Two years later, Chavez also succumbed to cancer. The ASA summit slated for Libya was cancelled and the last seen of the group was in 2013 when Equatorial Guinea hosted it in place of Libya.
South Africa and Brazil, the juggernauts of ASA began to drift more towards the organization formed by the globe’s emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, BRICS. Together with Argentina, the three are also members of the G20 Forum. A lack of interest in ASA by any or all of these three tilts the fulcrum of ASA the wrong way, and it does seem that is what is happening. One of the galvanizers of ASA was Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
ASA’s momentum loss could partly be due to the exit of Lula as President of Brazil in 2011. He made a comeback to the same stage in late 2022. Can he pull ASA from the ashes of oblivion?
This was a forum that buoyed bilaterals between nations in the southern hemisphere. For instance, at the Venezuela summit in 2009, Ghana and Argentina represented by now outgone Presidents John Atta Mills and Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner respectively, attempted to have their countries collaborate in livestock husbandry, an area in which Argentina has a comparative advantage. The objective was to provide training for Ghanaians and the setting up of animal and animal products factories for the side that required new leverage in animal production.
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