From the 22nd of January, running till Friday the 25th, there has been a gathering of the high and mighty of industry and politics in the Swiss Alps village of Davos.
It began as a private sector driven meeting of corporate titans and business managers organized by a Swiss professor. It has grown to become a large annual gathering of leaders in industry, management and government. While finance and economy still rule the roost, a lot of focus in the discussion nowadays is on matters of social and political concern. So high is the visibility of the modest Swiss village that it is common for heads of state of the major countries in the world to mingle with captains of industry and celebrities of the print and screen in the corridors and conference rooms.
Because of the high visibility of the gathering, it is also a magnet for dissenting voices and agitators for all manner of social causes. Anarchists, nihilists, leftists and anti-capitalists have made the Davos gathering a favourite target and are often a feature ofthe periphery of the meeting rooms and swank eating places where the celebrities gather. They are kept sufficiently far away for their placards to be seen, but for their missiles and projectiles to be safely out of range.
The theme of the Davos gathering for 2019 is ‘Globalization 4.0: Shaping a Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’.
For a remote town in the Swiss Alps where people such as Robert Louis Stevenson the Scottish writer (‘Kidnapped’) used to come on the advice of their doctors to recuperate from tuberculosis, Davos has become a name known all over the world as a bye-word for globalization and a world order based on free trade. So popular and powerful has the name become that people have tried to hijack it and use in other contexts and places. Only a few months ago, Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), Crown Prince and heir apparent of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia organized an event in his country which he tagged ‘Davos in the Desert’. The pull of the name was expected to attract government leaders and captains of industry from all over the world to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which was seeking to position itself as a new hub for world trade. Unfortunately the odium surrounding the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khaashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey created such a furor that most government leaders and corporate executives backed out at the last minute, not wanting to be seen to be associated with someone suspected on responsibility for such a heinous crime.
The World Economic Forum, with offices bases in Cologny-Geneva, was founded in 1971, originally as ‘European Management Forum’, a not-for-profit organization. The founder and executive chairman from inception was Professor Klaus Schwab. That summer, he invited 444 executives from European companies to the first European Management Symposium in Davos. He developed the ‘stakeholder management’ approach, which attributes corporate success to the engagement of all groups, including shareholders, clients, customers, employees and the community.
The summit expanded its focus from management to social and economic issues in 1973. In 1974, political leaders were invited for the first time. Over time, Davos began to be seen as ‘neutral ground’ for settling political issues. Greece and Turkey signed the Davos Declaration in 1988. In 1992 F.W. De Klerk met with Nelson Mandela and Mangosuthu Buthelezi in Davos. In 1994 Shimon Peres, Prime Minister of Israel, reached a draft agreement on Gaza and Jericho with Yasser Arafat in Davos.
In 2017, the Head of State of China made an appearance. And in 2018 Narendra Modi, the ‘Make in India’ apostle of Indian rebirth and reinvigoration, gave a plenary address.
The foundation that runs the Davos event is funded by 1000 member-companies, which are global enterprises with more than five billion dollars in annual turnover. Membership is stratified by the level of contribution and engagement with the Forum. Individual members pay US$52,000, while ‘Industry Partners’ pay $263,000., and ‘Strategic Partners’ pay $628,000. There is an admission fee to the Davos event of $19,000 per person.
Davos is not a zone for the economically faint-hearted. It is easy to see why the annual gathering has been described by anti-globalists’ as ‘a gathering of fat cats in the snow’.
But a lot of good work is going on at Davos, and a good number of the corporate titans who attend are beginning to focus more on their high-minded ideas about how to save the world, how to halt climate change, how to expand ‘green’ power, how to take free internet to the most remote villages in Africa and Asia, how to construct innovative toilets for the rural poor who live in villages without drainage, where the human waste may be converted into useful biotechnology products, how to put every child in school, and how to end poverty. Of course, behind all the ‘altruism’ of Bill Gates and the others is the knowledge that the only world in which it will be permanently safe to practice business and make big profits is a world that is reasonably safe and happy for everyone else.
This year President Donald Trump, bogged down by his self-inflicted problems in Washington, is not attending. Theresa May – mired in a Brexit quagmire, is staying put in London. Emmanuel Macron harassed every Saturday on the streets of Paris and other major cities by his countrymen in ‘yellow vests’ is not attending. But Prince William is there to push the long-neglected message of mental health. Sir David Attenborough, the great conservationist, a powerful moral force for good in the planet, is there to talk about biodiversity. Paul Kagame, the new poster boy for effective, if not ‘gentle’, governance in Africa, is there to shift the perception of Africa from a basket case to that of a continent of hopeful change.
Davos has become more than a useful annual ritual for ‘fat cats’ pushing the message of globalization. It has become an engine-room for the generation and dissemination of new ideas and innovative solutions to the problems of the vast majority of humankind who live on the fringes of a prosperity they do not share.
Femi Olugbile
