Standard Bank AGM 12 June 2023
Activists Kumi Naidoo (left) and Malik Dasoo are carried out of the Standard Bank’s Rosebank, Johannesburg headquarters by security on 12 June 2023 after protesting against the bank’s involvement in the East African Crude Oil Pipeline project (Photo: Julia Evans)
Most of us prefer to be anonymous bystanders, comfortable cogs in the wheel, but last week I stepped out of the crowd and entered a new universe – Standard Bank’s AGM in Johannesburg.
We’d been told to wear office or shareholder-type attire to fit in with the crowd and not attract attention, but the security patrol was circling us before we’d even unfurled our banners.
“This is private property. You can’t protest here.”
“We only want to offer your stakeholders some information.”
“They don’t need it.”
An AGM is a call to the faithful, but what do Standard Bank’s shareholders believe in? Profit above self and the future of our children? The word written according to the gospel of Fossil? How can people like you, who look just like me, believe in such an opposing reality?
EACOP is an easy acronym that slips off the tongue as easily as the oil it will transport from Uganda’s Lake Albert oilfields to the port of Tanga in Tanzania. The East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline will supply consumers in Europe while displacing 100,000 people, destroying 2000km of wildlife habitats and releasing 34 million tons of crude into the atmosphere.
The shareholders avoided eye contact as they walked past us, preferring Standard Bank’s alternative truth that their projects revolve around job and economic creation, though without asking who for.
As fossil fuel and mining history has already proved over decades, the skilled and remunerated jobs will be expat-retained while local community employment will be short-term and transient. Meanwhile, the funds identified for ‘social improvement’ are diverted to wealthy elites and the environment is decimated to literally oil the juggernaut’s wheels .
When the security enforcers picked up and dragged two of our team away, I briefly wondered if we as individuals could ever turn the tide, but then I followed them through the revolving doors and met the vast crowd of protestors outside. A mass of individuals like me, standing together as one. When a woman gave me a poster, I let her take a photo because I wanted a record of the slit in time when I moved from bystander to frontliner.
Shareholders of Standard Bank and other institutions like it, your investment will take everyone and the entire planet down with you. When your grandchild looks you in the eye and asks what you did to fight climate change, how will you answer?
