ECONOMY: African Initiative Debated Ahead of G-8 Endorsement

By Emad Mekay Reprint | | Print |

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Jun 21 2002 (IPS) - When heads of state of the Group of Eight (G-8) powers meet in Canada next week, they will launch a plan much touted as fresh approach to African development. In the view of some analysts, however, the leaders will simply be unleashing more of the conditions that have spawned economic regression in Africa.

At its Jun. 26-27 summit, the G-8 — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States — is to place its seal of approval on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), an effort devised by African leaders. The plan has been described as a chance for African governments to demonstrate good governance, love for democracy, and struggle against corruption in exchange for Western aid.

“NEPAD is an attempt to give Africa control,” said Robert Rotberg, director of the Harvard Programme on Intrastate Conflict and president of the World Peace Foundation. “The North no longer wants control and no longer has the patience for anything of that kind. NEPAD is an attempt to put the final screws in the coffin of previous relationships between North and South.”

The plan, among many goals, calls for an average economic growth rate of more than seven percent per year for the next 15 years and conformity with goals set by Northern institutions on poverty reduction, education, health, and sustainable development.

It also creates a peer-review mechanism, under which African countries would monitor each other’s progress.

Africa activists said they see only cosmetic changes.

“Isn’t it amazing that a few African countries sat down and mapped out a future for Africa that looks exactly like structural adjustment programmes of the world Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund), and the World Trade Organisation, to be presented to the rich nations?” asked Njoki Njehu of anti-poverty campaigners 50 Years Is Enough Network. “It’s just quite the most incredible coincidence anyone could come up with.”

To critics like Njehu, NEPAD is a golden chance for the G-8 to place the entire onus for Africa’s future on Africa itself, and to evade responsibility for an international system that plunged the continent into deep poverty in the first place.

Instead of immediately helping to provide safe water, send more children to schools, employ women, or train doctors and fill pharmacy shelves with much needed cheap medicines, the rich countries would wash their hands of the messy affair by passing the bucket to African governments under NEPAD, critics charged.

“It is no surprise that all Northern countries are all falling over themselves saying ‘Hail to NEPAD, what a great piece that is’,” said Njehu. “But in fact Africans now call it the kneepad,” a symbol of capitulation.

Activists also argue that since NEPAD is marketed as the brainchild of African leaders, Northern countries would be exempt from responsibility if things go wrong.

As President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria recently pointed out, if NEPAD fails “we have no one to blame but ourselves.”

Rotberg, however, defended the initiative on the grounds that African leaders themselves have overcome the issue. “They, particularly some of the key leaders, understand that one cannot blame the past, one cannot blame anything but move forward.”

Njehu disagreed. “This will keep Northern countries off the hook, since they can now say ‘they (African leaders) said they would do this and that but they didn’t do it, you see even their ideas, their great ideas, didn’t work’.”

Critics also expressed dismay at what they saw as NEPAD’s reinforcement of the notion that the North has a monopoly on monitoring and certifying progress — or its lack — in the South. Even the peer review mechanism, they said, would ultimately report to Northern financial institutions and donor governments in order for them to disburse aid and loans.

In other respects, critics charged, NEPAD is derived from orthodox conditions and programmes designed by Northern creditors. These include an emphasis on attracing foreign investment and privatising domestic assets. These conditions have, at best, failed to lift the continent’s economic performance, critics said, and therefore portend ill.

“It is an identical blueprint and has all the components of economic restructuring, privatisation, and trade programmes pushed in other arenas through structural adjustment programmes by the multilateral financial institutions,” said Njehu.

“This shows the lie and the hypocrisy in saying that this is an African owned thing. It is neither something that comes from the grassroots nor is it something that is organically African,” she declared.