DEVELOPMENT: EU Takes Advantage of Africa’s Weakness to Impose Conditions

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Aug 25 2003 (IPS) - The European Union is taking advantage of Africa’s weak bargaining power to bloat the list of conditions – attached to development aid – with further demands.

Washington Akumu, a senior economic writer and columnist with a Kenyan newspaper, says most of the EU conditions border on tokenism and “the urge to be perceived as politically-correct among the community of nations”.

“Time and again, the West and the EU in particular has supported and traded with African states not on the basis of their adherence to good governance, but in the pursuit of their own overbearing self-interest,” he observes.

“Nothing can become of these conditionalities unless the EU assists African institutions like the AU (Africa Union) and NEPAD (New Partnerships for Africa’s Development) to develop monitoring mechanisms that work. In any case, they are nearer to the ground and have relatively cleaner hands,” remarks Akumu.

Job Ogolla, of the Nairobi-based Africa Economic Research and Development Consortium, contends that some of EU’s terms, such as involving civil society and faith groups in projects proposal writing, are welcome, since they are meant to guard against corruption by governments.

“The government is placed on check right from conceptualisation of ideas to proposal writing. When the proposals are approved and money sent, other parties, apart from the government, will be aware of it and chances of squandering it are therefore reduced,” he says.

“But some of the EU terms require change of legislation and establishment of new institutions. This might not be an easy task for recipient countries,” notes Ogolla

EU has often demanded privatisation, procurement laws and civil service restructuring as conditions for providing aid to developing countries.

The EU has maintained that economic and institutional reforms are necessary to attract international funding, and has been asking recipients to intensify the reforms to boost investor confidence.

More than 50 percent of EU’s support in Africa targets the creation of a favourable and sustainable environment for private sector participation to revitalise economy, complains local development officials.

Road infrastructure, tourism and trade are some of the key areas the union looks at in regard to boosting economy.

Ogolla has accused the European Union of manipulating Africa when it comes to trade. “They tell us that we will enjoy non-tariff rate for our raw materials getting into the European market. When you look at this critically, Africa is condemned to remain a raw material economy, because it supplies the west with raw goods, the west manufactures and exports the goods back to Africa, which is not right,” he says.

Some African countries have disagreed with EU officials over aid sanctions. Last year, Kenya fell out with European Union, one of her key development partners, over contents of a draft copy of a “country strategy paper”, which spelled out aid terms.

The paper, prepared by the local EU delegation, spelled out unattainable conditions in exchange for aid.

Government officials insisted that the terms were humiliating and touched on sovereignty.

The disagreement happened after ten years of “donor boycott” but Kenya never went on bended knees. During that period, the plunder of the country’s economy by its leadership was at its best. “We suffered an economic melt-down but survived because of the resilience of the people,” Ogolla says.

EU has frozen aid to countries accused of human rights abuses and some African nations have fallen prey.

Donor funds to Zimbabwe, for example, have been frozen due to, among other things, its policy on land, where farms owned by 4,500 white commercial farmers have been parceled out to landless black people. In July, the European Union froze development aid, running into ‘hundreds of millions of euros”, to Africa over the insistence that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe attend meetings between EU and Africa.

Mugabe has been banned from traveling to Europe in accordance with EU sanctions, but African leaders say Europe could not dictate who should attend meetings.

The first EU-Africa meeting was held in Cairo, Egypt two years ago. This year’s meeting was supposed to take place in Lisbon, Portugal.

EU spokesperson Michael Curtis indicated that despite the cancellation of the meeting, dialogue will continue between the union and African countries, most of which share a lucrative multi-billion Euro aid and trade deal with the union.

The EU work with Africa through the Cotonou Agreement, whose main objective is to alleviate poverty through increased and better-targeted aid, a new trade partnerships and political dialogue.

The agreement was signed in Benin’s capital, Cotonou, in Jun. 2000, and links 77 countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) with the 15 EU member states. The agreement, which provides the framework for EU’s cooperation with the ACP countries, also seeks to liberalise trade between the two blocs.

This year the European Union responded to calls from the United States and civil society to step-up its humanitarian aid to Africa by pledging more than 2 million euros in financial help to the troubled continent.

France and Germany, two of largest countries in the 15-member EU followed in the Union’s footsteps by increasing the financial assistance they give to Africa.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has granted an additional 215 million euros to fight HIV/AIDS on the continent, in addition to 300 million euros it has already pledged to international health funds operating in Africa.

French President Jacques Chirac said Paris would also triple its contribution from 50 million euros to 150 million euros. He was confident that the European Union would in the future also be prepared to pledge one million dollars to the cause.

Aid to sub-Saharan Africa fell from 16 billion U.S. dollars in 1996 to 12.7 billion U.S. dollars in 2000.

Oxfam, the largest British charity, says aid spending in Africa needs to increase at least 25 billion U.S. dollars a year if the region is to meet the intended target of halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day by 2015.