Africa, Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Headlines

DEVELOPMENT: Wars Kill Hope for African Recovery Plan – U.N.

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 2003 (IPS) - A major homegrown economic plan aimed at lifting Africa out of poverty is being stifled by a rash of unresolved political and economic problems, including new military conflicts, the United Nations heard this week.

”Without peace and stability, the fight against poverty (in Africa) would fail,” warned Ambassador Johan Lovad of Norway, addressing the 191-member General Assembly late Wednesday as it took stock of the successes and failures of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).

The Assembly, which gave its unanimous blessings to NEPAD exactly one year ago, has appealed to Western donors for financial assistance to ensure the success of the ambitious plan for the continent’s economic recovery and good governance.

Described as ”the most promising African-led development initiative in a generation”, NEPAD has made little progress as countries there continue to fight a losing battle against rising debts, increasing trade barriers and the spread of the deadly disease AIDS, according to delegates and senior U.N. officials.

But the deteriorating social and economic situation has been aggravated by seemingly unending conflicts, forcing the United Nations to field more peacekeeping missions in Africa than on any other continent, including in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Western Sahara.

”The challenges of poverty reduction in Africa, especially in conflict and post-conflict countries, are enormous,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Wednesday.

Alarmed by the number of conflicts ravaging their continent, African leaders met last February at the first extraordinary summit of heads of state of the African Union (AU) to ”invigorate their efforts to end the conflicts in the region”.

But a proposal to create a peace and security council within the newly-established 52-member AU – a successor to the now-defunct Organisation of Africa Unity – has made little progress despite a three-day, sparsely attended summit meeting in Mozambique in July.

The proposed council would be empowered to intervene militarily based on the principle that Africa is best qualified to resolve its own political and military problems.

Ambassador Ibrahim Gambari, U.N. special adviser on Africa, told reporters Tuesday that ”on the plus side”, many conflicts in Africa were now being or had been resolved.

In Angola, he said, peace was irreversible. Progress could be seen in the DRC, as well as in Burundi, he added. Gambari also pointed out that an interim government had just been installed in Liberia, and that peace now reigns in Sudan.

”But despite all those positive developments,” he cautioned, ”the bigger challenge was maintaining the peace in countries emerging from conflict”.

What is new, Gambari added, is that African countries want to take ownership of their problems. ”They are taking steps to implement development programmes and urging the international community to assist them in that effort.”

Those include establishing a peer review mechanism so that states could volunteer to have their economic and political performance monitored by other African nations, Gambari said.

NEPAD’s ultimate success, he predicted, depends largely on two factors: concrete actions from African governments on the political and economic fronts, and a more positive role by the international donor community.

In their original estimates for NEPAD, African leaders sought about 64 billion dollars a year in investments and aid to fight poverty in the continent.

Leaders of the industrial world, who met in Canada in June last year, announced that one-half of an international aid increase already agreed – about 12 billion dollars by 2006 – would go to Africa. But the offer was dismissed as ”peanuts” by Phil Twyford of Oxfam, a development aid organisation based in London.

But all Western aid to Africa is also conditional: new funds will be provided only in return for good governance, including multi-party democracy, rule of law and respect for human rights.

In a report submitted to the General Assembly on Wednesday, Annan noted that official development assistance (ODA) to Africa over the last two years has improved slightly after a decline in the latter part of the 1990s.

In 2000, ODA to Africa was 16.4 billion dollars, rising to 17.7 billion dollars in 2001 and 18.6 billion dollars in 2002.

The urgency for increased development assistance to poor countries – particularly those in Africa – echoed at recent international conferences, has in no small way rekindled the renewed commitment of donors, Annan adds.

But Gambari says that despite ”the modest increase” in ODA, the chances of meeting the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ”appear to be slim”. These goals, which were spelled out at a special session of the General Assembly in 1990, include reducing by half the proportion of the world’s people who suffer from hunger by 2015.

In its annual report released in July, the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) said the performance of African economies last year fell short of expectations.

The overall growth rate for Africa declined from 4.3 percent in 2001 to 3.2 percent in 2002, largely due to sluggish growth of the global economy and the sharp downturn in international trade.

Only five African countries – Angola, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique and Rwanda – achieved 7.0 percent growth, the level needed to achieve the U.N. target for reducing poverty. Another five – Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Malawi and Zimbabwe – recorded negative growth in 2002.