DEVELOPMENT-AFRICA: A Mixed Verdict for Commission’s Report

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Mar 14 2005 (IPS) - A "decisive first step" towards making poverty in Africa history, an "exercise to cover up the Iraq war": reactions to the report issued last week by Britain’s Commission for Africa have been many and varied.

The document, weighing in at a substantial 453 pages, lays out the findings of a nine-month inquiry by 17 commissioners – nine of them from Africa – into how best to end poverty and promote development in Africa.

"The commission was established at a unique moment in history. It is a time when the world is making tremendous progress in reducing poverty, with the notable exception of Africa," said Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi Friday, during a keynote speech he delivered in Addis Ababa at one of the launches of the report. (The document was released simultaneously in the Ethiopian capital and in London.)

"For Africa as well, however, it is a moment of re-awakening buttressed by a new resolve to take concrete measures to address its deep-seated problems," Zenawi added.

Wole Olaleye of ActionAid International, a non-governmental organisation headquartered in Johannesburg, was relatively upbeat about the contents of the report.

"Despite some weak spots in the report, we believe that the CfA (Commission for Africa) recommendations are an agenda that is worth implementing as a decisive first step to make poverty history," he told journalists in South Africa’s commercial hub.

"The real test of whether the time and money expended on the commission is justified will be the extent to which it is agreed and implemented at the Gleneagles summit in July," Olaleye added.

The summit in the Scottish city of Gleneagles will mark the annual gathering of the Group of Eight (G8), which comprises the world’s leading industrialized countries: Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States. The G8 is being chaired this year by Britain, which has pledged to use its presidency of the group to focus the attention of wealthy states on Africa.

"The last two decades are littered with grand initiatives and plans for the region that have been long on analysis and short on implementation. This year must be different," said Olaleye.

The CfA recommendation that has perhaps received the most attention is the call for aid flows to Africa to be tripled to 50 billion dollars a year by 2015. (This year was agreed on in a separate forum, the Millennium Summit at the United Nations, as the deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals – or MDGs. The eight MDGs target key aspects of under-development, such as extreme hunger and poverty, the lack of universal primary education, gender inequality – and the prevalence of diseases such as AIDS and malaria in poor nations.)

Under the commission’s recommendations, wealthy countries would be required to devote an additional 10 billion dollars annually to fight the HIV pandemic, with some of this money (3.2 billion dollars) going towards meeting the funding shortfall currently experienced by the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. This fund was created in 2002 to mobilize additional support in the fight against these diseases, which are said to claim over six million lives annually.

The CfA recommendations also include calls for complete debt forgiveness for African countries, the elimination of trade-distorting agricultural subsidies – and the repatriation of billions of dollars which have been siphoned off by corrupt officials and deposited abroad.

In addition, the commission notes that Africa has a significant role to play in improving the lot of its people, through improving standards of governance – and spending more money on health programmes, amongst other measures.

Certain analysts maintain the CfA has brought little of note to the debate about how to stop Africa being, in the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "a scar on the conscience of the world".

Sam Moyo, executive director of the Harare-based African Institute for Agrarian Studies, is also suspicious of the timing of the commission’s work.

"To be cynical, one could say it’s a PR (public relations) exercise to cover up the Iraq war. It’s a PR exercise to cover up Britain’s failure in Africa," he told journalists at a news conference organised by ActionAid in Johannesburg Friday.

Blair’s government has attracted considerable criticism both domestically and abroad for its support of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Sharing the same platform as Moyo was Chris Landsberg of the Centre for Policy Studies, located in Johannesburg, who also appeared largely pessimistic about the eventual benefits of the CfA’s work.

"We are not going to get a response from the rest of the G8. I don’t think that they will, for example, write off Africa’s debt," he noted. "And there will be no real commitment as equal partners because Africa is of no strategic importance to the West."