Hoping for NEPAD?

The long history of reform concepts for Africa

The leaders of the anti-colonial liberation movements knew 40 years ago that Africa’s hopes for economic growth, fruitful social development and peace were linked closely with striving for unity. But their ideas were not very coherent. When in March 1964 Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah announced his seven-year development plan, he called in a single speech for:
– a socialist and co-operative programme for industry, and the mechanization and diversification of our agriculture…
– a “mixed economy”;
– “foreign investors in a spirit of partnership”; and
– a continental union government for the United States of Africa (which he was unable to push through at the founding of the OAU in 1963).

The various elements of this exhortation, socialist and capitalist at the same time, did not suit each other even in 1964. And the OAU offered nothing more than a counterpart to the United Nations (indeed, even less than that: it did not have the right of the UN Security Council to act as the world’s policeman). It was a forum in which every member country had a vote regardless of its size, power or the goodness of its government. The OAU secretariat in Addis Ababa was much worse off than the UN Secretary-General in New York. It mostly left economic matters to the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), which was also located in Addis Ababa.


The Lagos Plan of Action

In the 1970s, the rosy socialist dreams began to wilt. At the same time, the glut of petrodollar loans that were virtually thrown at Africa’s rulers resulted in the first signs of overindebtedness in an economy which still ran according to colonial rules: the exchange of African raw materials for European finished goods. From 1975 onthe OAU heads of state talked about a common development plan, which was proclaimed ceremoniously in 1980. This was the Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa 1980-2000. The plan provided in its initial phase for duty-free preferential trade areas, concomitant with them an expansion of inner-African trade, and finally by 2000 the establishment of a continental economic community. But the Lagos Plan was “ignored by the African governments as well as so-called donors”, as Professor Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o (now Kenyan Planning Minister) wrote in a memorandum on NEPAD for the G8 Summit in 2002.

Perhaps both camps were well advised to treat it with disdain. The Lagos Plan always resembled more a Christmas present wish-list than a realistic concept. Everything was to be spruced up, and in fact immediately: Food and agriculture (chapter I), Industry (chapter II), Natural resources (chapter III), Human resource development and utilisation (chapter IV), Science and technology (chapter V), Transport and communications (chapter VI), Trade and finance (chapter VII), …economic and technical co-operation… (chapter VIII), Environment… (chapter IX), The least developed African countries (chapter X), Energy (chapter XI), Women and development (chapter XII), Development planning… (chapter XIII). All that fitted perfectly well in the programme of a new world economic system which the developing countries sought to assert against the West in the 1970s in UNCTAD and the UN General Assembly. But that was merely the final afterpains of the birth of the socialist economic concepts; it went no further than non-binding resolutions. The rich West, on the way to the notion that all problems must be solved by the market, had no intention of subjecting itself to this programme.


The World Bank prescribes structural adjustment

In fact, the exact opposite took place. The World Bank, in which, as is well-known, the rich countries have the say, presented Africa in 1981 with an Agenda for Action (its sub-title), whose main title promised Accelerated Development but actually demanded structural adjustment. That meant Africa was to adjust itself to the structures of the real capitalistic world market – meaning stabilising its balance of payments by cutting public spending, above all for staff (fewer for buying arms), promoting exports by currency devaluation, and privatising public enterprises. Whereas in the western industrialised nations democracy prevented too cruel impacts of such a policy on the social system, this domestic political corrective was lacking in most African countries. Regimes such as that of Jerry Rawlings in Ghana (which turned to democracy only later) and of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda managed to grab the limelight as model pupils of structural adjustment while their peoples became ever poorer.


Protest: Alternative Framework

Africa did not capitulate without talking back. On April 10, 1989 the OAU economic and finance ministers adopted an African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-economic Recovery and Transformation (AAF-SAP) developed together with the ECA. In Section 4 of the accompanying declaration the ministers said: “ We have realized that conventional structural adjustment programmes have generally failed to take into account the social and human dimensions, the long-term development objectives, and the structural transformation of African economies.”

But it went no further than an indignant paper; not much more was subsequently heard of the AAF-SAP. The World Bank reported regularly on its structural adjustment programmes and at the same time also wove thoroughly critical passages into them, correcting the initial ignoring of each policy by an analysis of what its report of 2000 – Can Africa claim the 21st Century? – expresses in a chapter heading as Improving Governance, Managing Conflict, and Rebuilding States. Such texts like to steer clear of the emotive word ‘democracy’; in the chapter mentioned, however, it appears several times. The World Bank’s strictly economic stocktaking is gloomy, and is brightened only with difficulty by citing positive individual cases and prospects of a better future. “ Unlike other developing regions, Africa’s average output per capita in constant prices was lower at the end of the 1990s than 30 years before – and in some countries had fallen by more than 60 percent … Africa’s share of world trade has plummeted since the 1960s: it now accounts for less than 2 percent… Africa missed out on industrial expansion and now risks being excluded from the global information revolution. In contrast to other regions that have diversified, most countries in Africa are still largely primary producers. They are also aid dependent and deeply indebted. … Africa is the only major region to see investment and savings per capita decline after 1970… [] high inequality, uneven access to resources, social exclusion, and insecurity


The Millennium Renaissance Programme

Against this dismal background, the presidents of three major African countries – Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria – presented their Millennium Africa Renaissance Programme at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2001, naturally with the goal of “sustainable development”. With the inclusion of a parallel initiative of Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade (Omega Plan) and a Compact for African Recovery which the ECA published in April 2001, this led by the October of that year to the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD). In the meantime, Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi appeared on the scene as the heir to Kwame Nkrumah: at his urging, the OAU at its Summit in 2000 agreed to dissolve itself and establish the African Union (AU) in its place. Its new charter was completed by May 2001.

The AU is in no way what Nkrumah once envisaged as a Union Government. If the OAU resembled a UN, it can be seen from the AU’s charter that it wants to orient itself on the EU. As previously in the OAU, the power of decision in the AU is held by the ‘Assembly’, as the Summit of the heads of state is called. Article 7 of the charter lays down that the leaders must take decisions “…by consensus or, failing which, by a two-thirds majority of the Member States”. The OAU Secretariat was renamed ‘Commission’, but it can hardly be expected that it will ever be able to gain anything like the power of the European Commission. The AU has announced that it aims to establish a pan-African Parliament; there exists now at least a protocol [on its composition, powers, functions and organisation], and a steering committee.


Hope for human rights?

An approach that points to the political future (indeed, not only that of Africa!) is included in the AU ‘Principles’ listed under Art. 4 of the charter. Paragraph ‘h’ (the list ranges to ‘p’) proclaims “ The right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity”.

That is diametrically opposed to the hallowed principle of national sovereignty of not only traditional international law but also of the UN Charter, which bans intervention in a country’s internal affairs. The ‘Principles’ of the AU Charter modify this axiom in Paragraph ‘g’ with a formulation according to which intervention in “every member state” is forbidden. Do the African heads of state really want to subject their colleagues to the authorisation of a two-thirds majority?

NEPAD also recognises this approach. Section 71 of its 207 paragraphs-long policy document lifts the barriers between ‘internal’ and ‘foreign’ affairs. It says: “ African leaders have learnt from their own experiences that peace, security, democracy, good governance, human rights and sound economic management are conditions for sustainable development…”. Indeed, Section 79 finally says clearly what democracy means. “ It is now generally acknowledged that development is impossible in the absence of true democracy, respect for human rights, peace and good governance. With the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, Africa undertakes to respect the global standards of democracy, which core components include political pluralism, allowing for the existence of several political parties and workers’ unions, fair, open, free and democratic elections periodically organised to enable the populace choose their leaders freely.”

Section 84 then includes the practical consequence, which, known since then as peer review, focuses on regular political behaviour. “The Heads of State Forum on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development will serve as a mechanism through which the leadership of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development will periodically monitor and assess the progress made by African countries in meeting their commitment towards achieving good governance and social reforms.” However, in the case of Zimbabwe, where a regime conceived in 1980 as a democracy has for many years not only tended to become a one-party state but also is descending into the despotic rule of its President, the peer review evidently does not work because the government of neighbouring South Africa sees its own interests as being better protected if it does nothing.

And economic development?

What about the economic muscle that is supposed to find a hold on the political skeleton of the AU and NEPAD? Alex de Waal in 2002 characterised NEPAD as “…an initiative with a hard core of commitments and principles, and surrounding layers of varying softness – some of them very soft indeed”. A particularly soft layer is certainly the bold (although also aimed for by the World Bank in 2000) expectation that Africa’s GNP will in the next 15 years grow by 7 per cent per year, on which the South African political scientist Gerrit Olivier cast doubts earlier this year. His colleague Robert Kappel, of Leipzig, commented as early as in 2000: “Every sensible development expert will see growth of 7 per cent as unrealistic.” At the end of the day, the old wish-list of the Lagos Plan of Action shines through even under the fresh printer’s ink of the NEPAD document.

A strategically important difference from 1980, however, is that Africa now does not put its wish-list in the post-box of an illusionary New World Economic System. Thabo Mbeki and his comrades-in-arms front up deliberately to the real powers of the world economy – at the two G8 summits in Canada in 2002 and on Lake Geneva in 2003. Anyang’ Nyong’o criticised this strategy in his paper of 2002, saying: “It has been argued that the NEPAD document … is mainly a public relations exercise by the African heads of state to attract donor funding and foreign investment in Africa. In this regard, it gives in wholesale to the neo-liberal view of the world and Africa’s subordinate position in this world…”

Friendly words were committed to paper at the G8 Summit. Yet Olivier remains sceptical. “…Talk of a &Mac226;new political will’ among African governments seems premature and wishful thinking. The ball remains still very much in the court of Mbeki and his fellow NEPAD promoters to deliver on what they have promised. They still have to take the next steps to convince the industrial nations that their plan is more than a catalogue of aspirations and ambitious wish-lists. In short, Mbeki and his African colleagues must deliver an Africa that is visibly abandoning its old ways, an Africa that is more democratic, internally stable, more efficient, more predictable and better governed…”

With somewhat more confidence, Professor Philippe Hugon, of Paris, summed up his analysis in Afrique Contemporain: “NEPAD forms an interesting framework negotiations and partnership. It must first be translated into concrete projects and deeds…assistance can only have an effect if it is accompanied by internal dynamism, thus if it integrates in coherent policy at the levels of the societies, the states and the regional unions. The challenge for NEPAD is to see whether these internal conditions are actually realised…”.

That was indeed the whole object of the efforts by which Africa freed itself from foreign colonial rule half a century ago.

Literature

Kappel, Robert:
Afrika. Illusionen über Entwicklung. Immer wieder
neue Wolkenkuckucksheime, in: E+Z 2000:12, pp. 340-341 (in German).

Waal, Alex de:
What’s new in the New Partnership for Africa’s Development?
In: International Affairs (London) 78.2002:3, pp. 463-476.

Dossier NEPAD, in:
Afrique contemporaine (Paris) Oct/Dec 2002, No. 204, pp. 5-80 (in French).
NEPAD – Chance für Afrika? Dossier, in:
Querbrief (Berlin, Weltfriedensdienst) 2002:3, pp. 4-15 (in German).

Olivier, Gerrit :
Is Thabo Mbeki Africa’s saviour?
In: International Affairs (London) 79.2003:4, pp. 815-828.