The
“New Partnership for Africa’s Development” (NEPAD) was formally introduced to
the world on October 23, 2001 in Abuja, Nigeria, by several African heads of
state. The NEPAD is already included in
the Chairman’s text of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) and
will likely be a centerpiece of discussions there. Unfortunately, NEPAD’s prominence rests not, as is claimed by its
authors, in support from African people or in its likelihood to bring Africa
environmental and social sustainability.
Rather, its prominence is derived from adoption of the economic
globalization “development” model that is poised to over-take the Summit based
on free trade, market liberalization, private investment and privatization of
vital services. Based on passed
experience in Africa and around the world with such policies, critics predict that,
if adopted, NEPAD will bring increased environmental devastation, poverty and
social instability to Africa.
NEPAD’s main
author and champion, South African President Thabo Mbeki, began writing a
development plan for South Africa to attract both foreign aid and foreign
investment in 1999. He circulated it
among heads of state at meetings of the G-8, transnational corporations at the
World Economic Forum (WEF), and at the Seattle and Doha Ministerial meetings of
the World Trade Organization (WTO). It was not circulated, however, among African
civil society. It is therefore not
surprising that once the text of NEPAD was made public, statements and protests
opposing it emerged from all sectors of South African society, including the
South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the Congress of South African Trade
Unions, and the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa. The first public protest against NEPAD was
led by Jubilee South Africa in June 2002, at the WEF’s Southern African
regional meeting in Durban.
According to
Patrick Bond, professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg,
“During the formulation of NEPAD, no civil society, church, political-party,
parliamentary, or other potentially democratic or progressive forces were
consulted.”[i] Furthermore, “NEPAD contains no concrete
actions to be taken by the African peoples, no offer of organizational
resources, and no civil-society implementation plan. The document itself was available to African civil society only
through internet websites [which are, in turn, only available to a limited
number of Africans].”[ii]
The
lack of African civil society input is reflected in the fact that NEPAD rejects
the multitude of alternative African development strategies that have emerged
from civil society and academic movements over the past two decades. These include the Lagos Plan of Action
(1980) and the Abuja Treaty (1991), African Alternative Framework to Structural
Adjustment Programmes (1989), the African Charter for Popular Participation and
Development (Arusha Charter, 1990) and the Cairo Agenda (1994). Included in
these policies are commitments, among others, to fully participatory democratic
policy-making, rejection of the privatization of public services, redirection
of resources from the private to the public sector, debt repudiation, increased
exchange controls, protection of vital infant industries, greater regional
cooperation and mobility of people across Africa and meaningful environmental
sustainability that fully comprehends that the wealth of so-called developed
nations was gained a huge environmental cost.
The rejection of
these initiatives is reflected in NEPAD’s economic globalization
policy-prescriptions derived from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund
(IMF), WTO, AGOA and others. Moreover,
it also fits neatly within the guidelines of the newly proposed Bush
Administration Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) for U.S. development
aid. One of the most obvious
disconnects with civil society is NEPADs rejection of the demands for total
debt cancellation – the starting point for most African models of
development. While the citizens of
Africa have been risking their lives, rising up in protest and critical
analysis against this globalization framework, NEPAD whole-heartedly and uncritically
adopts it.
According to the
“African Civil Society Statement on NEPAD” authored several groups, including
the Economic Justice Network, Third World Network-Africa, the Secretariat of
the Gender & Trade Network in Africa and the Alternative Information and
Development Centre, “In essence, the document is an attempt to negotiate with
Northern powers the terms of Africa’s integration into the world economy
without challenging the systemic and structural dynamics by which globalization
has further marginalized and created polarization within Africa, both within
individual African countries and between them.”
To achieve
“sustainable” and “self” development, NEPAD calculates and builds a plan around
achieving an annual growth rate of 7% for the next 15 years and securing
financing of $64 billion per year to accomplish its development goals. These resources will go into a series of key
projects. NEPAD’s policies focus on privatization, particularly of
infrastructure such as water, electricity, telecommunications and transport,
largely in the form of “Public-Private Partnerships” between private industry
and government – as does the World Bank, the Bush Administration’s MCA and,
potentially, the WSSD itself.
Privatization in Africa, however, has been a marked by deadly failure in
some of the most vital environmental and human need areas, including water and
sanitation.
For example,
after the World Bank forced KwaZulu-Natal, South
Africa to privatize its water, those who were too poor to pay were cut
off. They were then forced to resort
to using polluted river water, resulting in an outbreak of cholera that has
already claimed 32 lives. In fact, due
to privatization and other forces, cholera
outbreaks affecting more than 140,000 people occurred in South Africa between
the years 2000 and 20002.
The “African
Civil Society Declaration on NEPAD” outlines, among others, the following
specific problematic elements of NEPADs economic globalization policies:
“[NEPAD] accepts export-led growth and the expansion of Africa’s traditional
exports which has already aggravated the deteriorating terms of trade for
Africa; endorses the aims of reciprocal free trade and other policy
conditionalities demanded by the EU and US, such as privatization, labor
deregulation, and investment liberalization in the Cotonou Agreement and the
AGOA, respectively; and accepts the erroneous depiction of the
“marginalization” of Africa, whereas Africa has long been deeply and
disadvantageously integrated into the global economy...”
Civil society groups
are concerned that NEPADs focus on expanded export-led development will increase
natural resource depletion without offering new environmental protections.
Groups such as the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa
(WESSA),
write that there is a lack of importance given to the ecological leg of sustainable
development in the NEPAD, it “puts Africa on the path to destruction… What
is needed is a development path which enables people to enjoy a good quality
of life without destroying our life support systems such as clean water and
air.”
There will be at least one formal day of protest against the NEPAD during the WSSD led by African civil society groups and joined by citizens of the world in the name of meaningful democratic policy development, creation and implementation for sustainable environmental and social development.
Antonia Juhasz
Project Director
International Forum on
Globalization
1009 General Kennedy
Avenue, #2
San Francisco, CA 94129
415-561-3490
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