New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD):
PLANTING STERILE SEEDS
By Oduor Ongwen
Last Saturday,
as I prepared to watch the quarterfinal World Cup soccer match pitting Senegal
against Turkey, I heard that presidents of Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda had
converged at President Moi’s Nairobi State House to lick their wounds. Reason? East Africa is marginalized as far
the drawing of a shopping list known as the New Partnership for Africa’s
Development (NEPAD) was concerned. I did not pay much attention to the four
Excellencies bemoaning their loss when Africa, through the Lions of Teranga,
was going to kick and conquer the world with soccer boots. Sadly, my team lost. Africa lost.
As in football,
the international division of labor among nations is that some specialize in
winning and others in losing. Our part of the world “Africa” has specialized in
losing ever since those remote days when Renaissance Europeans ventured across
the ocean in search of a sea route to India. Centuries passed, and Africa perfected
its role. We are no longer in the era of marvels when fact surpassed fable and
imagination was shamed by the trophies of conquest - the shiploads of human
cargo destined for “newly discovered” Americas, the lodes of gold, heaps of
ivory and mountains of silver. But our continent still works as a menial.
NEPAD, as it is
currently conceived and packaged is, in my view, another recipe for Africa’s
loss. I honestly do not understand why self-respecting leaders are complaining
for not being fielded in a team that has lost, even before the match kicks off.
I hasten to add that I am not an Afro-pessimist. But history's lessons are too
compelling to wish away. Herein below, I delve into only five reasons that make
NEPAD a non-starter as Africa‚s development blue print.
There is no
better place to begin than the name itself - New Partnership for Africa’s
Development. Partnership portends joining together to pursue some common
objective. The objective could be enjoyment of music as in the partnership of a
man and women on the dance floor; it could be pursuit of profit as for business
partnerships; or it could be emotional comfort as in marriage. The NEPAD
document is not clear on who is partnering with whom and in pursuit of what.
Whatever the nature of this partnership, what is it in pursuit of? In other
words, what is Africa’s development vision?
Our leaders have
exhausted themselves in European and North American circuits trying to sell
NEPAD to group of eight (G8) richest countries. It is instructive that as NEPAD was being discussed in various
forums in European and North America capitals, the African civil society,
farmers, entrepreneurs and intellectuals had difficulty accessing the document.
I believe I was one of the first few to get this document at the beginning of
November 2001 but, paradoxically, through a Canadian contact. Either the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nairobi did not have a copy or Kenya's Official
Secrets Act forbade releasing it to the gentiles. One can thus only conclude
that the partnership is between African leaders and the G8 countries. However,
as I show later in this article, that amounts to a partnership between a cat
and a mouse, which is not
partnership.
Two, NEPAD is
based on the wrong assumption that countries of the North, particularly the G8
countries, are interested in helping us develop. This is at variance with evidence of history. The North seems to
have fully internalized Newton's Third Law i.e. that for every action, there
must be equal and opposite reaction. This, as we show presently, is what
industrialized countries and the global institutions they control have done
with all the previous home-grown African development initiatives.
Independence
came with the call by patriotic African leaders like Nkrumah, Lumumba, Cabral
and Nyerere to disengage from the colonial political economy and to build
independent, internally integrated self-sustaining economies. This was
countered by the North with alacrity as many versions of “African socialism”
were sold to Africa. As Collins Leys said of Kenya's African Socialism
articulated in Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965, African Socialism and Its
Application to Planning in Kenya, these development blueprints had nothing
African and nothing socialist. In the 1970s, the call for a New International
Economic Order by the nations of the Non-Aligned Movement led the UN Economic
Commission for Africa (ECA) to produce the Revised Framework of Principles for
the Implementation of the New International Order in Africa, which
provided the basis for the Monrovia Strategy (1979), the Lagos Plan of Action
(LPA) and the Final Act of Lagos in 1980.
The LPA called
for development based on five principles: self-reliance, self-sustainability,
economic union by the year 2000 through regional integration, democratization
of the development process and equity and fairness in the distribution of
benefits of development through progressive eradication of poverty and unemployment.
The International Financial Institutions and the countries that control them
were alarmed. Their opposite reaction was the commissioning in 1981 of Prof.
E.T. Berg and his team to look at Africa's development problems. The Berg
Report became the harbinger of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs).
In 1986, the
continent came up with Africa’s Priority Program for Economic Recovery (APPER),
later adopted by the United Nations and renamed the UN Program of Action for
Africa’s Economic Recovery and Development (UNPAAERD), followed in 1989 by the
African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programs for
Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation (AAF-SAP). Again IFIs, with the
support and connivance of G8, countries came up with a counter measure: a
report called Sub Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth, which reinforced
the international division of labor that makes Africa produce what it does not
consume and consume what it does not produce. From that report came an
initiative called the Global Coalition for Africa led by former World Bank
President and US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Jan Pronk, former Dutch
Minister of International Cooperation. Equally shunted by the rich nations and
global institutions that they control
were the African
Charter for Popular Participation for Development (1990) and the UN New Agenda
for the Development of Africa (UN-NADAF, 1991). That the very forces that have
frustrated our homegrown development efforts are embracing NEPAD is curious.
Three, NEPAD is
premised on an economic framework that cannot take Africa out of the present
development crisis simply because it the one responsible for it. This is
explicitly recognized in the NEPAD document itself. Yet our leaders ask for
more of the same. It proposes a regime
that has been
forced down the throats of our leaders for the last two decades under SAPs.
According to the authors of NEPAD, we should, as a matter of policy,
concentrate all our efforts in creating an attractive environment for TNCs, so
that industrialized countries would be
encouraged to
put their money into Africa in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI). I
wonder if our leaders who authored NEPAD asked themselves the question: what
are the aims of economic activity?
Four, NEPAD is
undemocratic. Popular forces in Africa – the farmers through their associations,
the workers and their unions, the civil society and their organizations, the
indigenous business community, women and their organizations and the
professionals and intelligentsia – were not consulted, let alone involved in
the development of the initiative. As the adage goes, “you cannot shave a
person's head in his absence.” If NEPAD
is about our development, why were we ignored? Now East African presidents are
also crying foul as far as their participation is concerned.
Five, NEPAD is a
begging bowl. It is a contradiction in perception and practice that while the
rhetoric of NEPAD decries our dependence on aid and declares that trade and
investment is the way out, our leaders are in a hurry to have G8 commit aid
resources for NEPAD. What is the resource
envelope? Some US$ 64 billion. One wonders whether or not our leaders are aware
that by fighting trade barriers in the North they would have more resources for
development than this pittance they are begging. According to a report by
Oxfam, Rigged Rules and Double Standards: Trade, Globalization and the Fight
Against Poverty, released in April 2002, trade restrictions in rich countries
cost us around US$ 100 billion annually. Add to this what we would gain if the
intellectual property regime did not block technology transfer and resources
(circa US$ 400 billion) that would be freed by debt cancellation and you get an
idea of what NEPAD should be focusing on, which it isn't.
Africa continues
to exist at the service of others‚ needs, as a source and reserve of oil and
diamonds, of copper and meat, of coffee and fruits, the raw materials and foods
destined for the rich countries which profit more from consuming them than we
do from producing them. The taxes
collected by the buyers are much higher than the prices received by the
sellers. After all Covey T. Oliver, the then coordinator of Alliance for
Progress, did tell the world in July 1968 that to speak of fair prices “is a medieval concept” for we are in the era of free trade.
Last November,
after industrialized countries bullied and cajoled developing countries to
acquiesce to a new WTO round of trade negotiations that will effectively write
a Bill of Rights for transnational corporations, our leaders were promised
technical assistance. What we were not told is that the more freedom is
extended to foreign investors, the more prisons have to be built for those who
suffer from their investment. Our inquisitor-hangman systems function not only
for the dominating external markets; they also provide gushers of profit from
foreign loans and investments in the dominated markets. Way back in
1913, United States President Woodrow Wilson observed: “You hear of
concessions‚ to foreign capitalists in Latin America. You do not hear of
concessions to foreign capitalists in the United States. They are not granted
concessions.” President Wilson was
confident as he added “states that are obliged to grant concessions are in this
condition, that foreign interests are apt to dominate their affairs.” Our
experience shows that he was dead right.
Africa is a
continent of open arteries. From Bartholomew Diaz’s famous journey until our
times, everything has always been transmuted into European – and later United
States – capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power.
Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and
their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources.
Production methods and class structure have successively been determined from
outside for each country by meshing it into the universal gearbox of
capitalism.
While I would
excuse Kenya's self-proclaimed “Professor of Politics” when he is alarmed at
the marginalization of East Africa (on which part of Africa does Ethiopia stand
by the way?), I would have expected presidents Museveni, Mkapa and Kagame as
former “anti-imperialist crusaders” to appreciate that the chain of
marginalization, exploitation and dependency that is the hallmark of global
capitalism has many more than two links. In Africa, it also includes the
marginalization of weaker countries by their more powerful neighbors. Thus,
just as it is no accident that virtually all the TNCs that had set up their
regional headquarters in Nairobi are relocating to Johannesburg, so South
Africa, Egypt and Nigeria have of necessity to lead any initiative where the
West has a fundamental interest. Add Senegal and Algeria to take care of
Francophone and Muslim members of the continent and the picture is complete.
Inside our individual countries‚ frontiers it includes the exploitation of
rural areas and small towns by the big cities and ports, exploitation of women
by men and exploitation of arid and semi-arid regions by their
high agricultural potential counterparts.
Africa’s defeat
is always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated
poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others – the empires and their native
overseers. In the colonial and neo-colonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap
metal and food into poison.
For those who
see history as competition, Africa’s backwardness and poverty are merely the
result of its failure. We lost; others won. But the winners happen to have won
thanks to our losing. Instead of placing my hope on NEPAD, I better root for
Senegal soccer team. At least the
boys have the
determination to win for Africa.
Oduor Ongwen