Global Policy Forum

By Wambua Sammy

AFRICAN INTELLECTUALS are divided on the legitimacy of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad).

During a three-day "African Forum for Envisioning Africa by African Scholars" in Nairobi last week, a section of civil society representatives and scholars said that Nepad lacked legitimacy as it was agreed upon by African presidents and sold to Western economic powers for funding without consulting citizens, parliaments and the civil society.

"[Thabo] Mbeki told Europeans that it [Nepad] could start even before African leaders had been consulted," said Dr Dani Nabudere of the Afrika Study Centre, Uganda. He was referring to South African President Mbeki's meetings with Western, leaders including Britain's Tony Blair, to drum up support for Nepad.

The Genoa G-8 Summit, Dr Nabudere said, adopted Mbeki's idea and called it an "Africa Plan," changing it to focus on certain African success stories. The $64 billion Nepad expects to be raised locally and from the West annually in order to take off, Dr Nabudere said, would never translate into development unless the "current structures" were changed.

However South Africa's Electoral Commission chair Brigalia Bam said President Mbeki did not have to consult the civil society and all Africans. "He was responding to a crisis of unemployment and poverty in South Africa.... something should be done. There should be an alternative if Nepad is rejected," she said.

Defending Nepad, Prof Gerishon Ikiara from the University of Nairobi blamed political scientists for being pessimistic when analysing enterprises involving African governments, which, he said, must be given a chance. "Africa is still blaming imperialists when none can point out to me how an imperialist is preventing Kenya from undertaking certain endeavours," he said. To Prof Ikiara, the West could never see Africa as a competitor because its share of global trade was a mere 2 per cent.

Prof Shadrack Gutto, a Kenyan who teaches law at Witwatersrand University, South Africa, said Nepad was not an alien initiative to be thrown away. Its presidential peer mechanism for ensuring there was good governance in Africa, he said, had to be made to work "instead of condemning it "from our libraries."

Keynote speaker, Prof Adedeji Adebayo, accused the West and international institutions of frustrating efforts to resuscitate African economies. "Helping Africa is always a refrain and gratuitous rhetoric at UN sessions and international conferences."

Although Kenya's Prof Peter Anyang Nyong'o was not for the rejection of the initiative, he was critical of its drivers. Nepad's strategy of renewing Africa's growth through "a competent liberal state in Africa and a friendly "capital providing" world market, in which donors and investors will have vested interests in creating wealth for Africa," he said, was only okay on paper.

"Where is the competent and democratic state going to come from in Africa?" he wondered. The best the "Nepad crowd" could hope for, he added, was a form of benevolent leadership arising out of the "presidential authoritarian regimes that now claim to be democracies all over the continent."

As the UN Undersecretary General and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, ECA, Prof Adedeji was instrumental in five initiatives to jump-start Africa's economic growth, all of which were stifled by Western donors and financial institutions.

The efforts aimed at creating regional home markets through regional economic integration blocs principally through the Lagos Plan of Action, (LPA) of 1980 and the Final Act of Lagos. These were largely ignored by African leaders he called donor democrats, and their donor partners, whereupon, in 1989, Prof Adedeji and his team came up with proposals to counteract the the World Bank-fronted Structural Adjustment Programmes (Saps). They were also swept aside by the same lot.

According to Prof Adedeji, the Nepad initiative is top-heavy, being a presidents' initiative, which did not bother to seriously consult with stakeholders and key actors such as parliaments. Maintaining that Africa had suffered "benign neglect" by the "Development Merchant System" (Western donors and financial institutions), Prof Adedeji was sceptical that Nepad would take off on the strength of its support.

"Is the welcome being accorded to Nepad by the Development Merchant System the beginning of a new approach to Africa? Is it because Nepad is in line with the Development Merchant System or has there been a change of heart?" he wondered. "The Nepad actors must become real partners in development without pushing their own agendas in the process."

For Nepad to succeed, he said, it had to recognise the LPA cornerstones of self-reliance, sustenance, governance and progressive eradication of poverty. Aid, he said, had failed to solve Africa's problems in four decades and was not about to. "No Marshal Plan will work in Africa's underdeveloped markets. It worked in Germany because of Germans' hard work and intellectual resources." "Africa requires building anew; not rehabilitation or reconstruction," was Prof Adedeji's parting shot.

Nepad was also accused of "lacking consistency in gender matters." "It fails almost completely to recognise or address the major issue of gender inequality and discrimination, and the oppression of women that lies hidden and unacknowledged in the Nepad goals and objectives," said Ms Sara Longwe from Zambia.

[Paragraph 69 of the Nepad document talks of making "progress towards gender equality and empowering women by eliminating gender disparities in the enrolment in primary and secondary education by 2005.] Kenya's Mazingira Institute, the African Academy of Sciences and the Regional Office (Horn and East Africa) of the Heinrich Boell Foundation organised the forum.

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