From Africa Recovery, Vol.15 #3, October 2001, page 21

As we go to press, a summit of African leaders in Abuja, Nigeria, officially launched the New Partnership for African Development on 23 October. Previously called the New African Initiative, it will seek to stimulate the continent's development and prepare it for the challenges of political change and globalization.

New African Initiative stirs cautious hope

Praise and scepticism for continental development plan

By Ernest Harsch

"Hugely ambitious" and "very difficult" was how South African President Thabo Mbeki characterized Africa's twin plans for socio-economic development and political union. Many of his fellow presidents and prime ministers -- gathered in Lusaka, Zambia, for a summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) -- shared that sense of the daunting challenges ahead as they try to change the way African countries interact with each other and with the rest of the world.

Photo: © SIPA Press

At the political level, Africa's leaders intend to transform the OAU into a more effective continent-wide institution, the African Union, over the next year (see box, "Transforming the OAU into the African Union"). Simultaneously, they aim to promote an innovative "made-in-Africa" development strategy known as the New African Initiative. It incorporates two draft plans put forward by different African presidents earlier this year, the Millennium Partnership for the African Recovery Programme and the Omega Plan (see Africa Recovery, June 2001), which were merged into a single, common framework just before the OAU's 9-11 July Lusaka summit.

The Initiative's overall goal, declared the assembled heads of state, will be to achieve "human-centred and sustainable development," while also ensuring that Africa becomes more than a marginal player in the world economy. Key to this, notes the Initiative, will be better leadership and governance. "African peoples have begun to demonstrate their refusal to accept poor economic and political leadership." Although many of the fine points of the Initiative are still to be worked out, the broad outlines of the strategy have been set (see box "We will determine our own destiny").

A new partnership?

The Initiative commits African governments to more energetically raise financial resources from within the continent itself, through improved taxation, greater efficiency, and higher domestic investment and savings rates. But it also calls for "a new relationship of partnership between Africa and the international community, especially the highly industrialized countries, to overcome the development chasm that had widened over centuries of unequal relations."

A number of African leaders have been traveling abroad to press for quicker and deeper debt relief, more development assistance, greater foreign investment, and improved access of African exports to Northern markets. At a high-level session devoted to Africa in July, the UN Economic and Social Council (see article "African Initiative challenges the UN") heard World Bank President James Wolfensohn praise the New African Initiative as "of enormous importance for every citizen of the world." He pledged that the World Bank would support its call for programmes that are "home-grown and home-owned. We recognize that top-down development imposed from Washington or London or Geneva will not work." Although the Bank would continue to attach conditions to its lending, he said, it would seek to "streamline conditionality." It also will give greater support to developing and deepening regional integration within Africa, rather than focusing almost exclusively on national projects, as it has in the past.

'Aiding Africa is not charity'

The following week, a delegation of African leaders led by President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal pitched the Initiative to the annual summit of the Group of Eight industrialized countries in Genoa, Italy. "For the first time in the G8," said French President Jacques Chirac, "Africa was seriously addressed." UK Prime Minister Tony Blair called on donors to initiate a "kind of Marshall plan" for Africa, referring to the large infusion of funds that helped rebuild Europe following World War II.

Mr. Guy Verhofstadt, acting president of the European Union, observed: "There is a political will on the part of the rich [countries] to join in partnership action with the African continent. Until now, that wasn't the case. After three days of discussions, everyone, including the American President George Bush, was aware of the chasm between the North and the South, between the rich of the G8 and Africa."

The G8 welcomed the New African Initiative as a promising basis for stronger partnership. It also adopted a "Genoa Plan for Africa," which highlights areas of particular interest to the industrialized countries: promoting private investment, expanding trade within Africa and externally, improving public health systems, overcoming hunger, ensuring sound management of economic enterprises, introducing new technologies, combating corruption, achieving good governance and preventing conflicts. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who will host the next G8 summit in Canada, pledged that Africa will be its central theme. "Aiding Africa is not charity," he said, "it's an investment."

The G8 members plan to prepare more concrete partnership proposals by next year's summit. In the meantime, they also aim to engage in on-going dialogue with a 15-member committee of African heads of state. That committee, chaired by Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, is to formulate specific programmes for implementing the New African Initiative, also in time for the 2002 summit of the G8.

African leaders attending the Genoa summit got a glimpse of the passions aroused by the G8's international economic policies, as security forces clashed with "anti-globalization" demonstrators, leading to many injuries and one death among the protesters. President Wade criticized the "violence" of a wing of the protest movement, but also expressed sympathy with their ideals. "It is true that capitalist rules, applied blindly, generate intolerable situations," he said. Yet he urged protesters to "be realistic" in their demands, since "such rules govern the world." He also predicted that "the current critique of capitalism" will gain ground in developing countries and "will one day win over the youth of Senegal. There is a danger they will consider reform [of the international economic system] as not coming fast enough, or not moving in a good direction. I will have to maneouvre so that they do not turn against me."

Debating pros and cons

As Mr. Wade's remarks suggested, promoters of the New African Initiative are keenly aware that whatever backing it might garner internationally, it must above all win active support from the people of Africa if it is to have a chance of success.

Photo: © iAfrika Photos

Since the Millennium Programme and Omega Plan were first floated earlier in the year, and then merged into the Initiative, African policy-makers, academics, development practitioners, media commentators, trade unionists, civil society activists and many others have been debating their merits and shortcomings. Many have expressed cautious hope that the Initiative might indeed represent a new departure for the continent. If peace and political stability can be achieved and if the industrialized countries follow through on their promises, the Initiative "should lay a solid foundation for Africa to assert itself in the mainstream spheres of global economic, political and cultural affairs," commented Mr. Kuseni Dlamini, a research associate with the South African Institute of International Affairs.

Some, however, are more sceptical. They express concern over the negative impact that globalization may have in Africa and lack confidence in African leaders' political commitment to their own plans. The Initiative "is the right thing to do at the right time," declared an editorial in the Gambian daily Independent. But the newspaper worried that foreign investors would not be attracted to a continent with "so much unrest and lawlessness" and doubted that the new African Union would be any more effective than the OAU.

Stronger focus on regional integration

Prof. Moustapha Kasse, dean of economics at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, noted that earlier OAU economic development programmes, such as the 1980 Lagos Plan of Action, failed for a variety of reasons, not just the deficiencies of African governments. These included a deterioration in the international economic environment, lack of support from donor countries -- which preferred to push structural adjustment policies instead -- drought, the outbreak of civil wars, and the tendency of each African country to look after its own short-term interests, to the detriment of any overarching continental vision.

Mr. Kasse believes that the approach taken in the New African Initiative reflects some of the lessons of past failures. The Initiative, he notes, acknowledges that economic growth and development are not influenced by financial and productive factors alone, but also by political and social ones. This is reflected in the Initiative's emphasis on peace, good governance and women's advancement. Of particular importance, Mr. Kasse emphasizes, is the focus on ways to increase trade, transport links, and joint investment projects among African countries. Greater regional integration, he points out, will expand local markets, making it easier to realize economies of scale, attract greater investment for infrastructure, and permit a more optimal division of resources.

Similarly, Mr. K.Y. Amoako, executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, argues that accelerated regional integration "can facilitate the pooling of risks between otherwise vulnerable economies and enable the continent to exploit complementarities and attract the levels of investment required to sustain economic growth and development in Africa." This in turn could open a "gateway for our continent to enter the competitive global market."

Economic integration in Africa will take quite some time to achieve, however. Mr. Tito Mboweni, elected in mid-August as the new president of the Association of African Central Bank Governors, predicts that it may require two more decades before Africa will be ready for a single currency and a continent-wide central bank. It took Europe more than 30 years to establish a single currency, he notes, but with "a consistent programme and organized approach, these goals are achievable."

According to South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Zuma, in order to lay the foundation for economic integration across Africa, it is important now to strengthen Africa's existing regional groupings, such as the Southern African Development Community and the Economic Community of West African States. "If the regional blocs are weak, then the economic integration of the continent will be weak," she says.

On trade, President Obasanjo of Nigeria points out that African countries must work more energetically to "re-shape trade relations" among themselves. In West Africa, the liberalization of trade across borders already has led to a notable increase in commercial relations among regional neighbours over the past decade. In addition, Mr. Obasanjo insists, African countries must better coordinate their negotiating positions to have a stronger voice in world trade talks.

Fears of globalization

Largely because of the prevailing inequities of world trade and financial markets, the New African Initiative's emphasis on better integrating Africa into the globalization process has stirred some anxiety and criticism. "Free trade, along with deregulation and liberalization of markets, privatization and globalization ... threatens to condemn the people of the South to eternal poverty and subjugation," argues Mr. Abie Ditlhake, executive director of the South African National NGO Coalition (Sangoco), a coordinating body of non-governmental organizations. "Rather than challenge the prevailing neo-liberal hegemony, African countries appear ready to offer the continent as a sacrificial lamb."

Photo: © iAfrika Photos

Similarly, Mr. Mamadou Dia, who was president of Senegal's Council of Ministers shortly after the country's independence in 1960, maintains that the New African Initiative's emphasis on trade and foreign investments will open "Africa's door even more widely to multinationals, to improve their ability to exploit our material and human resources."

Mr. Sipho Seepe, a columnist for South Africa's Mail and Guardian, directed a similar criticism against the Millennium Programme. Rather than charting a new course, he argued, it represented a "recycling of ideas" and demonstrated "blind faith" in the willingness of developed countries to help Africa. "It is naive to assume that the glaring global economic inequalities are mere accidents of history, divorced from the dictates of political and economic interests," he wrote. "If anything, it is the policies of the rich countries that have strangled the economies of poor countries."

Some of Africa's trade unions have strenuously resisted privatization and trade liberalization and oppose any further reduction of the state in favour of the private sector. "We know that the state played important roles in the development of infrastructure in developed countries," comments Mr. John Odah, acting general secretary of the Nigerian Labour Congress. "But now, we developing countries are being told we can't have that. Our governments are being told to cut spending on education, health, communication and others. How then can we develop?"

Peace and democracy

Among almost all commentators, there was broad agreement with the New African Initiative's insistence on achieving peace and consolidating democracy. Africa's vision can be realized, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the OAU summit, but only on one condition: "that we end Africa's conflicts, without which no amount of aid or trade, assistance or advice, will make the difference."

Some of the critics of the Initiative argued that the way it was developed -- by a handful of African presidents, without much public discussion -- did not reflect commitment to the stated goals of democracy and people's participation. Responding, Mr. Sipho Pityana, South Africa's director-general of foreign affairs and a veteran anti-apartheid leader, acknowledged that it was an initiative of African leaders. "But this does not prevent broader participation," he added. He urged people to debate the Initiative and offer constructive ideas to improve it.

Others have echoed the call. Mr. Dia recommended that NGOs, unions, anti-debt campaigners and human rights activists in Senegal and other countries form an "African citizens' movement" to put pressure on the new institutions created by the African Union, so that they will be "at the service of the peoples of Africa." Mr. Sindiso Ngwenya, acting secretary-general of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, urged industry executives to pressure governments to adopt policies to facilitate economic integration.

At a conference of African women in Dakar in late July, Ms. Amastou Sow Sidibé, president of the Réseau africain des femmes travailleuses (African Network of Women Workers), encouraged participants to examine how they could "better adapt" the New African Initiative to women's fundamental interests. Among other things, they recommended applying a gender approach to all development policies and programmes, increasing girls' school enrolment rates, banning genital mutilation, providing more AIDS information and training, combating high maternal and infant mortality rates and involving women in all peace initiatives.

See related boxes:
[ A challenge to the international community ]
[ Transforming the Organization of African unity into the African Union ]
[ 'We will determine our own destiny' ]

Material from this article may be freely reproduced, with attribution to
"Africa Recovery, United Nations".
We would appreciate a copy of the reproduction.

Africa Recovery
Room S-931
United Nations
New York, NY 10017 USA

Tel: (212) 963-6857
Fax: (212) 963-4556
Email: africa_recovery@un.org

Website: www.africarecovery.org
Contact us by email: africa_recovery@un.org