Partners, Not Beggars

Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni insists that partnership is necessary for Africa to make progress. But the answer is not simply more aid. “Beggars are tolerated,” he says, “but they are not partners.” Last week’s G-8 summit of industrialized nations in the Canadian resort village of Kananaskis took an important step toward treating Africans as partners rather than beggars. The summit’s agenda, in addition to global economic recovery and the fight against terrorism, included a novel plan for African reconstruction. Under the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), African countries would undertake to establish peace and good governance in return for a target of $64 billion in investment from the rich world.

Can NEPAD work? It had better. In sub-Saharan Africa 40% of people exist on less than $1 a day, and average per capita income is lower now than in the 1960s. One African in five lives in a country severely disputed by war. This decline reflects both political and institutional failure. Reform, Museveni argues, “must clearly aim at repositioning Africa from backward, agriculturally focused to industrial societies.”

The G-8 leadership endorsed NEPAD, but the plan requires more than rhetoric. Under NEPAD, in return for increased aid, trade access and debt relief, African governments will commit themselves to standards of good governance and democracy through a system of peer review. Without upholding these core principles, donors and business will be loath to invest. Yet translating governance buzzwords into reality requires considerable institutional capacity and the sort of political will hitherto lacking in Africa. Business and civil society have a key role to play in holding leadership to these promises, often made abroad but seldom kept at home, though their relationship with African governments is typically too close or too contested.

Developed states should support NEPAD’s strides toward good governance, but they also have to offer increased trade access to African products. That includes, painfully, reducing their own agricultural subsidies — not raising them, as the U.S. has done. Developed countries’ financial support for their own farm products is today equal to sub-Saharan Africa’s combined economic output. It is folly, as well as unfair, for the developed North to protect its inefficient industries at the expense of the more competitive industries of the South. And to encourage more responsible and accountable government, the G-8 should also insist that their companies operating in Africa, particularly in the oil sector, maintain high standards of transparency and disclosure. This can only serve to strengthen the accountability of African governments to their people.

Whether the developed world is prepared to offer improved access depends on Africans providing proof of their intent to crack down on deviant states. President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is one such example; a harder line on that troubled state by African Presidents would have won them more sympathy and support at Kananaskis and beyond. Africa also needs to choose its flag-bearers with care. NEPAD is currently spearheaded by Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa, not all examples of good governance, democracy and human rights.

There have been, according to one calculation, 18 African developmental initiatives over the past 20 years. What makes NEPAD different is its recognition of past failures, its ownership by Africans themselves and, critically, its timing in the wake of Sept 11. NEPAD’s proponents recognize that failure would, at this stage, be more damaging had nothing been attempted. But its success could bring unparalleled benefit. As South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki has noted, “It would be an extraordinary thing to be party to a process which turned the continent around and defined Africans in a radically different way ? to [that] which history has defined them over the past 500 years. This would be worth anything.” African leaders had expected a greater commitment at Kananaskis. They were allocated roughly $6 billion of a $12 billion aid package that had been announced at an earlier intergovernmental conference. But despite this shortfall, it is clear that the developed world is starting to get Africa’s message.