The New Partnership for African Development (Nepad) is the initiative of four African presidents who were elected to office through competitive democratic elections. Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal and Abdulaziz Buteflika of Algeria, realised they needed to come up with a major development plan for Africa as a basis for negotiating foreign aid and investments for Africa.

This was after a number of meetings with their counterparts from the OECD countries. In the end, Nepad became an economic manifesto for African Unity in the context of the political drive to establish the African Union billed for the OAU heads of states meeting coming up in Pretoria in July this year.

The basic assumption in Nepad is that Africa has been lagging behind in development in spite of her enormous endowment with natural resources and a human resources base that is trainable to make full use of modern technology for rapid modernisation. If a focused program is mounted at the continental level, based on regional economic integration, the development of human resources, the exploitation of natural resources for domestic industrialisation and a large and growing home market, Africa can easily leap-frog from the Third to the First World, the way Singapore did over the last 30 years. 

In the immediate, a GDP growth rate of 7-12 per annum will be the target for every country, rich or poor. In the long run, this should translate into national economy profiles where the enormous gap between the rich and the poor is reduced, and standards of living for the majority are stabilised way above the current poverty line.

For that to happen, there must be a new type of political leadership in Africa. This is a leadership to be provided by honest, disciplined, hard working and knowledgeable men and women with the interest of the people of Africa at heart. These men and women will be leading governments founded on democratic principles, the rule of law and respect for human rights. 

It means therefore that such men and women cannot afford to be corrupt and champion the Nepad agenda at the same time. They cannot involve their governments in fighting wars against their own citizens and claim that they respect human rights. They cannot stifle civil society in public discourses on public policies and insist that they are promoting democratic governance. 

Since 1990, African countries have been trying to do away with authoritarian regimes in preference for more liberal and democratic regimes. At the same time, there have been concerted attempts to make governments more responsive to the people’s needs, less corrupt in handling public affairs and more accountable to the people. These attempts have achieved mixed results. Quite often the clock of democratisation has been turned back as authoritarian presidents re-invent themselves as democrats and begin frustrating the very processes of democratisation in their own countries.

Nepad now says that this clock must not be turned back again. African leaders will have to accept a peer review mechanism will ensure that the backsliders are brought back to line and the wayward ones are punished. It is not quite clear how this mechanism will work, and who will review who; the much more important point is that the leaders accept that such a mechanism is necessary as a form of accountability.

NEPAD is therefore a partnership between the following:-

• Democratic, legitimate, performing, capable and economically developmental states in Africa that will promote social equity, social inclusion, national unity and respect for human rights;

• "Capital providing" and internationalist OECD states determined to fight poverty on a global scale, deal effectively with the HIV/Aids pandemic, ensure equity in the international trading system and accept Africa as a partner in the community of modern nations.

Africa, however, is only peripherally industrial, and an African Marshall Plan would mean a massive infusion of capital to build its technological base for purposes of industrialisation. This Plan would also include the writing off of Africa’s massive debts the repayment of which is responsible for starving Africa of developmental resources. A similar organisation like the OEEC–or the African Development Bank turned into Africa’s OEEC–may be necessary.

Notwithstanding the problems of bad governance that have bedeviled Africa over the last 30years, the international economic environment has not been very kind to Africa in terms of capital flows. There have been tremendous problems of unequal exchange with regard to what Africa earns from her raw material exports and what she spends in importing technology and manufactured goods. Even where preferential trade arrangements have been made under the Lome Conventions and Coutonou Agreements, the European Union has been quick to use veterinary and agricultural standards to shut out African agricultural and animal imports into European markets. The WTO rules have not made things any better.

As the implementation of Nepad is discussed, these unfair aspects of neo-liberal globalisation, institutionalised under organisations like the WTO, must be critically reviewed. Africa cannot assume that further integration into world financial and trading systems, even when spiced by increased aid flow under Nepad, will structurally change the fate of the African people. Worse still, it may not lead to leap-frogging Africa from underdevelopment into modernity.

No nation has industrialised without investing heavily in its human resources development in the areas of health, education, housing and nutritional standards. In doing this, the state has always been central. Secondly, no nation has undergone industrial revolution without encouraging private sector investments in manufacture in collaboration with the state. Thirdly, as the manufacturing sector grows, industrialisation always means fewer and fewer people being engaged in agricultural production and more and more people congregating in urban areas as workers in the manufacturing, transport and service sectors.

Finally, the sign that a nation is successfully industrialising can be seen when income inequalities are being reduced, when the middle income group swells and when the state can finally afford a social welfare program that ensures the less fortunate decent human existence.

Africa has had the tragedy of having increasing growth in urban populations who largely survive in the informal sector or are largely unemployed. At the same time, agricultural production has declined and has contributed less and less to the GDP without a corresponding increase in the share of manufactures to the GDP. As a result of political insecurity and lack of legitimacy in governments, substantial savings are turned into dead capital as various classes of people over-invest in real estate and housing as the only safe security for the future.

A Latin American scholar, Hernando de Soto, in his book The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Succeeds in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, has rightly argued that the development of capitalism has stagnated in Africa due to problems other than lack of capital. The reality is that there is a lot of idle and unused capital in Africa. This capital is locked up in "dead" assets, such as houses and land, because of the unfavourable investment climate created by bad political and economic governance. 

Nepad now says that a new investment climate must be created in Africa at the local, national and regional levels. Appropriate trade and macro-economic policies will ensure improvements in the availability of basic human needs such as education and health facilities, rapid growth in agricultural and food production and expanding employment opportunities and export earnings from the manufacturing sector.

If this is done, then it is quite possible that foreign investments and low interest loans worth about $64 billion a year will flow into Africa as part of this Marshall Plan. In the meantime, the Nepad proponents have not worked out how much domestic savings need to be mobilised for the purposes of financing domestic capital formation in tandem with foreign capital inflows. 

Nepad is quite clear on priorities to be given to investments in the various sectors of the economy, and how regional integration can encourage improvement in physical infrastructure across the board. But Nepad is still vague on how to reorganise agriculture and increase value addition in this sector for the home market as well as export markets. Perhaps what is needed is a more detailed study and plan, country by country and region by region, on how the Nepad agenda can be implemented in every sector in the context of a self-reliant and sustainable process of capitalist development. 

When the African heads of state meet in Pretoria in July, they will put their stamp of approval on Nepad as the policy engine for the African Union. This will follow the G8 meeting in June in Ottawa where Nepad is also likely to be given the stamp of approval as the platform on which the OECD governments will engage their African counterparts in "the global partnership for Africa’s development"

Africa’s civil society organisations, intellectuals and research centres have reacted to the Nepad proposal creatively and proactively. They have pointed out the top-down approach by the leaders, the blind acceptance of neo-liberalism as the end of history and the fact that Africa’s renaissance is now heavily predicated upon dependence on external support.

While the partnership in its internationalist aspect is no doubt progressive, it needs to be more rooted in an internal debate and consensus in Africa before it is accepted as a platform for negotiating external partnership. It is this gross neglect of internal debates and consensus that has also made Nepad be rather thin on gender concerns in processes of social transformation. Nepad also needs to take more seriously the need to synchronise the economic reasoning with the political demands that the African Union project will put on the table.

Finally, it is sad to note that few African governments have submitted to their Parliaments white papers on Nepad for discussion and approval before the July meeting in Pretoria. One wonders with what consensus Nepad is being discussed with the G8 if African parliaments, let alone civil society in Africa, are largely ignorant about this Marshall Plan. The proponents of Nepad should be true to their word. Nepad’s success is predicated upon democratic governance. Its proposition should also come out of a democratic discourse.

---

Prof Nyong’o is a Nominated MP.