Africa

by Guy Arnold

  (h) The right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

  There could not be a clearer case demanding intervention than DRC and there is no ambiguity about the above principle; yet there was no sign that the AU or any member state was prepared to invoke it. Not only did the AU act like its predecessor the OAU and do nothing about the internal affairs of a member state (DRC) but it seemed ready also to condone or ignore the blatant piracy of that state’s neighbours. Until Africa is seen to be ready to deal with such crimes on the continent, there can be little hope of an African renaissance that has any meaning.

  The NEPAD concept arose out of the October 2001 meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, when African leaders reviewed the dangers of terrorism. They also discussed the New Africa Initiative (NAI) that had been formulated in July 2000 at the final OAU summit in Lusaka. They agreed to rename NAI as NEPAD and establish its headquarters in Pretoria. They envisaged three African commitments: clear accountability and open government; an end to gross human rights abuses; and an end to African wars and the imposition of African peacekeeping. In return, the West would provide more aid for infrastructure, development and education as well as increased investment and the lifting of existing trade barriers. This represented a neat equation and though the initiative should not be decried, it was depressingly similar to past occasions when, in return for promises of good governance, Africa asks for more aid. It is surely a humiliation, to put it no higher, that 40 years after independence Africa is collectively promising to behave well in return for more aid. Libya’s Col. Gaddafi put his finger on the blatant neo-colonialism of the NEPAD concept when he said: ‘We are not children who need to be taught. They (the colonial powers) made us slaves, they called us inferior but we have regained our African name and culture.’ Thus, it has to be asked, will NEPAD do anything other than tie Africa more closely to the West just when it should be breaking free? The only NEPAD initiative that would make ground-breaking sense would be one that brought an end to US and EU subsidies to their farming sectors so that they opened their markets to African agricultural products in the way President Bush asks Africa to open its markets to the more advanced Western economies.

  NEPAD presupposes a new relationship between Africa and the North, especially Britain, France and the EU, and the United States. This requires us, first, to look at the old relationship. At the beginning of the 1960s the leaders of newly independent Africa nonetheless recognized that the West was determined to continue controlling the economies of Africa and this has not changed. Poverty, and the manipulation of the poor by the rich, is central to the world’s current problems. Almost all international gatherings over the last 10 to 15 years have revealed a hardening of attitudes between North and South with both sides finding confrontation easier than consensus. Moreover, no matter how many initiatives have been launched, for example over debt relief, the rich get richer and the poor poorer, and though we have the knowledge as well as the resources to bridge all the gaps that exist, the rich do not have the will to do anything of the sort. Those who possess wealth and power do not want to equip the poor to rival them. Demonstrations against the annual meetings of the G8, the World Bank and IMF, the WTO or the Davos meeting are symbolic of the yawning divide that separates North and South. Far from altering anything, these demonstrations simply emphasize the fact that the world is divided into two camps: smug power facing desperate poverty. Finding solutions to an unequal relationship always founders on two realities: the first, that the weak have very few weapons to hand with which to confront the strong; and the second, that the strong are always determined, by whatever means, to maintain their advantages. Thus, when we consider NEPAD, we must ask: what does the EU want of Africa and what does the United States want?

  The manipulation of Third World states – especially in Africa – has been part of a relentless policy pursued by the United States and the old metropolitan powers Britain and France, ever since decolonization took place. It has been evolved as a form of indirect rule. Aid has been the West’s main weapon in this manipulation process and the attitudes that divide the rich donors from their African recipients were formed during the 1960s and have changed little since that time. It is historically instructive that the donors only recognized the value of aid after African countries had become independent; prior to independence, colonies were largely supposed to pay for themselves. As a broad generalization, aid became a weapon of economic management for donors while for recipient rulers it relieved them of responsibilities to their people that could not have been avoided if there had been no aid. The result of decades of aid has been to create aid dependency on the one hand and mountains of debt on the other, which between them deprive African countries of any freedom of economic choice. Further, it is pertinent to ask just what aid has achieved over the last 40 years of the twentieth century and why so many African countries, despite aid, are either no better off or even worse off than they were at independence. It has become difficult for donors any more to justify aid as an instrument of development when so little development has taken place, so instead they have switched the justification to the pursuit of good governance. According to Phoebe Griffiths of the UK Foreign Policy Centre aid provided through the IMF or World Bank has created globalized dependency, which ‘means that because most of their revenue is generated externally (whether through aid or mining revenues), African governments are more accountable to the outside world than to their own people’.2 The most obvious demands for Africa to make in any future aid forum ought to cover three areas: the elimination of debt followed by a clear statement that no more aid is requested; an insistence upon fairer trade which means the elimination of Western agricultural subsidies; and finally, the introduction of democracy in the economic decision-making bodies such as the World Bank – that is, one country one vote rather than weighted voting according to financial contributions. It is naïve to suppose that a NEPAD funded by the West will do anything other than tie Africa more closely into an economic system it cannot control.

  At the G8 summit of July 2002 in Canada a deputation of African leaders including South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki and Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo were invited to attend and present the case for NEPAD. They obtained a firm promise of an additional US$1 billion of aid for Africa (US$22 billion was promised Russia, the former superpower). Now, whatever NEPAD is about, it should not require African leaders acting as supplicants, like Oliver Twist, asking for more. Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is reportedly a firm supporter of NEPAD, which is an African-led initiative, but just what do statements of support for the initiative mean? Will NEPAD simply legitimize the present North-South relationship under a new name and attract marginally more aid for Africa? Or does it amount to something more valuable? At the March 2002 Monterrey summit in Mexico – the International Conference on Financing for Development with the grand title ‘Confronting the Challenge of Financing Development, A Global Response’ – which discussed eradicating African poverty and elaborated on the Millennium Development Goals, targets were set for universal education and a two-thirds reduction of child deaths for 2015. President Bush spoke of a ‘compact for development’, in which US aid would only go to countries that rooted out corruption, restructured their economies and opened their markets. Then reluctantly, under intense EU pressure (since the Europeans did not wish to bear the greater part of the aid ‘burden’), Bush agreed a small increase in US aid from US$10 billion to US$15 billion by 2006 (a rise from 0.1 per cent to 0.15 per cent of GDP as opposed to the EU average of 0.33 per cent which was to rise to 0.39 per cent, both far below the target of 0.7 per cent). The inclusion of rooting out corruption in President Bush’s ‘compact for development’ must have appeared unbelievably arrogant to anyone from Africa or elsewhere in the South at a time when the Enron scandal, the largest corporate corruption case in history, was unfolding.

 
There was a repeat performance for the 2003 G8 summit. On 28 May the Heads of State and Government Implementation Committee of NEPAD met in Abuja, Nigeria, to urge the international community to ensure that African issues remained on the global agenda. However, the British development charity, ActionAid, said Africa had been let down once again by the G8. In its report, Wishful Thinking, it concluded that there had been less action since the 2002 G8 launch of the Africa Action Plan than there was before. According to Wishful Thinking, ‘The United States has blocked negotiations which would have given poor people access to cheap drugs for AIDS. European states, most visibly France and Germany, have refused to dismantle agricultural subsidies which undermine the livelihood of farmers in the developing world’. While the G8 met at Evian in France, at the end of May, another alternative summit, Summit for Another World, met at Annemasse and Geneva. This ended on 31 May having expressed doubts about NEPAD and claimed it would not constitute a true opportunity for fair relations between Africa and the industrialized world. The head of the Africa Network Forum for African Alternatives (in Dakar), Demba Moussa Dembele, said: ‘NEPAD must be rejected by all African people because it is not anything different from structural adjustment policies – in fact it is even worse because we now have African leaders championing it.’ The Vice-Chairman of the Southern African Institute of International Affairs in South Africa, Moeletsi Mbeki, said: ‘The dependency of African governments seems to be at the centre of the relationship with the G8.’ He added: ‘After 40 years of self-rule it is sad that the rulers have no idea about how to mobilize African skills and capital to solve some of Africa’s problems.’3

  Almost as soon as NEPAD was born British MPs were suggesting that Britain ought not to support it unless first President Mbeki of South Africa had exerted pressure upon Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe to change his ways; this was to revert to classic aid tactics: behave politically as we (the donors) tell you and aid may be forthcoming. In other words, nothing had changed.

  An aspect of the New World Order, first proclaimed by George Bush senior, is the democratization and greater accountability of countries in the South. Now accountability and open government is accepted as part of NEPAD, though exactly what is expected is difficult to analyse. In order for it to work, democracy must be an indigenous growth. It cannot be imposed from without. The people of a country have to want it and fight for it themselves, as has been happening over much of Africa in recent years. Similarly, accountability is not to be imposed from outside. Western governments make much of the need for accountability though their own actions are often not accounted for at all. Uniquely, in 2003, the Zambian parliament voted unanimously to lift ex-president Frederick Chiluba’s immunity against prosecution for corruption although such actions are still something of a rarity in Africa. Even so, it was in stark contrast to the action of the Italian parliament, which in July 2003 passed legislation to exempt Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from prosecution on massive corruption charges. Once more, the world was treated to the spectacle of double standards. What the West insists Africa must do is contemptuously disregarded in Europe. This raises another question about this most uneven of relationships. Should aid donors that claim to believe in democracy only deliver aid to countries that practise democracy (as the West understands it) or should they continue, as they do, to deliver it to tyrannies and so help keep the tyrants in power? And this leads, naturally, to another question: what to do about the decision-makers of major institutions that govern so much that takes place in Africa. These comprise the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the G8 itself. The United Nations may try to speak on behalf of the poor and least developed yet all-important decisions are subject to scrutiny by the Security Council where the five permanent members have the veto, which enables them to override the wishes of the majority, as they frequently do. The World Bank and the IMF are even less democratic in terms of either transparency or democracy where the weighted voting power of the major donors always enables the West to control policy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States controlled 46 per cent of World Bank and 48 per cent of IMF voting rights. The US always appoints the head of the World Bank, Europe of the IMF. These institutions above all, since so much of their work concerns the developing world, should themselves be made fully transparent and democratic, with one country one vote, no matter the size of their monetary contributions. The democratic structure of the WTO has been subverted by the rich nations who make key decisions in conclave before open sessions take place. Given such practices in the developed world, why should African countries be expected dutifully to accept Western prescriptions about accountability?

  NEPAD raises awkward questions about Western trading practices. For example, would the President of the United States – any President – risk losing votes by insisting upon a reduction of US living standards that would follow if certain measures to achieve a more equitable world trading system were adopted? The most obvious of these would be an end to subsidies to American farmers so as to allow African agricultural products a chance to penetrate the huge American market while also bringing an end to subsidized US cotton undermining African cotton production. Similar considerations apply to the EU with its iniquitous CAP support system for its farming sector. Another cause for concern is the constant Western pressure upon African countries to privatize state assets. Such privatization in a poor country where few of its citizens are able to purchase shares merely ensures that Western companies can move in to buy up the assets whose control may then pass out of the continent. The strong argue for free trade (though in the matter of agriculture they ignore their own precepts) while the poor need protection. Dependence upon commodities accounts for 76 per cent of the continent’s agricultural exports. Almost all initiatives emanating from the North require Africa to open its markets to outside competition while ignoring the fact that the North, where it has political groups to protect, does not do the same thing.

  The launching of the NEPAD initiative by Africa’s two most powerful leaders, Obasanjo of Nigeria and Mbeki of South Africa, certainly did not receive universal approval. In an upbeat appraisal, S. K. B. Asante wrote:

  NEPAD is the most significant continent-wide economic initiative to emerge in contemporary Africa. It is an initiative by African leaders, based on a common vision and a firm and shared conviction that they have a pressing duty to eradicate poverty and to place their countries, both collectively and individually, on a path of sustainable growth and development while, at the same time, participating actively in the world economy… What makes NEPAD different is the African political commitment behind it. For the first time, Africa is offering to move away from a relationship of dependency with the developed world and replace it with one of development by equals through co-operation, mutual understanding and partnership in the global economy. NEPAD is an African solution to an African problem; it is also a challenge to the developed world.4

  The sting is in the tail: is the vision to be shared by the rich West and will it provide the funds and what will be the price? Asante’s enthusiasm was not shared by Richard Dowden. He first pointed out that NEPAD is a creed setting out Africa’s development aims and governance principles and adopted – in theory – by all 52 countries in the African Union. However, he then suggested: ‘But there is a strong suspicion that most African leaders regard it as a new hymn sheet from which they must sing for their aid. Like hymns, the words may be beautiful and the feelings divine but understanding them, let alone following the precepts, are far from the minds of many leaders.’5

  When in March 2002, Presidents Obasanjo and Mbeki went to Harare as representatives of the Commonwealth to try to persuade Mugabe to make concessions following his flawed elections and, for example, appoint a government of national unity, they came away empty-handed. Subsequently they went to London where they were joined by the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, and had to make their re
commendation as to whether or not Zimbabwe should be suspended from the Commonwealth. Mbeki still wanted to give Mugabe another chance but was constrained as the architect of NEPAD since he wanted to obtain more Western aid for it. When he spoke with Tony Blair over the telephone the British Prime Minister warned him that NEPAD would have little credibility if Africa gave the impression that it would tolerate Mugabe’s excesses. So Mbeki endorsed Zimbabwe’s suspension from the Commonwealth.

  NEPAD suffered a setback in July 2003 when Zimbabwe’s Mugabe snubbed a high-level EU delegation to the African Union summit in Maputo. The EU President, Romano Prodi, had come to the summit with the offer of €250 million (£170 million) for a standing African peacekeeping force but he was obliged to admit that he had watered down the offer because ‘we face a wall in any contacts, and that wall is Zimbabwe’. The previous April the Europe-Africa summit, due to take place in Lisbon, had been cancelled because of EU resistance to inviting Mugabe. At the end of the Maputo summit Romano Prodi said: ‘Lots of ideas are flying around but at the moment we are getting nowhere. On the issue of money for the standing African force, we had a proposal, but for the moment we are just saying we will look at funding if and when a force is created.’6 The idea of a standing African force had been around for 40 years and had always been treated with extreme caution by African states, many of which opposed the concept altogether. Perhaps the withholding of the EU offer to fund this particular AU operation had less to do with Zimbabwean intransigence than African suspicions of the project and of European interest in it. African leaders have complained more than once that while the UN deploys peacekeeping forces round the world it is very ready to emphasize that Africans should do the peacekeeping in Africa. Certainly, UN peacekeeping efforts in Africa – Congo, Somalia, Rwanda – have been less than rewarding for the reputation of the world body.