Jonathan Katzenellenbogen and Vuyo Mvoko
27 June 2002
As President Thabo Mbeki and other African leaders geared up yesterday to seek support from the Group of Eight (G-8) for the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad), a group of African scholars and experts released their most critical appraisal of Nepad yet.
The group, which met in Pretoria recently and was addressed by Mbeki, panned several aspects of the blueprint for Africa's economic recovery, referring to Mbeki and members of Nepad's steering committee as "a small group of political elites" and saying the nature of Nepad would perpetuate Africa's subjugation.
Mbeki, his Nigerian counterpart Olusegun Obasanjo, Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria are meeting the G-8 leaders today in a bid to get their support for Nepad.
The G-8 is expected to release its own Africa Action plan at its annual summit.
In an interview yesterday, Wiseman Nkuhlu, who heads the Nepad secretariat, set out his wish list for the G-8's plan, saying it should point the way to concrete projects that can be implemented from next month onward.
He warned that the plan would be a disappointment if it did not involve a commitment to help Africa resolve conflicts and address the issue of "unethical behaviour" of western companies in countries with civil conflict.
The G-8 plan should address trade, debt relief, aid and market access and demonstrate "clear principles of commitment".
As conflicts were a key source of the continent's development problems, Nkuhlu said he would like to see the G-8 give far more diplomatic weight to helping resolve the conflicts in Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.
He was not specific about the sort of influence he thought they might bring to bear, but urged a far deeper involvement. "If there is no movement on this I really will be disappointed."
African leaders would also ask the G-8 to ensure their mining and oil companies behave in a far more ethical manner when doing business in countries in conflict.
In their report on Nepad, the scholars and experts went even further in their criticism than at their recent meeting. "Given the absence of consultation between African leaders with civil society", African people were now being invited to discuss the detail of Nepad's implementation "instead of the project's origins and ideological grounding".
A big problem was that Nepad's drivers had located it within the "Washington consensus" which, according to Eddy Maloka, SA's representative at the experts' meeting, refers to the view that the state must be less involved in the economy, privatise and leave everything to the "invisible" hand of the market.
Within that consensus Nepad was "likely to perpetuate and reinforce the subjugation of Africa in the international global system, the enclavity of African economies and the marginalisation of Africa's people".
Responding to the criticism, Mbeki's spokesman, Bheki Khumalo, said: "Ideology and slogans don't feed people. That has been the problem in the past."
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