MFI/Radio France Internationale (Paris)
Marie Joannidis
3 July 2002
analysis
Durban, South Africa — Organizing A Union For Africa - Durban 2002 (11 of 11)
In June 1991, after a "lost" decade in the economic field, African leaders meeting at the OAU summit in Abuja, Nigeria, signed a treaty laying down the foundations for an African Economic Community to come into being towards the year 2025. Ten years later, in the wake of a globalisation process which risks leaving Africa behind, they decided to take their destiny in hand by launching, at the OAU summit in Lusaka, Zambia, a new partnership for the economic development of the continent, NEPAD. This project will be at the centre of discussions at the first African Union summit.
The lost decade of the 1980's
The debt problem and the fall in the price of raw materials dominated the African scene in the 1980's. However, despite the 1980 extraordinary summit in Lagos dedicated to the continent's economic problems and despite the extraordinary meeting on debt in Addis-Ababa in 1987, no solutions were found. Private aid to Africa continued to decrease while public aid had neither the impulse nor the results hoped for. Drought in the Horn of Africa and other regions of the continent, made worse by the numerous conflicts fanned by East-West rivalry, threatened the very survival of millions of Africans, and made food self-sufficiency a priority.
The dashed hopes of the post Cold War
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, marking the end of the Cold War and the crumbling of the Soviet block, sparked high expectations in an Africa which hoped to harvest the "peace dividend" to lighten its debt burden and receive more development aid. These hopes were quickly dashed, due to the multiplication of local conflicts and the disaffection of donors who turned to Asia and Latin America and for whom Africa no longer had the same geo-strategic importance. The Americans were notably put off by their experience in Somalia and the French by their being accused in connection with the genocide in Rwanda. Moreover, the impact of the democratisation process in the 1990's was far from delivering on expectations.
The mid-1990's nevertheless marked a turning point: the devaluation of the CFA franc in the Franc Zone, making their exports more competitive; the African tour of American President Bill Clinton; and the new initiative for highly indebted poor countries (HIPC). At the same time, African oil reserves, notably in the Gulf of Guinea, sparked a renewed interest on the part of rich countries, the major energy consumers, bringing in new private capital.
The Millennium Summit and NEPAD
Globalisation was also to demonstrate interdependence between rich and poor, if for nothing else, to stop the flood of illegal immigrants to the North, which had become one of the developed world's main worries. The UN Millennium Summit in 2000 consecrated the international community's new preoccupation with Africa, by launching a decade of fight against poverty, thus admitting the failure of preceding development strategies. In response to this message, African Heads of State, conscious that their continent lagged far behind, decided in 2001 to elaborate their own development plan based on a dynamic of internal effort and a partnership with donors, designed to replace the old donor-aid recipient relationship.
South African President Thabo Mbeki, champion of the "African renaissance", along with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, launched the Millennium Plan, which called for good political and economic governance and underlined the importance of the private sector. Egypt later joined the three. Meanwhile, the Senegalese Head of State, Abdoulaye Wade, proposed the Omega plan, which insisted on the importance of continued development aid and expanding infrastructure.
The merger of the two plans was achieved with the help of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and led to the New African Initiative, adopted at the Lusaka summit. It was presented at the G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001. The new initiative then changed name to become the New Partnership for African Development: NEPAD.
After Genoa, each of the G-8 countries designated a senior official - the "sherpa" - to keep permanent contact with the African countries, so that an adequate response could be prepared by the rich countries at the G-8 summit in Kananaskis, Canada, in June 2002. For their part, the Africans prepared a series of regional and continental projects to present both to the G-8 countries and to the African and international private sector.
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