Africa: Mbeki, Obasanjo, Bouteflika Absent from Nepad Meeting in Senegal

15 April 2002
allAfrica.com
By Ofeibea Quist-Arcton

Dakar, Senegal — The programme for an important summit on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) in Senegal boasted an impressive line-up of African leaders. And many arrived. But some of the key players failed to appear on Monday for the 2-day conference in Dakar.

Indeed, four of the five 'founding fathers’ of the new continental African initiative, South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, the Algerian leader, Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt -- all expected in Dakar -- were absent.

All explained that pressing bilateral, continental or international engagements kept them away from Senegal.

Mbeki was busy at the Sun City resort, trying to help the warring parties of the Democratic Republic of Congo reach a peaceful settlement, said his stand-in, South Africa’s deputy president Jacob Zuma.

Obasanjo’s pretext was that he was hosting the visiting Chinese president, Jiang Zemin.

Mubarak was preoccupied with the crisis in the Middle East.

Bouteflika apparently failed to supply any reason for his absence.

There have long been rumours of rivalry and brinkmanship among the Nepad founding fathers and they resurfaced in Dakar as those present speculated on the reasons for the no-shows.

Nepad is the combination of different plans touted by different African heads of state, all of which have been cited by their authors as the foundation for the others. The Millennium Africa Plan (MAP) was spearheaded by Mbeki - widely seen by the West as the champion of African renaissance. It was eventually combined with Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade’s Plan Omega in 2001, but not without reports of internal tussles. The merged and renamed New African Initiative (NAI) was then presented to the summit of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Lusaka, Zambia last July. But the NAI was soon renamed the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, or Nepad.

It was left to the meeting's host president, Wade, to put on a brave face and, after a hasty programme change, pass the chairmanship honours from the absent Obasanjo to the president of Gabon, Omar Bongo.

Sources close to the Senegalese leader said Wade felt personally 'slighted’ by the absence of his South African and Nigerian counterparts - the influential anglophone contingent of the Nepad leadership, and co-architects of the plan which is supposed to kick-start Africa’s development.

But Wade’s foreign minister, Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, later rejected talk of rivalry in an interview with allAfrica.com. He said: "We would have loved to have them (Mbeki, Obasanjo and Bouteflika) here. But there is no resentment whatsoever, because of their absence." Gadio said the Senegalese leader quite understood that they had other important commitments which prevented their attendance at the Dakar Nepad summit.

Many other African leaders, and representatives from about 40 African countries, were on hand in Dakar to support the Senegalese president, exchange views and encourage investment for continental progress from the private sector in and outside Africa.

The conclusions of the Dakar Nepad conference will be presented to the summit of the G8 group of industrialised nations in Canada in June.

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