Washington, DC — South African president Thabo Mbeki and Nigerian head of state Olusegun Obasanjo arrived in Calgary, Canada this week to lobby the world leaders gathering for the annual Group of Eight - or G-8 -- summit to deliver on promises of more foreign aid and investment for Africa, faster debt relief and lower trade barriers for African goods.
Joining Mbeki and Obasanjo for an intensive day of lobbying on Thursday will be Presidents Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria. The African leaders are not actually staying with the world leaders at the remote Kananakis lodge where they are meeting, but are sleeping in Calgary and will join the G-8 leaders on Thursday morning for discussions about the New Partnership for Africa's Development - or Nepad - initiative.
This is the first time that leaders of countries that are not part of the G-8 have been invited to attend these meetings, and there have been considerable expectations in Africa that the world leaders gathering in Kananakis would approve an "Action Plan for Africa" that offered specific assistance to encourage the Nepad agenda. But the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States and the crisis in the Middle East have edged other items onto the agenda. Adding to the pressure, the three-day meeting has now been collapsed into less than two days. Canada's intention that the Summit would end with a unified pledge of dramatically increased development aid tied to Nepad have been essentially abandoned because of pressure from the U.S. and Japan.
Nonetheless, African leaders have continued to press their case. For months now African diplomats have been providing G-8 members with lists of concrete infrastructure projects that need funding, proposals for how to expand debt relief and appeals to G-8 members to lower trade barriers to African goods entering their countries.
In a speech to the World Economic Forum in Durban earlier this month, South African President Mbeki said that among the projects being discussed with G-8 leaders is an extensive hydroelectric scheme at the Inga Falls on the Congo River. At the same meeting, Nigerian President Obasanjo said he also hopes that G-8 leaders will also discuss with African leaders the proposals in Nepad for mechanisms to resolve conflicts and establish good governance and democracy on the continent.
"African leaders will arrive [at the G-8] with concrete proposals on how to get this partnership off the ground," wrote South African President Mbeki in an opinion article published in the New York Times. He called specifically on the G-8 countries to "work with Africans in redefining assistance, fashioning a fairer trade regime and treating Africa as an investment destination."
Joining the Africans in pressing for more concrete effort will be United Nations Secretary General Kofi Anaan who on June 17 warned in an open letter to the G-8 that developing nations would be severely disappointed if the G-8 meeting ended without "firm pledges of action in areas where your own contributions can be decisive". But in a sign that hope for such pledges may be slipping, less than ten days later the Secretary General acknowledged that "we are not going there looking for a magic success." He conceded that some people were hoping the G-8 might pledge major new money to fund infrastructure projects in Africa, but added that he did not think that was going to happen.
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien had originally proposed to the G-8 members that the Action Plan for Africa include a collective, multi-billion package of aid and investment for Africa that would be tied to Nepad and more particularly to African efforts to open up their economies, protect foreign investment and improve democracy. "Canada was also an early supporter of the NEPAD, pledging $500 million towards an Africa Action Plan which will be discussed at the G8", explained Susan Whelan, the Canadian Minister for International Cooperation in a speech in Calgary on June 25, just before the G8 meetings began. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has also reportedly been pushing for a substantial boost in foreign aid from the G-8 members.
But Canadian officials now privately acknowledge that earlier hopes for an ambitious unified plan are unlikely to be realized. "The G8 Africa Action Plan's goals will support the NEPAD; and it will focus on areas where the G8 stands to add real value in addressing the many challenges confronting the continent. These areas include building peace and security; addressing the crises in health and education; strengthening democratic governance; opening trade and investment; and agriculture and water", Whelan said. Canada also hopes to press for greater collective efforts at debt relief and for action in G-8 countries to lower tariff barriers for African goods.
The final G-8 Action Plan for Africa, however, is now expected to be a general document that individual countries will then fill out with their own bilateral initiatives. For instance White House officials on Wednesday were describing the new $500 million initiatives to stop mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDs and a program to provide $100 million to support African education as a U.S. implementation of the G-8 Action Plan.
But these bilateral initiatives could actually hamper G-8 efforts to tackle poverty in Africa, argued a top United Nations Development Program administrator in a recent interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail. "It is a problem because it cuts off the United States from the influence it could have on these multilateral initiatives and it tends to fragment the resources rather than getting them in a coherent way behind some well thought-out initiative," Mark Malloch Brown told the Canadian newspaper.
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Malloch Brown, whose agency prepared a report on African development for the G-8 leaders, also insisted that the world leaders need to refocus attention on supporting infrastructure projects in Africa. "You can give a trade break to a poor African country, but if it doesn't have the roads and its neighbors don't have the ports to get those goods out for export at a reasonable cost, it still amounts to a cruel deception."
Steven Lewis, the United Nations Special Envoy for Africa, was even blunter. In a speech earlier this month to a group of non-governmental organizations, citizens groups and others who believe the G-8 leaders do not represent the interests of most of the six billion people who live on the planet, Lewis said "Sadly, inexplicably, the G8 is guilty of a profound moral default."
He catalogued the pledges for assistance for Africa from these nations going back to the early 1970s, before noting that even today the leading world economies do not provide even 7/10ths of one percent of their combined GDP in development assistance. "The truth is that over the next several days we're going to witness an avalanche of competing figures and contributions, most of which would challenge the beautiful minds of the best mathematicians," said Lewis. "Somehow we have to emerge from the G-8 Summit with a true and clear accounting of what's been pledged."
