Despite its drawbacks, the initiative opens the way for a new, positive international engagement with the continent
Greg Mills
The finer details of the Millennium Partnership for the African Recovery Programme (MAP) will be revealed, we are told, after the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit in Lusaka next month.
The MAP concept has apparently been founded on two principles: first, that Africa’s chronic development position demands radical action. Today a quarter of Africa’s 800-million people, according to the World Bank, exist on 65c (US) a day. From 1965 to 1997 sub-Saharan Africa recorded a negative real gross domestic product growth rate of 0,2%.
The second principle is that while the assistance of the global environment is critical in meeting these challenges, African states cannot afford to disengage with the forces (and benefits) of globalisation that globalisation is not the polar opposite of “development” as some critics argue.
To achieve this and to engage in collective and cooperative action with other countries, however, a strong and capable state is required, a feature largely absent from the African landscape.
With this in mind, the MAP has a number of inter-related objectives, including the need to address poverty, improve human resource capacity and to create a platform for private capital investment and thus economic growth.
These will be achieved, it is planned, through the promotion of intra-African trade and infrastructure links, the establishment of conditions of good economic and political governance, the combating of regional threats, including conflict and disease, and the promotion of resource inflows. In essence the MAP is, in the words of one of its drafters, “an attempt, first, to accelerate poverty reduction and, second, to provide a platform for investors”.
This is a courageous and unique project for Africa, not least in its continent-wide approach. What also sets it apart from other previous (failed) African initiatives is both its seemingly strict criteria for membership of the MAP club and potential sanction of deviants, and also the apparently highly technical nature of many of the projects that will stimulate intra-African cooperation and development through public (largely external) financing.
But it does have a number of weaknesses and potential pitfalls. The first is the absence of civil society from debates on the MAP, both in South Africa and the other principal motivating/ organising states. This has been a top-down, technocratic process in which Parliaments and the public alike have had little or no input.
Second, there is a related danger of leadership being judged by the high standards it has set itself rather than by what will in reality be rather slower developmental progress with incremental reforms and results. These may have an effect on the domestic support given to the MAP’s African proponents, especially since a number face considerable domestic opposition already.
Third, Africa has displayed little guts when it comes to sanctioning OAU members, preferring to genuflect towards sovereignty in defence of some of the worst excesses perpetrated by its membership. South Africa was unable to convince Africa, for example, to follow its lead in condemning Sani Abacha’s criminal rule in Nigeria, in spite of the charismatic leadership of Nelson Mandela; and closer to home, Pretoria openly admits its lack of leverage over Zimbabwe in justifying the absence of a policy punishing Robert Mugabe’s actions. The effective use of peer pressure in this way would, it is admitted, “represent a 180 turnaround in the behaviour of African states”, although it builds on the OAU “yellow card” system that in itself signalled an important conceptual shift.
Fourth, the role of a cabal of countries in steering the MAP originally South Africa, Algeria and Nigeria, but now including Senegal, Egypt, Tanzania, Mozambique and Mali could create problems of African-wide ownership. Senegal’s involvement would appear to have removed the spectre of their Omega plan from rivalling the MAP; but this does not mean that alternative routes will not surface in the future.
Finally, in pursuing what essentially is a macro-policy approach founded on the need for marrying external and internal policy action, there is a danger of overlooking the more simple policy issues that African states can do something about in isolation notably on issues of good governance.
Related to this last point, while a focus on technological “connectivity” presents opportunities to leapfrog previously defined development stages, globalisation presents two particular challenges in this regard.
First, the need to harmonise with international standards and expectations, especially with regard to auditing, the role of the media, and banking and stock-market regulations and scrutiny. Second, the changing nature of the global economy and the advances made in e-commerce dilute (and possibly remove) the role played by the “middleman” in business, with consequent political costs, including the removal of patronage ties. Added to this, technology notably IT also presents social and political challenges, altering the norms tending towards hierarchy and conformity that pertain in many African nations, alongside more pernicious opportunities for nepotism in the licensing, for example, of telecommunications.
Whatever these drawbacks, the MAP initiative is deserving of support simply because it offers a framework for a new, positive international engagement with the continent, and in doing so a more hopeful future. At the least, it will encourage the formation of coalitions of domestic reformers.
But like its paper counterpart, the MAP can only be a schematic impression of a three-dimensional picture: the course it offers will not entirely replicate the inevitably complex route of development, one that will be fraught with setbacks and filled with difficult political and policy choices.
Dr Greg Mills is the national director of the South African Institute of International Affairs