African leaders on Sunday took the first step towards setting up a mechanism to monitor each other’s progress towards good government, a key plank in a widely-praised new development strategy.
President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria emerged after a six-hour closed door meeting in Abuja to announce that 12 of the 17 countries who attended had signed a declaration of intent on the ”African Peer Review Mechanism”.
Among those that signed, he said, was President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who had raised fears over the success of the summit earlier in the week when he appeared to back off from support of the process.
The remaining countries who did not sign did so for technical or procedural reasons, delegates told reporters afterwards, and not because they oppose peer review, part of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) plan.
”It’s a successful meeting,” a clearly tired Obasanjo told reporters, flanked by some of the heads of state and government and senior African officials who attended the summit.
”We spent a lot of time on the issue of the African Peer Review Mechanism. Not only did we spend an awful lot of useful time on it, we also had a declaration of intent,” he said, hinting at the hard negotiating behind the deal.
The Nepad countries will meet again in February to sign up to a precise framework within which African nations can monitor each other’s progress towards the goal of open, accountable investment-friendly government, he said.
The Nepad devlopment plan has been hailed by the United Nations and the G8 group of industrialised countries, which has offered a package of aid and debt relief for Africa if its leaders live up to
the promises on good government.
A full post summit communique was to be released Monday, officials said. – Sapa