Although only a few days have passed since the Group of Eight summit revealed its response to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), many academics and aid industry organisations have condemned the G8 for once again offering soothing rhetoric rather than substance.
Debt-relief campaigners have complained, with justification, that the $1-billion in added debt relief offered was a pittance compared to the $20-billion offered to Russia for disarmament. The pro-aid campaigners cast aside issues of aid effectiveness and argued that the amounts offered at Kananaskis were ”peanuts” and hence immoral given the dire and increasing poverty in Africa. And many have condemned the G8’s failure to make meaningful trade concessions, without which all the aid in the world will not effect a durable reduction in poverty.
All are correct in some respects. Yes, Kananaskis did not offer material concessions of the magnitude demanded by many Africans and aid activists. And yes, G8 rhetoric to assist, enhance, strengthen and promote this or that represents an incredibly slippery set of Clintonesque promises designed to maximise the appearance of empathy and minimise accountability if later politicians decide to back off from commitments.
However, the developed nations do have a very real concern that Africa does not collapse into more Somalias. The recent European Union debates over stopping economic migrants reflect the same kind of anxiety that ultimately pushed the United States into the North American Free Trade Area, which was aimed at stopping massive Mexican migration by giving the poor better opportunities in Mexico. Africa must have the self-confidence and assertiveness to use this to its advantage in every possible forum.
On trade the G8 clearly did deflect the call for major trade access for Africa and reduction of farm subsidies. This was accomplished by firmly tying trade concessions to the Doha round of World Trade Organisation negotiations, which does not have to reach a conclusion until 2005. This may not be what Africa wanted, but this is just one phase of what must be a long fight for trade equity. Pathos alone will not win in what is a very tough world. Africa must continue to forcefully make its moral case in the developed world’s media, bluntly argue that refugee problems and instability will only grow worse without trade access and build coalitions with other like-minded states to threaten to block a new trade deal unless agriculture subsidies are reduced.
It appears that the US increase in farm subsidies was in part a hard-ball negotiating strategy with the EU. The G8 move to dodge the trade demands is also partially a reflection of the strength of the developing world’s arguments. Here Africa has no choice but to fight on.
On debt relief the G8 did not budge from its earlier views. It offered an additional $1-billion in debt forgiveness, but closed the door on additional funds after countries complete the current debt-relief process.
Officials around the Nepad secretariat had suggested prior to Kananaskis that the G8 would support a few major infrastructure projects in each African region to get Nepad rolling. No mention of this appeared in the Kananaskis statements. Aid donors increasingly resist mega-projects that cannot be clearly justified through a tangible economic pay-off. The message of Kananaskis is thus: if Nepad infrastructure projects make economic sense they can be funded through traditional aid programmes or through the World Bank, based on sound economic analysis.
It would be unrealistic to have expected the G8 to make major new aid promises on top of the 50% increase it pledged at the Monterrey Financing for Development conference in March. There was a tussle over what fraction of that $12-billion increase in aid would go to Africa and how firmly to word the commitment. The final language affirms that half of that $12-billion increase should go to Africa. This will mean a major increase on the $10-billion odd in aid the continent currently receives.
In political terms the G8 did offer strong support for Nepad, and vowed to direct this new aid to governments that follow the good governance and fiscal responsibility principles in Nepad. The trend among aid donors has been increasingly clear. There is deep frustration that aid has been misspent and abused for the profit of politicians. Aid conditions in future will include demands that African governments clean up their fiscal administration and cut corruption.
The G8 accepted the principle that Africa ought to set its own development agenda and that developed countries ought to support that agenda. That is a clear victory. So far Nepad has been explained with generalities about development. The programmatic detail is still missing. Now the burden is on African countries to provide the detailed plans that articulate how they will be more effective than past efforts.
Nepad is correct that good fiscal and political governance is absolutely indispensable. Those who complain that the G8 did not offer massive new aid misconstrue Africa’s development challenges.
African governments that have slid economically backward have not just accidentally fallen into bad policies. Their leaders have spent years actively destroying the checks and balances of government that hindered their power or limited their ability to profit from control of the state. This includes gutting the mechanisms of proper fiscal control, subverting proper tendering, ruining the fiscal management of parastatals, buying off the judiciary, emasculating parliaments, muzzling the press and jailing political opponents.
To pour more money into such environments will accomplish little. What Africa needs is a firm focus on management and capacity-building. Already the South African government, the most administratively competent in Africa, has difficulty spending its own internal development funds and has left much foreign aid money unspent. As a result it is unrealistic to expect the rest of Africa to digest massive new aid. Even now many African governments depend on aid for half of their recurrent expenditures and three-quarters of their infrastructure.
Nepad has always fudged the issue of which would come first: improved African governance or increased aid. The G8 expects good governance first. In this there is little Africa can do but deliver. Good governance is precisely what Nepad called for and so the G8 has simply hit the ball back into Africa’s court.
That means dealing not just with Zimbabwe, but the veritable civil war in Madagascar, the corrupt grab for a third term in Malawi, dubious elections in Cameroon, instability in Congo (Brazzaville), the three-decade dictatorship in Togo, tottering government in the Central African Republic, flourishing corruption and repression in Equatorial Guinea, war in Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.
Africa did not get everything it wanted from the G8, but it got some substantial aid and commitment to African leadership of the development agenda. Now is the time for Africa to roll up its sleeves and work at making Nepad a reality. For those who follow the Nepad course, significant benefits await. For those who do not, the future looks bleak.
Ross Herbert is Africa Research Fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs