The body blow dealt to Africa’s recovery plan, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), last week could have been avoided with better communication.
Developed countries whose buy-in is crucial to the process are left doubting whether African nations will keep their promise to police themselves on good governance and fiscal discipline.
The confusion was sown in statements by South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aziz Pahad, who was backed by President Thabo Mbeki.
They were interpreted as saying Nepad never planned to have a political peer review process. In fact, they were explaining that the process need not necessarily be driven by the Nepad Secretariat in Midrand.
Mbeki and Pahad met no fewer than three times on the weekend prior to making this declaration. They do not, however, appear to have consulted widely on the issue.
Both Deputy President Jacob Zuma and Nepad General Secretary Wiseman Nkuhlu were clearly caught on the hop, making statements that contradicted Mbeki’s.
Unravelling this riddle requires an understanding of continental politics, with Nigeria flexing its muscles.
”It’s messy out there,” says Chris Landsberg, the director of the Centre for Policy Studies. ”They are playing power politics and nothing is clear. ”The way the statement came out last week, I can understand that there is confusion.”
Mbeki decided to play his hand as he approached the deadline of the Nepad implementation committee meeting in Abuja.
With elections approaching, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo is balking at Mbeki’s domination of the African Union (AU) through Nepad.
”His people are demanding more gravitas from him. They don’t want him to appear to be led by Mbeki,” says Landsberg.
”Obasanjo is therefore laying great store by the Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA) that posited a peer review process several years before Nepad was conceived,” says Landsberg.
Despite the poor marketing the CSSDCA, like Nepad, has been given the AU seal of approval. The function of the Nigerian concept is more blurred than Mbeki’s brainchild.
”Obasanjo appears to have identified political peer review as the ideal role for CSSDCA. This would explain Obasanjo’s insistence at the Nepad implementation committee meeting in Abuja last weekend that African leaders commit themselves to keeping an eye on each other’s progress to open government,” Landsberg says.
Mbeki obviously had no problems putting South Africa on the list of a dozen of the 17 countries present committed to such a process.
He went light on political peer review when he flew from Nigeria to Phnom Penh, where he became the first non-Asian leader to address a summit of the regional Asean grouping.
His message there encouraged Asian countries to join the partnership with Africa. Nepad was not limited to engaging Europe and North America, said Mbeki.
Leaving the political hot potato to Obasanjo suits Mbeki who was left in no doubt by Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, President Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya and Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi that they would not brook any thought of being examined by fellow Africans.
Mbeki’s more powerful supporters in the diplomatic corps also advised him that political peer review could hurt his precious Nepad.
”We do not even have a peer review system in the very sophisticated Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that incorporates the world’s high fliers,” said one ambassador representing a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
”The European Union has not even attempted one. In current circumstances, an African political peer review system would have to emphasise the negative. It would be a conflict between reporting failure or failing to report failure.”
Nevertheless, Mbeki’s volte-face has dented his image as a conviction politician and made him look decidedly pragmatic.
”Perhaps we were na”ve, but we were very taken by Mbeki going where very few other leaders — and certainly no Africans has dared,” said a Scandinavian ambassador.
”It was this that captured our imagination and made Nepad that much easier to sell.”
Stephen Morrison, a former United States State Department adviser and now director of the African programme at the Council for Strategic and International Studies, agrees that Nepad has been battered.
”No one is going to stand up and say Nepad is a bad thing. But people are talking about it less and less because they don’t believe it will amount to much.
”The US administration agrees in principle with Nepad’s goals. But the inaction over Zimbabwe’s persistent breaches of human rights, the inclusion of some very strange people on the Nepad steering committee and Mbeki’s statement that political criteria are not part of the peer review system give rise to skepticism.
”The interest level in Nepad wanes as its credibility drops.”
Jakkie Cilliers of the Pretoria-based Institute of Security Studies says expectations among the media and the diplomatic corps may have been too high.
”In due course it will become evident that African expectations around Nepad and support from its development partners are equally unrealistic,” says Cilliers.