There is a deepening fissure between analysts in their understanding of, and approach to, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad). Researchers are being herded into two camps, the Afro-pessimists and the Afro-optimists.
Neither of these labels is heuristic, but rather is being used by academics and politicians to provide a crude, jaundiced and unreflective epithet that purports to demarcate those with “good intentions”, that is, well disposed to the African renaissance and those with mala fides (read racist) whose stock in trade is to revel in schadenfreude every time the promoters of Nepad appear to lose their way.
The Afro-pessimists are exemplified by the approach adopted in The Economist in its May 13 2000 article entitled “Africa: The Hopeless Continent”. The irony of this article is that within months of its publication was born the Millennium Africa Recovery Programme, later to be developed and formalised into Nepad. If it achieved no more, the article galvanised important elements of African opinion to prove it wrong. Symptomatic of a deepening poverty of analysis, however, few African scholars took issue with The Economist on the basis of fact. The data went unquestioned, it was accepted as accurate and its conclusions were thus regarded as consistent. What The Economist failed to do was to fully consider data and evidence to provide a contrarian point of view that might have led to a different and thus more “hopeful” conclusion.
To question the prudence (and possible dangers) of a highly ambitious global restructuring programme, rather than, for example, the development of a number of more modest, defined and achievable national and regional programmes is seized upon as evidence of an innate Afro-pessimism. To raise concerns about the absence of broad political and civic consultation nationally and regionally in the drafting of Nepad is construed as a challenge to the political leadership and authority of the “democratically elected government”, rather than being accorded the serious consideration matters of democratic consultation and engagement demand if any developmental and poverty reduction programme is to have any chance of success.
Afro-pessimists have also recently been at the forefront of those questioning the embarrassing and disquieting equivocation on the cardinal Nepad mechanism of peer review. This includes the usual suspects of “highly placed but unnamed diplomats”, newspaper editors and those perhaps most scurrilous of all breeds, the neo-liberal Africa analyst. The analytical “crime” committed by those labelled Afro-pessimists was to take African leaders at their word regarding their desire to promote good governance, to read too literally the Nepad declaration committing members of the African Union to political peer review and to believe too unquestioningly that Africa had become serious about creating the conditions of governance that would become attractive to international investors. Clearly the pessimists have been found to be too optimistic by far.
What then of the Afro-optimists? These are the analysts, policymakers, and promoters and praise singers that cast an equally myopic, yet uncritical, eye over Nepad, its formulations and programmes. Afro-optimists fall into two broad and often mutually supportive categories. The first is the indigenous “progressive” scholar or policy analyst who is infused with a sincerity of purpose, a deep sense of pride and identity with the aims and objectives of the African renaissance, but all too often seeks out only the facts and data to support the inductive reasoning that Africa and Nepad are heading towards their rightful destiny, that of a successful continent able to compete on equal terms with the West. This overwhelming desire to see Africa succeed does not permit of fundamental critique or questioning, to do so is seen to deflect the continent and its leaders from their chosen developmental destiny. On this view development is what the leadership says it is; after all, African leaders are democratically elected and thus de facto reflect the view of the majority of Africans.
Similarly, for Afro-optimists, peer review is whatever the drafters of Nepad say it is. The other week it was a mechanism for measuring economic performance, such that those adhering to acceptable levels of economic policy formulation and governance are more likely to attract investment.
On this view the peer review mechanism means that those states who do not meet the, yet to be established, economic and governance criteria will not receive investment, but certainly will not be punished by member states. Post Abuja, peer review includes an evaluation of political governance. The advantage Afro-optimists hold is that they are invariably on the side of the elected government and thus always right.
The second group of Afro-optimists is less tolerable, less sincere and altogether more dangerous. They are typically “progressive”, “Western” scholars, analysts, development workers and diplomats who come to Africa with the central objective of saving the continent and its peoples from themselves and from the clutches of the venal twin forces of multinational capitalism and globalisation. These exotic Afro-optimists occupy positions close to, but always below, the indigenous Afro-optimists, always supportive, always humble, always starry-eyed and sometimes duplicitous. Their mission in Africa is to offer support, not criticism; praise rather than analysis. But in behaving thus, they exhibit double standards for which they would be run out of town in their respective homelands. For the exotic Afro-optimist, a profound and potentially mortal about-face on the question of political peer review is excused away as tactically sound. To lend credence to such a profound misjudgement is but one demonstration of the dangers of the exotic Afro-optimist.
It is time to scrap the unhelpful Afro-pessimist/Afro-optimist nomenclature and reclaim our discipline as scholars and analysts. It is time to drop the destructive labelling of equating scholarly critique with unpatriotic behaviour. It is time to be African scholars.
Tim Hughes is the parliamentary research fellow at the Institute of International Affairs