Chris Staals, South Africa’s last white central bank governor and Graca Machel, were among six people picked on Wednesday for Africa’s first peer-review body, charged with pressing the continent’s leaders to end wars and corruption.
Chris Staals, the last central bank governor appointed by South Africa’s former minority white rulers, and Graca Machel, the widowed former Mozambiquan first lady and wife of former SA president Nelson Mandela, were among the six-member Panel of Eminent Persons charged with ”putting peer pressure on African leaders,” said Isaac Oluko-Olokun of Nigeria.
The peer review body is under the auspices of the New Partnership for African Development, or Nepad.
The programme, developed by continental heavyweights South Africa, Senegal, Algeria and Nigeria, would see $6-billion in new aid flow to African countries whose governments are certified by the body as honest and accountable.
Oluko-Olukun, Nigeria’s ambassador to Nepad, said the other members of the peer review panel are Nigerian economist Adebayo Adedeji, former Kenyan diplomat BA Kipglaat, Senegal’s former UN development official Marie-Angelique Savane and Cameroon’s Dorothy Njeuma.
The members were picked in a meeting of heads of state in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, on the eve of Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s inauguration to a second term.
Oluko-Olukun described peer-review as a ”cutting-edge idea that no other region has done.”
The aim, he said, was putting quiet pressure on African leaders to ”ensure peace, security and good governance.”
Thirteen African nations ratified the agreement in March and several more had since joined in, Oluko-Olukun said.
A recent visit by Obasanjo and South African President Thabo Mbeki to Zimbabwe, where octagenarian leader Robert Mugabe faces growing pressure to step down, ”is a classic example of how the peer review body will work,” Oluko-Olukun said.
”It will not be punitive,” Oluko-Olukun stressed, adding that all consultations between the peer review body and African leaders would be discreet, private and ”eyeball to eyeball, African to African.”
Donor nations have expressed doubt that the peer-review board would have the clout to effectively police abuses.
Some Western governments have chided African governments — giants South Africa and Nigeria in particular — for being particularly soft on Zimbabwe’s Mugabe.
Mugabe’s chaotic and often-violent seizure of white-owned commercial farms have worsened a food crisis threatening several million people with starvation.
Obasanjo said earlier on Wednesday that African leaders ”should assure our developed partners … of the African resolve to discharge our responsibilities” to make the peer review body effective.
In return, he urged the G-8 of the world’s richest nations to honour the commitment they made last year in Kananaskis, Canada to increase aid to Africa, the world’s poorest, most conflict-ridden, and disease-plagued continent.
”It is high time the implementation of this plan took off in earnest,” Obasanjo said.
Other Western commitments to Africa ”remain unfulfilled,” the Nigerian leader said, stressing the result was the continent would otherwise remain unable to meet goals set at the Millennium Summit in New York in 2000 to dramatically improve education and health care in the world’s poorest countries.
Mugabe did not participate in the Abuja meeting, although he was expected to attend Thursday’s inauguration. – Sapa-AP