The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) talks about African self-reliance and ownership by people united in their diversity — but the people themselves were never consulted in the process, say most African civil society organisations. They also argue that Nepad will not break the chains of global capital.
“Nepad is about talking left and acting right,” says Masimba Manyanya, former chief economist for the Zimbabwean Ministry of Finance and editor of a booklet to be released by the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (Zimcodd). “It is exclusionary and reduces African citizens to recipients of abstract social and economic policies that they were not party to.”
In a forward to the booklet entitled Nepad’s Zimbabwe Test: Why the New Partnership for Africa’s Development is Already Failing, Zimcodd chairperson Jonah Gokova calls Nepad a “home-grown rehashing of the Washington Consensus, augmented by transparently false promises of good governance and democracy”.
African civil society, largely ignored by African leaders, says that Nepad has surrendered to the whims of northern donors and transnational corporations. Nepad’s commitment to democracy, they say, is merely a ruse.
“Rather than breaking the chains of global apartheid, Nepad is polishing them,” says Patrick Bond, professor at the public and development management school at the University of Witwatersrand. “The Nepad document is a top-down imposed blueprint that reeks of technicism, a scent that would dissipate partially if exposed to the fires of popular debate.”
Critics point out that, after President Thabo Mbeki and his aides had discussed Nepad among themselves, they appear to have gone first to the Western capitals and northern donors before consulting with their own people.
And, until 2002, no African NGO and broader social movement, trade union, church or women’s group had been consulted.
Rather, African leaders consulted with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 2000 and 2001. Major transnational corporate executives and associated government leaders were consulted at the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2001 and in New York in 2002, and at the Group of Eight summits in Tokyo in 2000 and in Genoa in 2001.
For civil society, Nepad is simply a mirror reflection of Africa’s socio-historical past marked by neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes.
Multiple critics argue that, behind a smokescreen of people-centered, pro-poor and gender-sensitive rhetoric, the programmes entrench economic principles that privatise essential services, socialise the costs and spread poverty.
At the launch of the African Union last July, more than 200 opponents of Nepad from the Democractic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe demonstrated at the opening ceremony in Durban. During the World Summit on Sustainable Development, about 20 000 protesters strongly condemned Nepad.
“Nepad is simply an attempt to renew the failed neo-liberal experiences of the 1980s and 1990s and provide a platform for their political acceptability now,” says Manyanya. “International interests are being served behind a pretence of African development. The real promise to the Africans is simply the recycling of crude forms of governance.”
The Southern African Development Community and the European Union civil society conference held in Copenhagen last year slammed Nepad for failing to identify the “past conditions attached to neo-liberalism”.
“Nepad is a programme driven by African elites and drawn up by the corporate forces and institutional instruments of globalisation, rather than being based on African people’s experiences, knowledge and demands,” the conference concluded.
But civil society’s discontent with Nepad risks becoming a toothless tiger unless it moves away from being cynical and critical towards creating a real and feasible alternative programme, Manyanya says.
“The hammering by civil society of Nepad actually provides an opportunity to discuss real continent-wide issues of African recovery centered on human development rather than capital accumulation. The criticism mustn’t be an end in itself, but rather a means to an end.”
The basis of the civil society debate is that no African country can change its economic and political relations within the international system without pulling down the obstacles to its own development, such as the character and role of African leadership. This depends on the mobilisation and engagement of the African people, who have mostly heard about Nepad only through hearsay.
The Accra declaration of 2002 by African academics of the Council for Development and Social Science Research in Africa believes that altering the Nepad document will require “training and dissemination of knowledge about the issue at stake” with social groups around their interests and strategies of development “in collaboration with our colleagues in the global movement”.
In other words, rather than withdrawing from the global economy, civil society proponents believe that the rebirth of the African continent is about reorientating African economies towards the local market through regional cooperation and internalisation of development.
While civil society supports Nepad’s intentions, it rejects its chosen strategy. Its biggest challenge now is to develop an alternative that includes the same noble ideas of “self-reliance” and “ownership”.