As Africa gears up to adopt the New Partnership for Africa's Development, Gamal Nkrumah asks whether NEPAD really can be an effective blueprint for the continent's survival The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is stirring much controversy in Africa. While officials from most African governments have hailed it as a panacea for the continent's ills, the vast majority of African academics, development workers and non-governmental organisations view NEPAD as the same old wolf of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) disguised in sheep's clothing. The now universally discredited SAPs, imposed upon Africa by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are generally regarded as the main cause for the economic malaise and socio-political upheaval that plague Africa today. International trade reinforces, rather than alleviates, poverty and underdevelopment in Africa. Commodity price fluctuations mean that increases in export volume do not always translate into a simultaneous rise in export revenue. How then, African scholars and activists ask, can these very same forces be trusted to rescue the continent? "The onus is on our leaders to formulate policies that better our people's lot. Instead, our leaders are not formulating policies that advance the peoples' interests. NEPAD is indicative of the crisis of leadership in Africa," Tetteh Hormeku, trade coordinator and head of programmes at Ghana's Third World Network Africa Regional Secretariat told Al- Ahram Weekly. Hormeku was off to Brussels to attend a meeting convened to discuss the progress of the Cotonou Agreement between the European Union and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of developing countries, a grouping of the world's most impoverished and underdeveloped economies. He stressed that NEPAD is a "top-heavy" initiative dreamed up by African leaders who are keen on attracting Western financial support. "NEPAD is a retreat, a step backwards for Africa," he lamented. Hormeku's views are shared by key African academics and activists. "Africa requires building anew, not rehabilitation or reconstruction," warned Prof Adedeji Adebayo, the United Nations Under-Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, at a recent conference in Nairobi. "Helping Africa is always a refrain, a staple of the gratuitous rhetoric that is mouthed at UN sessions and international conferences," professor Adebayo added. Hormeku concurs. "At a time when even the World Bank is trying to polish up its tarnished image in Africa, African leaders are spearheading the distortion and destruction of African initiative, reinforcing the old constraints to people-oriented development and reproducing problems associated with SAPs. It's as if the horse has decided to take the whip and start whipping itself," Hormeku said. "NEPAD might be well-intentioned, but it is flawed. A neo-colonial policy framework lies at the heart of the plan," he added. Critics of NEPAD argue that Africa is already integrated into the world economy as an exporter of raw materials and mineral and agricultural primary commodities. Africa is an importer of high-tech manufactured goods, an area in which the international terms of trade are heavily weighed against the continent. Many African scholar activists believe that, given that NEPAD was dreamed-up by African presidents and sold to Western economic powers without consulting Africa's citizens and parliaments, it lacks legitimacy. NEPAD is based on policies that aim at liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation. It encourages the imposition of conditionality on aid, the very hallmark of the current unequal, neo-colonial relationship between Africa and its main Western trade partners, African scholars say. They add that there is no genuine partnership between Africa and its creditors, donors and trade partners. The Nairobi meeting on NEPAD is one of several to have taken place across the continent this year. Meetings have been convened in Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana to discus NEPAD's viability. The TWN and the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) have emerged as serious critics of NEPAD. Next month, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) will be replaced by the African Union (AU) summit. South African President Thabo Mbeki and his Nigerian and Algerian counterparts, Olusegun Obasanjo and Abdel- Aziz Bouteflika, will present NEPAD for approval at the 26-28 June G8 summit in Canada, where the world's top industrialised nations meet. At the launch of the AU in Durban, South Africa, next month, NEPAD will be officially adopted as the blueprint for African economic and political survival. Several African academics have voiced fears that NEPAD might undermine the socio-economic development prospects for several impoverished African countries. It is widely acknowledged that regulating the activities of foreign investors and firms in Africa in ways that complement African countries' development priorities is extremely difficult. The interests of foreign firms and investors in Africa generally differ radically from those of the host governments and are often given top priority. Two areas in which African governments and scholar activists are in total agreement, however, are writing off the continent's mounting debts and abolishing Western subsidies to farmers in the wealthy, industrialised North. But despite African leaders repeatedly pleading for the cancellation of the continent's debt at international forums, their requests have fallen on deaf Western ears. As for the agricultural subsidies whose side-effects have wrought havoc with agriculture in the developing South, they have just been fortified by US President George W Bush's signing of an agricultural bill which authorises a massive $190 billion in farm subsidies over the next decade. The legislation, which will lead to $57 billion being paid directly to US farmers to offset low commodity prices, has united African governments and scholar-activists in condemnation. A major cause of consternation for Africans, at the moment, is that the biggest subsidies will be earmarked for producers of wheat, corn, sorghum, barley, rice, fruit, vegetables and cotton -- typically products that African countries produce and were hoping to exploit in penetrating the US market under the much-touted African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Ironically, the AGOA is a US plan. In 2000, US government support averaged $20,800 per American farmer. No matter how far the market price of subsidised crops falls, the US farmer has no incentive to reduce production. Indeed, as prices decline, farmers get more subsidies in a bid to make up for their losses. At the same time, the US has been channeling its grain surplus to Africa as food aid -- a powerful instrument of economic manipulation. African countries, such as Egypt and Sudan, that were until two decades ago major exporters of high quality cotton, have seen a marked deterioration in their local cotton industries. This is precisely because the $2 billion in subsidies received by US cotton farmers every year has led to overproduction in the US and a downward spiral in world prices that has seen cotton plunge to a third of its peak levels in the mid-1990s. Humanitarian and aid agencies agree with African countries that EU and US agricultural policies are ruining agriculture in the South's developing countries. "For practical purposes, the world agriculture market is a dumping market in which prices are unrelated to the cost of products," confirmed a recently-released OXFAM report. Meanwhile, it is the EU and the US which are seen as instrumental in guaranteeing NEPAD's success. This utter dependence on dubious Western financial backing, Africa's scholar activists argue, is the NEPAD plan's Achilles heel.
