by James Mpinga and Simangaliso Ncube
“If you do not know where you are going, all the roads will take you there.” That old Zambian saying was recited by a World Bank representative as light aside to a serious debate on how Africa should relate with donors at the just-ended fourth advisory committee meeting of the Global Coalition for Africa (GCA). As it turned out, the joke was too true to be light-hearted about.
For two days running (2-3 June), six sitting and three former heads of state meeting for the GCA at the Harare international conference centre, left observers with precious little clues as to where the continent was headed.
They shared a common platform — and the dilemma — with diplomats from 14 industrialised countries and representatives of 15 multilateral and non-governmental organizations
(NGOs).
Both the African leaders and the donors acknowledged that the continent was in deep trouble but, as usual with conferences pitting North and South economic divides, disagreed widely on the causes of Africa’s plight and likely solutions to myriads of socio-economic and political problems.
“Today is worse than yesterday, and yesterday was worse than the day before,” said former World Bank president Robert MacNamara. He was referring to the AIDS pandemic, in which nine out of 14 million HIV -positive victims are in Africa. ”
A day later, and just above the plenary hall where the GCA was still meeting, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) issued its fourth edition of the Human Development Report (1994)
which begged MacNamara’s remorse even more — how aid has worked and how it has failed.
The centre-pin of the UNDP report was that everything we consider today as main problems facing Africa, such as trade barriers, environmental degradation and the spread of diseases like AIDS, are merely symptoms of failed development thinking in the past.
The message from UNDP was telling: the richest 40 percent of the developing world gets twice the amount of aid per capita as the poorest 40 percent. Even then, 90 percent of that aid is spent on foreign experts when local expertise is often available — and cheaply too. The report urges donors to broaden international cooperation to include trade, investment, labour and technology.
Unfortunately, the message did not get across to the plenary hall below. Only former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere took time off from GCA to witness the launch of the report — the first to happen in Africa.
Ironically, at both the GCA plenary and the”UNDP launch, impassioned pleas were made for a deliberate break with the past. But while the UNDP report called for specific actions the GCA
disastrously degenerated into the rhetorical fencing of yesteryear.
The GCA is the brain-child of a 1989 World Bank report, Sub-Saharan Africa — From Crisis to Sustainable Growth, A Long Term Perspective. That report owns up that Africa faces “exceptional”
difficulties and merits equally “exceptional” treatment by the donor community. But the only exceptional treatment African governments increasingly get these days comes in the form of World Bank-sponsored economic structural adjustment programmes (£SAPs) in exchange for aid.
The economic reforms were first introduced in the 1980s, but new aid conditionalities have since joined ESAPs — human rights, good governance (the bane of the GCA debate), gender sensitivity and the environment, among other issues.
“We totally reject this kind of linkage …it is blackmail”, said host president, Robert Mugabe. Even as many of Mugabe’s colleagues nodded their agreement, the UK representative dropped what
delegates may certainly remember as a bombshell: “We will only support African countries pursuing sensible policies …Africa cannot afford to implement wrong policies …”That touched raw nerves in Julius Nyerere, whose socialist policies which centred on improvements in education and health are accused by some of causing economic ruin in Tanzania.
“Of course, we all need sensible policies,” he retorted. “But there is this blessed attitude that if you leave these things {policy-making} in the hands of Africans, nothing sensible will come out”.
Nyerere took particular exception to double standards adopted by donors on economic reforms and linkages being made between development assistance and good governance.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he said, privatized only a handful of parastatals during 15 years of her rule. But now donors have gone to Tanzania with a shopping list of 200 parastatals which they say must be privatized in a record six months.
“That’s silly,” Nyerere said, amid spirited laughter from the floor. Many delegates also agreed with Nyerere that the GCA was not a proper forum for discussing the issue of good governance.
“How can we discuss the legitimacy of…Robert Mugabe as president of Zimbabwe here? This is a forum of donors and recipients …please, my leaders, not here!” Nyerere implored the heads of state.
Formed in 1990 at the Maastricht Conference on Africa in the Netherlands, the GCA has now found it compelling to redefine Africa’s relations with its donors. Its catch-phrase, take charge, sounded callously hollow as one African leader after another called for more autonomy than they currently hold against donor agencies.
The GCA’s biggest challenge today lies in attracting donor funds to where its fine words are — a challenge epitomised by the apathy of the Ethiopian delegate who said in part: “…What do I do with all the good and beautiful things being said here?”
Granted, the GCA is not a lending agency, nor is it a bureaucracy. It is quite simply a forum — a meeting of minds in search for a Marshall Plan for Africa. Yet tragically, no one within its ranks knows just where Africa is headed right now. (SARDC)
