BY PATRICK BOND
JOHANNESBURG — South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki made the cover of the June 10 international edition of Time magazine, with the misleading headline: "He has finally faced up to the AIDS crisis and is now leading the charge for a new African development plan. Will the rich world listen?".
Mbeki's opportunity to present his "plan" — the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) — with its request for annual commitments of billions in aid, loans and investments will come during the June 26-28 G8 summit in Kananaskis, Canada.
The thousands of protesters who will mass in Calgary and Ottawa will be told by the G8 governments and Canadian press that they can stop worrying about corporate globalisation's impact on the poor of Africa because Mbeki is there to ensure the continent's "marginalisation" from international capitalism will soon come to an end.
But is NEPAD really a "new framework of interaction with the rest of the world ... based on the agenda set by African peoples through their own initiatives and of their own volition, to shape their own destiny" as claimed in its base document (available at <http://www.NEPAD.org>)? Or is it a sell-out of Africa's legitimate aspirations for social, environmental and economic justice?
Even if a case can be made that it is the former, can it work? Has anybody or any organisation aside from a few members of the ruling elites and their backroom technocrats been a party to its authorship? And what does Mbeki's meanderings on the AIDS crisis tell us about the nature of the proposed "partnership"?
"We do not want the old partnership of a rider and a horse", Mbeki claimed in mid-June when Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi criticised NEPAD for its obeisance to "former colonisers and racists".
NEPAD rejected
Africa's progressive movement activists and allied intellectuals are united in anger that Mbeki's continent-wide plan is a surrender to the hegemony of neoliberalism. NEPAD accepts and will exacerbate the last two decades of social dislocation, economic austerity and deindustrialisation, ecological degradation and state fragmentation that has been imposed on Africa by the Western imperialist financial institutions.
Because of NEPAD's evolution in the secrecy of smoke-filled rooms — in close contact with the G8, the Bretton Woods institutions and international capital — the plan's genesis owes nothing to African social struggles. Instead, it empowers Northern donor agency technocrats, Washington financial agencies, Geneva trade bureaucrats, Machiavellian Pretoria geopoliticians and Johannesburg capitalists, in a coy mix of imperialism and South African sub-imperialism.
Critical, rejectionist conclusions such as these have come from more than a dozen major consultations within and between social movements and intellectuals across the continent, beginning in January with the African Social Forum's summit in Bamako, Mali. Civil society groups have used the document as a means of articulating long-held grievances (many such statements are collected at <http://www.aidc.org.za>).
The first public protest against NEPAD occurred in early June, at the World Economic Forum regional meeting in Durban, where anti-apartheid activists and poet Dennis Brutus — now acting secretary of Jubilee South Africa — led more than 100 demonstrators, who were attacked by charging mounted police.
NEPAD has gone by various names, including the African Renaissance (1996-2000), the Millennium Africa Recovery Plan (2000-July 2001) and New African Initiative (July-October 2001). Aside from Mbeki, its main advocates are Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania. None can be considered democrats, as they showed when they joined Mbeki to endorse Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's violent election theft in March.
NEPAD's slippery premise is that poverty in Africa can be cured, if only the world elite gives the continent a chance: "The continued marginalisation of Africa from the globalisation process and the social exclusion of the vast majority of its peoples constitute a serious threat to global stability... We readily admit that globalisation is a product of scientific and technological advances, many of which have been market-driven... The locomotive for these major advances is the highly industrialised nations."
These arguments are better put by reversing the logic. Africa's continued poverty and degradation ("marginalisation") are a direct outcome of capitalist globalisation, not of a lack of it. Technology lubricates but does not cause international economic dynamics. The advanced capitalist world has witnessed substantially lower profits and growth since the mid-1970s, and the dot com craze is only one indication of technology's failure to resolve capitalism's intrinsic crisis tendencies.
As a result, the main organisations of the African left, including women's groups which know who must pay the bill, are expressing skepticism about NEPAD's main strategies because:
- privatisation, especially of infrastructure such as water, electricity, telecommunications and transport, will fail because of the insufficient buying power of most African consumers;
- more insertion of Africa into the world economy will simply worsen fast-declining terms of trade, given that African countries produce so many cash crops and minerals whose global markets are glutted;
- multi-party elections are held, typically, between variants of neoliberal parties, and cannot substitute for the genuine democracy required to restore legitimacy to so many failed neocolonial African states;
- grand visions of information and communications technology are hopelessly unrealistic considering the lack of simple reliable electricity across the continent; and
- South Africa's self-mandate for peace-keeping gives no peace of mind, in the wake of Pretoria's ongoing purchase of US$5 billion worth of offensive weaponry and its unhappy record of regional military interventions.
Status quo
As for lowering African countries' foreign debt, creating more stable capital financial flows and increased foreign investment, Mbeki offers only the status quo.
Instead of promoting debt cancellation, as do virtually all serious reformers, the NEPAD strategy is to "support existing poverty reduction initiatives at the multilateral level, such as the Comprehensive Development Framework of the World Bank and the Poverty Reduction Strategy approach linked to the Highly Indebted Poor Country debt relief initiative".
Only after pursuing such discredited strategies, replete with neoliberal conditions such as further privatisation, would African leaders "seek recourse" through NEPAD. Malawi's famine and starvation, because the country's grain stocks were sold following IMF advice to first repay commercial bankers, is telling.
Speculative "hot-money" inflows to emerging markets such as South Africa have harmed rather than helped development. And the vast majority of foreign loans granted to Third World governments over the past 30 years have instead allied African state elites with foreign bankers. NEPAD calls for more of each.
NEPAD's solution to Africa's foreign investment drought includes the worst international rhetoric associated with "public-private partnerships" in privatised infrastructure: "Establish and nurture PPPs as well as grant concessions towards the construction, development and maintenance of ports, roads, railways and maritime transportation... With the assistance of sector-specialised agencies, put in place policy and legislative frameworks to encourage competition".
But most infrastructure is of a "natural monopoly" type, for which competition is unsuitable: roads and railroads, telephone land lines, water and sewage reticulation systems, electricity transmission, ports and the like. NEPAD cannot make a case for competition in these areas. There is, in contrast, an extremely strong case, based on the "public good" provided by this infrastructure, for state control and non-profit operation.
Most noticeably, privatisation of infrastructure usually prevents the cross-subsidisation required to serve poor consumers, especially those headed by women.
NEPAD is at its most self-contradictory when it appeals "to all the peoples of Africa, in all their diversity, to become aware of the seriousness of the situation and the need to mobilise themselves in order to put an end to further marginalisation of the continent and ensure its development by bridging the gap with the developed countries".
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Africans falling further into poverty as a result of the collaboration with Western governments and imperialist financial institutions do not need to "become aware of the seriousness of the situation". It is the elite rulers who live in luxury, at great distance from the masses, who could do with a reality check. And when progressive Africans express "the need to mobilise themselves", they are nearly invariably met with repression.
Mbeki and the ruling African National Congress government's own practice in all these regards — repaying apartheid debt, allowing speculative finance to wreck the currency, privatising basic services delivery at great social cost (especially damage to public health) and meting out repression to those who object — are reminders of the fact that NEPAD cannot work.
As for "mobilising", Mbeki does not mention the mass protests that threw off the yokes of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and dictatorships. Those protests are increasingly turning against Pretoria's own neoliberal, sub-imperialist agenda.
One burst of activism occurred in May, when thousands of Treatment Action Campaign supporters went to the South African Constitutional Court to make the case that the country's 5 million HIV+ people have a human right to anti-retroviral medicines.
Weeks after Mbeki's cabinet announced an alleged u-turn on its policy of denying AIDS medication to sufferers, the department of health continues to prevaricate on providing AIDS treatment, including inexpensive nevirapine for pregnant women and rape survivors.
In the wake of the G8 meeting, in which global leaders will seek legitimacy for more trade and financial liberalisation behind the facade of NEPAD, African progressives will have two important opportunities to make a different case.
In early July, the African Union will be launched in Durban, with Mbeki as chairperson for 2002-03. In late August, the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development will convene in Johannesburg's plush Sandton suburb. At each, progressives will protest NEPAD, neoliberalism and imperialism.
[Patrick Bond is editor of a new book, Fanon's Warning: A Civil Society Reader on NEPAD, available through Africa World Press at <http://www.africanworld.com>.]
From Green Left Weekly, June 26, 2002.
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